It was on days like this when she went there. When her husband was on a training trip with their two sons now both already grown up men with families of their own. When she was all alone in the house he had built for someone else.
Yes, on days like this she went to the storage room, pulled out a small box and took out a picture frame. She would look at the picture and smile. She had seen quite many of the people in the picture dash through their 40years together. Yet there was one person she could never meet and she was the one she wanted to meet the most.
He never talked about the time before she met him as if he hadn't lived then. Yet just one look at the picture and she knew it was then that he was more alive than ever. Truth to be told she had never seen this cocky dazzling smile he wore in the picture. His smiles were always broken, his laugh always hollow. In the little worn out pictures of him and her on the frame, she saw that once his voice had filled the world and his smile lit up the room. She didn't mind that his smile was not meant for her. She wasn't the jealous type of woman. After all she had married him knowing that he was carrying rocky cliffs with him. She had known from the start that she could never be nr 1, but as long as she had her wedding ring around her finger, she didn't mind.
She took out the pictures that had been added to the box around ten years ago. Yet the pictures went back even more years to the past. Taken just some years after the little pictures on the frame. She looked at the picture - how beautiful she was. Even if she could turn back time and lose all her wrinkles, be a maiden again, she couldn't compare herself to the beauty in the picture. This young girl was and always will be more beautiful than she was.
She unfolded the letter which content she had memorised word by word. And still there was so much she didn't understand.
"It would have been Jusenkyo all over again. Only this time your voice would not, could not bring me back." She could only imagine the meaning behind it. She had heard the name Jusenkyo before along with the stories of a curse her husband used to have. But that could possibly not be the case this time.
After the explanation of how she saw her father go through with it, how she didn't want him to suffer even more, were the words that haunted her every day since the day she first read them:"I will love you until death and beyond."
There were many things she still didn't know about her husband. Yet these words made her understand a part of her husband she had always felt confused about. His habit of sleep-talking wasn't just a mumble of random things. It had always been an answer to her.
"Me too, tomboy, me too."
On days like this she wished that death could take him faster. Maybe in next life, they could be together.
So it was supposed to be a oneshot. But then I woke up next morning and had the whole second chapter ready in my mind. And by the time I finished jotting down the son's POV, I already knew every single thing the wife was feeling. Hope you understood that every chapter had a 10 year gap. So yeah- I'm sorry for giving you more chapters.
And yes, the whole story is based on the fact that Akane's mother died at a young age. Takahashi never revealed what happened but I always got the feeling that it wasn't just an accident. So what if whatever took her was genetic?