Tomorrow, I'll Be Someone's Girlfriend, and the Price of Being Chosen

The first minutes of the first episode pass through five rooms. A nineteen-year-old sits at a mirror and works a cover cream into the right side of her face until the mark there is gone, because she has a date today and she is being paid for it. A young woman walks arm in arm with a man. A woman of thirty-five sits in the consulting room of a cosmetic surgery clinic. Another young woman, in black and frills, buys a little of a host’s attention across a club table. A student knocks back a drink at the bar where she feels most at home. Over the pictures, the first woman’s voice asks how much money it takes, now, to live alone in Tokyo, and answers that without a fortunate start or a very strong will, even an ordinary life is out of reach.

That is where Tomorrow, I'll Be Someone's Girlfriend begins, and the rest of the series is what those five women do with the answer. It is usually described by its subjects: rental girlfriends, papa-katsu, cosmetic surgery, host clubs, subjects that tend to reach the public as scandal or as a joke. And it is usually praised for refusing to laugh at the women inside them. It does refuse. The refusal is not the sharpest thing about it.

Watch what changes hands. Almost everywhere in the series, what is being bought and sold is the same thing: the feeling of being chosen. Men pay Yuki for an afternoon in which a beautiful young woman seems to have chosen them. Rina’s regular pays for the feeling that a young woman has picked him, and when he would rather pick her friend, he stops paying. A student pays a host for the nights on which she is the one he came to the table for. The series puts the buyer and the seller in the same frame so often that the line between them stops mattering. What matters is where the price falls. It falls, on both sides of the money, mostly on the women.

The last refusal in the series is its argument. The kindest man in Yuki’s story, who has seen the scar and not looked away, offers her the one thing the market cannot sell: to be chosen for good, with no invoice attached. He offers it as protection, and she turns it down. This essay argues that she is not choosing the market over love. She is refusing a love that would need her to become someone who needs rescuing. And the title, which sounds at first like resignation, turns out to be the one sentence in the story that she wrote for herself.

The record first. This is a Japanese drama series of twelve half-hour episodes, produced by MBS and shown after midnight in the Dramaism slot on MBS and TBS from April to the end of June 2022. It was directed by Mai Sakai, Sachiko Kondo and Masato Sugawara from scripts by Kisa Miura, Anna Kawahara and Lee Nawon, and it stars Ai Yoshikawa as Yuki, with Mayu Yokota, Misato Ugaki, Yumena Yanai and Nagisa Saito as the women whose stories run beside hers. Before the premiere, Disney+ announced that it would stream the series worldwide.

It adapts a web manga by Hinao Wono, serialised from May 2019 in Cygames’s app Cycomi and told as an anthology, each chapter belonging to a different heroine. The broadcaster introduced it as a story that had caught fire by word of mouth, mainly among young women, and had passed three million copies in print by the time the drama was announced; in 2023 it won the 68th Shogakukan Manga Award in the category for girls’ manga. A second season of nine episodes followed in May and June 2023. After two special episodes on Yua’s past, it follows Runa, a university student paying her own way, played by Mizuki Kayashima, and Emi, a woman in her forties, both doing sex work in the same establishment.

The special episodes go back to Yua’s last days in a small town, while she was still at school: a town that ran on rumour, a father who had made a family elsewhere, a grandmother she lived with and lost, and an adult man who took advantage of her before she left. That last is harm done to a child, not a choice made by one. This essay names it as such and goes no further into it.

What follows discusses the whole first season, including its ending and the scenes set a year later. It says little about the second season, and about the manga only where the drama departs from it. The series was not screened for this essay. What is described comes from the broadcaster’s own episode synopses and from published reviews and recaps; no line of dialogue is quoted, and where accounts differ, the essay says so or says nothing.

Yuki Shirai is nineteen and pays her own university fees and rent. Once a week she is somebody’s girlfriend: a client books her through an agency and, for an agreed stretch of time, she walks with him, eats with him, holds his hand and is the date he wanted. The work involves no sex, though people who hear of it tend to assume otherwise. Under a special cover make-up she hides a burn scar on the right side of her face, from a childhood in which her mother mistreated her, and she lets nobody close; even Rina, her one friend at university, does not know what she does for money. One client, Sota Tsuji, a young office worker who grew up in a warm family, runs into her in the street without her make-up and sees the scar. She lashes out and says what she really thinks. He tells her it changes nothing.

Rina is popular and lonely, and she fills the loneliness with men. She does papa-katsu, paid dates with older men, which in her case include sex. When a boyfriend turns out to be married, she goes off with two students who pick her up, is left alone afterwards in a hotel room, and goes back to her regular, Iida. Iida uses her birthday as a pretext to get Yuki alone, offers Yuki a contract of her own, is refused, and drops Rina. Hearing a rumour that Yuki does something like sex work, Rina is wounded less by the work than by the secret, until Yudai, the young man she has started seeing, asks whether she tells people that she sleeps with the men who pay her. She goes to apologise. Yuki, to have no more secrets, shows her the scar, and Rina cannot keep the pity out of her face.

Aya Nakatani is thirty-five and passes for her twenties. She has remade almost her whole face, and she works for the same agency as Yuki to pay for more. She hides her age, her job and her surgery from the boyfriend who wants to marry her, and to finish every operation before the wedding she takes money from clients outside the agency, among them a middle-aged man who believes the two of them are really together. When her boyfriend finds out, she tells him everything and shows him photographs of her old face. He calls her face a lie and leaves, the agency fires her, and that night, in the rain, Yuki holds an umbrella over her.

Moe Maya is a student who believes she has a self of her own, unlike the girls around her. Yua, whom she meets at her regular bar, takes her to a host club, where a quiet, gentle host called Kaede turns out to be the one person she can show her weakness to. She gives him more and more, until she is doing sex work to pay for him and has left university. On the night of his birthday, with the money she has saved for it in hand, she walks away from him without a word, and tells the owner of her regular bar, smiling, that she has had a great love.

Yua Takahashi came to Tokyo, in the broadcaster’s words, looking for freedom. She does sex work and spends what she earns on her host, Haruhi, to lift his sales; they fight, make up and fight again.

A year on, the series looks in on each of them. Sota is about to introduce a new girlfriend to his parents. Rina has stopped leaning on men and is working as a model. Aya is still earning for her next operation. Yua is sitting with a new host, complaining about the old one. Moe is at beauty school, and when a truck carrying Kaede’s face goes past her in the street, she can smile. And Yuki is still somebody’s girlfriend by the hour, walking on her own feet. Tomorrow, again, she will be someone’s girlfriend.

Before any argument about these women, their reasons: because the series insists on them, and because every easy way of talking about women like these skips them. The skipping is where contempt begins. Pity begins there too, and pity is only contempt’s gentler cousin.

The first reason is money, and the series means it literally. Its opening question is not about love. It is about rent. A student who pays her own fees and rent in Tokyo does the arithmetic every month, and rental-girlfriend work pays better by the hour than the ordinary part-time jobs open to her. Yuki is not dazzled by it and not ashamed of it. She is paying for her life, and she is good at the work.

Rina’s reason is loneliness, of the kind that popularity cannot reach. She is invited everywhere, liked by everyone and, in the series’ telling, known by nobody. A man who pays for her company is at least paying attention; for a few hours she is the one he wants. That is not nothing. It is also not enough, and she knows it.

Aya’s reason is a face she can bear to live in, and Yuki’s cover make-up is a smaller version of the same thing. Both have learned that the way their faces are received decides a great deal about how their days go, and both have taken the matter into their own hands. For Aya that means surgery. For Yuki it means a mirror and a cream before every date.

Moe’s reason is the hardest to admit, so she does not admit it. She wants to be chosen. She has built a whole self around not needing it, around being different from the girls who do, and the series lets us see that the building was never about superiority. It was about safety. A woman who has decided in advance that she will not be chosen can never be passed over.

And Yua’s reason is freedom: the plain wish to be somewhere nobody knows her story.

None of these reasons is a symptom, and none of these women is a case. Each reason is what anybody might feel under the same pressure. That is where the series starts, and where this essay starts too.

One reviewer wrote of getting goosebumps at a moment in the seventh episode. Moe, who has just received a message of thanks from Kaede, passes Yuki, who is sending exactly that kind of message to one of her own clients. It may be the most honest image in the series, because it puts the buyer and the seller in one frame and shows that the words are the same.

Look at the series with that image in mind and its world stops dividing neatly into buyers and bought. Men pay Yua for her body. Yua pays Haruhi for his attention, and her money becomes his sales, and his sales become his rank. When she rages at him, the series gives Haruhi the reply, and it is not a villain’s. Women like her, he says in effect, push their ideal onto hosts, want love on convenient terms, discard the men who fail them, and are the ones who never treat hosts as people. A reviewer of that episode drew the uncomfortable conclusion: the men who pay Yua and Yua who pays Haruhi share one root demand, which is that having paid, they are owed a good feeling.

The women do not stand only on one side of it. Part of Aya’s money for surgery comes from a middle-aged client who believes she is really his, which is, with the genders reversed, what Kaede may be doing to Moe, and the series makes no excuse for it. And when Kaede appears for the last time, a year on, it is on the side of an advertising truck announcing that he is the club’s number one, with his face quietly altered: his eyelids are double now, as in the manga. The man at the top of the market has been working on his face as well.

So what is being sold, across all of it? Not sex, which only some of these arrangements involve, and not love, which none of them can promise. It is the feeling of having been picked out, the one commodity everybody in the series wants and everybody in it is also selling. Its price is not shared evenly. The men pay in money. The women pay in money and in everything else: a place at university, a job, a body’s hours, a face.

Moe’s story is the most carefully made in the series, and the reason is that it shows a mechanism rather than a fall. She does not walk into the host club wanting a man. She walks in bored, a little superior, determined to collect an experience. Kaede does not overwhelm her. He is the plain one, the quiet one, the one who seems different from the rest. When his messages come often, she decides they are sales messages and does not reply. She knows exactly what she is dealing with. Knowing does not help.

What turns it is a bad night. At her regular bar, among her university crowd, Rina shines, and Moe feels she has lost her place even in the one place that was hers. She runs out, looks at her phone, and there is a missed call from him. One reviewer lists how carefully the drama builds him: he comes running when she is crying, pays part of her bill, never pushes champagne on her, never asks of her what other hosts ask of their customers, and lets her feel that she, unlike the others, need not. He treats her as the exception. That is what he is selling, and it is the one thing her whole self-image was built both to want and to refuse: to be the girl who is not like the others, and to hear it from someone who has seen the others.

Then the ladder, one rung at a time, and the series is exact about each. Money asked of her mother. Her scholarship. An attempt at rental-girlfriend work that will not pay fast enough. Sex work. A running tab at the club, which is debt by another name. Leaving university. A target sum for his birthday, when she means to order an expensive bottle to lift his sales. Nobody forces any single step. Each follows from the one before as if it were the only reasonable thing to do.

An essay in this Library, “The Woman Who Pays Has No Script Yet”, took this series as its example of where the culture’s attention rests, on the woman who is paid, and argued that a woman who pays for a man’s attention has no script of her own, only borrowed ones. Moe’s months at the club suggest a refinement. She does have a script, and a detailed one: the special exception, the attentive messages, the rank, the calendar of occasions on which to spend. The seller writes it. What she lacks is not a script. It is the authorship of one.

Which is why the birthday matters so much. “Pale Moon, and the First Money She Ever Spent as Herself” argued that having access to money and having the standing to point it at what you want are different things. Moe’s nights at the club look like standing: she spends as herself, for herself, on the one who chose her. But the script chose the occasions. On the night it has been building towards, she holds the whole target sum and does the one thing it has no line for. She keeps it. The most self-directed thing she does with money in the whole series is not spending it.

Then she tells the owner of her bar, smiling, that she has had a great love. It would be easy, and cheap, to say she was fooled. The series does not say it, and nobody else should. She has named what happened to her, and the name is hers to give. Both things are true at once: the club wrote almost all of her story, and she wrote its last line. A year later, when his face goes past on a truck and she can smile at it, that may be the best evidence available that the last line held.

It needs saying plainly, because the whole market the series shows runs on blurring it. Money never equals consent. A fee buys a defined thing: an afternoon, a table, a role, a stretch of time. It never buys a yes to anything else. It does not turn a yes into a debt, and it does not make a no an offence.

The series tests this in its second story, when Yuki turns down Iida’s contract flatly. That refusal cost her nothing she had agreed to. It is instructive to watch what the market does with it anyway. Iida leaves her, by one reviewer’s account, with a parting remark about girls’ value having a use-by date, and then he drops Rina. The no was free for Yuki, and the bill went to her friend. A market that cannot charge the woman who refuses will find someone nearby to charge.

In Moe’s story the test is harder. On her first day of sex work, the reviewer of that episode records, a client presses her for more than the work includes, and she comes out of the day in pieces. The point has to be made without flinching. Agreeing to a job is not agreeing to whatever a customer pushes for inside it. Money that has changed hands for one thing is not consent to another, and pressure from the paying side is still pressure after the money has moved. The person who needs the money has the thinner no, which is exactly why holding the line should never be left to her alone, in the moment. It belongs to whoever holds the power in the room: the customer, the club, the business that sent her there.

Consent runs the other way too, and the series knows it. Moe’s yes to each bottle is real in the sense that nobody forces it, and manufactured in the sense that the whole attentive performance around her is built to produce it. Aya does something similar to a client who believes she is his, and the series lets the complaints arrive. A yes that someone has cultivated for profit is not the free yes it feels like from inside. That is no reason to call either woman a victim or either man a fool. It is a reason to ask who wrote the script.

When Aya finally tells her boyfriend everything, he says two things, as one reviewer records them. Surgery is not effort. And her face is a lie. The reviewer’s answer to the first is the right one: the money has to be saved, and the fear and the pain have to be faced. Add the recovery and the risk of failure, and if that is not effort, the word has no meaning. Aya’s own conviction is that people can change as far as they are willing to work for, and that this simple fact has held her up for years.

The second charge is the one worth staying with, because it is the charge made against everything in this series. Her boyfriend loved her face. He loved it until he learned what it had cost, and then he called it false. It is the same move a client makes on learning that the warm girlfriend was paid, and the same move made by everyone who has ever sneered at the women in these storylines: whatever money helped to make is presumed to be fake. This Library put the question directly in “Does Paying for Companionship Make Intimacy Fake?”, and part of its answer applies to Aya exactly. The instinct that money makes something impure very often comes from not counting the work at all.

Aya did lie. She lied about her age, her job and her past, and the man who wanted to marry her had a right to the truth about all three. The series does not brush that aside, and neither does this essay. But the lie she told and the face she made are different things, and his sentence fuses them. Her face is not a lie. It is the face she lives in, built with money, pain and years, and nothing about how it was made makes it less hers.

Nor is she a saint. In a quarrel she calls another woman ugly, the word that, one reviewer notes, had been thrown at her for years, and the series lets her hear herself say it. She takes money from a lonely man by letting him believe what he wants to believe. The series can afford to be fair to her because it does not need her to be good, and it never punishes her into regret.

After the firing, talking with Yuki on a beach at night, Aya says that nobody but herself is going to make her happy, that she will not disown the way she has lived, and that she will not regret it however it ends. She has the operation she wanted. A year later a cabaret club turns her away because of her age; she kicks its sign and walks on to the next. Iida had told Yuki that a girl’s value has a use-by date. Aya is the woman the market says has passed hers, and she keeps walking.

Some reference works on the series attach clinical labels to Aya, and to Rina. This essay does not. It cannot see inside a fictional woman and neither can they, and the labels close a question the series goes out of its way to keep open. What the series shows is a woman who decided what her face would be, paid for it, and would do it again.

The scar is seen by three people, and each gives Yuki a different look.

Sota sees it first, by accident, in the street. Yuki lashes out; he tells her it changes nothing. It is generous, and it is also a statement about him: whatever the scar is, it will not alter his feelings. About what the scar is to her, it says nothing.

Rina sees it next, because Yuki chooses to show her, to end their quarrel and to have no more secrets. Rina cannot keep the pity out of her face. Afterwards Yuki quietly puts away in a drawer the lipstick Rina once told her suited her. It is the smallest gesture in the series and one of the most exact. Pity is a look that lowers a person while seeming to lean towards her. Rina does not mean it that way, and she is not a cruel friend; that is exactly why it lands.

Aya sees it last, over drinks on the night she has lost everything, and says, more or less, that it must be rough. Nothing more, and then some practical advice. It is neither contempt nor sympathy. It is what a woman who has spent her life being judged by her face says to another woman in the same position: the scar matters, it is hard, and you can carry it. Of the three looks, it is the only one that sees the scar as Yuki’s.

Then the last episode. Sota books her again and asks her to come away with him for two days, outside the agency; whether she comes, he says, is up to her. She comes, and thanks him for the two-day booking, keeping the work’s frame around the trip like a coat. At the inn the staff flinch at her face after the bath, and Sota silently takes her hand. He is a good man, and the series never pretends otherwise. He tells her he loves her, and that he wants to protect her.

That night, the broadcaster’s synopsis says, she dreams for the first time. In the dream, as the recaps describe it, she grew up in an ordinary, happy home, had an ordinary student life and met Sota in an ordinary way, and there is no mark on her face. Then the question: would that still be me? She tells him no. She does not, in one recap’s words, want anyone to protect her.

It is worth being exact about what she refuses, because it is easy to misread. She is not choosing the agency over a man, or payment over love. She is refusing love on the terms offered. Protection needs someone to be protected, and to accept it she would have to agree that her life is a condition to be rescued from, and that the self the rescue is for is the woman in the dream, with the other childhood and the unmarked face. Sota’s two sentences, the one about the scar changing nothing and the one about protecting her, turn out to be two ways of not seeing the scar as hers. The first says it does not matter. The second says it is a wound to be guarded. Only Aya’s sentence said it was part of her.

“Between Jofu, Rental Boyfriend and Private Companionship: What Are Women Actually Looking For?” gave this Library a way of seeing it. Every arrangement of this kind supplies two things in different proportions: how accurately you are known, and how predictable the other person’s response is. A role played well gives a great deal of predictability and almost no accuracy, and it is restful precisely because nothing of you is at stake. Yuki has lived inside that from the seller’s side; the cover make-up is the role, and the role is her safety. Sota offers accuracy, because he has seen the scar, but with a claim attached. Aya offered accuracy with no claim at all, for one night, on a beach. That, the series suggests, is what Yuki is short of, and neither the agency nor Sota could give it on the terms each had to offer.

Set the ending beside Rent-a-Girlfriend, the long-running anime about a student who rents a girlfriend and falls for her, and the choice of point of view comes into focus. That series tells the same trade from the client’s side, and its long arc bends towards the rented girlfriend becoming a real one: at a spa resort, in front of his family, she says she is his girlfriend now, and the anime is honest enough to show her unsure of it afterwards. Tomorrow, I'll Be Someone's Girlfriend sends its rental girlfriend to a hot spring too, and the answer is no. Neither ending is the truth about the trade; each is the truth about who is telling the story. Told by the one who pays, the story wants the paid girl to become real. Told by her, it wants her to remain the author of her own life.

The manga’s host-club chapter, by one critic’s recollection, trended on social media almost every Friday night it updated. That critic, Chiaki Fujitani, read the chapter through oshi, the now ordinary practice of devoting yourself to a favourite performer, and suggested that both Yua and Moe, in the end, wanted a professional idol more than they wanted a man. The drama’s last sight of Kaede, his face on the side of a truck, bears her out, and the second season follows the thread to an online singer and his fans.

Three years after the first season, the law caught up with some of what it shows. In May 2025 an amendment was enacted to the law that governs host clubs and other businesses where staff keep customers company over food and drink; as the National Police Agency puts it, it responded to the problem of malicious host clubs. From 28 June 2025 such businesses may not press customers to order by playing on their romantic feelings, and demanding, by intimidation or enticement, that a customer turn to prostitution or sex work to pay became a prohibited act carrying penalties. The drama was made before any of this, and this essay applies the law to no one in it. It is worth noticing, though, that the attentive messages, the bottle meant to lift a man’s sales and the road from a bill to sex work, which the drama sets out step by step, are close to what the law later named.

Tokyo is not the whole country, and the series seems to know that its city is one kind of place among others. The one small town it shows, in the episodes on Yua’s past, is the place she had to leave: a town that ran on rumour and talk behind people’s backs. The city offered what the town could not, which was not to be known. That runs against the familiar story in which the city is where young women lose themselves. For Yua, anonymity was the first freedom she ever had; by the time the first season meets her, at twenty, the market has settled inside it. The second season sends Emi the other way, home to her mother and a job in a local snack bar, where an old friend’s marriage and children stand beside her own life as a measure she never asked for.

For a viewer outside Japan, the series can look like a catalogue of peculiarly Japanese trades, and that reading is worth resisting. The trades have local names and a local legal shape; the wants under them do not. Paid dates with older men, attention bought by the bottle, a face bought at a clinic, a young woman doing arithmetic about rent in an expensive city: none is a Japanese invention, and treating them as exotic is one way of not recognising them. What may be specific is how finely the language divides the market, so that each arrangement has its own word, its own rules and its own stigma. For a woman who came to Japan from somewhere else and lives alone in one of its cities, the first episode’s question may not be abstract at all, and she may find the words easier to learn than the stigma, which is the part nobody explains.

Four objections, and at least two of them land.

The first is that the series is beautiful, and beauty sells. It is carefully cast and lit, its host was designed to be irresistible (one reviewer admitted to wanting to ask where his club was), and the manga had a fashion-magazine collaboration and a cosplay following before it reached television. A drama can refuse to laugh at women and still make the world that hurts them look like the most interesting place in the city, and this essay’s talk of choosing and naming may then be the aesthetic’s alibi, a respectable vocabulary for enjoying a spectacle. This is conceded in part. Nothing here can measure what the series did to the people who watched it.

The second is sharper. To honour Moe’s name for what happened, a great love, may be to let the club off. She gave up her place at university and months of her body’s labour, the money went where the script sent it, and the series closes her story on a smile. Yua ends where she began, and the series presents it with something close to a shrug; one recap admires her toughness. The drama is kinder than its source in at least one place, too: Rina’s new life as a model is, by one reviewer’s account, the drama’s own invention. There is a way of respecting women’s choices that stops looking at the machinery that shaped them, and this essay may be doing it. The only answer offered is the one already given: both things are true, and the essay has tried to keep both in view. A reader who thinks the balance tips toward the machine is not wrong.

The third concerns Yuki. Her refusal may be less a decision than a history speaking. A woman whose mother did not look after her might find being looked after unbearable, and call the flinch freedom. This essay cannot know, and will not diagnose a fictional woman to find out. The series frames the refusal as hers, and the readings do not exclude each other: a choice shaped by a history is still a choice. But a reader who sees in the ending a young woman closing a door she may one day want open is reading the same scene with a different kind of care.

The fourth is aimed inward. An essay from this house, concluding that paid warmth is not fake, that a woman can keep her own feet inside the market, and that rescue is not the answer, reaches conclusions that suit the house. They were not chosen for that reason, but the suspicion is fair, and there is no reply to it that would not also work as an advertisement. So none is attempted.

This house sells private companionship. That puts its business close to Yuki’s, and everything above should be read with that in view.

It cannot claim to be the safe version of what the series shows. The series is precise about how a seller of warmth writes the buyer’s script: the attentive message, the exception, the calendar of occasions on which to spend. Anyone who sells company is a seller of that kind, this house included, and nothing written here exempts it. Whether any arrangement keeps a no free on both sides of the money is not something an essay can certify from the inside.

It cannot take Yuki’s refusal as an argument for paid company over love. She did not choose a market over a man. She refused a rescue, and the series does not reward her with anything a business could sell. What it gives her is her own feet.

And it cannot claim that money makes a yes. That was the plainest thing the series had to teach, and it applies here before it applies anywhere else.

It is cultural criticism, not clinical, legal or therapeutic writing. It diagnoses nobody, describes no treatment and says nothing about any reader.

It uses no clinical label for any character, although some reference works do; what it says about what these women feel or need is a reading of a drama, not a report about people.

It makes no claim about the legality of any arrangement shown in the series, papa-katsu included. The 2025 amendment is described from official police notices and applied to no one, and nothing here is legal advice.

The series was not screened for this essay, and its lines are given only in paraphrase. Accounts of the final narration differ in their wording, so it is not quoted. Where the drama and the manga differ, the essay follows the drama.

Nothing is said about the private lives of the performers or of the artist.

The second season’s special episodes include harm done to Yua while she was still at school. The essay names that harm and does not describe it.

No statistic appears in it. Its distinctions, between being chosen and choosing and between pity and plain acknowledgement, are this Library’s formulations, not findings.

Nothing here implies that anyone who made or appears in the series knows of this house or endorses it. The house’s interest is stated in the body of the essay, where stating it costs something.

A few questions, for anyone who has stood on either side of the money, or on both.

When did you last feel chosen, and who set the terms? If someone has been kind to you in the shape of a rescue, what did the rescue need you to become? Who in your life has looked at the thing you cover and said only that it must be hard, and then let you carry it yourself? And if you had to name the most expensive thing you ever did for love, would you call it a great love, or would you let someone else call it something else?

The series ends with a young woman walking on her own feet through a cramped world, and it does not pretend the world will become any less cramped. It insists only that the naming is hers. The same goes for you. You are allowed to want to be chosen. And you are the only person who gets to decide what it was.