The wife’s section of the restored marriage registration form had my name on it.
Fujisaki Mio.
Even the trembling handwriting was mine.
“I didn’t write this.”
Sara Takase had only just been rescued from inside the hollow in the wall. Wrapped in a blanket, she looked at me quietly.
“You did. Five years ago, on August seventeenth.”
Two days after my sister died. I should have been at my parents’ house, preparing for the funeral.
“Who were the witnesses?”
“My brother and I.”
There were two signatures in the witness section of the marriage registration form. When Sara restored the blacked-out portions, “Sara Takase” and “Shuji Takase” appeared.
“Was Takase the person who brought the box?”
“Yes. My brother follows Ren. But he wasn’t our enemy from the beginning.”
A real police officer tried to question Sara about what had happened. She refused, saying, “If I talk, they’ll erase the records,” and handed the tablet only to me.
A folder from five years ago was open on the screen.
KASUMI, MIO, REN.
When I opened my name, twelve videos appeared.
The first video showed a small chapel.
The date was August 17, five years ago, at 4:12 p.m. The day after my sister’s funeral. In the corner of the screen sat the bag I’d used back then. I could also see the black handkerchief I’d brought home from the funeral hall.
The chapel appeared to have been built inside a resort in Hakone. The mark of white flowers on the wall matched the mark on the gate I’d seen on the map.
I was wearing a white dress and standing across from Ren before the altar. There were no guests. No pastor, either. Only Sara and Takase stood behind us as witnesses.
Ren’s hair was shorter than it was now. But the shallow dimple that appeared only in his left cheek when he smiled was the same.
“Are you really sure, Mio?”
Ren asked in the video.
“If it means finding the person who killed my sister, I’ll do anything.”
I hadn’t married him because I loved him.
I was pretending to be Ren’s wife so I could investigate my sister’s case.
In the video, I accepted the ring and slipped it onto my left ring finger. A thin silver ring. The same one that had appeared in the wife’s photograph in Chapter One.
“Starting today, you’re my wife.”
Ren kissed my forehead.
The look on my face in that moment didn’t seem like an act.
“Did I fall in love with Ren after this?”
Sara lowered her eyes.
“That isn’t for me to answer.”
The second video. Ren and I were making dinner in a rented apartment.
The third. We were sharing an umbrella at a rainy station.
The fourth. I was crying while Ren silently held me.
It was a record of a fake marriage, yet the two of us looked more intimate than we had during our three months as lovers.
In the fifth video, I was applying medicine to Ren’s left shoulder. There was an old burn scar there.
I’d seen the same scar on the night we first embraced, three months ago. When I asked about it, he said it had come from an accident when he was a child.
But the Mio in the video knew a different story.
“Does the wound you got saving Kasumi still hurt?”
“Only on rainy days.”
“You saved my sister?”
“I couldn’t save her. That’s why I met you.”
It was possible Ren hadn’t killed my sister. He may have been injured trying to save her.
In the sixth video, the two of us were arranging old newspaper articles across a wall. Kasumi Asakura’s obituary, the discovery of an unidentified woman, a missing-person report. At the center, connected by white thread, was a photograph of Takase.
“Is your brother, Shuji, behind this?”
The Mio in the video asked.
“Shuji is being used, too. The person at the center is someone whose name has never been recorded even once.”
“Isn’t it you?”
“I don’t know who I am, either.”
Ren was someone whose name had been stolen, too.
The seventh video. I was crying with my face buried against Ren’s chest.
“I want us to stay together even after the case is over.”
“By then, you’ll hate me.”
“I won’t.”
“Because I’m the one who’s supposed to erase your memories.”
The video cut off there.
An inexplicable sense of loss spread through my chest. I wasn’t watching someone else’s romance. Only the shape remained of a time I had truly felt—and lost.
“Why did you erase my memories?”
“Watch the last video.”
I opened the twelfth video.
The location was the abandoned resort in Hakone. I was sitting in a chair, clutching a white-flower pendant. I spoke clearly to Ren, who sat across from me.
“I love you. That’s why I can’t believe anything you say anymore.”
Ren didn’t answer.
“Even if you weren’t the one who killed my sister, you’ve been stealing people’s names. You used mine, too.”
“It was to protect you.”
“If you didn’t let me choose, then you didn’t protect me.”
The Mio in the video placed a marriage registration form on the table.
“I’ll forget this marriage, and the fact that I fell in love with you. In return, come to me five years from now. This time, make the me who knows nothing fall in love with the real you.”
I stopped breathing.
Ren had approached me three months ago because I myself had asked him to.
“If I don’t choose you five years from now, don’t come after me again.”
“And if you do?”
“Give me everything back. My sister’s records, the names you stole, and your real name.”
At the end of the video, Ren took my hand.
“I promise.”
The screen went dark.
Three months ago, I chose Ren.
Knowing nothing, I fell in love with the same man twice.
Nana sat down beside me.
“Do you believe this?”
“The video could have been made. The voices could have been faked.”
“Then it’s not evidence.”
“But it shows habits only I know.”
When I’m nervous, I trace the nail of my left thumb. When I’m sleepy, and only then, I tuck my hair behind my right ear. The Mio in the videos did both exactly the same way.
That wasn’t all. Partway through the sixth video, I spoke a code phrase my sister and I had made up as children.
“A yellow umbrella means it’s okay to lie.”
It was something Kasumi and I had come up with the night our father left home, so we wouldn’t worry our crying mother. No one besides Kasumi and me knew about it.
The Mio in the video handed Ren a drawing of a yellow umbrella.
That meant there was a lie somewhere in what we’d been saying there.
It was even possible that the request in the twelfth video—to “erase my memories”—hadn’t been what I truly wanted.
“Did Ren know what the code meant?”
Sara shook her head.
“I only learned it now.”
“Then did I pretend to erase my memories to deceive Ren?”
“No. The loss of your memories was real. But before they were erased, you left a different plan for your future self.”
That plan was The Lover’s Instruction Manual.
Sara spoke.
“The videos are real. But they show only what Ren wants you to see.”
“Were the inconvenient parts erased?”
“There was one more video between the eleventh and twelfth.”
“What was on it?”
“Proof that your sister is alive.”
I stood up.
“Kasumi is dead.”
“A person named Fujisaki Kasumi died. But you already know how the system works, don’t you?”
Kill one identity, then give it another name.
“Who did my sister become?”
Sara opened the DM account screen.
<Hello. I’m Ren’s wife.>
The first sentence I’d received.
“I didn’t write The Lover’s Instruction Manual. I only helped prepare the scheduled messages.”
“Who wrote it?”
“Your sister.”
My sister was alive, and she had predicted everything Ren and I would do.
I should have been happy.
For five years, I’d wished I would do anything if it meant hearing her voice one more time. Every birthday reminded me that my sister wasn’t growing older. My mother and I would sort through her belongings, then put them back in boxes because we couldn’t bring ourselves to throw them away.
And yet anger was the first thing that rose in me.
If she was alive, why had she let our mother keep crying? Why had she stayed silent until I approached Ren? Why had her way of warning me about the danger been such a cruel riddle?
But if the person behind the DM really was my sister, she had to have a reason for not identifying herself directly.
Article Five would surely reveal that reason.
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know. This account is the only way we communicate.”
I typed into the DM field.
<Are you alive, Sis?>
It didn’t show as read.
<Why didn’t you tell me directly?>
There was no reply.
Instead, Article Five of The Lover’s Instruction Manual was revealed.
<Even if you find your sister, don’t call her by name.>
Immediately afterward, my mother called me on video chat.
The living room of my parents’ house appeared on the screen. Sitting beside my mother was my sister, looking exactly as she had five years ago.
“Mio.”
My sister smiled.
“I’m home.”
My mother wasn’t looking at the woman beside her. She continued talking to me through the screen about dinner.
“Mom, who’s next to you?”
“Next to me? There’s no one here.”
My sister placed a hand on my mother’s shoulder. Even then, my mother didn’t react.
“Don’t call me by my name.”
My sister’s smile vanished.
“Anyone who acknowledges that I’m Kasumi will have their name stolen next.”
“By whom?”
“By the person who kept me alive. The real wife Ren has been searching for these past five years.”
In the hallway behind them, a woman in white stood.
She had the same face as my sister.
“Mio, look closely,” my sister whispered. “We aren’t twins. That’s you.”
The woman in white lifted her face.
Another me, carrying five years’ worth of memories.
On her left hand was a silver ring, and in her right she held a bouquet of white flowers identical to the one Ren had sent me.
Just before the video call ended, the woman silently mouthed something at me.
—Give me back my husband.