The taxi driver took one look at my face and ran every red light in Suginami.
I don’t remember the ride. I remember Mio’s hand wrapped around mine so tightly it hurt. I remember Yui’s voice on the phone, thin and wet and terrified, saying the ambulance is here, they’re taking her, Onii-chan, they won’t let me go with her. I remember the meter running and not caring. I remember my own heartbeat, so loud it felt like the car was shaking with it.
I remember the thought that kept looping, over and over, like a scratched record:
I saved her. I paid for it. I PAID FOR IT.
Suginami General Hospital smells like every hospital on earth. Bleach, floor wax, and fear. At 2:20 a.m., the emergency entrance was a tunnel of buzzing light and squeaking sneakers.
Yui was sitting on a plastic chair outside the ICU doors, in her pajamas and one of my old hoodies, knees pulled up to her chest. When she saw me, she didn’t scream or run. She just crumpled, and I caught her halfway across the hall.
“Onii-chan,” she sobbed into my shoulder. “I tried to wake her. I tried and she was cold and her, her mouth, and I called, and I didn’t know what to...”
“You did everything right.” My voice cracked. “Everything. You hear me? You saved her. You did so good, Yui.”
“I was so scared.”
“I know. I know. I’m here.”
Over her head, I caught sight of Mio standing a few steps away, one hand pressed to her mouth. She looked like she wanted to disappear. Like she was afraid she’d intrude on something private.
I jerked my chin at her. Come here.
She hesitated. Then she walked over, and without a word, put a hand on Yui’s back.
Yui looked up. Her eyes were swollen and red. “Who...?”
“A friend,” I said.
“Hi,” said Mio softly. “I’m Mio. I’m so sorry about your mom.”
Yui stared at her for a long, wobbly moment. Then she sniffled and said, “Are you Onii-chan’s girlfriend?”
“Yui.”
“She’s pretty.”
“Yui!”
“I’m just saying...”
And God help me, in the middle of the worst night of my life, Mio let out a small, shaky, astonished laugh. And Yui laughed too, a wet little hiccup of a laugh. And for a second, the three of us just stood there under the fluorescent lights, holding onto each other like survivors on a raft.
The doctor came out at 3:10.
His name was Dr. Okabe. He was in his forties, with tired eyes and a wrinkled coat, and the kind of calm voice that makes you hate how calm it is. He led us into a small consultation room, sat down across from me, and folded his hands.
“You’re the eldest?”
“Yes.”
“And your father?”
“Not around.”
He nodded as if that wasn’t news. “Hoshina-kun, your mother is stable for now. But I need to be very direct with you. She went into acute heart failure tonight. Fluid in the lungs, irregular rhythm. Another half hour at home, and she wouldn’t have made it.”
My ears started ringing.
“What caused it?”
“Severe aortic stenosis. Her valve has been failing for a long time, probably years. It was likely asymptomatic until recently.” He paused. “Has she been having fatigue? Dizziness? Chest tightness?”
“She’s been tired,” I whispered. “She’s always tired. She works eleven hours a day, she, she said her back hurt...”
“It wasn’t her back.”
The ringing got louder.
Years. My mom had been walking around with a dying heart for years. She’d carried groceries and cooked dinners and stood on her feet in a bento shop for eleven hours a day, and she’d told me her back hurt because she didn’t want me to worry.
“She needs a valve replacement,” Dr. Okabe said. “Soon. Within forty-eight hours, ideally.”
“Okay.” I nodded. I couldn’t stop nodding. “Okay. Do it. Whatever she needs.”
“We can perform it here.” He hesitated. “But I want you to understand the risks. Given her condition, the heart failure, the age, the lung damage, the survival rate with our team is around seventy-five percent.”
I stopped breathing.
“Seventy-five.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I could say more.”
“There’s a twenty-five percent chance she dies?”
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“There are better surgeons,” Dr. Okabe said, very quietly, and I looked up.
His eyes flicked away. Embarrassed. Ashamed of his own sentence.
“Teito University Hospital,” he said. “Dr. Hayashibara Kenjiro. He’s the best valve surgeon in Japan. At his hands, the odds go up to ninety-six percent.”
“Then send her there!”
“I would. I’d do it in a heartbeat.” He rubbed his temple. “But he has a three-week waiting list, and even for emergencies, he only accepts transfers approved by the hospital director. It’s, politics. A matter of connections. And I’m sorry. I don’t have any.”
The room went very quiet.
I felt something cold slide down my spine, a certainty so heavy it made the world go gray.
Seventy-five. Or ninety-six.
Twenty-one percent.
That’s the price of one phone call.
I went to the bathroom and locked myself in a stall.
It was the only place in the hospital where nobody would look at me. I sat on the closed toilet lid, shaking, and took out my phone with hands that felt like they belonged to someone else.
The Notes app glowed.
Next reset: available.Rewind point: 03:31:22
A countdown flickered in the corner. Sixty seconds. The window of what I could still change.
Sixty seconds ago, I was sitting in a bathroom stall.
I almost laughed.
Out of everything the app could do, it couldn’t touch this. Not the valve. Not the years of untreated damage. Not the collapse, which had happened over an hour ago, long out of reach. It could rewrite a single minute of a single day. It could fix a van. It could fix a wave. It couldn’t fix a heart.
In the alley, with Kuroiwa’s fist in my gut, I’d thought, I could rewind ten minutes. I’d been wrong about that. I’d just never found out.
I understood something then, with a sick, sinking clarity, about the thing in my pocket. It wasn’t a miracle. It wasn’t a magic wand.
It was a pair of scissors.
It could cut out a moment. Nothing more.
I pressed my forehead against my knees and let the panic wash over me like cold water, and a very small voice at the back of my skull said, You could use it on the doctor.Rewind the minute he told you the odds. Say something. Beg. Persuade him to call in a favor.It would cost you a memory, but...
But Dr. Okabe had no favors to call. That was the entire problem.
I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand and stood up.
There was only one person in the world who owned the kind of power I needed.
And I’d already put his number in my wallet.
I found Mio in the corridor, sitting beside Yui on a bench, both of them asleep with their heads tilted together. Mio had draped my jacket over my sister like a blanket. Her notebook lay open and forgotten in her lap.
I didn’t wake them.
I walked out through the emergency doors into the parking lot, where the sky was just beginning to pale at the edges. Cold air bit my face. The streetlights hummed.
I took Jin’s black card out of my wallet.
My thumb hovered over the number.
If you call him, you owe him.
I could hear it. Not in Mio’s voice. In my mother’s. Standing in the doorway of our first apartment, holding a bag of groceries. We don’t owe anyone for being poor, Ren. We owe each other.
But she was lying in a hospital bed with twenty-five percent of her life on the line, and I didn’t have a pride budget that big.
I dialed.
It rang once.
“Hoshina.”
No greeting. No surprise. Just that calm, flat voice, awake at four in the morning like he’d been waiting by the phone.
“How...” I swallowed. “How did you...”
“Your mother was admitted to Suginami General at 2:14. Severe aortic stenosis, acute decompensation. Dr. Okabe will have told you the survival odds.” A pause. “Teito University Hospital. Dr. Hayashibara.”
My stomach dropped through the floor.
“You knew.”
“I knew the minute she was admitted. I have people.” There was no apology in it. “A car is already on its way. Dr. Hayashibara will be at the hospital by six. The transfer paperwork is signed. Kurose Foundation is a major donor, and the director owes me a favor.”
I couldn’t speak.
“I’m not telling you this to make you feel indebted,” Jin said. “I’m telling you because there’s no time to ask.”
“What do you want?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“Not now.” His voice didn’t change. “I’m not going to pretend I’ll never ask for something. I will. But not tonight. Tonight, the only thing you owe me is a yes.”
I stood in the parking lot, shaking, with the phone pressed against my ear and the first gray light of morning spilling over the rooftops.
I thought about Yui, asleep on a plastic bench in my hoodie. I thought about Mio, and her brother, and a boy who’d said remember me before the world closed over his name. I thought about every cheap trade I’d ever made to survive.
I thought about my mother’s laugh.
“Yes,” I said.
It was a whisper.
“Say it again.”
“Yes. Okay? Yes. Save her. Please.”
“Good.” There was a small, strange sound on the line. It might have been relief. “Go back inside. Tell your sister the best surgeon in the country is coming for your mother. And Ren?”
“What?”
“You’re not the first person who’s made this call.” A beat. “You won’t be the last. And whatever you think of me, I want you to know that I wouldn’t have picked up if I didn’t think it was worth it.”
He hung up.
I stood there, listening to the silence, until the screen went black.
Behind me, the automatic doors slid open with a soft hiss. And Mio was standing there in the pale light, arms wrapped around herself, hair mussed from sleep, eyes wide and dark and knowing.
“You called him,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Ren...”
“I know.” I swallowed. “I know what he is. I know what it’ll cost. I know you hate him. And I don’t care.”
For a long moment, she just looked at me. Then she walked over, slowly, and stopped close enough that I could feel the warmth of her.
“I don’t hate you for it,” she said.
“You should.”
“I don’t.” She reached up, hesitated, then laid her palm flat against my chest, just over my heart. It was beating like a drum. “You did what you had to do. For someone you love. That’s not weakness.”
“It feels like weakness.”
“That’s because it’s brave.” Her voice cracked. “It always feels like the opposite.”
I closed my eyes. Her hand was warm. The sky was lightening. Somewhere inside the hospital, a long, steady beep marked time for the woman who’d carried me, fed me, and lied to me about her back for three years.
“I’m so scared,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“I know.” She stepped forward, and slowly, carefully, like someone approaching a wounded animal, wrapped both arms around my waist and pressed her face to my shoulder. “You don’t have to do it alone.”
It was the first time she’d ever touched me on purpose.
And for the first time since the van, since the app, since my whole stupid, tangled life had come undone, I felt something warm and heavy settle into the hollow behind my ribs, like a missing piece sliding gently into place.
I held her.
I held her until the sun came up.