# Prologue

It’s been two years since my brother passed away. Spring has come, soft and warm.

Today is the grand opening of our dream café—**Koneko Biyori**.

Petals from the cherry trees in full bloom drift on the breeze as if to bless the day. Staring at the refurbished shop—an old wooden house with more than eighty years of history—I can’t help slipping into a quiet reverie.

From the moment I learned of my brother’s dream to this very day, so much has happened.

Even so, now isn’t the time to look back.

“Any minute now…”

I take out my phone and check the time: just past eight in the morning.

It’s far too early to open. I didn’t come here at this hour to prep the shop, or to dwell on the past, or even to indulge in a little melancholy.

I’m here to put my feelings in order once and for all.

“It’s finally happening, isn’t it?”

The words brush my ear like a gentle spring wind.

I turn around to see a woman standing there with a soft smile.

“Two years since then… It felt so long, and yet it passed in a blink.”

Holding down her wind-tossed hair, she sinks briefly into memory.

I know exactly what she means.

“Yeah… But the only reason we could open within two years is because of you, Shiho. After my brother died, you never stopped supporting me—you helped me carry out his dream.”

“That’s not it at all. We got here because we did it together.”

Just like she says, even through all the twists and turns, we really did shoulder it side by side.

There isn’t enough time to tell every step of that journey, so I’ll leave it at this: to fulfill my late brother’s dream, his fiancée, Shiho, and I have kept going until today.

We stumbled more times than I can count, but we kept moving—and finally reached this moment.

“Today, we’re finally making the dream real…”

Shiho savors the words.

“But making a dream come true isn’t the finish line.”

It isn’t an ending. It’s where the dream continues.

“Today is a new beginning. And before it starts, there’s something I need to tell you.”

“So that’s why you asked me to come so early?”

“Yeah.”

It’s taken me two years to sort out how I really feel.

I knew no one would bless it. I tried to lie to myself. But the feeling has swelled to the point I can’t hide it anymore.

I meet Shiho’s eyes and let the truth out.

“I—”

This is the first confession of my life.

With these words, the relationship of “my brother’s fiancée” and “the fiancé’s younger brother” will come to an end.

So that we can stop being stand-ins for someone else—and become irreplaceable to each other.

Memories flicker through my mind like a lantern slide.

This is the record of a life in which, knowing full well I shouldn’t, I fell for my brother’s fiancée; in which I worked with her to fulfill his dream; and when we finally brought it to life, I spoke my heart.

Two people who share the same ache, struggling all the way through—and in the end, finding our hearts aligned.

These pages are a record of how—knowing full well I shouldn’t—I fell for my brother’s fiancée, worked with her to fulfill his dream, and, at the very moment that dream came true, finally spoke my heart.

It’s the story of two people who share the same ache—who wrestled with it, and in the end, found our hearts aligned.