It took four hours to give Jin back his own week.
We sat on the floor of the east parlor, with the lantern burning low and the tea long cold, and I told him everything. The roof. The punch. The surgery. The phone call at 4 a.m. The ledger that said Tea with R. Fine three hundred times. I told him what he’d said in the hospital corridor, and what he’d said in the penthouse, and what he’d written on a piece of paper that morning with a dead-steady hand.
He listened like a man reading his own obituary.
At 11 p.m., he turned over the note in his fingers, Whoever you think he is, believe him, and finally spoke.
“I hit you.”
“No. I hit you.”
“Why?”
“You sat in a car and watched a loan shark corner my fourteen-year-old sister.”
“Ah.” He touched his cheekbone, where a faint yellowish bruise had finished fading days ago. “Did I deserve it?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” A ghost of a smile crossed his face. It was the first one I’d seen since the tea. “Then I must have been a worse person than I remember.”
“You were fine.”
“That’s generous.”
“You were trying.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I’d like to say something,” he said, “and I’d like you to not make it a thing.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you.” He stared at the floor. “I don’t remember what I lost. I probably never will. But I know that someone sat in a closet for an hour listening to my sister, and held my hand when I was an idiot, and wrote it all down so I’d have it back.” His voice dropped. “No one has done that for me before.”
I didn’t trust my voice. So I just nodded.
“Now.” He straightened, and the Ice Prince slid back over his face like a visor. “Let’s discuss what happens on Monday.”
“She’ll find another vessel,” I said.
“Yes.”
“As soon as she realizes you won’t do it anymore. Tomie’s out of commission. Which leaves, who?”
“The list isn’t long.” Jin pulled the laptop onto his knees. “I’ve been keeping a file on everyone she’s close to. For the wrong reasons, but it’ll serve.” He turned the screen toward me. A row of photos. “Aoki Daisuke, Father’s secretary. Thirty years of service. He adores her. Matsumoto Rina, her childhood friend, a pianist. Takeda Sora, a junior at her college. And Kurosawa.”
“Your driver?”
“He loves her like a granddaughter.” A muscle jumped in his jaw. “If she asks him, he’ll say yes without a second thought.”
My stomach clenched. “We have to warn them.”
“They won’t remember it. Not if they’ve already paid.” Jin shook his head. “And if we tell them, she’ll know. She’s too clever. She’ll pivot to someone we haven’t thought of.”
“So what do we do?”
“We cut off the supply.” His eyes were hard. “I’ll move Tomie into a care facility this week, somewhere Reina can’t reach. I’ll reassign Aoki, Matsumoto, and Takeda abroad. Kurosawa I’ll keep close. It’ll take time. She’ll notice.”
“And when she does?”
“She’ll come for me.” He closed the laptop. “Which is why I’m not going to be here.”
“What do you mean?”
“On Friday, my father announces the succession. If I’m named heir, I’ll have the Group’s resources. I’ll have people. Lawyers. Security.” He rose gracefully to his feet. “Until then, I’m going to be extremely boring. I’m going to go to dinner. I’m going to smile. I’m going to give her no reason to suspect that I know.”
“You can act that well?”
“I’ve been doing it for twenty-four years.” He offered a hand to help me up. “Apparently, I’ve been very good at it for longer than I realized.”
I got back to the hospital at 3:40 a.m.
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The corridors were silent, floors gleaming under the dim night lights. My mother was asleep. Yui was curled up on the couch under Takumi’s hoodie. And in the plastic chair by the window, with her notebook in her lap and her head tilted against the glass, Mio was dozing.
I stood in the doorway for a while, just looking.
She looked small. She’d taken her hair out of its clip, and it fell across her cheek in soft dark waves. One hand was still curled around a pen. A cup of cold tea sat untouched on the sill. She must have been waiting for me. She must have been trying to stay awake.
She has a notebook about me, I thought. Hundreds of pages. She knows my favorite sugar. She knows how I fold a napkin. And she let me walk in here tonight and say ‘nice to meet you’ and not once told me what I’d lost.
I crossed the room as quietly as I could and sat down on the floor beside her chair.
She stirred anyway.
“...Ren?”
“Hey.”
“You’re back.” Her eyes opened, bleary and unfocused. Then they sharpened. She sat up so fast her notebook slid to the floor. “Are you okay? Did he, was it, did something happen...”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m a little bit fine.”
“Ren.”
“He’s okay,” I said. “He lost a week. Everything, the roof, the hospital, me. He wrote himself a note first. I played him the tape. He believed it.”
Mio’s face crumpled. “Oh, Ren.”
“I know.”
“Poor Jin.”
“I know.”
She slid down off the chair and sat on the floor beside me, so close that our shoulders touched. Neither of us said anything for a long time. Outside the window, the first gray of dawn was starting to smudge the sky.
“I keep thinking about it,” I said finally. “She loves him. That’s the worst part. She actually, really loves him, and she’s still doing this. I don’t understand how that’s possible.”
“I think it’s very possible.”
“How?”
“Because love and need are different things.” Mio’s voice was quiet. “People confuse them all the time. They look the same from the inside. But one asks, ‘What can I give you?’ And the other one asks, ‘What can I take?’”
I let that sink in.
“Which one am I?” I asked.
She turned her head and looked at me.
“I don’t know yet,” she said honestly. “You haven’t had to choose.”
It wasn’t a comfortable answer. But it was true, and she’d always told me the truth, even when she was lying. I understood that now. Every lie she’d told me, muscle memory, a planetarium gift shop, we haven’t met, had been a truth she couldn’t afford to say yet.
I took the silver star from my pocket and held it out.
“Yours.”
“Keep it.”
“I’ve had it for two days. I’m afraid I’ll lose it.”
“You won’t.”
“I lost a week of Jin’s life tonight, Mio. I can’t promise I won’t lose a key...”
“You didn’t lose it.” She closed my fingers around the star. “You kept it. For him. That’s different.”
I stared at her.
“You remembered it for him,” she said. “That’s what a ledger is. It’s not about what you lose. It’s about who you hold on to.” She leaned her head against my shoulder. Her hair smelled like hospital soap and faintly of jasmine tea. “He’ll get it back. Not the memory. But the meaning. You’ll give it to him.”
I swallowed. Tried to speak. Couldn’t.
So I just sat there, with my back against the wall of a hospital room at dawn, and let her lean on me, and wished that this one moment, this tiny, stupid, perfect moment, could be a thing I’d never lose.
Interlude: Reina
The storage room behind the east parlor was exactly as she’d left it.
Almost.
Reina stood in the doorway at ten o’clock on Monday morning, in a pale gray suit, one hand on the frame, and tilted her head. The light through the paper screen was soft and clean. The tatami smelled of camphor. Nothing was out of place.
That was the first thing that bothered her.
Too neat.
Tomie always left the room in a small, particular mess. A blanket not quite folded. A cushion slightly crooked. Tomie hadn’t been in here for two days. Which meant someone else had tidied it.
She stepped inside. Crouched. Ran her finger along the floorboard.
A line in the dust.
Not a footprint. A smear, narrow and straight, where someone had stood for a long time with their back pressed against the wall. Their shoulders had left two faint gray marks on the paper.
Reina studied them for a moment. Then she smiled.
It wasn’t the wide smile. It was small, and sharp, and very real.
“Hello, Hoshina Ren,” she murmured.
She looked down. And there, half-hidden beneath the edge of a cushion, was a tiny, bright purple object.
She picked it up.
It was the ear of a cartoon cat, barely an inch long, made of cheap plastic. It had snapped off the cap of a recording pen. The little hinge was still warm from the afternoon light.
For a long moment, Reina turned it over in her fingers.
She wasn’t angry. That was the strange part. She’d expected to be. She’d expected the cold flash of fury that came whenever she was outplayed, the sharp, clean snap of her own control. But what she felt, instead, was almost delight.
He did it.
That clumsy, honest, terrible liar. He actually did it.
She sat down on the tatami, crossed her legs, and drew her phone from her sleeve. She didn’t open the Notes app. She opened a different one, an ordinary little notebook, and began to type.
Hoshina Ren. 19. Mother: Kaori, recovering. Sister: Yui, 14.Friend: Ishida Takumi.Girl: Tsukishiro Mio.Brother of Mio: Tsukishiro Shun.
Her thumb paused over the last name.
Shun.
The one who’d vanished.
Of course, Reina thought. Of course it’s her. The girl from the hospital. The one who stood in the lobby of Kurose Tower in the rain, clutching a notebook. She’d seen the photographs in Jin’s file. She just hadn’t connected them.
She’d been so focused on the boy. She hadn’t thought about the girl who held his memory.
The only person alive who remembers what the world forgot.
Reina pressed the little cat’s ear into her palm.
“You were clever,” she said softly, to the empty room. “But you made one mistake.”
She stood. Smoothed her skirt. The smile curved across her face, a millimeter too wide.
“You left her alone.”