“You look like you saw a ghost.”
Mio was waiting for me on the sidewalk outside Reina’s bamboo fence, arms wrapped around herself in the cold, a paper cup of tea steaming in each hand. She’d obviously been there since the moment my thirty minutes ran out. Her eyes went straight to my face, and whatever she saw there made her stop talking.
“Ren?”
“I need to tell you something,” I said. “And you’re not going to like it.”
“You said no editing.”
“I know.” I took the tea. My hands were trembling so badly that it sloshed over the rim. “That’s why I’m telling you before I figure out what to do about it.”
We found a bench in a small park two blocks away, under a ginkgo tree dripping gold leaves. I told her everything. The vessel. The lies Reina told Tomie. The line about the cruelest thing about love. The question I couldn’t stop hearing.
Ask him how many of those hundreds were his.
When I finished, Mio sat very still, her tea untouched in her lap.
“The memory of pressing the button,” she said slowly. “If the cost takes a memory, it takes the one about the button. The vessel wouldn’t know they did it.”
“That’s what I think.”
“So Tomie doesn’t remember agreeing. And Jin doesn’t remember...”
“Handing it back.” I swallowed. “I think every time he pays for her, he loses the memory of paying. It’s a perfect system. It covers its own tracks.”
“Oh, Ren.”
“I could be wrong. She could be lying. She loves messing with people’s heads.”
“Do you think she’s lying?”
I stared at a leaf spiraling down from the branch.
“No,” I said. “I think it’s the first honest thing she’s said.”
Mio set her cup on the bench. Folded her hands. Took a long, careful breath, like someone about to lift something heavy.
“You have to tell him.”
“It’ll destroy him.”
“He’s already destroyed.” Her voice was gentle but unyielding. “He’s just been holding it up with his hands for six years, not knowing why it hurts.”
“What if I’m wrong?”
“Then we find out.”
“What if I’m right?” My voice cracked. “He’s got nothing else, Mio. He’s got a sister he’s been protecting his whole life. If I walk in there and say she’s been using you, I’m taking the last thing he has.”
“No.” She shook her head. “You’re not. She already did.”
I looked at her.
She looked back, steady and fierce and so tired.
“You’re doing it again,” she said quietly. “The thing where you decide what someone can handle. You lied to your family about your back. You lied about the bruise. You lied about the debt. And you were wrong every single time, because they knew, and all it did was make them lonelier.”
My throat burned.
“Jin would rather know,” she said. “I think. If it were me, I’d rather know.”
I closed my eyes.
She’s right. I hated how right she was. I hated it so much I wanted to scream. But I’d been a liar for three years, and I was so tired of being the only person in my own life who didn’t get to be told the truth.
“Okay,” I said hoarsely. “Okay. I’ll tell him.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No.”
“Ren.”
“This one’s mine.” I opened my eyes. “He’s my...” I stopped. I didn’t know the word. “He’s something. And I’m the one who has to say it.”
Mio studied me for a moment.
Then she nodded, reached across, and took the star from my pocket, her star, the one she’d lent me. She pressed it back into my palm.
“Keep it,” she said. “Until you come back.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because you keep forgetting to.”
Kurose Tower, sixty-fourth floor, 4:30 p.m.
Jin opened the door himself.
He wore a gray shirt with the sleeves rolled up and no jacket. There were shadows under his eyes, the kind you get from not sleeping. A half-empty glass of water sat on the table behind him, next to a laptop covered in files.
“You went to see her,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
“I had the driver tail you.” His voice was flat. “He saw you walk into the glass house at 10:47. And walk out at 12:15. Mio waited outside.”
“I know.”
“I assumed you’d tell me when you were ready.” He stepped aside. “Come in.”
I walked into the penthouse for the second time in a week. The skyline glittered, pale and cold, through the floor-to-ceiling glass. Jin shut the door and leaned against it, arms crossed.
“What did she offer?”
“A vessel.”
He didn’t move.
“She explained how it works,” I said. “The cost lands on whoever taps the button. She hands her phone to someone who loves her. They press it. They pay.” I made myself keep talking. “Tomie’s been doing it for years. She asked me to find someone. She wanted me to use Mio.”
A muscle twitched in Jin’s jaw.
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“And you refused.”
“Obviously.”
“Good.” He exhaled. “Is that all?”
“No.”
He waited.
My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth. In my pocket, my fingers closed around a silver star.
“Jin,” I said. “What do you do on Sundays?”
The question hung in the room for a beat.
“Excuse me?”
“Sundays. Evenings. What do you do?”
“I have tea with my sister.” A flicker of confusion. “It’s a tradition. Since we were children. It’s the one thing that’s... why are you asking?”
“How do you feel afterward?”
“Tired.”
“Always?”
“Everyone is tired, Ren. It’s modern life.”
“How many Sundays do you remember?”
The silence that followed was very different.
Jin’s mouth opened slightly. Then closed. His brow creased, a small, confused line between his eyebrows, like a man trying to find a word on the tip of his tongue.
“All of them,” he said.
“Tell me about last Sunday.”
“We had tea. In the east room. She, we talked about...” He faltered. “We talked about the succession. Father’s health.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, it was...” His hand rose to his temple. “It was a perfectly ordinary conversation.”
“What was she wearing?”
“A, a kimono. Pale. Blue? Or...” He stopped. His eyes had gone unfocused. “I’m sure she was wearing a kimono.”
“And the Sunday before that?”
“We had tea.”
“The Sunday before that?”
“We had tea.” His voice rose, sharp and brittle. “What is your point?”
I took a step toward him. My voice was very quiet.
“You told me you’ve used the app hundreds of times in four years. That your balance is thin. That you’ve lost your mother’s name and almost nothing else.” I swallowed. “But you can’t tell me one single detail about a single Sunday in the last six years. You can’t tell me what she wore. You can’t tell me what she said. You just know you had tea.”
Jin had gone white.
“Jin,” I said. “I think that’s where it goes.”
“No.”
“I think she hands you the phone.”
“No.”
“And you press it, because you love her, and you pay, and you forget you did.”
“Stop.” It came out like a whip crack. “Stop it. That’s not, you’re being, you’re manipulated, Ren. This is exactly what she wants. She’s poisoned you against me. She’s good at this.”
“Maybe.”
“She’s lying.”
“Then it’ll be easy to prove,” I said. “Ask someone who’s been there.”
His eyes snapped to mine.
“Who?”
I didn’t answer.
I just looked at the door behind him, where, through the narrow frosted glass at the side, I could see the faint silhouette of an old man in a driver’s uniform, waiting quietly in the hall with his hands folded.
Jin followed my gaze.
For a long, terrible moment, neither of us moved.
Then, very slowly, as though his body had stopped taking orders from his brain, Jin turned around and opened the door.
Kurosawa was sixty-two years old.
He’d been the Kurose family driver for thirty-five years. He had white gloves, silver hair, a gentle face, and the kind of dignity that only comes from a lifetime of keeping other people’s secrets.
When Jin stood in front of him, his shoulders were shaking.
“Kurosawa,” Jin said. His voice was strange. “I need you to answer me honestly. Do you understand? Whatever the truth is. It doesn’t matter if it’s... I’m not giving you an order. I’m asking.”
“Young master.” Kurosawa bowed slightly. “I’d always answer you honestly.”
“Every Sunday.” A pause. “When I go to see my sister. What happens?”
Kurosawa was quiet.
His face did something I’ll remember for the rest of my life. A tiny, flinching flicker of grief, like a man who’d been carrying a stone for so long he’d forgotten it was heavy, and who’d just been told he could finally put it down.
“You have tea with Ojousama,” he said gently. “For about an hour. And then you come out. And you look, forgive me, young master. You look like a man who’s lost his keys.”
Jin didn’t move.
“You’ll sit in the car for a few minutes. You’ll rub your forehead. And you’ll say, ‘Kurosawa, I feel strange.’ And I say, ‘Shall I take you home?’ And you say, ‘No. It’s nothing.’” Kurosawa’s voice wavered. “You’ve said it for six years.”
“I never, I don’t, I don’t remember that.”
“I know, young master.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t know what I was seeing.” The old man’s eyes were wet. “And because I was afraid that if I said something, it would make it real. And I, I couldn’t bear to be the one to tell you your sister was...”
He stopped.
Nobody breathed.
“You had a better way of knowing than I did,” Kurosawa said softly. “You’ve always kept careful notes. Perhaps you could check your ledger.”
Jin turned slowly, like a man in a dream. Walked back into the penthouse. Sat down at his desk. Opened the laptop.
His fingers were shaking so badly he couldn’t type.
I stood behind him, watching. I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
He scrolled through his ledger, hundreds of entries, years of careful, meticulous notes. The things he’d edited. The costs he’d tracked. A life measured in sixty-second increments.
And then he stopped.
On the screen was a column of dates. Every Sunday. Six years of them. Each one, in his own handwriting, said the exact same thing:
Tea with R. Fine.
Tea with R. Fine.Tea with R. Fine.Tea with R. Fine.
Over three hundred times.
Not one word more.
Jin sat there for a very long time, staring at the screen.
When he finally spoke, his voice was barely a whisper.
“I wrote that every week,” he said. “And I never noticed that I wrote the same thing.”
I thought he might scream.
I thought he might throw the laptop through the glass wall, or rage, or break. I was braced for it. I’d have understood.
He didn’t.
He just sat there. And slowly, so slowly I barely saw it happen, he put his hand over his mouth. His shoulders folded inward. A tiny, strangled sound slipped out from behind his fingers, and then another.
Kurose Jin, the Ice Prince, the untouchable heir, the boy who’d watched his best friend vanish without blinking, wept.
It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just a quiet, devastated, bone-deep grief, the kind that doesn’t have words, the grief of a man who’d spent six years protecting a person who’d been taking him apart one Sunday at a time.
I didn’t touch him. I didn’t know if I was allowed.
But I stayed.
I stayed in that room, in the cold light of sixty-four floors, until he stopped. Until he wiped his face with the heel of his hand and stood up and straightened his shirt like a man pulling his armor back on.
“Leave,” he said hoarsely.
“Jin...”
“I need to be alone.”
“Okay.”
I went to the door. Kurosawa was still standing in the hallway with his white gloves clasped in front of him, eyes lowered. I touched his arm lightly as I passed.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Take care of him,” the old man whispered.
I walked to the elevator.
“Ren.”
I stopped.
Jin was standing in the doorway of the penthouse, tall and pale and shattered, one hand braced against the frame. His eyes were red. But his voice, when it came, was steady and cold and terrifyingly lucid.
“If you were lying to me,” he said.
“I wasn’t.”
“I know.” He swallowed. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
The elevator opened. I stepped inside.
The doors began to close, and the last thing I saw was Jin, framed by the dark, standing perfectly still, staring at the floor as though it might open up and swallow him.
My phone buzzed at 11:47 that night.
I was sitting on the edge of my mother’s hospital bed, watching her sleep, when I saw the screen light up. Mio was asleep in the corner chair. Yui had fallen asleep over her homework.
Kurose Jin: Sunday. 6 p.m.
Kurose Jin: I’m going to tea. I’m going to sit across from her. And if she hands me the phone, I’m going to let her.
My blood went cold.
Me: You can’t
Kurose Jin: I’ll leave my ledger open. You’ll sit in the next room with a recorder.
Kurose Jin: I’ll lose the memory. I know. That’s the point.
Kurose Jin: I need it on tape.
Me: Jin, this is insane. You’ll forget it
Kurose Jin: Then you’ll have to remember for me.
The room was silent. The monitors beeped softly. On the bed, my mother’s chest rose and fell.
I stared at the screen for a long, long time.
Then I typed:
Me: Okay.
Kurose Jin: Thank you.
Kurose Jin: One more thing.
Kurose Jin: If I come out of that room not knowing who you are, don’t take it personally.
I put the phone down.
And for the first time, I understood exactly how much a person can love someone they’ve already forgotten.