Chapter 12B: The Girls’ Answer

Emiko waited until Kaito left for his evening run.

He had gone without announcing it, as he usually did. One moment he had been in the kitchen, checking something on his phone while tea steeped in the pot; the next, the front door had closed softly behind him.

Hana and Midori were upstairs.

For several minutes Emiko stood at the bottom of the stairs, telling herself she was being foolish.

Kaito was fifteen. Brilliant, capable, too serious sometimes—but fifteen. A boy who still forgot to bring his laundry down until she reminded him. A boy who ate the burnt edges of toast so his sisters could have the better pieces. A boy who had been awake half the night after Josh died, sitting alone in the hall because he believed someone had to be there if either girl came looking for him.

He was her son.

Yet, in the kitchen that morning, he had looked at her with an awareness so complete it had seemed to reach past what she said and into what she had tried not to know.

What are you becoming?

She had asked him.

He had not answered.

Emiko climbed the stairs.

Hana’s door was open. She was seated at the desk, reading from a screen with one knee drawn up beneath her chin. Midori lay across the foot of Hana’s bed, half-listening and half-working through a puzzle game on her tablet.

Neither girl looked surprised when Emiko appeared.

“Can I come in?” she asked.

Hana immediately closed the laptop. “Of course.”

Midori sat up, moving over to make room between them on the bed.

Emiko sat between her daughters. The gesture was so automatic, so grown-up, that for a moment she felt the ache of time passing—not distance, not rejection, only the realization that they were no longer little girls who needed to climb into her lap to be comforted.

That small gesture hurt Emiko more than it should have. They made room for her. They always made room for her.

She sat.

For a few moments, none of them spoke.

The room smelled faintly of clean laundry and Hana’s lavender shampoo. Moonlight lay across the floorboards. On the shelf above Hana’s desk were the photographs they had not moved: Josh smiling at the three children on a beach; Kaito, younger and scowling at the camera while both girls clung to him; Emiko with all of them around her at a birthday table.

A whole life preserved in frames.

“Is something wrong?” Midori asked.

Emiko looked at them.

“No,” she said. Then, because they deserved better than the easy answer, “I don’t know.”

Hana’s expression softened.

“Is it about Kaito?” she asked.

Emiko felt herself still.

“Why would you think that?”

“Because you have been watching him all day.”