‘AKI!’

Fuka was standing in front of the glowing mirror, calling out for Aki.

‘Let’s go home now, Aki-chan!’

But Aki didn’t appear.

She stood in front of Kokoro’s mirror, and pleaded. I don’t want to forget any of it. If someone’s wish comes true, I’ll forget everything.

She was so angry at Aki’s selfishness she could hardly speak.

‘Please, Kokoro, the wish …’

Aki, whom she’d spent so much time with – she couldn’t just vanish for ever.

Not now, when we’ve promised to do our studying together – I just can’t bear it.

Make a wish come true.

Find the key.

She begged this, from the bottom of her heart.

THE STABBING PAIN FADED FROM Kokoro’s forehead. She wiped away her tears, and laid her palm on the broken piano keys.

‘Just hold on,’ she called, looking over at the desk, at Fuka’s neatly arranged pens lying idle.

‘I will help you. And then I’ll say to you: I’m so happy I met you too, Fuka.’

THE ROOM NEXT TO FUKA’S belonged to Rion.

She hesitated for a moment, before turning the handle and pushing the door open.

It was definitely a boy’s room. A burlap bag and football lay on the floor, things he must have brought with him at some point. Just like the other rooms, the Wolf Queen had trashed it. Even so, Kokoro thought: This is clearly Rion’s room.

Just as Rion had said, there was an X underneath his bed. She scraped it lightly with her fingernail.

Rion had noticed that the Wolf Queen was not the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood, but from The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats.

How did he even know? And why didn’t he tell anyone?

She was thinking this when she heard a singsong voice.

‘KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK. IT’S YOUR mother! No, it isn’t! It’s the wolf!’

A young girl – of elementary school age perhaps – had a book open on her lap and was reading aloud from it.

It was Rion’s older sister, Mio-chan.

She was wearing a hospital gown and a cap. Kokoro saw she had no hair.

Rion was only five years old, and loved to come to the hospital to visit his sister.

Mio may have been bald, but her eyes were large, her skin creamy. Whenever Rion was asked in kindergarten who he would marry, he always answered, ‘Mio-chan!’

Mio-chan was so good at reading aloud, and she’d brought alive the same scene many times – ‘It’s your mother! No, it isn’t! It’s the wolf!’ – with all the appropriate facial expressions.

‘OK, so who do you think it is?’ she asked him. ‘The mother? Or the wolf?’

And Rion cried out, ‘It’s the wolf!’ as if he were inside the story himself.

‘Well, then … we shall see, won’t we …’ said Mio-chan, turning the page.