Lin Xiaolu gripped the edge of her phone, her fingers unconsciously tightening.
She could see that in the photograph, the magical girl in a cherry-pink frilly dress was smiling alongside the others, wrapping an arm around the shy blue-haired magical girl beside her with an indescribable tenderness.
Two people who should never have crossed paths in her understanding stood so intimately together in the photograph that Lin Xiaolu unconsciously opened and closed her mouth, unable to say a word.
Is that so? She desperately wanted to ask again.
But whatever doubts she had harbored before vanished completely the instant she saw this scene.
Yes, of course it should have been this way.
All the unusual things about her mother while she was alive; why her father had been so secretive about her death; why the mysterious magical girl Larkspur had taken such special care of her... every answer led back to one conclusion: her mother had been a magical girl.
It was like finding the original key to an unsolvable lock. With a gentle turn, it clicked open.
She had never thought that her mother could have anything to do with being a "magical girl." In her memories, her mother had simply been a somewhat strange housewife who always insisted she was a freelancer.
She had been cheerful to the point of being scatterbrained, lazy and careless in her everyday life, and sometimes even more childish than Lin Xiaolu. But she had truly loved and spoiled her, and had been a wonderful mother.
She remembered snuggling in her mother's arms while watching magical girl cartoons on television. She had not forgotten the smile on her mother's face when she told her, "I want to become a magical girl when I grow up."
Lin Xiaolu suddenly remembered so many more things: