After all this, she had to ask herself whether she would have loved Makoto if she had known the truth from the start. Did love even need the past? She wanted to say no. And yet, if she was honest with herself, she suspected that she would not have been capable of embracing a partner with such a tortured history at a time when grieving her own losses and raising Yuto had absorbed all her energy—ultimately, there was no way to know. But the fact was that, thanks to Makoto’s lies, they had fallen in love and she had been blessed with Hana.