She sat on the sofa with her knees to her chest and looked at the grilled fish and rice on the table. Both were wrapped in cling film and had gone quite cold, and she should probably reheat them if she was going to eat. But she didn’t feel hungry, and couldn’t. She had eaten nothing since before she and Hatano parted — it was now evening of the following day, three meals missed in a row — and whether the nausea and headache and dizziness were from hunger, dehydration, poor sleep, or something less physical, she could no longer tell.
The only sound in the flat was the faint hum of the heater. Shinomiya looked at the lantern sitting beside her on the sofa.
Four hiragana characters in confident brushwork. Shinomiya. Looking at the gift, she felt the heat gathering behind her eyes. She pressed her sleeve to them and sniffed. Every time the memory surfaced, the need to cry came up with it, and she understood again how large Hatano had grown inside her.
There was a part of her that knew, somewhere quiet in herself, that she might be wrong. Not the panicked version of herself that had drawn the worst conclusion — the cooler part, the part that knew its own mistakes. But asking the question that might have corrected it had met with silence on the other end of the line, and silence had done the work of an answer.
She felt like an overripe tomato. One small pressure and everything would come apart.
Just a little longer. Just a bit more time and ordinary days will start again. Things will go back to how they were. She was telling herself this, sitting with her grief, when the phone on the table buzzed. She looked up before she’d decided to, and heard herself say “senpai” inwardly, reaching for that hope without meaning to.
The name on the screen was not the one she’d hoped for. It was, in fact, the person she found most difficult. Registered simply as Mother, one character. Shinomiya went still.
What could she possibly want now. Nothing good.
She had not spoken to her mother in any real way for several years. In practice the relationship had ended. She had no desire to receive this call with any warmth.
She looked at the screen for a while, exhaled faintly, and reached for it.
She’d considered ignoring it, but it might be something that mattered. She would at least hear what it was. She tapped answer and held the phone to her ear.
“…Hello.”
No energy or inclination to make her voice bright. She answered in a flat, sunken tone. Neither of them offered a greeting, and that suited Shinomiya fine.
Do you have a partner?
A voice like cold steel, quiet and sharp and exactly as she remembered it. Direct as a blade, no approach to it at all.
The question took a moment to process. Shinomiya’s brows drew together.
“What? You call out of nowhere and that’s what you want to talk about?”
Even between family, she had no intention of discussing her private life with someone she hadn’t spoken to in years, and she didn’t believe the other person would expect her to. She said so with a push of resentment in her voice, and her mother answered with an audible, deliberate sigh.
You have a marriage proposal. A calligrapher of some repute. You will accept it.
It was so sudden, so completely from nowhere, that Shinomiya could only stare. The kind of thing she’d seen in historical dramas and old manga, considered a relic of another era, was being said to her by a living person, by her own mother, the same mother who had effectively shown her the door.
Before she could respond, her mother continued.
He has considerable artistic talent but certain difficulties with his character. He is past forty and has no stable family, and his line will end with him without an heir. The arrangement suits both families. We showed him your photograph and he expressed enthusiasm.
A rage rose through her so quickly it was almost dizzying, and she wanted to end the call immediately with every word available to her. She steadied herself. Anger wouldn’t produce anything like a real conversation. She answered in a measured voice, as though explaining something.
“Why would I accept something like that?”
It isn’t a bad arrangement for you either.
“Whether it’s good for me is something I decide. You haven’t spoken to me in years, and you expect me to cheerfully agree to be married off to a stranger? I choose my own partner.”
You contributed nothing to the Shinomiya family’s artistic legacy. You can sell a body or two. That is the responsibility of a person born into the Shinomiya name.
The words wouldn’t go through. The same language, and nothing was reaching. Shinomiya stared into the distance and kept listening.
I have never considered you my daughter. No artistic talent, and then you ran from even that and became a shackle on your sister’s legacy. A child I cannot acknowledge — you have shamed your parents. Your sister carries the same blood, and yet somehow you turned out like this. Do you know how much I grieved that?
The headache was getting worse. Her vision swam and contorted, as though reality were bending in the heat, and her stomach rose. She tasted acid. She pressed her lips together hard and dug her nails into her knee to keep from being sick.
But if you were to bring a distinguished bloodline into the Shinomiya family, that life of yours would have meant something. There would be a reason to have brought you into the world. Everyone wants that. Everyone wants you to do it. They would acknowledge your existence.
All her life she had wanted this. To have someone acknowledge her existence, her right to be here. And the person who had driven her to that need understood it better than anyone. Which was exactly why she was weaponising it now.
But the strange thing was: none of it moved her. Not at all.
Someone had been there who finally, genuinely, filled the hunger. Each time she called back a word Hatano had given her, she felt the accumulated weight of her inadequacy and grief beginning to lift. She looked at the lantern beside her and thought of Hatano’s face. Maybe Hatano had come to her at Rōkai’s prompting. But everything she had received was real. Every object, every word, every piece of feeling behind them.
Close your eyes and she was there, the first image that came.
Shinomiya reached for her, and used her, with some guilt, as her excuse.
“I have a partner. I can’t accept it.”
She was too tired to argue. She told the lie easily.
A pause. Then her mother cut through it without hesitation.
Break it off. I don’t know who you’ve chosen, but they’re hardly going to be suitable.
“Don’t—!”
Her blood went hot. She opened her mouth to say something sharp, for Hatano if not for herself, because dismissing someone they’d never met while knowing nothing about them was the one thing she would not absorb quietly. She caught herself, breathed, pushed it back.
“…Don’t say that. What does my mother know about it?”
Choose the person I’ve selected. You have always made the wrong choices.
“Someone who can call a person they’ve never met ‘hardly suitable’ — I can’t trust their idea of a suitable person. I choose my own partner. I am not a tool of the Shinomiya family.”
She said it in a voice that was tightly strung with pain and the effort of staying controlled, and there was a silence on the other side. A deliberate, contemptuous sigh. A few seconds. If there was any family feeling there at all, even a fragment, perhaps those words would be enough. She allowed herself that small hope.
Her mother said nothing of the kind.
You contributed nothing to the family’s legacy. You shamed its name and held your exceptional sister back. Less than a pet kept for sentiment — a tool is exactly the right word for you.
Nothing came out. She opened her mouth to answer and her throat refused her. A scraped exhale was all that followed, and she felt her hands and feet begin to shake. Her breathing was going unsteady. Heat was building behind her eyes. If she let go for a single second she would cry, so she bit down hard.
Her breathing was audible. The person on the other end could surely hear it.
She fought the tears back, and for a moment managed it, but a single drop fell onto her knee and she couldn’t stop it. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and made herself ask the question she’d been holding.
“You told me — told me not to use the Shinomiya name. Not to pick up a brush under the family’s name. You said to do it on my own so Nee-chan’s name wasn’t associated with mine. You said it. Both of you!”
The voice that answered was utterly cold.
Then what if I told you that you could paint as a Shinomiya? Would you be able to do it?
The question stopped her breathing. A single moment of silence, and then the cruelty expanded to fill it.
Use the name freely. Paint under it, with all the media attention that comes from being Rōkai’s younger sister, and all the public interest, and let your ability speak for itself. If that’s what you want, I’ll allow it. I’m asking nothing in return. Simply do as you like.
Can you? The question was in her mother’s voice without being said. And Shinomiya had no answer. Only loneliness and shame, running down her face. She gripped her own fist and her mother gave a short, cool laugh at the silence.
There’s no one who would value your paintings. No one would be drawn to what you produce. I was offering you a chance to have everyone acknowledge you, even so. But fine. If you’re refusing, I won’t press you further.
The voice did what it always did at the end: withdrew its interest, tidily, as though the matter were simply concluded.
Shinomiya had nothing left. No words, no energy to reach for them. She bit her lip and killed the sob and went on wiping her eyes.
One thing. You are no longer a member of the Shinomiya family. Do not cross this threshold again.
She didn’t wait for an answer. She ended the call.
The flat, mechanical sound of disconnection. Shinomiya lowered the phone onto the sofa cushion. There was no one to hear anything she said now. No one to take in any complaint she might make. Understanding this, the sob she had been holding back by force broke loose.
She curled around her knees, pressed her face against her own arm. The wetness soaked through to the fabric. Her shoulders moved with each sob, and her breathing, uneven and ragged, gave sound to the tears.
She had never expected anything of herself. She had known she was a lost cause, and built a life around filling the empty days. And then she had met someone who made her think she might want to change. She had let herself feel recognised, had let herself hope. And because she had changed like that, the current shape of herself was unbearable to look at.
Herself, who couldn’t say a word back. Herself, who couldn’t pick up a brush.
She had grown to hate all of it.
She needed someone. She needed someone to come and sit with her and say something. And every time she thought so, the face of the person she had pushed away came up, and something in her chest tightened until she could barely breathe. Clinging to the memories even as the pain of them pressed in.
All of this — every bit of this hurting — is your fault.
Her changed heart said it like a small, teary complaint addressed to someone who wasn’t in the room.
The streets at night blazed with light, and Hatano moved through them with her eyes slightly narrowed, exhaling white into the cold.
Traffic signals, car headlights, streetlamps, neon from the evening establishments, fluorescent light from older shops, spots illuminating signs, the glow of phones, the blaze of a large screen on a building. The evidence of people breathing in a city at night was why she liked it. She walked alone through streets that hadn’t lost their energy even at this hour, and thought.
Then why are you kind to me, senpai?
She had spent the night on it, foregone sleep over it, and reached nothing. She had acted from feeling rather than reason, but couldn’t identify the feeling. At the beginning, a vague dislike of Shinomiya’s way of living had been the engine. But at some point that had changed, and she hadn’t tracked the change or given it a name, and had simply kept moving.
What Shinomiya needed from the question and what Hatano was actually trying to work out were slightly different. Shinomiya wanted to know: if you’re not Rōkai’s agent, why do you care this much about me? The absence of an answer read, in her logic, as confirmation. She needed something to disprove that. Some kind of answer — any answer.
What Hatano wanted was the true one. She understood what Shinomiya was actually asking and that any response would have done. But she couldn’t give something that wasn’t honest about her own feelings, not if she was going to keep being present in this person’s life. And besides, she recognised in herself the kind of person who couldn’t leave this vague — it would have shown on her face regardless.
She massaged her own rigid expression with both hands and kept walking.
She was passing the side of a convenience store when two familiar faces came out of it.
“Ah.”
“Oh.”
The same sense of something happening twice. Hatano looked up, and Shindo looked equally surprised. Coming out together, bags heavy with snacks and alcohol — Shindo and Shijima. What they were about to do needed no explaining.
Shijima saw her and lit up.
“Hatano! Of all places. What are you doing out here?”
“Walking. And you two — fairly obvious, isn’t it.”
Both of them lifted their bags in answer. The warmth she felt at the sight of two old friends living comfortably like this was genuine, even now. She looked at Shindo.
“You again.”
“You again. Though I should say — this is my neighbourhood. Come around after dark and you’ll run into me fairly regularly.”
She had no particular reason to seek him out, but he had told her things about the Shinomiya family she couldn’t have known otherwise, and anything to do with that family, he likely knew better than she did. He’d also done her a service at the drinks the other night.
“I owe you for that, by the way.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just trying to earn some goodwill with a certain someone who won’t give me the time of day.”
He said it cheerfully, and made no further effort to disguise his feelings about Rōkai. Hatano filed this away, along with the decision that she wouldn’t be sharing Rōkai’s contact information without permission, whatever goodwill it might buy.
Shijima, catching only part of the exchange, looked mildly put out but pleased enough that his friends seemed to know each other. When the conversation reached a natural pause, Shindo held up his bag.
“We’re heading to mine to drink if you want to come. No ulterior motives, I promise.”
“I’m not worried about that. But—”
Shindo was devoted to Rōkai, and Shijima had publicly declared himself uninterested in romance and she trusted that at face value. Neither of them gave her cause for concern. But she hadn’t been looking for company in that particular way tonight, and more than anything.
She glanced at the nighttime street around her, full of movement and nowhere to be.
“I’ve got some thinking to do. Another time.”
She exhaled white into the neon. Shindo took this without pressing her, gave an easy laugh, and waved a hand from his coat pocket. There was something more important occupying every spare part of her attention, and wherever she walked tonight it was Shinomiya she was walking with. But the invitation was welcome, and she meant it.
“Invite me again sometime. I’ll pay for both of us, as thanks for the other night.”
“I’ve been wanting to try Johnny Walker Blue.”
“Dream on. Goodbye.”
She laughed and was turning to go when Shijima, who had been quietly observing all of this, spoke.
“Hatano.”
She turned. He was looking at her with eyes that had a way of going directly to what they were looking at, and the face he was wearing now was not the student writer or the club president or the casually sociable Shijima. It was the one he wore for people he actually knew.
“If there’s something weighing on you — I’ll listen.”
He said it as though he already knew what it was, which with Shijima was not something to be surprised by. He had identified her as someone who worked with words the very first time they’d spoken. His perceptiveness was not in doubt.
She thought about it. How much of Shinomiya’s situation was hers to discuss with a third party, and whether doing so would actually help.
But it was also true that knowing yourself from the inside was not always easier than knowing yourself from a distance. Self-observation was not neutral; your own biases bent the view. Sometimes what you needed was a different pair of eyes.
What mattered most right now?
Shinomiya’s voice had been shaking over the phone. The responsibility of someone who had reached out to her, once, was to wipe those tears. And beyond responsibility — she was her friend.
Hatano closed her eyes and breathed, pushing oxygen through her thoughts. She had made one bad judgment and hurt her. This time she wanted to think more carefully before acting. She felt the fist she hadn’t realised she’d been clenching slowly loosen, and smiled, just slightly.
“…Fair enough.”
Shijima handed his bags to Shindo without another word.
A small park off the lit streets, where the city’s noise didn’t quite reach. One streetlamp on a pole, barely enough. Hatano and Shijima on separate benches facing the same direction.
Neither of them looked at the other. They looked at the stars, and the distant smear of light that was the city.
“This is going to sound strange, but — I’ve been talking to Shinomiya a lot recently.”
Exhaled white, and the sentence. Shijima’s eyes went briefly wide, and then he seemed to run back through a series of events that now made more sense, and nodded. “I see,” he said, without pressing for more.
“I’ll leave out the details, but there was an accidental connection, and as I got to know her I understood she was carrying a great deal. I’d thought I hated her kind of person more than any other, but the more I knew, the less I could look away.”
“…The arts family. Wasn’t it.”
She looked at him, surprised, and he narrowed his eyes with something sad in them.
“I know. You know Shindo’s been devoted to her sister for years. I’ve been his friend a long time, and there are connections to the sister’s world. Information comes in whether you want it to or not, and some of it has been about Shinomiya.”
He leaned back against the bench and looked at the sky.
“A stone held up against a gem and found lacking. Shinomiya is the deep and concentrated shadow produced by the light of Rōkai. I’m not in her position, but I’ve achieved something, which means I’ve had some exposure to what that world looks like from the side that gets compared. I understand it. More than a little.”
His profile as he said this, Hatano noted, belonged to someone with personal knowledge of the terrain.
He was a skilled writer. But writing professionally meant clearing a very narrow gate, and for everyone who cleared it, others had not. He had climbed something, and he knew what it felt like to look at the ones who didn’t. Or to be watched climbing by them.
“The night Shinomiya came to the drinks, a while back. You were the one who ended up with her.”
“I was. I almost hit you for it.”
“I’m sorry.” He said it while looking like he wasn’t, quite, and then let a small, pleased note into his voice. “But — for people like me and her, caught in other people’s expectations and comparisons and the pressure of all of that, someone like you is an extraordinary thing to have nearby.”
The same thing, more or less, that both the Shinomiya sisters had said. They’d all arrived at the same place independently, which suggested it was probably time to accept it.
Hatano made a gesture that said she didn’t follow, and Shijima continued.
“You have a way of living that nothing can push off course, and a spine of conviction running from the ground up that doesn’t bend. You understand the pain of effort and the pull of wanting to succeed, so you can genuinely be present both for people who’ve achieved things and for people who haven’t. You can meet both of them honestly. I had my own calculations going too — this particular piece of grit might straighten out something that’s twisted in her.”
Hatano took this in with some surprise. He had known about the Shinomiya family all along, through Shindo. He had known what Shinomiya was carrying. And he had said what he said that night with eyes wide open. She thought back to his words — who else here could do it but you — and understood now what the real meaning had been.
“So I danced on your palm the whole time. I couldn’t leave her way of living alone, and once I understood where it came from, I couldn’t leave that alone either.”
“And somewhere a connection misfired.”
He said it immediately, and she took a breath. He was looking at her with those eyes that went directly into things.
“Shinomiya responds sincerely to genuine care, and you don’t abandon people who are making an effort. If you’re troubled by something involving her, it’s because two good intentions ended up missing each other. I’ve never known anyone with as much goodwill as you, and I’ve also never known anyone quite as clumsy with it.”
She would have had something to say to that if he weren’t so completely right. Instead she told him to quit writing and take up mind-reading, and he smiled briefly and said he’d once considered becoming a counsellor.
They sat for a time looking at the distant brightness of the city. The sound of a car somewhere far off, the residual noise and warmth of people, the smell of alcohol on the cold air, neon catching the eye. Hatano took it all in with a vague sense of comfort, and then spoke toward the stars.
“The misunderstanding will clear up. But if I’m going to keep being part of her life, I need to know what I’m actually aiming at — what I want for her. Yesterday she asked me. Why are you kind to me? And I couldn’t answer.”
She had put the real question out into the open. Shijima looked at her with full attention.
She closed her eyes, and the image she’d been carrying pressed forward, sharp and immediate. She breathed deliberately. Then she opened her eyes and continued.
“I don’t know myself. What I’m trying to do, what I want from this, what I want for her — none of it is clear. I just pushed her, vaguely, toward less pain, without knowing why. That was probably what you’d call my good-faith instinct doing the right thing — but there’s no feeling in it that’s specifically mine. And yet I know there’s something there, behind the action. I want to find it.”
She said it knowing it sounded difficult and was aware it sounded difficult, but the honest truth was that being inside your own life didn’t give you a clear view of it. Even trying to be objective, bias got in the way. Self-knowledge was harder than it seemed from the outside, which was why people went on journeys looking for themselves.
Shijima listened, then sat quietly with it for a while. Somewhere distant, a car moved through the dark. The silence didn’t stretch long.
“I know you better than you know yourself, but only slightly, and only in one direction. My opinion is, by definition, partial. Take that as a caveat.”
“Go on.”
He answered without delay.
“You love writing.”
Something she had never needed anyone to tell her, and she frowned at being told it. He saw the look and didn’t change his expression.
“Yes, I know — that goes without saying. But what I mean is: you love writing, and if you dig further, what you love is the act of making something. All of it — the effort, the stumbles, the occasional success, the anxiety and the relief — all of it, you love as part of what creation is. That’s why you work as hard as you do.”
“I know that. It’s not why I work this hard.”
“Then this is simple. Your reasons for acting are straightforward.”
He said it plainly, and said the thing she hadn’t found.
“You don’t want someone you care about to dislike what you love.”
The words arrived and she lost her own.
Not shock, exactly. Not surprise. More like water soaking into cloth — simply, naturally, going in. No resistance, no doubt. She heard it and understood, with the specific quality of remembering something she’d forgotten she knew.
Of course. That’s it.
She didn’t want Shinomiya to hate the act of making things. She didn’t want her to hate painting. That was why she had looked for ways around the canvas — the lantern workshop, a different surface, a different context, no stakes attached. The beginning might have been concern, genuine and simple. But after learning everything Shinomiya carried, what kept driving her was this. Something so ordinary any child could feel it.
I don’t want the person I care about to hate what I love.
Shijima was smiling faintly as he spoke again.
“Her way of living until now — it’s like drinking seawater to quench a thirst. Endless, and never satisfied, and wearing her down. So what first moved you was probably the good-faith response to watching that: this has to stop, someone has to say something. That sense of urgency drove you.”
She had no argument with this reconstruction. “Yes. I think so. At first.”
“That’s who you are. But you didn’t give her that answer when she asked. Because by that point, whether she stopped living destructively was no longer enough — you’d already gone further than that. You wanted her to look at the canvas again. You wanted her to take up the brush she’d put down. You wanted it badly enough that you kept tending the furnace.”
He stood up, stretching his back with a small sound.
“I only know the kind of caring that’s friendship or family, so I can’t tell you what the specific flavour of yours is. But whatever kind it is, you care about her. And when you care about someone, you want them to love what you love. I feel it with Shindo and with you — I want you to love what I love about this club and about writing.”
He looked back at her, doing it with rather more composure than the speech warranted, but she decided not to tease him about it tonight, having received too much from him to be ungrateful.
She closed her eyes and sat with her own heart for a moment. Then she stood too.
“…It isn’t that I want her to love painting. Or that I want her to paint.”
She thought of being told as a small child that if you didn’t like something you should make yourself like it, and hating the thing more for the instruction. She knew how it felt to be told to love what you had decided to hate.
But if underneath the decision was something that had always wanted to love it, and the environment had twisted that feeling into rejection — protecting her from the environment was not too much to ask.
Hatano finally had the answer she’d been searching for, and she looked up at the clear winter sky to say it.
“I want her to be able to pick up a brush without dreading it.”