Chapter 50
Epilogue
A few years later, on a particularly calm day at sea, a group of fishermen from Kokoya Village noticed something unusual.
It was the day of the market, and a woman who used to visit the village regularly to sell cold medicine had returned after a long absence. Accompanying her were a man and a young girl.
“Dad!”
The little girl, playing on the beach, called out to her father after discovering something in a crevice between the rocks. She picked up a small, transparent, shimmering bead and showed it to him.
“It’s a merperson’s tear.”
She remembered seeing something identical among the precious ingredients her mother had carefully sorted.
“It must have been washed ashore by the waves.”
Although it was possible that one of the merfolk had been sitting on the rocks, crying and leaving behind a tear, the girl dismissed that thought. After all, except for her father, all of the merfolk lived deep in the ocean. No merperson would ever come up to a human village to cry.
“Which merperson do you think this tear belongs to?”
The girl let her imagination wander, wondering what sad story might have caused the merperson to cry. Just then, her father approached, took the tear she had found, and examined it closely.
“I thought I collected all of them back then, but it seems I missed one.”
“Back then?”
The girl asked her father, who, with a distant look in his eyes, seemed lost in memory. He then roughly ruffled his curious daughter’s hair.
“This one is mine.”
“Dad’s? Dad cried?”
The girl was taken aback, unable to imagine her father crying. She had never seen her parents cry in her entire life. The thought that her father might have cried made it feel like something impossible had happened.
“Why?”
“Because I was very sad.”
“Why?”
The girl’s relentless barrage of “why” questions made her father smile gently. He knelt down to her eye level and pointed toward her mother.
Her mother was busy reorganizing the items she had bought at the market into a sack, preparing for their long-awaited return home.
“Go ask your mom. She’s the one who made me cry.”
Her father whispered the words into her ear, as if sharing the world’s most secretive confession. The girl gasped and looked up at his face.
“No way.”
Her father had played so many pranks on her that she didn’t immediately believe him. But he slowly nodded, insisting it was true. His serious expression made her doubt what was real and what wasn’t.
“Who else but Mom could make Dad cry?”
Now that she thought about it, it made sense. Her father always seemed to lose to her mother, and sometimes, he even got scolded along with her.
“Is it really yours? Did you cry because Mom scolded you?”
“Mom said something really harsh to me.”
The girl’s eyes widened in shock. She was now completely convinced that the tear belonged to her father.
“Making you cry is so mean! I’m gonna tell Mom off.”
Her father gently nudged her forward. The girl hesitated for a moment, then ran over to her mother.
“Mom! Tell me the story about how you made Dad cry!”
“Yes, and give her a good scolding while you’re at it.”
Like her mother, the girl was more curious than she was concerned about her father. She was a cool-headed child who loved her mother more that anything in the world. A small smile played on her father’s lips as he watched her go.
—And they lived happily ever after.
<Fin>
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