“I’ll Still Love You When We’re Old”
Aika Misora never planned to fall in love. Not with the boy who sat alone on rooftops, or the one who pressed flowers instead of speaking his pain. But some stories don’t wait to be written — they bloom in silence, in shared glances, in the weight of unsaid things.
After her mother’s quiet abandonment, Aika survives high school by keeping her heart zipped shut. Her world is routine: library lunches, hushed notebooks, and pretending everything’s fine. Until she meets Ren Hayashi, the quiet sketch-artist with rumors on his name and bruises in his smile.
He doesn’t talk much. But his silence says everything.
Drawn together by chance — and maybe fate — the two begin to orbit each other in secret places: the abandoned rooftop, the library’s back corner, the flower shop that smells like lost time. As seasons shift, so do they. Slowly. Tenderly. Terrifyingly.
But love, even the gentle kind, brings buried pain to the surface. And when a long-unopened letter from Aika’s mother resurfaces, the wounds between them deepen — not enough to break, but enough to test whether two broken hearts can really hold each other.
A soft, grief-tinged coming-of-age romance about first love, second chances, and what it means to stay — even when everything else leaves.
