Tear Jerker / My Deepest Secret

• Whenever Emma's past is brought up, it's shown she had an abusive childhood.
  • Made even worse when she finally tells Yohan about it. She was abused by her father, something that's just horrible to think about. The saddest part is that she begs him not to tell anyone, in part because she's afraid that Elios would leave her if he found out.
• The reason Yohan became an amateur detective: when he was a boy, he ran into a kind old man named Oscar, who shared his comics and gave him advice about becoming friends with his classmates. One day, he saw a masked man going into Oscar's tent, who was a serial killer that the police were after. When he goes to meet Oscar, he learned that the older man had contacted his estranged son to make amends and had learned his wife had died two years ago. Yohan buys a can of soda to help support his friend. Unfortunately, he ends up grabbing one of Oscar's beer cans by mistake, causing him to be intoxicated. The police then find the two and arrest Oscar, believing him to be the murderer since the real killer left his knife in the older man's tent. No one believes Yohan that Oscar was innocent due to his age and the fact he was intoxicated, which they blamed the older man for. This event led Yohan to train for law enforcement, so no innocent would be arrested for someone else's crime.
• The first episode of Season 3 is gut-wrenching. Somehow it makes Emma's past even sadder than most fans had figured.
  • Emma and her father and come home to let her mother know that Emma just won a school award...only to find her in bed with someone else. She soon divorces Emma's dad, even if he's willing to forgive her just if she doesn't leave him. She wants nothing to do with Emma, either, saying in front of her daughter that she doesn't need her.
  • Eventually Emma's dad slides into the abusive figure readers have seen throughout the rest of the story. Originally it ties into his alcoholism, and each morning after he apologizes and gives Emma presents. It's implied as time goes on that he begins to emotionally abuse his daughter as well as physically abuse her, telling her how she couldn't survive on her own as a little girl without anyone else to protect her and so on.
  • The worst part is that prior to this, Emma and her dad were shown to be quite close. All of this is portrayed in an incredibly, disturbingly realistic fashion that's sure to resonate with any readers whose parents descended into alcoholism.
  • The other worst part is that it becomes clear that Emma's dad was so traumatized by what his wife did to him that it eventually drove him insane, thinking Emma would eventually cheat on and abandon him as well, revealing that he used DNA test with her hair to apparently discover he wasn't her real father, and was grooming Emma to replace her as his ideal version of her mother. When attempting to contain a horrified Emma from escaping, he ends up slipping and falls onto a broken beer bottle, his last words simply being him more focused on the pain and telling Emma to call an ambulance before instantly bleeding to death in front of her. Showing that despite his abuse, there's a good explanation where it came from, which ultimately ended in tragedy.
• Emma's home room teacher actually called Child Protective Services on Emma's dad. And Emma begged them not to take her away because she was too scared of being alone. The poor girl was so close to being safe.
• While on the run together, Emma becomes convinced that Yohan is another of her hallucinations because he's nice to her despite all she's done. When he manages to convince her that he's real and that he loves her and that she deserves to be loved, telling her that he'll be by her side and help her get the help she needs, Emma just bawls in his arms for several panels. Seeing all her grief finally come flooding out after mostly holding it is heart-wrenching.
• Despite his feelings for Emma, Yohan Did Not Get the Girl because Emma only loves Elios, particularly the Elios that she created in her mind. And after Emma turns herself in, he never does see her again.
• The implication that Emma was Driven to Suicide at the end of the story. She had so many factors going against her from an abusive family, bullying classmates, and mental trauma that despite the brief happiness she found with friends like Nura, Mika, and Yohan, it wasn't enough to pull her out of the darkness. Emma was still trapped under the pull of her mind and what she created from it that she couldn't move forward.
  • Alternatively, the THUD! sound effect indicates that the door to her room is being closed, since it was used a few panels up to show her nurse leaving the room, but what follows isn't much better. It's indicated that Emma's hallucination of her ideal Elios visits her room after she stored her medication in a drawer, saying that she'll take them later but she wanted to see him first. She then looks out the window and flashes back to the memory of Yohan telling her he wants her to be happy. She smiles and says that he doesn't need to worry about her anymore, that she's happy—just as the door to her room closes with no one on the other side. Either she finally let go of her version of Elios, or she let him in the room with her (as indicated by her not taking her meds). Either way, a bittersweet end to the story.