Growing up in an escalator-style girls' school, the narrator idolized her senior Kurahashi Yukari — smart, warm, and endlessly fascinating. After graduation, the narrator followed Yukari into the same company, only to be met with a cryptic hint about love and retirement. When news comes back from abroad that Yukari has killed herself, the narrator refuses to believe it. She takes Yukari's old secretary role at the same firm and begins quietly digging into what really happened.