The "study session" ends in a cloud of unresolved tension. Rina and Haruka are now more suspicious of me than ever, and Aiwa has a new, confusing puzzle to solve. She spends the entire trip home replaying the scene in her mind. My strange, nostalgic smile. My intense focus on the single line about the "promise." The way I looked at her. It does not make any sense.
Unless…
A wild, impossible idea, a fantasy she has entertained a thousand times, begins to form in her mind. It is a one-in-a-billion chance. But the coincidences are starting to pile up. The shared love for 'Starlight Paladin.' The fact that he is kind to her. And now, his bizarre reaction to the most personal, secret motivation in her life.
When she gets to her apartment, she is a woman on a mission. "Okaasan!" she calls out, finding her mother in the kitchen. "Do you remember when we lived in Japan when I was little? That first time, when I was in kindergarten?"
Her mother looks up, a warm smile on her face. "Of course, dear. You were so small. You loved that little park next to your kindergarten and wore that silly purple wig everywhere."
"Do we… do we still have any photos from back then?" Aiwa asks, trying to sound casual, as if the question is not the most important one she has ever asked. "I was just feeling a little nostalgic."
Her mother's smile widens. "I think I have just the thing." She goes to a large, sealed box labeled 'OLD ALBUMS' and, after a moment of digging, pulls out a thick, slightly faded photo album. "Here you go. A trip down memory lane."
Aiwa takes the album back to her room, her heart pounding with a strange mixture of hope and fear. She sits on her bed and opens the first page.
There she is, a tiny, six-year-old girl with a shy smile. There are photos of her at the kindergarten, in the park, with her parents. She flips through the pages, her own past looking back at her, a life she barely remembers.
And then, she finds it.
It is a single, slightly blurry photograph, tucked between a picture of her on a swing and one of her with a birthday cake. It is a picture of her, age six, wearing her cheap, beloved princess costume with the shiny purple wig. And standing next to her, holding a plastic toy sword and puffing out his chest with a look of immense, serious pride, is a little boy with short, messy black hair and the most serious, intense eyes she has ever seen.
She stares at the photograph. The boy. Her hero. The one who saved her from the dogs. The one she promised to marry.
Her mind races, trying to superimpose the face of the seventeen-year-old boy from her class onto this seven-year-old hero. The shape of the eyes. The serious set of the mouth. It is blurry, a ghost of a resemblance, but it is there. It is undeniably there.
It is him. It has to be him.
Rui Hinamata, the kind, observant, and constantly flustered boy from her class, is the hero from her past.
A wave of heat rushes to her face, so intense it makes her dizzy. Mortification. Embarrassment. And a deep, profound, and utterly terrifying flutter of joy. She has been casually chatting with him, being weird and shy around him, all while he is the long-lost boy she has been dreaming about for a decade. The boy she confessed to admiring in a national magazine.
She snaps the photo album shut, her mind a complete and total mess. She has to find out for sure. But how can she possibly ask him? How can she even look him in the eye tomorrow at school?