Morning still has that thin taste of metal when I stop in front of Arima's house. The street is awake in a quiet way—delivery scooters, a neighbor watering concrete as if it were a stubborn plant, crows arguing about nothing. My daughter shades her eyes and looks up at the second-floor window like she expects a face to appear there and shake its head at us.
"Are you sure he's home?" she asks, voice small but crisp, already suspicious of the day.
"He's home," I say. "He goes nowhere when he hurts."
I press the doorbell. The chime warbles inside, off-key, as if the wire is tired. We wait. Nothing. I ring again. I knock, the polite way, then the less polite way that gets landlords involved. Still nothing.
My daughter watches me the way children watch adults who are about to break a rule. "Maybe he's sleeping?" she offers, careful.
"He is always sleeping or never sleeping," I mutter. "Same result."
I call his name. "Arima!"
Silence, fat and unhelpful.
The knob turns under my hand with the soft shrug of a house that hasn't been locked in a while. The door opens three centimeters, then six, then gives up and swings wide on a long, complaining hinge.
My daughter's hand finds my coat. "Mom..."
"Stay by me," I say, and we step into stale air.
It smells like dust, paper, something sweet gone flat, and the faint ghost of detergent that didn't make it all the way through a load. The entry rug has worn a path from door to hall. Shoes sit in a crooked line like they were told to behave and refused.
The living room is a low tide of things. Sheet music spills across the coffee table and onto the couch, the floor, the chair with the wounded arm. A notebook lies open on the cushion, spine broken, pages filled with little black notes and the pencil ghosts of notes that didn't make the cut. Next to it: a different notebook, smaller, full of blocky English letters and numbers strung together in ways that belong in labs, not living rooms. Margins crammed with arrows. Chemical names. Unpronounceable syllables. There are printouts, too—journal articles, a grant template someone abandoned halfway through paragraph two, a flow chart with five steps circled and three crossed out.
My mouth presses itself into a line it knows well. "Idiot," I say under my breath, and I don't mean it unkindly.
My daughter touches the corner of a page with a single careful finger. "Is this music?"
"It's something he thinks is more important than sleep," I say. "Which makes it dangerous." I couldn't help but notice the content. Nothing music related... all complicated words and science... jeez what was this kid up to?
We move deeper. The kitchen is two plates in the sink and a fork that jumped ship. A pot on the stove with the lid on sideways and a ghost of rice starch clinging to the rim. Chopsticks balanced in a way that says they're waiting for someone to come back and pretend they didn't forget them there. The trash is tied but not taken out. A calendar hangs blank except for three boxes: a competition date already scratched over, a doctor's appointment with no time scribbled next to it, and a word I don't like in red.
My daughter wrinkles her nose. "It smells like... old tea."
"He drinks it until it has no courage left," I say, opening the hallway door.
The farther you go, the quieter houses get. We pass the bathroom with its light left on. The mirror is fogged along the bottom edge, as if the last face that looked into it breathed and ran. Another stack of papers waits on a low bookcase. I scan them without meaning to and feel the back of my neck tighten. More formulas. More plans. Someone has been at war here without leaving the house.
I raise my voice. "Arima! Enough. You answer, or I drag you into daylight by your ankles!"
Nothing. That's when worry jumps, impatient with itself, straight into fear.
I don't knock on the music room door. I plant my heel and kick like the hinge owes me money. It slaps the wall and the echo rebounds into my teeth.
"Kousei!"
He's on the floor. For a half-breath, the world narrows until I can fit it in my palm. Then he moves.
His back lifts, his shoulders unstick from the rug, and he sits up in a slow, clumsy arc like he's underwater. His glasses are missing. His eyes find the light and don't like it. The expression there is a wound with manners: hollow, exhausted, not sure whether it's supposed to apologize.
"Oh," he says, and the voice isn't much more than a scrape. "Hiroko." He rubs his eyes
There are notebooks all around him—one under his hip, two at his ribs, three like an outline where his head must have been. A pencil has tattooed a faint black line along his forearm. The shirt he wore yesterday has curled at the collar; the stubborn block letters across his chest look as tired as he does. His socks are mismatched in the way of boys who believe covering the feet is binary.
I grimace because otherwise I will say something I can't unsay. "Get up."
He blinks like that is a complex instruction.
My daughter hovers in the doorway, her mouth a small, worried line. She takes him in with the efficient cruelty of children who don't have time to lie to themselves yet. She stays quiet.
I cross the room, squat, and put two fingers on his cheek. Then I pinch, hard.
"Gyah!" He recoils like a cat who trusted the wrong hand. The noise has more life in it than the rest of him.
"I've been calling and calling," I say, letting go only when I feel the heat of his skin under my fingertips. "Your phone is a tombstone. Do you not know how to answer a person who cares whether you're dead?"
He rubs his cheek, staring at me like I have offended the physics of the world. "Cut me some slack," he mutters. "I was sleepy."
"There are twelve sleeping positions and none of them are 'face down on staff paper.'" I point at his shirt. "And you are still wearing yesterday."
He looks down as if the shirt surprised him by clinging. "Yeah."
My hands find my hips. They do it often. "Bath. Now."
He doesn't move. It isn't defiance. It's a system restart that hasn't finished booting.
"Get up," I repeat, flat. "You smell like a boy who tried to out-stare a problem and lost."
He stares at me instead. It is unsettling, the way his eyes seem older than his face. Not wise. Just... used up in a place the mirror won't catch.
"What," I ask, because his gaze has a question in it and he is too polite to ask it out loud.
He keeps looking. It's a look that makes me feel how long the day can be.
I move to the window, slide it open with a clack, and lean into the cold. The cigarette has been behind my ear since the doorbell. I flick the lighter; the flame leaps as if it's happy to be necessary. The first pull tastes like old habits and worse ideas. I blow the smoke outside because the house is sad enough without it.
I glance back. He's still watching me like I'm the only thing in the room that makes sense.
"What," I say again, sharper. "Go take a damn shower. Don't make me bathe you like I used to."
He doesn't smile. "Can I have a cigarette?"
The laugh jumps out of me, but it has no humor in it. I turn, full, and give him the most incredulous look I have given any child since the one I gave birth to once put my concert heels on the dog.
"You want.... what?" I grit out
"A cigarette," he repeats, perfectly level, as if he's requesting a metronome. Almost as if he was just a middle aged businessman.
"You are fourteen years old," I say. "You can have hot water and soap. You cannot have fire and cancer."
Was he serious?
He blinks again, like the number surprised him. For a second something raw flickers behind the tired. It goes as quickly as it came.
"Oh.... Yeah.."
I couldn't stop the glare. This kid was good at making me worry, especially now.
"You can't smoke Kousei" I said firmly not angry. "Bath," I say, softer now because the anger is just scaffolding and the house knows it. "Please..."
He nods. It's small, but it's a nod. He pushes his hands into the rug to stand and winces as if the world weighs more than usual today. He gets to his feet, sways, catches himself on the bench like he meant to do that.
He looks at me, and I wish I could take the weight from his eyes and hold it while he showers. I can't. I point down the hall like the villain in a children's book. "Go."
He goes.
My daughter releases a breath I didn't know she was holding. She sidles up to me and slides her hand into mine, the way she did when she was little and crowded rooms were oceans.
"Is he okay?" she asks.
"No," I say, honest and rough. "But he will be closer after a bath."
I stub the cigarette out against the cold sill and watch the smoke lift away like it has somewhere better to be. I look down at the notebooks on the floor and the notes on the table and the papers everywhere and think, Is this music, or is it a different kind of weather with the same threat of storm?
I straighten. I will not leave him alone with this house again. Not for a while. It's like a tomb.
"Come on," I say to my daughter, forcing my voice into something that sounds like a plan. "We'll make tea he won't drink and food he'll pretend to taste. Then we'll go through these piles and stack them like a person lives here."
She nods solemnly, relieved by tasks. We start gathering pages as if paper could be convinced to behave.
Behind the closed bathroom door, the pipes rattle awake. It is the most beautiful sound I have heard all morning.
She remembers a boy broken but with innocence. She remembers hugging as he cried repeating the mantra that the relationship between him and his mother was her fault. It was. She had unleashed the nightmare of the piano on him in such terrible circumstances.
This was not the boy I once knew. But it was. Same face, hair, voice, everything. I'm honeslty a little fearful to see the full extent of damage to this boy..
"What happened to this boy," I think but do not say, "and how do I give some of it back?"
I don't have an answer. I have hot water and a cigarette I didn't finish and an afternoon I am prepared to spend stubbornly.
It will do.
⸻
The lab looks like a person tried to turn a submarine into a library and gave up halfway. Everything hums at a pitch you only notice when you're very tired. I am very tired.
I flip the page on the clipboard and hate the new page as much as the last. Mice do not care how much you want them to behave. Cells, even less. The incubator ticks softly to itself like an old clock; the shaker does its idiot dance; the freezer coughs every twenty minutes like a smoker who swears they're quitting.
The photo of Aya watches me from the corner of the desk—black hair pinned back, impatient smile, the one that said Are we done here so life can continue? She would hate this picture frame and tell me to put the photo somewhere less tragic. I have not.
The door opens without the drama of a person who wants to be noticed. The Arima boy slips in around the handle, makes himself small without shrinking. He has the kind of face that is easy to underestimate until he looks up.
He looks up. The eyes are wrong for his age. They have the low-battery light that grief turns on and never lets you switch off.
He was an anomaly.
"You're late," I say, because it is my job to make truth sound like an insult.
He glances at the wall clock and frowns like it betrayed him. "Sorry," he says, and it isn't a performance.
"Sit." I point at the stool the way one points at a misbehaving dog. He sits, opens a notebook, already on a page where I left him three days ago. The handwriting is small, precise, irritated with itself.
We do not waste time with how-are-yous. They are landmines in rooms where science pretends to be an answer to questions it cannot parse. I take a breath and deliver the news as if it is weather and not a prayer.
"It's coming along," I say. "Shockingly well."
His head lifts a fraction. That is the only gesture he allows himself.
"Vector stability held through the stress assay," I continue. "Expression looks cleaner than last week. The off-targets we were worried about are stubborn, but they are not multiplying. I want to say weeks to animal trials. A month if I am conservative and the gods want to amuse themselves."
He does not smile. He writes: weeks/maybe month. "And if the animals don't die horribly," he says, dry, "what then?"
"Then I submit nine different forms to nine different people who have made an art of saying no, and if they say yes, we discuss human trials."
"When?" he says, too fast to be calm.
"Two to three months," I say, and wait for the sigh.
It arrives. It is not dramatic. It is a sound of air leaving a boy who has been holding it for a year.
"Months," he says.
"Months," I repeat. "If the mouse data sings instead of screaming. If the ethics board remembers that the point of saving lives is to save lives. If the company lending us half this equipment doesn't decide we're a waste of free PR."
He nods. He does the math. The math is cruel and simple and sits on his face like a new scar. He writes 2-3 months, then underlines it twice as if that could make time behave.
"And if everything goes right," he says. "Can the people who need it get it immediately?"
I rub the bridge of my nose until sparks flicker behind my eyelids. "Compassionate use exists," I say. "So does the fear of being the person who approved a drug that killed someone. Bureaucracy is a religion. It has many gods. But yes—if the data is clean and we can argue that doing nothing is a slower death—some patients can receive it early."
He is quiet. I can see the list in his head: names, most of them the same name.
"Do not push the clock so hard you break it," I say, surprising both of us by using a voice that has outlived my wife. "It will not move faster, and you will."
He looks at me like he knows exactly what that sentence cost. He has done the archaeology on people before; he knows a ruin when he sees one.
"I can work with months," he says, and he means it the way a soldier means an order he hates. "If a rational opinion gives me that... I can work with that."
"I did not say rational," I grunt. "I said conservative. Rationality left this building when I married a woman who believed soup could cure anything." The memory lands with its usual weight and its usual mercy. "She was wrong about soup," I add. "She was right about everything else."
He watches the photo without letting his eyes quite settle on it. "Thank you," he says, and manages not to make it sound like he thinks it means anything.
"Don't thank me yet," I say. "There is still plenty of time for everything to collapse in a way that makes us look like we were arrogant and stupid instead of desperate and careful."
He presses his mouth flat. "We're not arrogant."
"We're desperate," I agree. "Careful would be nice. Try careful."
We move to the bench. We talk in words that would kill poetry—promoters, titers, transduction, degradation. He asks good questions in a voice that fails to hide its tremor. He listens the way some people pray. He takes notes like a person trying to make sure a stranger can finish the job if he dies midway.
At some point the coffee machine coughs itself awake and offers a smell that can only be described as contractual obligation. I pour us both a cup and watch him pretend it helps.
"You look like you haven't slept," I say. He never does "Do you need a bed or a brick?"
"Neither," he says. "I need data."
"You need a brain that can read it," I counter. "Go stand by the freezer for five minutes. It'll knock you awake or remind you you're mortal. Both are useful."
He obeys, which I respect more than I say. While his back is to me I let myself look at him the way I don't when he's facing forward: a boy balancing a war on his shoulders like it's homework. The angle of his neck is wrong. The posture says there's a weight that won't come off even if he sits down.
Aya would tell me not to be cruel to him. She would tell me to feed him soup and make him lie on the sofa with a blanket and a scolding. She would be right. She is not here…
He returns from the freezer pale and more awake. I hand him a stack of printouts and a red pen. "Circle anything that makes you nervous," I say. "Then we'll decide which nerves are worth keeping."
He smirks, barely. "All of them."
"Choose three," I say. "The rest you can store in your spleen."
He bends over the papers and begins. I return to the bench and pretend to be the kind of man who knows how to shepherd miracles.
I do not say out loud the thought that keeps getting louder while the shaker hums and the incubator breathes: This boy is throwing himself into the same hell I walked through. The difference is he might actually win...
"Months," he murmurs once more, as if saying it will make the word a place he can stand.
"Months," I say back, and make it sound like a promise because sometimes lying to time is the only way to make it move.
We work until the lights look tired. When he leaves, he thanks me again without using the word, and I pretend I didn't hear it. After the door shuts, I lay my palm on the photo frame. Aya smiles like I have once again done something she would approve of and make fun of me for in the same breath.
"Don't look at me like that," I tell her. "I am being careful."
The incubator ticks. The shaker dances. Outside, the afternoon has the color of old paper. I sit down and start writing an email to a man who will not read it unless I use every synonym for urgent I can find.
If the gods want to amuse themselves, I hope they take up bowling instead.
⸻
The letter is heavier than it should be. Paper shouldn't have a pulse.
I sit at my desk with the invitation in my hands and pretend the lamp is warm enough to soften the words. Gala Concert looks like it belongs to someone else's life—curly font, polite flourish, the kind of ink that refuses to smear even when your thumb presses too hard.
It's a concert to commemorate the competition and wish the winners and runners-up luck in their music careers. It's also an excuse for adults to dress up and clap at the right times. I know how these nights feel: the stage dressed in flowers that look like they cost too much, the air scrubbed to the edge of sterile, the polite coughs between pieces like punctuation. The smiles you practice because you're supposed to.
We dropped out last time. I can still see the email I didn't answer, the polite calls that arrived with the same number and were turned into silence. He wouldn't budge. He was ice and I didn't have enough sun.
Maihou was different. I barely got him through the door and onto the bench. Then the music stopped and he stood and walked away and the hall didn't know what to do with its hands. I didn't either.
My eyes burn when I think about the way he looked afterward. That hollow that doesn't belong in a boy's face. That tired like he's been awake for years. That stare like he's already building a future where no one has to watch him break.
She hated it. It felt like it was all just making him worse. It wasn't supposed to be getting worse. It was supposed to be better.
The invitation edges dig into my fingers. I press harder and then stop because the paper will crease and then it will be a different kind of true.
I think about Towa. The first place. The way being beside him made everything feel less like a job and more like breathing. He was okay then, I tell myself. He was okay because he was with me.
The thought's edges are sharp. I don't like the shape of it. I don't want to be the only door he thinks is real. Doors stick. Doors jam. Doors get painted shut. If he keeps pushing all his weight against me, one day something will give and it won't be the house.
I set the letter down and flex my right hand. The wrist complains in a small, mean way. The tremor is sleepy tonight, but it's there, like a cat that has found a windowsill and dares you to make it move. I roll the joint, left to right, until the ache slides into background noise.
He always looks so miserable, I think, and then I hate the word because miserable is something adults say when they have the time to be dramatic. He looks like a person who is carrying something too heavy for his arms and insists that all he needs is better form.
I didn't realize it at the corner when he hugged me like he was trying not to fall off the world. Not fully. I only felt how warm he was, and the way his breath didn't want to coordinate with itself, and the way he asked me to say the same small words twice because repetition is a kind of medicine.
I'm here.
I said it again. He calmed. He let go because I did not. I went home and pretended not to be scared.
The letter sits on the desk like a dare. I know what it asks: a duet. The program lists pairs the way menus list dishes you don't deserve. I know how people will look at us if we walk out there together. Like a story they want to read in one sitting. Like children who learned to be ghosts and then forgot how to go back to bodies.
He won't want to. The piano must be a headstone to him some days. Other days it's a door he doesn't trust. Asking him to play is asking him to stand on the place where he broke and test the floor again.
But I keep thinking about his eyes when he looked at me without trying to hide it. About how the music is a thing that belongs to him even when it hurts him. About how sometimes you have to go back to the room where the air went strange and teach it how to behave.
I wanted to play with him at least one more time.
One more time, I think. Just one wish. Just this.
I pick up the letter again. The paper is cool, stubborn. I smooth the edge with my thumb and feel the slight tremble travel through my hand into it. The ache nudges my wrist like it wants attention and I tell it, Not now, not yet, please.
I think of walking to his house, knocking, waiting, being let in or breaking in if he forgets how doors work again. I think of his shirt with the stupid words and his eyes that won't lie for the mirror and the way he said I messed it up like he was confessing a crime instead of asking for a hug.
He needs to get over this somehow, I tell myself, and the word somehow tastes like uncertainty and sugar. He needs to face it. Not because the world wants him to. Because he is a pianist even when he is pretending not to be.
I hold the letter to my chest like a violin I don't know how to play. I close my eyes and let the room be quiet around me. It's possible to want too many things at once. I know that. I want him to heal. I want the piano to stop being a ghost. I want my hands to behave. I want a night where the stage is just wood and the bench is just a seat and the music is a friend who doesn't ask for blood.
"Okay," I say to the lamp, because it looks like it needs reassurance. "Okay. One more time."
I set the letter down, smooth, precise, because control is a small mercy. I slide under the blanket and let my body remember how to be heavy. My right hand rests on the quilt; the tremor flirts and then settles. The invitation lies beside the pillow like a small white animal that will still be there in the morning.
I stare at the ceiling until the pattern of the plaster turns into something that refuses to be named. When sleep comes, it does it the way elevators do—slowly, with a small hitch, then all at once. The letter does not move. Neither does the feeling in my chest.
One more time, I think, and let the dark finish the sentence for me.