We didn’t talk in the lobby.
Mio was shaking too hard, and I was too stunned, and the security guard had woken up and was starting to give us the look people give two idiots having a crisis under a chandelier. So I did the only sensible thing I could think of. I took off my jacket, put it around her shoulders, and said:
“Come on. You’re gonna get hypothermia.”
She stared at me. At my jacket. At the crooked red thread on the left cuff.
Then she let me walk her out into the rain.
The all-night family restaurant on the corner of Marunouchi Street was exactly what you’d expect at 1:20 a.m. Fluorescent lights. A bored waiter. Two drunk salarymen asleep in a booth. A single sad Christmas decoration, in October, that nobody had ever bothered to take down.
I ordered two hot chocolates and a tray of fries. Mio ordered a pudding.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“It’s not for you.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll share.”
“...Oh.”
She sat across from me, my jacket still over her shoulders, both hands wrapped around her mug. Her hair was drying in damp little waves. Her eyes were red but steady, and she wouldn’t stop looking at the table, the way you do when you’re about to jump off a cliff and don’t want to see how far down it is.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you about Shun. The real version.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I do.” A small, shaky breath. “Because if I don’t, you’ll keep trusting him. And if you keep trusting him, he’ll keep being useful. And I can’t, I can’t watch another person I...”
She stopped. Pressed her lips together.
“I can’t watch another person disappear,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I just nodded.
“I was sixteen,” Mio began. “Shun was nineteen.”
She told it slowly, her voice flat and careful, like someone reading from a script she’d rehearsed a thousand times in the dark.
“I had a heart condition. Congenital. Nobody knew until it got bad. One night in the winter, I collapsed on the roof of our old school. We were stargazing. It was our thing, even then.” She smiled faintly. “He was explaining the Pleiades to me. I was rolling my eyes. And then I just, wasn’t breathing.”
My hands tightened on my mug.
“The ambulance took twenty-three minutes. The doctor said afterward that I had maybe five.” Her voice thinned. “I should’ve died. And I didn’t. And for years, I thought it was luck.”
“It wasn’t.”
“No.” She looked up, and her eyes were dark and wet. “It was Shun. He got the app that night. In the middle of the panic, in the middle of the screaming, his phone lit up. He’d never seen it before. He used it without even thinking.”
“Like me,” I whispered.
“Like you.”
She picked up her spoon. Turned it over. Set it down.
“He told me everything, eventually. Not at first. He tried to hide it. But he was a terrible liar, and I was a very nosy little sister.” A broken laugh. “He told me about the cost. About the memories. He said it was a small price. That he didn’t even notice what it took.”
“But it kept taking.”
“It kept taking.” She nodded. “He kept using it for little things. He couldn’t stop. That was the thing. It was never one big mistake. It was a thousand tiny, reasonable ones, and every single one felt harmless.”
I thought of Jin’s voice. A thousand tiny edits, all of them stupid, all of them cheap.
“Jin was his friend,” Mio said, and her voice sharpened. “His only friend. He met him at the library one day, they got to talking, and Jin saw the glow on Shun’s phone. It was like two people recognizing each other across a crowded room. They talked about the app for hours. They compared costs. They counted.”
“Counted what?”
“Their balance. The weight of what they had left.” She wrapped both arms around her middle. “Jin had a theory. A way of estimating how much a person could spend before they hit zero. Not exact, never exact. But close. He taught Shun how to do it.”
My stomach turned over.
“So Shun knew.”
“He knew exactly how close he was.” She was crying now, quiet tears, just running down her face without any sound. “That night, three years ago. He called me. He said, ‘Mio, I need you to promise something.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘If I ever disappear, remember me.’”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
I couldn’t breathe.
“I thought he was being dramatic. I told him he was being an idiot. I said, ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ And he laughed, and said, ‘Right. Yeah. Sorry. Forget it.’” She wiped her face with the sleeve of my jacket. “That was the last time I heard his voice.”
“What happened?”
“There was an accident on his way home. A bad one. Somebody was going to die.” She shook her head. “I don’t know who. Nobody ever told me. Shun was there. And Jin was with him.”
“And Shun used his last reset.”
“Yes.” Barely audible. “And Jin knew it was his last. He’d done the math. He knew. And he let him.”
The words hung over the table like smoke.
“He told me that part himself,” Mio said, very quietly. “A few weeks later, when he finally found me. He came to my apartment with a notebook and a bunch of photographs of a man I didn’t remember, and he said, ‘I think we were both missing the same person.’”
“He said that?”
“Yes. And I thought he was insane.” A short, hollow laugh. “But then he showed me the notebooks. Shun’s. Pages and pages. In his handwriting. About a sister named Mio. And I opened my own notebook, the one I’d been keeping since I was twelve, and there he was. On every single page.”
I stared at her.
“That’s when I understood. Nobody else remembered him. Not our parents. Not his friends. Not the university. Not a single soul. I was the only person on earth who knew he’d ever existed.”
“Why you?”
“I don’t know.” She finally lifted her eyes, and they were like open wounds. “Jin thinks it’s because I was the one he saved. That if you spend your whole self for someone, they stay as the anchor. The last thing standing.”
My throat was so tight I could barely speak.
“I’m sorry,” I said. It was a pathetic, inadequate thing to say. “Mio, I’m so sorry.”
“It isn’t your fault.”
“It’s exactly my fault. I did the same thing to you.”
“No,” she said fiercely. “You didn’t.”
“I forgot you.”
“You forgot me to save your mother.” Her voice broke. “I would have done the same thing, Ren. I’d have done it a hundred times.”
“That doesn’t...”
“It does. It matters.” She reached across the table and, for the first time, took my hand. Her fingers were small and freezing and unbelievably fragile. “I’m not angry at you. I never could be. I’m just so tired of watching everyone I love get erased.”
The pudding arrived.
It was a small, wobbling cup of custard with a drizzle of caramel and a single sad maraschino cherry. The waiter set it between us, gave us a very weary look, and shuffled away.
Neither of us touched it.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Did we know each other? Me and you. Before.”
She went still.
For a long time, she didn’t answer. The fluorescent light buzzed. One of the drunk salarymen snored. Outside the window, the rain had thinned to a fine silver mist.
“Yes,” she said at last.
My heart punched against my ribs.
“Did it matter?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
She shook her head slowly. “I won’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I tell you, you’ll do one of two things.” She held up one finger. “You’ll pity me. You’ll look at me like I’m broken, and you’ll be gentle with me, and every time you’re kind, I’ll wonder if it’s really you, or just guilt.” A second finger. “Or you’ll force yourself to feel something. You’ll try so hard to love me because I’m telling you you already did. And it’ll be a lie. And I’ll know.”
I flinched.
“I don’t want either,” she said. “I don’t want pity, and I don’t want a performance.”
“Then what do you want?”
She took a deep, wet breath.
“I want you to choose.” She said it like a confession. “If you ever feel something for me, I want it to be real. I want it to come from you, from the person you are right now. Not from a notebook. Not from a photograph. Not from me telling you what to feel.”
“That might never happen.”
“I know.”
“You’d be okay with that?”
“No.” She smiled, tiny and trembling. “But I’d rather have a real maybe than a fake yes.”
I looked at her for a long time.
I looked at the small, pale face and the red-rimmed eyes and the mole under her left eye. I looked at a girl who’d lost her brother, lost her partner, lost everything she’d ever known, and was still sitting here, offering to hand me back my own life one careful piece at a time.
Something in my chest broke open.
“Then let me start from zero,” I said.
“What?”
“Treat me like a stranger. Tell me nothing. Let me ask you stupid questions, like a normal guy at a restaurant, and you can answer or not, and I’ll try to figure out who I am without a cheat sheet.” My voice shook. “And if it turns out I fall for you, it’ll be because I did. Not because the universe said so.”
Mio’s lips parted.
“Is that okay?” I asked.
She pressed a hand to her mouth. Her shoulders trembled. And then she laughed, a real laugh this time, wet and cracked and startled.
“That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” she said.
“Yeah, well. I’m bad at instructions.”
“You’re so bad at instructions.”
“Is that a yes?”
She wiped her eyes. Picked up her spoon. Took the first bite of the pudding, and her whole face melted into something soft and warm and impossibly tender.
Then she pushed the cup an inch toward me.
“First question,” she said. “Go.”
I thought about it.
“What’s your favorite food?”
“Pudding.”
“Obviously.”
“I was saving it for a day that deserved it.”
“And is tonight that?”
She looked down at the cup. Then up at me. And she smiled, the first real smile I’d seen from her, a small, startled, devastating thing that went straight through my ribs.
“Maybe,” she said.
We stayed until 1:45.
We split the pudding. We split the fries. She told me about her favorite star (Altair, because it spins so fast it’s flattened at the poles, a sort of beautiful dizziness). I told her about Yui and the rice cooker and the cat we didn’t have. She laughed at my worst jokes. I laughed at her best ones.
At one point, I took out the cat notebook and showed her the LEDGER. She read through it slowly, page by page, and when she got to the entry about Yui’s first day of school, she covered her mouth with her hand and had to look away.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “It’s just... you always did this.”
“Did what?”
“Wrote things down. Tried to keep hold of them.” She slid the notebook back to me. “You’re more like me than you know.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My heart was too full.
It was 1:47 a.m. when my phone rang.
I almost ignored it. I was so happy, for the first time in ten days, that I almost let it ring through. But the name on the screen made my blood run cold.
YUI.
I answered.
“Yui?”
Silence. Then a sound I’d never heard from my sister’s mouth in my life. A thin, high, ragged gasp, like someone drowning.
“Onii-chan,” she sobbed. “Onii-chan, it’s Mom. She’s, she won’t wake up. I tried and I tried and she, her lips are, there’s, I called the ambulance, I don’t know what to do...”
The restaurant went dead silent. The fluorescent lights seemed to flicker.
I was already standing.
“Don’t touch her,” I said. My voice was calm. I have no idea how. “Keep her on her side. Stay on the line. I’m coming. I’m coming right now.”
Mio was on her feet beside me, her face white, my jacket sliding off her shoulders.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll come with you.”
“Mio...”
“Go.”
I didn’t argue. I grabbed her hand, and we ran.