As the light failed, Hatano sat in a darkening room, pressing keys on a keyboard so worn the lettering had long since disappeared.

Having Shinomiya stay the night already felt like it belonged to another stretch of time. A week had passed since then, and she had barely seen her — barely at all. Some small part of her had found itself thinking about her occasionally; another part of her had found, with equal honesty, that she had no particular reason to do anything about it.

So she simply kept writing. For no one’s acknowledgement yet — but toward the day when she would make someone give it.

She looked at the girl struggling on the other side of the text. A second-rate striker, carrying her anguish and her refusals to quit, pressing forward through it all.

She had started playing football in primary school. Started with a childhood friend who lived nearby. They played together through primary school, middle school, high school — the same teams, the same clubs, all the way through.

For a while they had been called the two wings. A fitting name, for a while. But the further the team advanced, the more exceptional players they encountered — and the only one who cleared those heights was the childhood friend. They had shared the same environment, the same effort, and still the gap had opened, year by year, until the girl looked up one day and found her friend somewhere far ahead, beyond the range of her sight. That was what talent was, she understood then. In high school, where the disparity had made itself definitively clear, the protagonist had earned her starting place on raw competence — slightly above average, nothing more — and played as a strike partnership with her childhood friend, just as she always had.

And everyone compared them. Always.

Unrecognised. Unbelieved in. Gradually being crushed by all of it — and still refusing to break. That was her protagonist. And at the end, the effort would be rewarded, the decisive shot would fly—

Hatano’s hands stopped.

There on the screen, the striker had just driven the ball in for the equaliser. And the world inside the story had gone perfectly still. Something was missing. A story whose message was simply effort is rewarded — it had hit the right notes for a sports narrative, done what the genre required. But doing what was required wasn’t enough to stop it sinking without trace.

A talentless girl, ground down by inadequacy and invisibility, who refuses to break, and leads her team to victory in the end. A success story. And somewhere in there, it felt cheap. She wanted something she could stand behind — some quality that belonged to this story and no other.

If all you’re writing is received wisdom dressed up prettily, picture books do it better and find a wider audience.

Hatano sat thinking for a while, then exhaled, long and slow. She opened a scratch file, cut several tens of thousands of characters from the manuscript, and pasted them in.

She saved the main file several times over and lifted her hands from the keyboard entirely. She pressed her fingers against her forehead and rocked gently in the chair.

She could have written more, but she’d been at the desk for three hours. Her concentration was fraying; stopping here and working through the structure again was probably the right move. She could drift and think, or watch something, or take a walk to clear her head — she was running through the options when Shinomiya surfaced in her mind, uninvited.

That sulky expression from the other night.

She hated the life Shinomiya led — the indiscriminate charms deployed at anyone who moved, the body offered as currency, the self-sold cheaply and without negotiation. And yet the moments when the real girl flickered through — lonely, no more or less than her actual age, looking for company in the only way she knew — those were harder to dismiss. Harder to simply walk away from.

She was aware of how simple-minded this made her, and aware too that since she hadn’t reached out in a week, that instinct toward goodness was superficial at best. Probably just a well-meaning hypocrite in the end.

She told herself, mostly meaning it, that she was just going for a walk.

Just a walk — not expecting to find Shinomiya around any particular corner, not particularly hoping to. She was simply fond of the neon.

The bars and clubs and night-time establishments that the sober world tended to view with suspicion were run, most of them, by people who took genuine pride in what they did. The people who drifted toward them night after night were moths drawn to the lamp — or perhaps, she thought, more like those small insects that fly straight into bug zappers, dazzled and helpless. That was roughly how she felt, walking through the lit-up streets near the station as the dark came down.

The autumn night air, taken in a full breath, carried just a trace of alcohol.

It wasn’t supposed to be a search. But she found herself glancing through izakaya windows as she passed them, looking for a chestnut-haired figure, and when she didn’t find her, feeling a complicated mixture of mild relief and mild deflation. She didn’t have friendly feelings for Shinomiya, or romantic ones — nothing that had a tidy name. It was more like the impulse to grab someone by the shoulder on a rooftop, when you can see they’re about to do something irreversible — not because you need them to be safe, exactly, but because you can’t in conscience approve of the method.

She walked on. Quiet. Unhurried.

Rounding a convenience store, a voice she knew stopped her.

“Hey.”

The kind of voice that always sounds like it’s amused by something.

Hatano stopped, brows lifting.

“Shindo.”
“Out for a walk? That’s unusual.”

Tall, good-looking, lean in the way athletes get. He was carrying a plastic bag — drinks, snacks; he was probably planning to drink somewhere tonight. He raised a hand in easy greeting while she was still registering surprise.

“Looking for someone?”

They drifted to a quieter spot near the convenience store — the side by the rubbish bins, under the fluorescent light that washed the car park a bleached white. Hatano opened a warm can of coffee. Shindo loaded a cartridge into a vape pen and began quietly pulling nicotine into his system. Shinomiya’s face moved through her mind.

She looked away from it. “No,” she said, flat. “Just walking. I hit a wall.”

“The novel?”
“Amateur, unfortunately. I can’t sustain it for hours at a stretch.”

She drank the bitter coffee and looked at her own shadow, stretched by the fluorescent lamp. Shindo exhaled beside her.

“The club, by the way — since you left.”
“Same as ever.”
“You already knew?”
“I don’t flatter myself. It’d take you, or Shijima — or Shinomiya, maybe — to actually shift anything. I was a minority in that group.”

He fished a bag of rice crackers from his carrier and tossed them to her. She told him not to throw food. “My bad,” he said, and shrugged. She helped herself to a peanut, and he started talking again.

“…Shijima’s been lonely. The last trace of actual literary activity in that room is gone — there’s no one left for him to talk about writing with. Poor bastard.”
“If you feel that way, you could take it up yourself. You’re his oldest friend.”
“Regrettably, I have zero interest in fiction. Manga is all I read, and I make no apologies.”

She couldn’t summon the energy to reproach him, vaping with that complete lack of contrition. If he wasn’t there for Shijima’s sake, he was obviously there for the women. She was thinking exactly this when he read it off her face.

“‘Lecherous little creature, in it purely for the women’ — that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Correct. Lecherous little creature, in it purely for the women.”
“Correct. I am a lecherous little creature in it purely for the women.”

He said it with his chest out and not the slightest hint of apology. Hatano sighed. She felt sorry for Shijima. And then, with the air of someone who has just thought of something perfectly casual, Shindo said: “…Right, though.”

She looked at him. He smiled, the way people smile when they’ve been waiting to say something.

“You’re no longer a club member, so I’ll share something interesting.”
“You’re raising your own bar. Even professional comedians don’t call their own material funny.”
“‘Interesting’ as in noteworthy, not as in amusing. And there’s a small side story to go with it. I think you in particular will find it gets under your skin.”

He’d raised his own bar considerably. But the phrasing suggested it was something that actually involved her, and despite herself she made a small noise of interest.

“How to seduce women?”
“No. Why I joined this club.”

Hadn’t he just said it was for the women? Hatano frowned.

He nodded, pleased with himself.

“As I said — yes, I’m in it for a woman. But not in the sense of any female who happens to identify that way. I have a specific target.”

So it wasn’t general interest in the club’s female membership. It was one particular person. Given his reputation, the idea of him being seriously focused on anyone was surprising — but once you accepted it, the candidates narrowed quickly.

“Go on, guess.”

He had that challenging half-smile. The answer that came to Hatano was the only one that made sense.

“Shinomiya.”
“Correct!”

And then she waited for the rest of it, because the setup had been too elaborate for that to be the end. Shindo caught her flat expression and continued, with the timing of a game show host milking a moment:

“Correct — and probably also incorrect.”
“Make up your mind. You set the question.”

“Bear with me. Say I ask ‘what do I love?’ and you say ‘apples.’ Right answer — but the apple you’re picturing, the Rosales-order, Rosaceae-family, Malus-genus apple, is the wrong one. The correct answer is Shiina Ringo, the greatest singer-songwriter in the world. That’s what I mean.”

The only clear information this conveyed was that Shindo had strong feelings about Shiina Ringo. But vaguely, Hatano followed: the answer Shinomiya was correct but she’d imagined the wrong one — the member of the Literary Appreciation Club. Someone connected to her, then. A different person sharing the name.

She thought through the remaining possibilities, and offered the most likely.

“Shinomiya’s… sibling?”

He let the corner of his mouth curve into something satisfied.

“Correct.”

So he was trying to fill in the surrounding territory — working his way toward Shinomiya’s family through Shinomiya herself. Hatano grasped it, and found, alongside the surprise at the answer, a genuine curiosity about the sibling. What kind of person emerged from the same family as that girl? And how did they look at how she was living?

She had said she lived alone. What had led to that?

She was interested, and was irritated to find herself interested, exactly as he’d predicted. He watched her expression with a look of comfortable superiority and kept going.

“Shinomiya’s older sister, to be precise. She was in my year — middle and high school. I fell for her in middle school and followed her all the way through high school. Never managed to get her to look at me before graduation. I went for the same university, obviously, but she was beyond what I could reach.”

He shrugged. Their university was hardly unremarkable — it would qualify, by most external assessments, as a good institution, competitive to enter. The fact that he, at this university, had still found her out of reach said something about the sister.

“She must be exceptionally academic.”
“You’d think so.”

His tone deflected the assumption. She looked at him, asking with a glance, and he gave a rueful smile.

“Academics are a footnote. What she actually is — is an artist.”

An artist. Not a word that appeared in Hatano’s daily surroundings with any frequency — Shijima was the nearest equivalent, a novelist, if you counted literary fiction as art, which was its own argument. But that word, from Shindo’s mouth, had a weight to it.

“Is she at an art college?”
“No — straight sciences, extremely high-ranking institution. But as an artist, she’s first-rate.”

Hatano couldn’t quite picture it — a first-rate science student who was also a first-rate artist — and found she couldn’t treat either half as ordinary. Shinomiya’s sister, it was becoming clear, was a remarkable person.

Shindo had been scrolling through his phone. He found what he was looking for — “ah, here we go” — and tossed it across. She caught it cleanly and looked at the screen.

“…A news article?”

It was. Rōkai — Solo Exhibition, New York. Below the headline, a photograph.

In it: a foreign dignitary in an expensive suit, and standing beside him in front of a watercolour, a woman who could have been Shinomiya’s reflection. A quiet smile. And behind both of them, the painting — and the moment Hatano’s eyes found it, she felt the bottom drop out of her composure. Even photographed through a lens, filtered through a screen, it had depth that didn’t feel like it belonged to two dimensions. Calm water, rendered in pale pastels. A scene of perfect stillness that reached through the glass and took hold of something in her chest.

“Not the kind of name that trends like Banksy — most people outside the world wouldn’t know her. But inside it, she’s well known. A Japanese watercolourist with solo exhibitions abroad. If you’re serious about painting — about visual art in general — you’d know that artist name, and the Shinomiya surname, without being told.”

Hatano handed the phone back. She had seen first-rate demonstrated, and she understood it now.

“…She’s Shinomiya’s sister.”
“She is. And the one trying to work his way in through Shinomiya is me — Shindo.”
“I didn’t need that last part.”

She dismissed it cleanly. He shrugged without taking offence.

It was true that an association with that woman could mean something — a university student with solo exhibitions in New York was not a person you encountered often, or perhaps ever. She pulled out her own phone and searched the name Shindo had given her. A long cascade of results: exhibitions, reviews, collections, artist profiles, a Wikipedia page. She found a forum thread and skimmed it; the comments were matter-of-fact about the scale of what she was doing. One post noted that it was probably only a matter of years before domestic media picked her up in earnest.

“There are extraordinary people in the world.”
“There really are. Though — when it comes to the Shinomiya family specifically, it might be more accurate to say it’s the bloodline that’s extraordinary, not just the individual.”

Hatano considered that for a moment, and looked at the sister’s Wikipedia entry.

“The grandparents were noted sculptors. The mother is a musician. The father is also a painter. There are dancers in the extended family, craft artists, calligraphers — an artistic dynasty, exactly as the phrase describes. That’s the kind of family Shinomiya comes from.”

Every name on the page was hyperlinked. She tapped a few and found the same thing each time: remarkable records, genuine standing in their respective fields. And none of them — not a single one — shared a page with the girl Hatano knew. Of course they didn’t. The girl from the Literary Appreciation Club, the one who charmed men with a lowered glance and fed on the jealousy it produced — she had no place in this lineage, as far as anyone looking from outside would see.

“You’re thinking: ‘where’s Shinomiya?’ — aren’t you.”

She gave him a narrow look. He could read her well enough, apparently. She wanted him to get to the point, and her expression said so, and he conceded.

“You already know the answer. She’s not in that world. She’s not where you or Shijima are, either — she’s completely on the other side of the line. Which is precisely why I’m trying to reach the family through her.”

There was a note of opportunism in how he said it that briefly annoyed her — and then she caught herself, recognised the irritation for what it was, and let it go. She thought with a cooler head.

And when she did, a shape she’d been circling began to come into focus.

Doesn’t it hurt. When no one acknowledges you. — The question Shinomiya had asked while staring at Hatano’s screen. The warped hunger to be seen. And the family she came from.

They connected without effort. The weight of the connection settled into her like cold lead.

Her thinking slowed. Something in her mood descended. Her period wasn’t due yet, but the heaviness was there regardless.

She drank the last of the coffee, trying to sharpen her mind with caffeine.

“Word has it she used to paint, same as her sister. Watercolours, from what I’ve heard. Something went wrong somewhere — no idea what. Convenient for me, but it’s a melancholy story.”

She felt a flare of something at him calling Shinomiya’s situation convenient. But she also caught the faint, genuine note of sadness underneath it — he wasn’t mocking. Just being honest, in his particular way. Hatano pressed down what was smouldering and let it out in one pale breath into the cold night air.

“…Interesting, like you said?”

He blew his vapour up at the stars and waited for her verdict.

Hatano shook the empty can — a small, hollow sound — and dropped it into the bin with more force than it needed.

“It wasn’t funny, at least.”