CHAPTER 4 — Three Months of Not Knowing

Kaori spoke slower now, as if each sentence had to be placed carefully on the table between them.

“The first month I missed, I told myself it was stress,” she said. “Exams. My father’s anger at home. Walking too much. Girls’ bodies were mysterious even to girls, back then, in a place like ours. No one explained clearly. Magazines were locked away. Teachers changed the subject. Mothers said, ‘Be careful,’ without saying careful of what.”

Ren sat still, elbows on his knees.

“The second month, I got scared. I told Yuto behind the library. His face went white. He held my hands so hard they hurt, and he said, ‘If it’s true, I won’t run.’ I loved him more in that second than I ever had. But love does not buy a doctor visit when you are fifteen and terrified of being seen.”

“Couldn’t Madam Maya help?” Ren asked.

“Later she did. At first we were too ashamed to tell her. Yuto was her pride. I was a schoolgirl from a strict house. We thought if we waited one more week, nature would fix itself.” Kaori shook her head at her younger self. “Nature did not fix it.”

Morning sickness came in waves. She blamed bad lunch. She got tired too fast. Her uniform skirt felt tighter at the waist, but only a little. She hid it under loose sweaters. Yuto saved coins in a jar under his bed at the orphanage for a clinic trip “when we are sure.”

“In our town, the nearest real clinic with privacy was two bus rides away,” Kaori said. “There was a small local office, but the nurse knew everyone’s family. If I walked in, my father would know before dinner. So we delayed. We were children making adult choices with child tools.”

By the third month, hope and fear lived in the same room.

They finally went. Early morning. Different town. Kaori wore a hat low over her face. Yuto stood outside first, then went in with her when her legs shook too hard to stand alone.

The test was simple.

The result was not.

Pregnant.

Kaori stared at the word as if it belonged to another girl. Fifteen years old. A baby. School. Family. Future. All of it cracked at once.

Yuto did not speak for a long time. Then he bowed his head against her shoulder right there in the hallway and whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m with you. I’m with you.”

On the bus home they held hands under his bag and did not cry until the last stop, where no one they knew could see.

“For a week I wanted the problem to vanish,” Kaori admitted, voice raw. “I was ashamed of that later. I was so young. I thought of my father’s belt voice. I thought of school whispers. I thought, I can’t do this.”

Ren’s eyes stung. “Mom…”

“Then my belly began to change for real,” she said. “Not huge. Just a soft roundness I could feel with my own palm at night. One evening I lay on my futon and put both hands there, and something shifted inside me — not a kick yet, more like a knowing. This is mine. This is real. This is not only trouble. This is a life.”

She looked at Ren then, present-day Ren, tall and listening.

“That is when I started wanting you,” she said. “Not as an idea. As my child. I told Yuto the next day by the river. I said, ‘I want to keep the baby. Even if the world hates us.’ He cried with relief. He had been afraid I would ask him to disappear or ask the baby to disappear. He said, ‘Then we raise him. Or her. Together.’”

They made small plans that felt huge: leave town, work, find a room, tell Madam Maya, survive.

But plans move slower than bodies.

Kaori’s stomach kept growing. Hiding got harder. A teacher asked if she was eating well. A girl in class stared at her waist. At home her mother frowned at how often she refused oily food.

“We still had no perfect map,” Kaori said. “Only each other. And the clock.”

She reached into the wooden box and took out the old hospital bracelet — thin plastic, faded writing.

“This came later, on the day you were born. I keep it because it reminds me that fear and love can sit in the same chest. I was still fifteen when I held you. Still a child by law. Still a mother by blood.”

Ren wiped his face with his sleeve.

“I never knew it was that hard so early.”

“I didn’t want your childhood filled with my pain,” Kaori said. “I wanted you to eat warm food and think the world was basically kind. That was my job.”

Silence rested between them. Outside, someone dragged a garbage bin. A dog barked twice and stopped.

Kaori’s fingers brushed Ren’s hand by accident as she reached for a photo. Both of them felt it. Both of them pretended it was only accident. On a grief day, even small contact carried weight — comfort first, and under comfort, something warmer neither of them dared name.

“Are you tired?” Ren asked.

“A little. But the next part is important. The part where my family threw me away… and a woman with no child of her own became the reason we survived.”

She stood, stretched her back, and refilled the teapot.

“Let me make fresh tea. Then I’ll tell you about the night my father said I was no longer his daughter… and about Madam Maya’s land.”