‘I’ll hope for one wish for you,’ Mio-chan said again.

‘I want to be able to walk with you to school,’ he said. Rion would soon be going into elementary school.

His sister was silent. Rion wondered why she’d suddenly gone quiet.

After a while, she looked up and shook her head.

‘Next year when you start elementary school, Rion, I’ll be in junior high. We won’t be going to the same school.’ She paused. ‘But if I do go back to that school, then I want the same as you – to walk to school together, Rion, and to play with you.’

Her junior high uniform was hanging on the wall.

HE WAS SURE SHE WOULD never die. But then she did.

The last time he spoke to her was only a few hours earlier.

She reached out a hand to his and, in a barely audible whisper, said, ‘Rion … I’m sorry I scared you. But I had a good time.’

Rion remembered thinking that even up till the moment she died, she was always thinking about others.

Like she said, seeing her suffer was indeed very scary. Rion couldn’t stop crying; from fear, but also from not wanting to say goodbye.

Her funeral was at the beginning of April; a spring rain was falling as Rion sat beside his father. His mother was a pale shell of her former self, and when a guest came up to her she merely bowed, her eyes vacant.

You stay well, OK, and be with Mum and Dad always.

Rion finally understood what his sister’s words meant.

Her junior high uniform hung in her hospital room for a year. They’d hung it there in the hope that she would one day start, but she never wore it, not even once.

‘YOU’RE REALLY LUCKY, TO BE so healthy.’

The first time his mother said this was when Rion was in first grade in elementary school, the same age Mio had been when she fell sick.

Rion had joined a local football team and was beginning to enjoy learning a new sport. And then, as Rion was about to go out to play, ball in hand, his mother said, ‘If only she’d had half the energy you have.’

Rion was caught off guard.

He couldn’t think what to say. ‘Uh …’ he managed.

‘Uh … you say,’ his mother mocked, and lowered her eyes.

They had been told of Mio’s condition while his mother was pregnant with Rion. Simultaneously monitoring Mio’s treatment and taking care of baby Rion overwhelmed her for several years, and Rion knew she resented having to manage both of them at the same time.

Photos of his sister were on display on the far wall of the living room.

There was a photo of her last piano recital before she went into the hospital, a photo of the whole family, a photo of Mio and her mother in the hospital just before she passed away. And over by the window, they kept the exquisite doll’s house her parents had bought for her, and which she had loved so much.