Leave The Rest To Me

“Rokurō. Your mother and I want to start over as a family without you.”

That day, the man spoke to me in an unusually calm tone.

Normally, he was either drunk and worked up, lashing out at everything, or quietly seething in a bad mood. Either way, he wasn’t someone you could actually hold a conversation with.

At some point, our relationship had deteriorated, and the two of us had barely spoken anymore.

So when he suddenly took me out and sat across from me at a family restaurant, I already had a bad feeling.

As if patiently trying to make me understand—or perhaps pleading with me—the man spoke.

“You’re already eighteen. You’ll graduate high school next year. So I want you to move out of our house.”

His tone left no room for argument, and I felt my heart rapidly wither.

December of my third year of high school. I attended a college-preparatory school and had worked diligently for three years. I ranked within the top five in my year. My first-choice university was rated an A for my chances of acceptance. My exams would begin in another month.

And at that exact moment, everything was cut off.

My school prohibited part-time jobs, and I had never been given an allowance either. I had no money of my own, not even enough to pay an enrollment fee. The application period for scholarships had already passed.

More than anything, I lost the will to do anything.

My whole life would probably be like this from now on. Even things I desperately built up would be destroyed by a single word from someone else. Once I thought that, nothing seemed to matter anymore.

My life was a little more complicated than most.

My biological parents disappeared right after I was born, leaving me an orphan. Then my current mother and her former husband came along and adopted me. Apparently, her ex-husband had some kind of abnormal sperm condition and couldn’t have children. Later, my mother and her ex-husband fell out and divorced. The man she remarried was my current father, and Yūha was their child.

Since I had started out as an adopted child, I had no blood connection to any of them. I was some foreign object that had inexplicably ended up inside the Sanjō family.

When I was little, things had still been fine because I was cute enough as a child.

But as I grew older, I only became more and more out of place in that house.

My mother was the one who had brought me into the family. She didn’t hate me, but she had never taken my side either. Apparently, she could no longer endure the tension between my father and me, so they had decided to throw me out.

—Well, if I thought of it as finally being set free, I could at least feel a little relieved.

My only lingering concern was Yūha.

She alone would have objected if she knew I was leaving home.

So.

To tell the truth, that fight had been convenient.

Yūha would come to hate me. I would never return home again.

I had thought that would solve everything.

“Mom and Dad are getting divorced.”

Leaves rustled softly overhead. In the lethargic atmosphere of the early afternoon, Yūha said it clearly.

—We want to start over as a family.

The face of the man who had said that surfaced in my mind.

He was my legally designated father, and nothing more.

I had made one fatal mistake.

Someone capable of saying something like that had never been capable of protecting a family in the first place.

At the time, I hadn’t been able to think clearly. My entrance exams had effectively been thrown away, and I had also broken up with Komaki.

But even so.

I had left Yūha behind in a truly terrible place.

Sure, she was their “biological child,” born from those parents, and she had been loved far more than someone like me.

There probably hadn’t been anything I, someone with no real connection to them, could have done.

And yet, for two years.

Yūha had watched alone as something that had once resembled a family slowly fell apart.

“So that’s why you stopped being able to go to school?”

When I asked gently, Yūha hugged her knees and nodded. She clenched handfuls of her hair in both hands and slowly began forcing the words out.

“I know people would probably tell me this has nothing to do with not going to school… But when I see my friends and they all look happy, or they’re just getting along normally with their parents, or they tell me about family trips… it hurts.”

“No. Of course it’s related. And stop doing that. You’ll damage your hair.”

I gently pulled Yūha’s hands away from where she was gripping her hair. Behind the disheveled dark strands, her eyes had turned red.

“There’s nothing wrong with you. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“…But…”

“You did really well hanging on this long.”

“—!”

Yūha bit her lip. She clenched her hands tightly and nodded over and over while keeping her head lowered.

Drops fell onto the bench, leaving dark stains.

“I’m sorry I didn’t notice. It must’ve been awful.”

“…………Yeah… It was awful. It really, really hurt…………”

“Is there still anything I can do?”

I couldn’t stop the divorce.

I couldn’t erase Yūha’s sadness either.

Even so, if there was something she wanted, I wanted to do whatever I possibly could.

“…Do something.”

Yūha spoke in a trembling voice. She grabbed my hand, looked directly into my eyes, and said,

“Do something, Rokurō.”

“Okay.”

I nodded without hesitation.

There was no reason to refuse.

“Thanks for telling me. There are some things nobody can fix, but anything I can do, I’ll handle.”

Yūha shook her head and sniffled.

I exhaled.

All kinds of emotions were swirling around inside my head, but for now, I ignored them.

I pressed a hand to my temple and thought about what to do.

There weren’t many options available.

But it wasn’t as though there were none.

There were things I could do precisely because I had been thrown out of that house and stopped being their child.

“Leave the rest to me.”

From here on out, this was a bastard’s job.