Dr. Hayashibara Kenjiro showed up at 5:58 a.m. wearing a rumpled gray coat and the expression of a man who’d been dragged out of bed against his will.
He was about sixty, short and wiry, with a shock of white hair that stuck up in three directions and a face that looked like it had been carved out of old walnut. He was chewing menthol gum so aggressively that I could hear it from across the hallway.
He didn’t say hello.
“Which one of you is the kid?”
I stood up. “Me.”
“You’re nineteen.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You sign the consent forms.”
“Yes.”
“You understand that I don’t give a damn who called the director at three in the morning?” He peered at me through thick glasses. “I want that clear. Kurose’s boy can send a thousand cars. It doesn’t make a valve any easier to fix. It’s still a heart. It still stops.”
“I understand.”
“Good.” He jerked his chin toward the nurses’ station. “Where’s the file?”
He went through it in thirty seconds, flipping pages with surgical precision, muttering things like ugh and hm and idiot, why didn’t anyone catch this earlier. Then he snapped the folder shut and looked up at me again. Something in his face softened, just slightly, like a crack in a stone.
“Tell me about her.”
“About who?”
“Your mother. I fix hearts, kid. But I like to know whose.” He chewed his gum. “What’s she like?”
I opened my mouth.
And I realized, to my horror, that I didn’t know where to start.
“She’s, she’s short,” I said. “Five-one. She wears this yellow raincoat I bought her, she never takes it off. She works at a bento shop eleven hours a day. She lies about everything that might worry us. She thinks I’m too skinny. She cooks twice as much food as we can eat. She laughs with her whole body. She, she hit me in the arm last week for lying to her.”
My voice cracked. I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye.
“She’s the best person I know.”
Dr. Hayashibara was quiet for a moment.
“Good,” he said gruffly. “That’s all I needed.”
He turned and shoved open the double doors to the OR prep wing. “Six hours. Maybe seven. Go eat something.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask.”
The doors swung shut behind him.
The surgical waiting room on the fourth floor of Teito University Hospital is the most depressing room in Tokyo.
Beige walls. A broken vending machine. A single potted fern that someone had clearly never watered. Twelve plastic chairs bolted to the floor, and a TV in the corner playing a morning cooking show on mute.
We took over the back corner.
Yui sat curled against my side, half-asleep, her head on my shoulder. Mio sat on my other side, knees tucked under her, notebook closed on her lap, pretending she wasn’t watching me every few seconds like a nurse monitoring a pulse.
At 7:40, the door banged open, and Takumi came in like a hurricane.
“I BRING FOOD.”
He was carrying three plastic bags, two thermoses, a pillow, and a stuffed bear. His hoodie said I’M NOT LATE, I’M ASYNCHRONOUS. There were dark circles under his eyes. He’d obviously run the entire way.
“Takumi?” I said. “How did you...”
“Yui texted me from the ambulance. You think I’m gonna sleep through that?” He dropped the bags in front of us and started unpacking with the frantic energy of a man coping with dread by organizing sandwiches. “Okay, we’ve got onigiri, we’ve got a ridiculous amount of melon bread, we’ve got hot tea, we’ve got a pillow in case anyone cries, and we’ve got Mr. Snuggles.”
“Mr. Snuggles?”
“The bear. He’s for emotional support.” He plonked the bear in Yui’s lap. She stared at it with her mouth half-open, then burst into tears and hugged it.
“Takumi-niisan,” she sobbed. “You’re so stupid.”
“I know, I know, I’m a monster.” He sat beside her and patted her head. Then, finally, he noticed the third person in our row, and his eyes went round as saucers.
“...Oh. Hi.”
“Hi,” said Mio.
“You’re the astronomy girl.”
“I’m Mio.”
“I’m Takumi. Ren’s best friend. I’m very sorry about that.” He bowed from the waist, still seated, which looked ridiculous. “I’ve heard nothing about you. Absolutely nothing. He’s a tomb.”
Mio smiled. It was small and tired, but real. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“You have?”
“He says you’re the only person who makes him eat.”
“He said that?”
“No.” She tilted her head. “But I figured.”
Takumi stared at her for a long second. Then he turned to me with a very solemn face and said, “Dude. Marry her.”
“Takumi!”
“I’m serious! She’s perfect! She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s already roasting you, it’s a miracle!”
I was going to kill him. I was going to kill him with a melon bread.
But Yui laughed, a tiny, hiccuping, snotty laugh, and Mio laughed too, hand pressed to her mouth. And in the middle of the beige room, under the buzzing lights, with my mother’s heart stopped on a table three floors away, I felt something loosen in my chest.
They were here. All of them.
I wasn’t alone.
Hour two was bad.
Hour three was worse. Yui fell asleep with the bear squashed against her face. Takumi pulled out his laptop and started pretending to code, though I saw him staring at the same line for forty minutes. Mio sat very straight, tracing a pattern on her knee with one finger. The TV chef on the screen was silently making a soufflé.
At 11:15, an alarm started going off somewhere down the hall.
Not a loud one. A thin, rhythmic, mechanical beep-beep-beep. A nurse in green scrubs sprinted past the waiting room doors. Then another. A voice shouted something I couldn’t hear.
My heart stopped.
“Ren.” Mio’s hand clamped down on mine. “Ren, it might not be...”
“It’s her.” I was already standing. “It’s, I know it’s her, I can feel it, something’s wrong...”
My phone was in my hand. I didn’t remember pulling it out. The Notes app was open. The white text glared at me, blank and patient and useless.
Rewind point: 11:14:22
Sixty seconds ago, I’d been sitting in a plastic chair, being a bystander.
I could do something. I have to be able to do something.
I thought about it as hard as I’ve ever thought about anything. What could I rewrite? What could sixty seconds possibly change? I wasn’t in the OR. I wasn’t a doctor. I couldn’t reach the table. I couldn’t touch the scalpel. I couldn’t fix anything.
I stood there with the phone shaking in my fist, and I understood the most terrible thing about the app yet.
It wasn’t just that it couldn’t fix a heart.
It was that for the first time in my life, I had a miracle in my pocket, and it was irrelevant.
“Ren.” Mio stepped in front of me, took my face in both hands, and forced me to look at her. Her eyes were fierce, and bright, and wet. “Put it away.”
“I can’t just...”
“Put it away.”
“What if she...”
“Then you let her go with a clean heart.” Her voice shook. “Not with a hole in it. Not with another piece of you missing. Do you understand? She wouldn’t want that.”
“I can’t lose her.”
“I know.” She pulled me down until my forehead rested against hers. “But you can’t fix this. And you can’t pay for it with yourself. You have to just wait.”
I was crying. I hadn’t noticed. Hot tears kept sliding down my face and dripping off my chin.
“Waiting is the worst thing,” I choked out.
“I know.” She whispered it into the space between us. “I know. I’m here. I’m right here. You don’t have to do it alone.”
I put the phone in my pocket.
It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
The alarm stopped at 11:31.
I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until it ended. The corridor went quiet. The nurses disappeared. The TV chef finished her soufflé and bowed.
At 1:48 p.m., the double doors opened.
Dr. Hayashibara walked out.
His scrubs were soaked with sweat. His mask hung around his neck. There was a long red mark across the bridge of his nose where his glasses had pressed into it. He looked about a hundred years old.
He stopped in front of me.
I stopped breathing.
“Kid,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Her heart is a stubborn son of a bitch. Just like its owner, I’d guess.” He pulled out a pack of menthol gum, took one, and started chewing. “It stopped on the table. Twice. We got it started again. The valve’s in. It’s holding. She’s in recovery. She’s going to be tired, and she’s going to be sore, and she’s going to be an absolute nightmare as a patient. But she’s alive.”
The world turned white.
I don’t remember falling to my knees. I just remember the floor, cold under my palms, and Yui screaming something, and Takumi swearing in a thick, crying voice, and Mio’s arms around my shoulders, saying, over and over, “Ren, Ren, she’s okay, she’s okay, she’s okay.”
Dr. Hayashibara watched us for a long moment.
“Tell your friend in the nice coat I said hello,” he muttered. “And that I’m still not impressed.”
Then he walked away, chewing his gum, and disappeared through the doors.
My mother woke up at 4:20 p.m.
I’d been sitting by her bed for two hours. She was so small in the hospital gown, tubes in her arms, monitors blinking beside her. Her skin was pale and papery. But her chest rose and fell, rose and fell, and every breath was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.
Her eyelids fluttered. She blinked slowly at the ceiling.
Then her head rolled sideways, and her eyes found my face.
“...Ren?” Her voice was a rasp.
“Hey, Mom.”
“What happened?”
“You had a heart thing. Surgery. You’re okay now.” My voice wobbled. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Language,” she mumbled.
“Sorry.”
“Did you eat?”
I stared at her.
Of course. Of course that’s the first thing she’d say.
“Yeah, Mom,” I said, wiping my face with my sleeve. “I ate the bento. I ate everything. Twice.”
“Good.” Her mouth curved. “Don’t lie to me. I can tell.”
“I’m not lying.”
“You’re crying again.”
“Shut up.”
“Don’t tell your mother to shut up.” A faint, ghostly echo of her old sternness. Then her eyes drifted past me, to the corner of the room, and her brows knit. “Who’s the girl?”
I turned.
Mio was standing awkwardly by the door, holding a paper cup of tea she’d obviously gotten for someone else. Yui sat on the edge of the bed, clutching Mr. Snuggles. Takumi was in the corner pretending to read a pamphlet on hand hygiene.
“That’s Onii-chan’s girlfriend,” Yui announced.
“Yui!”
“What? I’m helping.”
“I’m Tsukishiro Mio,” Mio said, very quickly, bowing so low her notebook slipped out from under her arm. “I’m sorry, I’m not, we’re just friends, it’s very nice to meet you, I’m so glad you’re okay.”
My mother looked at her for a very long moment.
Then she smiled. A slow, tired, knowing smile that said she’d raised two children and had seen everything.
“Friends,” she said.
“Mom...”
“It’s nice to meet you, Mio-chan.” She closed her eyes. “Take care of my idiot son.”
Mio went scarlet.
I wanted to die. I wanted to melt through the floor and into the basement.
But I also, for the first time in a long time, wanted to laugh.
It was nearly midnight when I stepped out into the hospital corridor.
The hallways were dim and empty, the nurses’ station quiet. Takumi had taken Yui to get some sleep at his place. Mio had gone to the cafeteria to find something to eat. I’d stayed with my mother until she drifted off again, and now I stood alone, leaning against the wall, soaking in the silence.
I never heard him coming.
“She’s out of danger,” said a quiet voice.
I turned.
Kurose Jin stood ten feet away, in a long dark coat, hands in his pockets. His face was pale, and shadowed under the eyes. For the first time since I’d met him, he looked less like an Ice Prince and more like a very tired young man.
“You waited till now,” I said.
“I didn’t want to intrude.”
“You paid for the best surgeon in Japan.”
“I made a phone call.” He glanced toward my mother’s door. “She looked well. I saw her through the window.”
“You were watching.”
“I’m always watching.”
I laughed, a short, exhausted sound. “That’s what you always say.”
“It’s always true.” He stepped closer. “I’m not here to collect, Ren. Not yet. But I do need to tell you something, and I’d rather you hear it before you hear it from someone else.”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
“The first favor.” His voice was low and level. “Next Friday, my family holds its annual dinner. My father, my uncle, my sister. It’s where the succession is decided, or rather, where it gets negotiated. I need you there.”
“As what?”
“As my guest.” A faint, humorless smile. “You’ll sit. You’ll eat. You’ll say nothing. And you’ll watch my sister.”
“Your sister?”
“Kurose Reina.” He said the name carefully. “Twenty-three. Brilliant. Elegant. The most dangerous person I’ve ever met.”
“Why?”
“Because she has the app.”
I froze.
“She got it six years ago,” said Jin. “And in six years, I’ve never seen her lose anything. Not a memory. Not a name. Not a single face. I’ve tested her. I’ve tracked her. She uses it every single day, and she’s perfectly, flawlessly whole.”
“That’s, that’s not possible.”
“No.” His eyes met mine. They were pale and bottomless. “It’s not.”
The corridor lights hummed. Somewhere far away, a nurse laughed, a small, ordinary sound in the quiet.
“The cost has to go somewhere,” Jin said. “That’s the one rule I’m sure of. A reset takes a memory. Always. It never disappears. It’s paid.”
“So if she’s not paying...”
“Then someone else is.”
I felt the hair rise on my arms.
“I don’t know who,” said Jin. “I don’t know how. But I’m going to find out. And I need you in that room, because you see things I don’t. People talk to you. Their guard drops. It’s a useful, dangerous talent.”
“I’m not a spy.”
“No. You’re a kid who owes me a favor.” There was no cruelty in it. Just fact. “I’m sorry. But it’s the truth.”
I looked at him for a long time.
I looked at the tired eyes and the perfect coat and the loneliest face in Tokyo. And I knew, with a creeping, sinking certainty, that whatever came next would cost more than a phone call.
“Fine,” I said. “Friday.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” I pushed off the wall. “Just don’t make me regret it.”
He nodded slowly. Then, as he turned to go, he paused.
“Ren.”
“What now?”
“If you ever find out who’s paying for her,” he said, without looking back, “I’d like to know before you decide what to do about it.”
He walked away down the empty corridor. I watched him until he vanished around the corner.
And behind me, in the dark room, my mother’s heart monitor kept its slow, steady rhythm.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.