I thought he might be either her dad (he cries while eating her mothers cookies) or her first love (no other men appear in the story) or something. I didn’t expect him to remain her neighbor and truly be a good person straddled with a sad backstory.

Context for those who haven’t started reading: Mr. Ma is a widower.

Note at the end states that we never get to see Mr. Ma’s wife except for ‘one glance through the telescope’. I thought at first that maybe I missed a description of him drawing his wife or something. I reread the end and the beginning and have come to a different realization. The extra pair of legs we see through the telescope are not human, but prosthetics.

The end reveals that an accident took his wife and his legs, but the child never once mentions a wheelchair. She notices details down to the scars on his hands and his good looking eyes. I reasonably suspect that she simply didn’t understand what she was seeing and could only describe it as ‘sitting on the edge of the bed and a pair of feet next to him.’ It could have been the wife’s feet like the note presumes, but she snuck into his home only the next day. The timeline is too fast for it to make sense for the wife to have still been alive in the first chapter (unless I am wrong and the note writer thought he kept the corpse on the bed????).

He was a recluse because of his grief and the little girl noticed him because he was a recluse. He carved the bannisters in memory of his wife and they were already complete when she snuck in. That kind of hand carving takes time especially while disabled. His wife must have already been dead for many years.

Does Mr. Ma have a happy ending? She notes that the home doesn’t seem to have been lived in for many years. Has he died or has he moved on???

I was hesitant about replacing the romance tag with the tragedy tag. The protagonist herself seems to have a happy ending after all. However, the protagonist exists only as a narrator to present both a tragedy and a love story she discovered in her childhood. In truth, neither belong to her as the story teller. I opted for the tragedy genre, because this is a tale revealing only the conclusion of a tragic love story. The author doesn’t show the process of falling in love or being in love at all, so the romance is only a subplot. Yay for the romantic subplot tag!