The thing was, her mother’s face was becoming more and more gaunt and exhausted. Fuka often thought she shouldn’t be playing the piano but rather helping her mother out.

Instead of going to a lesson, she wanted to make her mother a home-cooked meal, some rice and hot miso soup. She was always eating bentos from her part-time job, and it’d be nice to make her something else to eat.

And not performing well at the piano competition made her truly sad.

Which is why she thought that to give up now would be a waste.

All the time and money they’d invested in piano lessons for her would be for nothing.

When she started at junior high, she went to school even less often. Even then, she didn’t have much to talk about with the other girls. She didn’t do PE and wasn’t in any clubs. She felt left out.

But that was OK. She didn’t need friends.

ONE DAY, WHILE SHE WAS practising, the mirror near the front door of their flat started to shine.

And she landed up at the castle, and met everyone …

When she went to her own room, it too had a piano. She pressed a couple of keys to test the sound; the next moment she banged the keys down hard with both palms.

I don’t need a piano here, she thought.

‘Summer school starts tomorrow so I won’t be able to come over to the castle for a while.’

That’s the line Fuka gave them, but actually she was having piano lessons in Kyoto in preparation for a summer competition.

The student who had a lesson before Fuka sounded so much better than she did, she thought, and it made her want to plug her ears. She’d practised way too much to even know if she herself was any good any more.

In the competition, Fuka’s mark in the first round placed her out of the running. Anyone ranked thirty or below was automatically eliminated.

Even though she’d been told the competition was on a much smaller scale than the previous one she’d played in.

When Fuka saw the results posted on a noticeboard in the hallway, she went weak at the knees, as though her whole body, along with the piano, were sinking fast into an icy sea.

The summer competition over, she returned to Tokyo, and when she went over to the castle, she was given a box of sweets by Kokoro.

‘A birthday present,’ she said.

Eating a whole box of sweets wasn’t something that anyone did very often in her house. She relished them, savouring the taste, one by one.

Before the competition, Aki had also given her a birthday present.

And Ureshino had told her he really liked her.

His romantic focus flitted from one girl to the next and Fuka had reacted with a predictable shriek when he said this, but the thought that a boy who’d fancied girls like Aki and Kokoro now said he liked her honestly made her happy, even though she had looked grumpy about it.