The storage room behind the east parlor smelled of old tatami and camphor, and it was exactly four feet wide.
I stood in it for forty minutes with my back against a wall of paper screens, holding a recording pen Takumi had lent me, a purple one shaped like a cartoon cat, because he said if anyone finds it, you can just say you’re a weirdo. My phone was in my left pocket, set to record as backup. In my right pocket, two silver stars pressed against my thigh.
On the other side of the screen, a lantern glowed. A low table. Two cushions. A tea set with a single chrysanthemum painted on each cup.
Kurosawa had smuggled me in through the servants’ passage at 5:20. He hadn’t said a word the whole way. At the door, he’d bowed to me very slightly, deeply, the way you’d bow to a man going into a war.
“Please look after him,” he’d whispered.
I’d nodded.
I didn’t tell him I had no idea how.
At 5:58, footsteps.
Two sets, one slow and heavy, one light and quick. A door slid open. I stopped breathing.
“Brother!” Reina’s voice was warm and bright. “You came early.”
“I wanted to see you.”
It was Jin. His voice was perfectly steady. If I hadn’t heard him sob in a penthouse forty-eight hours earlier, I’d have believed it.
“You always do.” The rustle of silk. “Sit. I made your favorite. Genmaicha, roasted properly this time. Tomie’s been teaching me.”
A pause.
“How is she?” Jin asked.
“Tomie? Resting. She forgets a little more every day.” Reina sighed. “It breaks my heart.”
Does it? I thought. Does it really?
Porcelain clinked. Tea poured. For ten full minutes, I listened to two people have the most ordinary conversation in the world. Reina asked about his week. He answered in clipped, careful phrases. She laughed at a joke he didn’t make. She asked if he was eating. She told him he looked thin.
She seemed to love him.
That was the part that made my skin crawl. It wasn’t an act. Every note in her voice rang true. She leaned toward him when he spoke. She remembered what he’d said last month. She’d saved the good chrysanthemum cups for him.
She isn’t pretending, I thought. She actually loves him. She’s just also eating him alive.
At 6:14, her phone buzzed.
“Oh.” A rustle. “It’s Father.”
“Take it.”
“I’ll be quick.”
Her voice changed the moment she answered. It dropped half an octave. Went cool and precise, like a blade sliding from its sheath.
“Father. Yes. No, I’m having tea with Jin. What? ...I see.” A pause. “I understand. And you’re certain? ...Of course, it’s your decision. Yes. Goodnight.”
The call ended.
Silence stretched across the room.
“He’s naming you,” Reina said softly.
“What?”
“The succession. Father told me just now. He’s going to announce it next week.” Her voice was strangely flat. “It’s you, Jin. It was always going to be you.”
A long breath.
“I thought you’d be happy,” Jin said carefully.
“I am.”
“You don’t sound it.”
“I’m very happy for you.” The teacup clinked against its saucer. “Truly. You deserve it.”
I could hear it. The tilted head. The widening smile. A millimeter too wide.
Here it comes.
“Oniisan,” she said.
Her voice had changed again. Smaller. Softer. The voice of a child.
“I need a favor.”
I held the pen to the paper screen and prayed it was picking up every word.
“What kind of favor?” Jin asked.
“The usual kind.”
“Reina.”
“It’s just a small one.” Fabric shifted. Something slid across the table, a smooth, quiet scrape of glass on wood. “Just press this. You know the one.”
My heart stopped.
“Why?”
“Because I said something to Father. Just now, on the phone. Something I regret.” A soft, shaky laugh. “I want to take it back. It’s only sixty seconds. I’ve written it all out. You just have to press Confirm.”
“Is it a big one?”
“It’s just a little one.”
“Reina.”
“...It’s a medium one.”
I heard Jin breathe.
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“You always say that,” he said, so quietly I almost didn’t catch it.
“I know.”
“Do I... do I always do this?”
There was a pause. A long one. And then, for the first time, Reina’s voice cracked.
“Every Sunday,” she whispered. “For six years.”
I pressed my forehead against the screen.
“I never told you,” she said. “I never could. And you never remember, and I’m so grateful, Oniisan, because I don’t think I could bear it if you did.” A wet, trembling inhale. “But I think I’d like to tell you tonight. Just once. Since you’ll forget.”
“Tell me.”
“You’re the only person who ever loved me without wanting anything.” She sounded, suddenly, like a very young girl. “Mother wanted a perfect daughter. Father wanted a perfect heir. Everyone wanted me to be something. And you just, you just sat with me. When I cried. You gave me the biggest dumpling at dinner. Do you remember? You were seven. You said girls need more food because they’re smaller.”
A soft, broken laugh.
“I got it when I was seventeen. I nearly died in a car crash. And I used it, I didn’t think, and I lost a memory. I woke up not knowing the name of my favorite flower. And I was so scared.” Her voice shook. “And you came into my hospital room, and you held my hand, and I thought, oh.”
“Oh?”
“I thought: he loves me so much that if I gave him the phone, he’d take it.”
My stomach turned.
“I tried it once. Just to see.” She was crying now, softly, steadily. “I handed it to you in the car. I said, ‘Oniisan, press this for me.’ And you did. And it took a memory from you. And I felt it, Jin. I felt the cost go past me. Like a wave over a rock.”
“It only works if I love you.”
“It only works if you love me.” She laughed, a hiccuping, horrible laugh. “If you didn’t, the cost would land on me. That’s the rule. I’ve tested it. I’ve tried Tomie, and Father’s secretary, and a boy I liked in school. Only the ones who truly love me. Only them.”
“That’s why you chose me.”
“That’s why I had to.”
A long, thick silence.
“I’m so sorry,” Reina whispered. “I’m so sorry. I know it’s wrong. I know what it does. And I do it anyway. Every Sunday. Because I’m not strong enough to be nothing, Oniisan. I’m not strong enough to lose a single piece of myself. And you are.”
“Reina.”
“I know you hate me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“You should.”
“I love you.”
She made a sound like something tearing.
“That’s what makes it unbearable,” she sobbed. “That’s exactly what makes it so unbearable.”
I couldn’t breathe.
I was standing in a four-foot closet with tears running down my face, listening to a girl confess a sin to the one person who’d never be able to remember it. And on the other side of that paper wall, a young man was sitting very still, listening to his sister tell him she’d been eating him alive, and loving her anyway.
“Press it,” Reina said hoarsely. “Please. I’m so sorry.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.” His voice was calm, quiet, impossibly tender. “It’s all right, Reina. I know.”
And then, so softly I almost missed it, I heard a tap.
A single tap on glass.
The world flickered.
I felt it before I understood it, a faint, vertiginous tug, like the floor of the universe had slid six inches to the left. The lantern wavered. The tea in the cup rippled.
Then everything snapped back into place.
Reina’s voice again. Bright. Warm. Steady.
“Oniisan! You came early.”
“I wanted to see you.”
I put my hand over my mouth.
She’d started over. The whole minute. Rewritten. In this version of reality, Reina hadn’t taken the call from her father yet. She hadn’t confessed. She hadn’t cried. She was pouring tea with a bright, easy smile, as if the last sixty seconds had never happened.
And Jin, I could hear it in his breathing, was sitting across from her, clutching the table, remembering nothing.
I stayed pressed against the screen, shaking, as they finished their tea. As Reina told a story about a cat she’d met in the garden. As Jin laughed, in all the right places, a half-second too late.
At 6:47, Reina kissed his cheek and said, “I’m so glad we do this.”
At 6:48, the door slid shut behind her.
I waited five full minutes.
When I stepped through the screen, Jin was sitting alone at the low table, staring into his empty teacup.
He looked up.
I’d seen Kurose Jin cold. I’d seen him furious, and amused, and broken. But I had never seen him look at me the way he looked at me then.
Politely. Blankly. As if I were a waiter who’d walked into the wrong room.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Who are you?”
The floor dropped out of my stomach.
“Jin...”
“I’m sorry. I don’t believe we’ve met.” His voice was courteous, distant, utterly empty. He frowned at the paper screen behind me. “How did you get in here? This is a private residence.”
“It’s Ren,” I said hoarsely. “Hoshina Ren. You, we...”
“Hoshina.” He tilted his head. “I’m afraid that doesn’t ring a bell.”
Everything. He’d paid with everything. The last seven days. The rooftop. The hospital. The phone call. The sob in the penthouse and the whole terrible truth about his sister, all of it, gone, scrubbed off his mind like chalk from a board.
And behind that polite, empty mask, I saw something else. A flicker. A tiny, confused, desperate pull, like a man who knew he’d forgotten something, and didn’t know how much.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait. He said you’d, you wrote something. Check your pocket.”
Jin blinked.
“My pocket?”
“The left one. Please. Just check.”
He hesitated. Then, slowly, reluctantly, he reached into his jacket.
His hand came out holding a small, folded piece of paper.
I watched him open it. His eyes moved across the page. I knew what it said, because I’d watched him write it that morning, in the penthouse, in a dead-steady hand.
Whoever you think he is, believe him.His name is Hoshina Ren.Listen to the tape.You were brave. Don’t be afraid.— J.
Jin read it three times.
Something in his face changed. Not recognition. Not yet. But a hairline fracture in the wall, a tiny crack of light.
He looked up at me.
He didn’t smile. He didn’t cry. But the polite, empty mask slid off, and underneath it was a person, small and frightened and very, very tired.
“Play it,” he said.
I set the pen on the table between us and pressed the button.
Reina’s voice filled the quiet room, thin and trembling and unmistakable.
“You’re the only person who ever loved me without wanting anything.”
Jin went completely still.
“I tried it once. Just to see. I handed it to you in the car. I said, ‘Oniisan, press this for me.’ And you did.”
He didn’t breathe.
“It only works if you love me. If you didn’t, the cost would land on me. That’s the rule. I’ve tested it.”
For the whole six minutes, he didn’t move. Not a muscle. He sat with his hands flat on the table and listened to his sister tell him, in her own voice, that she’d been taking him apart for six years.
When the recording ended, the room was silent.
I couldn’t look at him. I stared at the cat pen, the little purple absurdity of it, because if I looked at his face I’d start crying again.
“Ren,” said Jin.
I looked up.
His eyes were red, and wet, and completely clear.
“I remember you,” he said. “Not, not remembered. I don’t have it. It’s gone. It’s a white hole.” His voice cracked. “But I know. I can tell from the way my chest hurts.”
“Jin...”
“I paid with the week.” He gave a small, broken laugh. “Did I at least make you laugh? Did I say anything good?”
“You told me not to take it personally.”
He closed his eyes.
“Then don’t,” he whispered. “Please. It’s not you. It’s never been you.”
He put his head down on the table, between his folded arms. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never comforted anyone in my life.
So I sat down beside him, on the cushion that still held the shape of his sister, and I put my hand on his shoulder.
And I said the only thing I could think of.
“I’ve got your back. Okay? I’ll remember it for you.”
His shoulders trembled.
He didn’t answer.
But he didn’t move away, either.