“Ugh. This is so hard to do.”

Reina and I stood outside of the door to the house. Not my house, their house. The one that I’d been living in for months without their knowledge. What would they think? To find out that the daughter who you’ve had for your whole life isn’t really your daughter at all – they’re just some random person from your town, who was touched by the finger of God.

“It’s too late for regrets now,” Reina said, “You resolved to let them know. I think it’s a wonderful idea.”

Half of the idea was to at least let them know that they were doing a good deed by taking me in. But standing outside of the door had given me an entirely different feeling. The fear of rejection. I’d spent so long thinking about how to push everyone away from me that it was entirely alien to me at that point. It paralyzed me where I stood.

Which is to say, things only really started when the doors were pulled open by a concerned looking Gorou Nakamura.

“Ah. Girls.”

He was always so earnest. There was a kindness in his eyes that at that moment I didn’t feel like I really deserved. I averted my gaze down to the floor. He understood. He remembered why things had changed so radically now. He was a man of two minds. The one from before who had two daughters, and now the man who had three. Becoming aware of something that before was accepted as fact, as reality, accepting that it was something done by someone else through powers that can’t be explained rationally must have been the hardest thing in the world.

“Come inside, you’re going to catch a cold out there.”

We followed him into the dining room. The leading lady of the house, the women I’d been calling mother for months on end, sat on one side. Dad took the seat next to her. The entire family had been assembled for a meeting on the ethics of brainwashing. I sat down and tried to avert my eyes once again. I felt like a naught child about to be scolded.

He tried to break the ice with a joke, “Well, this was certainly an interesting turn of events.”

“Interesting isn’t the word I’d use.”

He was taken aback by my reaction, and the statement that followed betrayed his own uncertainty, “I… don’t quite know what to say.”

Natsume shook her head, “Neither do I.”

“I don’t expect you to. This isn’t exactly the kind of thing that happens every day, is it?”

He needed me to explain, “What happened?”

“That shrine that Reina prays to all the time – turns out that there was a little something living in there. So, Reina asked him very nicely for something and we all got tangled up in it. Maybe it was a co-incidence, but he seemed really proud of himself when we talked to him.”

Reina continued, “Me and Miyako were the only ones who knew until now. God filled in the blanks in our memories so that she could live with us.”

“So who are you, really?”

“I’m… me. But if you’re asking who I was before Reina got involved, I was just one of her classmates.”

Reina hummed to herself, “We can’t ignore who you used to be now Miyako. What a strange situation we find ourselves in. Aware of the truth, but still filled with memories that feel so real.”

“They are real, as real as any other memory is,” Dad responded, “So you’ve been living with us for a while now, or for years depending on how we feel.”

“We don’t know if any of those memories happened - but if the only thing that matters is our acknowledgement of them, does it matter? We can’t stop ourselves from feeling this way.”

I crossed my arms as Reina and Dad went back and forth. It flew over my head completely. “So am I getting booted out? I don’t know if I inherited my Grandma’s house.”

“If he reset everything, shouldn’t you have?”

I was concerned. The inconsistencies with the two stories that God had weaved for us were in conflict with each other. “But did he? We don’t know if it only affected us four, or if everyone at school and the wider city knows too. For all they know, Hideki went missing a few months ago and never turned up again. They might think he’s dead and sold the house on to someone else.”

I realized that I was talking about my old self in the third person, but that was what he felt like. Hideki was me from a few months ago, and so much had happened since then that I’d separated those two parts of myself into different people. I knew he was still me though – and it would be foolish to discard every memory and meaning that I gained from that time. I wanted to remember my grandmother for all that she did for me.

I looked to my new parents, the ones who Reina introduced to me through divine intervention. “I could have easily just gone on about my business without ever telling you, but I don’t think that’s fair. You have a right to know. Deceiving you never sat right with me, even when I knew that the truth was unbelievable enough to keep to myself.

“So I asked him to give your memories back, the ones from the time when I wasn’t here. I didn’t want you to lose them. They have their own meaning; they’re part of who you are, even though they don’t line up with the world we’re in now.”

Dad scratched his head, “It is quite confusing.”

Mom nodded, “But nothing is going to change between us.”

“I’m practically a stranger.”

“The old you is a stranger, but we’ve known you our whole lives. You’re our daughter, just as much as you are someone else’s.”

It was hard to keep myself from smiling. Really hard. I stood from my seat and bowed my head, “Thank you for having me!”

They both tried to stop me, “You don’t need to…”

But I cut them off again, “Yes, I do. Whether you realize it or not, you took me in when I needed it the most – and you didn’t even know me. You took in a total stranger, accepted them as part of your family. I might have ended up on the streets without you. Thank you. I mean it.”

My eyes were closed. I could hear the both of them getting up and approaching me. I was surprised when I felt an arm wrap around my shoulder. I was dragged into a half-hug by Gorou and Natsume, “You’ll always have a place here. We can’t be upset at you. Real or fake, you still mean the world to us.”

That did it. My eyes began to tear up. An ugly sob escaped my chest. It was over, there was no way I was preserving my aloof attitude with a statement like that. I felt the same way. Those feelings were as good as real. There were real. I stood there and cried for a while, a pair of reassuring hands on my shoulders. When the waterworks dried up I covered my face, “That’s embarrassing as hell.”

“Reina’s cried over less,” Gorou laughed.