Rain has a strange way of reviving the things I've tried to forget.
The smell of wet soil, the tapping on a tin roof, even the reflection of streetlights in puddles — they all feel like fragments of the past refusing to sink away.
And today, as the train halts at Hoshimachi Station, I know I can no longer run from those memories.
The Rainsfeld house looks just the same as when I left it six years ago.
Its white walls are beginning to crack. The hydrangea tree in the front garden still blooms, keeping that soft blue shade that somehow feels quietly sorrowful.
The only thing that's changed is… me.
And time.
I am no longer the teenager who once sat on the balcony, listening to Mother hum while she painted.
No longer the brother who knew how to smile to ease his little sister's tears.
Now, I am simply Allen Rainsfeld, twenty-three years old — heir to a family name that feels too heavy for my own voice to carry.
The door opens softly when I knock.
Light footsteps echo from within — and amidst the faint scent of oil paint and the salt of the sea, I see her.
Erika.
MyLittle Sister — the one I left behind beneath a crying sky.
She stands in the doorway, her brown hair damp with rain, her green eyes looking at me as if she can't tell whether I'm real or just a dream.
> "You came back, Onii-chan?" she asks softly, almost afraid the words might shatter in the air.
I nod but don't reply. I'm too busy studying every detail — that gentle expression, those small hands now stained slightly with paint, and the smile that feels like something from another lifetime.
> "I thought you'd forgotten the color of this town," she murmurs.
I lower my gaze to my shoes, wet from the rain.
> "I tried to forget," I say at last. "But Hoshimachi always calls me back through the rain."
That night, we sit on the balcony.
The place that once felt vast now feels too small to hold all the silence between us.
The rain falls softly. The sea breeze stirs the curtains, carrying the faint scent of blooming hydrangeas from the garden below.
Erika is painting something — I don't ask what.
I simply watch, listening to the delicate sound of her brush gliding across the canvas, and I realize how much I've missed that sound.
Mother's voice.
Our childhood.
The life I thought I had lost.
> "Onii-chan," she says suddenly, still painting, "if life is a canvas… do you ever feel like your colors have faded?"
The question is simple, yet it cuts deeper than I expect.
I look up at the sky — gray blending into the sea.
> "Maybe," I whisper. "I stopped painting after Mother passed. I thought… if I stopped remembering, I could stop feeling the loss."
Erika glances at me and smiles faintly.
> "But loss is a color too, isn't it? Without the darker shades, a painting wouldn't look alive."
Silence.
Only the sound of rain — gentle, rhythmic, like the earth itself breathing.
I want to say something, but I don't know what.
So I just sit there beside my sister, who somehow seems so much more grown than I remembered.
And somehow, I realize — we're still standing beneath the same rain as before… only this time, we're no longer hiding from it.
A few days later, I help Erika restore Mother's old studio.
We replace wooden panels, clean the windows, and hang our mother's paintings back on the walls.
Each time I hammer a nail or lift a frame, I can feel something returning to me — something I thought time had stolen away.
On my last night before leaving for the city, Erika gives me a small painting.
Two figures stand beneath an umbrella in the rain — one tall, one small — facing a sea colored orange by the sunset.
> "You and me," she says softly. "That day when the first rain fell after Mother left."
I stare at the painting for a long time.
A strange warmth spreads quietly in my chest.
> "Thank you, Erika," I say at last.
"For the color that never faded."
Now, whenever it rains — whether it's against the glass roof of my Tokyo apartment or in the narrow, quiet streets of some unfamiliar place — I always stop for a moment.
Because within the sound of water and the scent of wet earth, I can still hear something:
a soft laugh, the sweep of a brush, and my mother's words that continue to live within us.
> "Every memory is a stroke of color on the canvas of life."
And beneath the rain, I always know —
the colors that once faded have finally come home.