She was taken to an authentic bar in the city — the kind of place appointed with antique pieces that looked as though they cost a great deal, and very probably had.
Low light. Jazz moving through it like something unhurried. Behind the counter, a wall of bottles, each one worth stopping to look at. The barman — elderly, and carrying the ease of someone who had been doing this for a very long time — was polishing a glass in the back. Around the room, customers in quietly expensive clothing sat over their drinks.
Hatano, in her ordinary clothes, felt acutely that she had walked into the wrong film. Rōkai, already seated at the counter, glanced at her and gave a small, quiet laugh.
“Don’t worry about any of that. It’s a casual establishment, despite appearances.”
She said this, throwing a brief look toward the barman.
The old man smiled with elegant amusement, and then turned to look at Hatano as she settled onto the stool beside Rōkai.
“Welcome. Forgive me if this is presumptuous — but are you an acquaintance of Rōkai’s?”
She was startled that he knew who Rōkai was, but nodded. He seemed to find this even more entertaining, shoulders lifting slightly as he let his eyes drift to the wall. Hatano followed the look — and found a painting. People at a table, in conversation over drinks. She had spent the last several hours looking at paintings, and her instincts had acquired a new sharpness: she placed the artist immediately, without being told.
“Rōkai is the owner of this establishment. If she’s invited you in, you’re welcome to do as you please.”
An authentic bar in a rather distinguished hotel in central Tokyo. The owner. Hatano stared at him, unable to find words, and then transferred the look to Rōkai. She returned it with a composed, elegant smile of the kind that Shinomiya had never quite perfected.
“Just so. Please, relax — and tonight is, of course, my treat.”
The celebrated watercolourist who held exhibitions abroad was, evidently, operating at a different scale in all things.
Hatano exhaled at the improbability of the situation. Then she turned to the barman and offered the most succinct order she could manage: “Something expensive and good.”
He received this without offence — rather with the air of someone who enjoys a challenge — and began his preparations with practised ease. Rōkai watched him with quiet pleasure.
Hatano looked at Rōkai properly.
Rich black hair. A beautiful face. Soft-looking lips. Dark eyes with the quality of a clear night sky. A face she could have confirmed as Shinomiya’s sister just from the resemblance — the same face, arrived at differently. The person she had seen on a phone screen beside a foreign dignitary, in front of a painting, was sitting next to her at a bar counter.
“So, Rōkai-san. You’ve cost me my last train and some measure of my private time. Would you like to tell me why?”
“My goodness, Hatano-san. Please drop the formality — just Rōkai, as before.”
A very slight, knowing curve to her smile. Hatano caught a glimpse of the person underneath the surface of it — and let her own shoulders drop a degree.
“All right, Rōkai. Our purposes probably overlap, so let’s get on with it.”
“Of course. Although you’ll forgive me — the formality is a habit I can’t quite shake.”
She said this pleasantly, and without apology, and then let her expression settle into something a fraction more serious. She came to it directly.
“I’ll go in order. As you already know, I am the older sister of the Shinomiya you know, and I am also the watercolourist who uses the artist name Rōkai. I’m currently holding a solo exhibition at a domestic museum, managed primarily by my patrons.”
That much was already known. The sister’s existence, the scale of her accomplishments. That she was sitting here. What wasn’t clear was why.
“A short while ago, my patron’s team notified me that my sister had visited the exhibition.”
“…They notified you? Are you having her watched?”
Most people didn’t send that kind of message at this hour. It had either come from Rōkai’s instructions or the family’s standing arrangement. Either way, it was not a normal state of things. Rōkai shook her head slightly.
“Nothing like that. But as a member of the Shinomiya family I have an obligation to be informed of her movements. No one has been able to account for what she’s been doing recently.”
Hatano would have preferred the word worried. That didn’t appear to be the direction Rōkai intended. Hatano held her look.
Rōkai received it and let a fraction of warmth show in her expression.
“Is something wrong?”
“…No.”
Perhaps an unneeded concern. By Shinomiya’s own account, Rōkai had been her defender — the one who protected her place in the family, who confronted the father, who reached for her when she was about to give everything up. Chances were the careful framing was surface, and underneath it she was as worried as anyone would be.
“So — you received the notification, and came to check on her. But now you’re sitting in a bar with me. What changed? And what exactly do you want from me?”
“Meeting her directly wouldn’t change anything or produce anything useful. It would only deepen the rift between the sister who carries the family weight and the sister who was pushed out by it. I don’t mind, personally — but she is my blood regardless of everything. Rather than confronting her, I thought it better to hear how she’s doing from someone who actually knows her.”
Hatano stared. She could not quite trust what she was hearing.
“…Regardless of everything?”
Something in her blood began to move faster. The casual, untroubled way this woman had just called her own younger sister regardless of everything — as though Shinomiya were an inconvenience to be managed. Everything Hatano had assumed about the shape of this relationship suddenly felt uncertain. Shinomiya had described Rōkai as someone who cared, who protected her. Had that been a mistake, or had Rōkai simply been performing the role very well?
Rōkai reached for her drink, looked at Hatano over the rim with cool eyes, and the corner of her mouth shifted.
“Ah — the regardless of everything. Let me discuss the family first.”
Hatano pushed the fury down, pressed her tightened fist carefully against the bar, and made herself breathe. Grabbing this woman by the collar and demanding answers would produce nothing, and if she actually cared about Shinomiya she should use the anger as fuel rather than a weapon, get what she needed, and get out.
“I’ve heard that the Shinomiya family is an artistic lineage, and that she — like you — used to paint. I’ve heard that her father told her to try under a different name. I’ve heard what it was like to keep creating while no one was looking at what you made. She told me all of it.”
She kept the fury locked behind the words, and laid the facts out plainly. Rōkai raised her brows, with something that might have been genuine surprise.
“Oh. I didn’t expect that. So the foolish girl told you all of that.”
Foolish girl. The third insult in as many minutes. The urge to take hold of this person’s collar was becoming something she had to actively manage. She bit the inside of her lip. Closed her hand. Told herself, silently and repeatedly, what the right action was.
She spoke anyway.
“Today I went to the aquarium with her. She said that once — when she was about to give up on painting — you were the one who took her to an aquarium and talked her back. That even in the worst of it there had been one person. I was relieved when I heard that.”
The heat was getting into her voice. She kept the volume down.
She wasn’t appealing to anything in particular. She was simply saying the thing that had been true when Shinomiya said it and was still true now. And somewhere in what she was saying was something that sounded like a plea: please be the person she said you were. Please don’t make this worse than it already is.
Rōkai listened with her eyes half-closed, and then opened her mouth.
“I’ve been told I have a talent for calculation. For working out who someone needs me to be so that they become useful to me. Presumably that’s how I found a use for even the failed one — but as for that particular incident…”
She gave a small, easy smile.
“I don’t really remember.”
Hatano clenched her teeth hard, feeling the blood surge through her veins with a pulsing fury. She hadn’t thought of herself as a violent woman, but she desperately wanted to punch the woman in front of her. What had Shinomiya felt when she thanked, admired, envied, and then turned away from this genius named Rōkai? Could they truly be called sisters if the elder sister knew nothing of her younger sister’s suffering?
Clutching her own chest with her right hand, which was trying to form a fist, Hatano still didn’t want to let go of that sliver of hope and forced out the words.
“Today… I thought you called me here like this because you care about Shinomiya —your sister— at least a little. I thought it was because you were worried about your family.”
She stared into Rōkai’s eyes, black as twilight, trying to see through her heart.
But Rōkai burst out laughing, unable to suppress her delight.
“I feel no pity for a loser who ran away without achieving anything.”
Something in Hatano’s head made a sound like something tearing. She stared.
She had gritted her teeth and carried the anger this whole time, and now it was past carrying. She pushed back the chair as she stood, making no attempt to be quiet about it, and her fist was very tight.
She wanted to take hold of this woman’s face and hit it. She was not someone who normally wanted to hit people. But she stood there wanting to, with genuine feeling, while the bar went still around her.
She thought about what hitting Rōkai would fix. The answer was: nothing. Her own frustration, for a moment, and nothing else. She left her hand where it was. She breathed, once, deliberately.
And then she said what she felt.
“She ran. Yes. She couldn’t go on fighting with no one looking, and she stopped. That’s the same thing as what you’re calling her — probably. Her life now is probably worse. But — she doesn’t forget the kindness she was given by the people she loves, even when she’s furious at them. She’s sharp-tongued and she’s tangled up inside, but her nature is gentle. And she never — however much she might resent all of it — she never said one word against her family.”
Rōkai could be whatever she liked as an artist. That had nothing to do with Hatano and nothing to do with the thing between her and Shinomiya.
“By your family’s standards, she might be the failure who pulls down the talented one. But by mine, she’s an infuriating junior who matters to me. And someone who is merely related by blood does not get to speak about my friend that way.”
She looked at Rōkai directly, and let it land.
The room had gone quiet. Hatano breathed. The jazz kept playing. The barman, who had been watching the whole thing from behind the counter, let the very slight softening of his mouth be what it was.
Hatano put her hands in her pockets and turned toward the door.
“I’m leaving. Don’t come looking for me again.”
She could have offered to pay for the drink. In the state she was in, reaching calmly for her purse and counting out notes was simply not something she could do. She’d come back and settle it with the owner another time. She cast one look at Rōkai’s profile, motionless and expressionless, and took her first step.
She’d taken two when a voice came through the jazz.
“Thank goodness.”
It was quiet. It was spoken to no one in particular, and at complete variance with everything that had come before it, and Hatano stopped without deciding to.
She stood there, not yet understanding it. But her mind, working slowly through what it had just received, began to piece it together.
She turned partway and looked. Rōkai’s expression had changed. The brows had relaxed. Something in the set of her face had released. Hatano formed a possibility, and Rōkai’s next words confirmed it:
“…That someone would say that. For her. That someone is there.”
That was the voice of a sister. Relief, and happiness, and loneliness — several feelings braided tightly together, the kind of voice that love produces, trembling just slightly at the edge of tears, and genuine, unmistakably. Not a continuation of the performance. Hatano understood this not through reasoning but through something more immediate, and the words she’d prepared vanished.
So. The things Rōkai had said since they sat down — foolish girl, failed one, regardless of everything — had been a kind of instrument. A way of measuring what Hatano would do when Shinomiya was attacked. Looking back at the whole conversation, Rōkai had been watching her throughout — eyes that assessed, questions that probed. And most telling of all: Shinomiya, who spoke ill of no one in her life, had never spoken badly of this person.
Put it that way and the calculation was simple: someone who wanted to insult Shinomiya would have done it directly, not invoked a righteous cause to leverage into it. Someone who wanted to defend her little sister from a stranger who had attached herself would do exactly what Rōkai had done.
Hatano pulled her hands from her pockets. She scratched the back of her head, looking deeply put-upon.
“…You were testing me.”
“I can’t entrust my sister to someone who laughs it off. I apologise for the rudeness. She’s a dear thing — I was worried about what kind of person had got close to her. I’m sorry.”
Going straight home from here still felt like the wrong option, with the conversation ending like this.
Hatano absorbed the apology, accepted it, and sat back down.
The other customers, seeing that it was over, cautiously resumed their conversations. Rōkai glanced at the barman and then turned toward the room.
“I apologise for the disturbance. Tonight is on me — please order whatever you like.”
Uncertain murmurs of delight followed. The barman’s expression said this again, but Rōkai was the owner, and her money was her money.
She turned back to Hatano with a composed, refreshed look.
“You have my permission to remain close to my sister, Hatano-san.”
“What makes you think your permission is required. You terrible actor.”
“I am her sister. Blood counts for something.”
She did look faintly put out at that, actually — an expression that recalled Shinomiya in its particular dissatisfied quality. Competing with Rōkai for standing, given the gap in how long Hatano and Shinomiya had known each other — she let the air of easy superiority show, and for the first time the composed surface of Rōkai’s face cracked very slightly into something envious.
She recovered with a small cough.
“But, well — I’m relieved. I would have been satisfied just to know that no one troublesome was nearby. And to find that someone genuinely cares about her is more than I’d hoped for. ‘An infuriating junior who matters to me’ — I couldn’t say that in cold blood.”
Her own words, recited back to her calmly. A small, delayed flush of embarrassment arrived in Hatano’s face. She glared.
“…You hold things, don’t you.”
“‘Someone who is merely related by blood.’”
“I’m not taking that back. My distance from her is shorter.”
That was Rōkai’s fault, for lying. Hatano had nothing to apologise for. She said this with the ease of someone settling the matter and Rōkai, elbow on the counter, chin in hand, could find nothing to say in return. The dissatisfaction in her expression was mildly human and mildly charming.
She swirled the glass in her hand. Watched the ice shift.
“Is she well? No injuries, no illness? She has a habit of sleeping with her midriff exposed — I hope she hasn’t caught cold.”
“When we were both still in the club I’d see her reasonably often, and nothing like that came up. She manages her risks well, all things considered — she’s good at steering around things before they get serious.”
“She was in a club?”
A note of something like hope. Hatano cut it.
“Literary Appreciation, not art. Effectively a social club at this point. She’s the princess of the group. I’ve left — I don’t know the current situation, but I doubt much has changed.”
Rōkai let out a small, quiet “I see” and her shoulders fell slightly.
Hatano reached for her glass and drank. A citrus note, unhurried, deep. Rōkai watched, and then — as though remembering something — spoke.
“She used to draw puffer fish in the corners of her notebooks. All the time, as a child.”
Hatano thought of the aquarium, of the tank, of Shinomiya’s face when she looked at the fish. She was glad Rōkai remembered this, and let it show with a nod.
“…She mentioned that, actually.”
“Does she still draw?”
Looking into the surface of the liquid as though looking for something far back, said quietly to the glass. In her eyes: love for a sister she hadn’t spoken to in a long time, and the loneliness of that love.
Hatano considered it. She had never seen Shinomiya take notes. She gave a small shrug.
“We’re not in any of the same lectures. If you want to know, you could ask her directly.”
A blunt response, but one with intention. Now that she understood Rōkai’s genuine feelings, she found herself wanting the two of them to meet. Shinomiya needed somewhere to rest.
But Rōkai understood the implication, and smiled with a sadness Hatano hadn’t expected.
“If I could meet her, I wouldn’t have invited you here tonight.”
A silence.
The reason surfaced quickly once she sat with it. Between them there was no absence of love, but there was guilt, and inadequacy, and the crushing weight of comparison running in both directions. Whatever Rōkai felt, Shinomiya was still living inside the loneliness that Rōkai’s existence had helped to create. The love of the one who has everything was not what Shinomiya needed. It was, perhaps, the one form of love that couldn’t reach her.
The cruelest part of it: the person in the world who loved Shinomiya most had, without intending to, taken every scrap of recognition that might have found its way to her.
Hatano drank to clear her thinking, and set the glass down. She looked at Rōkai.
“Yes,” she said, quietly. That was all.
The look of quiet relief on Rōkai’s face, at being understood, was something Hatano filed away without comment. Rōkai the artist had been nowhere in evidence for a while now. This was someone else — the person underneath.
She lifted her glass and let the amber catch the light of the antique lamp behind the bar.
“Wanting to see her is my selfishness. And that one-sided feeling would only cause her more pain. So today — being able to see her face, even from a distance, was enough. And finding that someone like you is beside her — I’m genuinely relieved.”
“However,” she went on, and her expression tightened slightly.
“Please don’t tell her about tonight.”
“You want me to keep a secret.”
“A necessary one. If she finds out about this — about you and me meeting — she may feel that I’ve reached into her life again, and pull back from you. Everything you might do afterward she might attribute to my influence. The time you’ve built with each other, the closeness — it shouldn’t be distorted by me stepping in as a third party. I wasn’t here.”
Hatano did not like this. Lying to Shinomiya sat badly.
But the reasoning held. Shinomiya’s entire sense of self was still caught around the shape of what her family had made of her. Her current way of living — the recklessness of it — was a form of flight, and flight meant that she was still, in some essential way, being chased by something she couldn’t outrun. If Hatano told her about this meeting, the immediate damage was easy to predict.
She looked at Rōkai. Rōkai was speaking with her jaw set, the words clearly costing her.
“…If it comes out, it will hurt her even more.”
“— This is my selfishness. She moved out to put distance between herself and all of us, and I’ve gone and contacted her friend anyway. I’m afraid that if I do anything more, I’ll hurt her again.”
The expression that accompanied this had nothing of the composed artist in it.
Hatano couldn’t refuse it. She didn’t fully agree, but she couldn’t refuse.
She was Shinomiya’s friend — and because of that, sometimes the thing she’d do would be the thing Shinomiya hadn’t asked for. Tonight, Hatano had come to know Rōkai through Shinomiya, and Rōkai was now someone she knew. And she would honour what that person had asked, while being honest about what that meant.
“…All right.”
Rōkai’s face softened with relief. But Hatano shook her head.
“This isn’t only your selfishness. It’s mine too — because I’ve agreed to it, and I’m going to carry it out. So when something goes wrong, you don’t get to shoulder that alone. We’re in this together — which means when it matters, I’ll help, and I expect the same from you.”
She said it directly, eyes level, and Rōkai looked taken aback for a moment. Then, after a few seconds, a small smile — something that had come apart inside her expression and was putting itself back together.
“No wonder she’s let her guard down with you. You’re an unusual person.”
“I’m told I’m very sensible.”
“Surely not. Sense can’t make her smile.”
She had just had this same conversation, very nearly word for word, with Shinomiya herself. The coincidence struck her, and with it the reminder — if any reminder were still needed — that the woman next to her was Shinomiya’s sister. She laughed, and for the first time tonight, Rōkai laughed too, without any reservation in it.
“Accomplices — I like the sound of that. Please, if there’s anything at all I can do—”
She produced her phone as she said it. Hatano understood at once and reached for her own. She was about to open the contacts screen when the wallpaper caught her eye.
“Oh.”
A small girl, looking almost exactly like Shinomiya. Hatano stopped.
Rōkai noticed where she was looking. “Ah — this?” She turned the phone so Hatano could see it properly, her voice going somewhere warmer and further away.
On the screen: a little girl holding up a painting of a puffer fish — bright with watercolour, obviously proud of herself. Her clothes were smeared with paint. There was a patch of yellow on her cheek. She was grinning at whoever was taking the photograph, completely unself-conscious, and Rōkai’s thumb moved over the screen with something close to tenderness.
“Those were the happiest times.”
She said it to no one. Hatano received it quietly — “I see” — and held it like something that might break.
There was no need to confirm who the little girl was, or why this particular photograph was set as a wallpaper. The pixel count was low enough to date the image by feel — years and years of being kept and carried, until the resolution no longer mattered.
They exchanged numbers, email addresses, and messaging app handles. Hatano saved the contact as Rōkai and tucked her phone away.
“Thank you for tonight. Seeing her face was all I’d hoped for — but I’ve also heard how she’s doing from someone close to her, and found an unexpected ally. Both more than I’d expected.”
“I’d have punched you for a moment back there. But I don’t think you’re lying about caring about her — so I’ll let it go. I understand why she avoids you, and why you can’t get close. I don’t know what I can do, or even what I want to do — but I promise I’ll do what I can.”
Because she’s my friend. She added it silently, and finished what remained of the drink in one go. Not the ideal way to treat something expensive, but she had never been comfortable in places like this. She apologised briefly to the barman, who took it with a tolerant smile, and began getting ready to leave. Rōkai did the same.
“Having to bow my head to a stranger instead of being there for her myself — the inadequacy of it is not lost on me. But please — I’m asking you. Please be there for her.”
She stood, and bowed to Hatano — a genuine bow, low and unhurried.
“She is my family. She matters to me. That’s all it is.”
Hatano absorbed the words, held them for a moment, and nodded.
“I’m glad too.”
Rōkai looked up, puzzled.
“That she has family like you. Even so.”
Rōkai made a small sound, almost a laugh, and looked away.
At the taxi stand. Cold air, both of them, their breath going white. They stood side by side and looked up at the small bright points of stars between the buildings.
On a thought, Hatano turned to Rōkai beside her.
“Actually — her paintings. From your perspective, are they good?”
Rōkai, who had been warming her hands with her breath, went still.
She rubbed her hands together, thinking. “…Hmm.”
“Are you asking the sister, or—”
“I’ll hear from her first.”
“The greatest talent I’ve ever seen. I know no artist better than her.”
“All right. Can I ask Rōkai the artist?”
The answer had been as expected, and Hatano let it satisfy her. Rōkai, who had delivered the superlative with complete seriousness, now shrugged and looked away. She thought for a moment, and looked back.
“What would you do with the answer?”
A precise question. She was probably weighing whether Hatano would use it to push Shinomiya in a direction that would hurt her. But Hatano wasn’t planning to do anything damaging with it. She looked at the stars and breathed out at them.
“I don’t know what I want for her, or what I want to do. I just can’t keep watching her live the way she lives, desperate to be seen by anyone who’ll look, and do nothing. I want to do something — I don’t know what. But whatever it is, I need to know her better than I do. So I want to know the things I don’t know yet.”
She said it without trimming a single edge, and Rōkai sat with the answer for a moment, weighing it for anything that worried her. She seemed to find nothing. She looked at Hatano.
And spoke.