I set the metronome on the lid and never touch it. Its red eye stays dark, judgment implied. Kaori's bow is already up, the violin braced under her chin, and the first phrase of Kreisler's "Love's Sorrow" spills out like warm tea poured a little too fast. She leans into the slide like she's showing the note how to sigh.
"Make it sing!"she says without looking at me. "Sing, Arima! Elegance!" Kaori's voice cut through the room sharp
I come in exactly on the breath between her words—no theatrics, no extra sugar. The left hand lays the path, the right hand trims it clean. I keep the pedal thin, just enough to gather the edges without turning them to fog.
She stops. "No," she snaps , the word crisp enough to chip, a flushed glare. "You're putting a ceiling on it!"
I look at the keys a Kaori shapes migraine forming. "I'm keeping you from crashing into the chandelier."
"Who's crashing?" She sets the violin on her shoulder again, tight smile. "You. You're stomping on the melody like you're trying to prove the accompanist exists."
"I'm not an accompanist," I say before I can stop myself. It comes out too sharp. "I'm the piano."
"You're a brick wall."
"And you're playing like you're trying to upstage the piano," I shoot back. "It's not my fault."
She plants her bow tip on the stand, the carbon fiber ticking the wood like a scolding finger. "It is when you refuse to breathe with me."
A thud on glass makes us both glance up. Watari is mashed against the outside window, hands cupped around his face like binoculars. Behind him, a pack of classmates and his team members stacks itself into a nosy totem pole.
"Ohhh," someone outside sings, delighted. "They're arguing again."
Kaori flips the stand so the music faces me. "Start four before letter B," she says. "No ice. Melt. Think of sorrow that still has manners."
"Thinking," I mutter. "So hard I can hear the clichés."
She glares. "Play."
I do. This time I warm the attack a fraction and let the middle of the chord bloom. The harmony carries a shoulder's worth of weight and offers it to her line rather than wrestling it away. She answers immediately, the bow hair leaning, the vibrato wide and human. For six bars we listen like we mean it.
Then I adjust the left-hand voicing to keep the bass from swallowing her—tiny change, obvious to a person like me, invisible to a room. She stops cold.
"That." She points at my fingers. "That thing. You pinch the phrase at the top, like you're afraid it'll fall."
"It falls when you lean on it like that," I say. "You're skating. The floor still exists."
She huffs, then plays the same bar alone, making the slide a little later, the arrival a little warmer. "It's not skating. It's singing while remembering your spine."
"And if I sing, you accuse me of syrup," I say. "If I structure, you accuse me of murder. Pick a crime."
She narrows her eyes, the kind of narrow that means I am one sentence from a thrown eraser. "The crime is boring me."
"The crime is confusing elegance with indulgence."
We stare at each other over the stand, the printed slurs and accents between us like a tiny court transcript. In the glass, Watari mouths a dramatic "whoa" and the crowd behind him leans as one organism, hungry for any sign of a winner.
I go first. "Again," I say, and set my hands, and this time I follow her breath before she takes it. The chord enters with a softness that invites your ear inside, and she catches it and shapes a phrase that could pass for regret if you were the kind of person who liked labeling feelings you don't own.
We make it through a page like that—me erring toward air, her erring toward bone. When we stop, it's because the quiet is full, not because we lost it.
She lowers the violin but doesn't relax her jaw. "Better," she says grudgingly. "But you're still... careful. Cold"
"Which saves you when you chase the horizon," I say. "I like you more when you don't turn the last note into a wedding dress."
Her mouth twitches. "I like you more when you're not a metronome with a moral code."
"Wow," Watari says through the glass, voice muffled. "Poetry."
Kaori snaps her head toward the window. "Get out of here!"
The crowd scatters badly—half tripping, half laughing, the way pigeons pretend they were leaving anyway. Watari stays stubbornly plastered to the glass. "Break time?" he mimes, tapping his wrist.
"No," we both answer aloud.
He thumbs up and vanishes.
Kaori rolls her shoulders, impatience clicking in her joints. "Again from the top."
"We've been on this for an hour," I say, rubbing the bridge of my nose.
"Then we're probably close," she says. "The last stretch always feels like that."
I don't say what's in my head—that I know what the last stretch feels like in more ways than one. That underneath the warm fight and the ridiculous audience and the lit window, there's a clock in me nobody else hears. It runs too fast whenever she lifts that violin. I can almost hear the exact bar in the exact rehearsal where her breath will snag and the room will lean and all of this will go tilting.
In my mind there's still the program from a life that didn't happen this time: her name next to mine, and then a sudden absence, and a kid with a crush and a grudge. I will be forced to play alone again. The one thing I didn't want. He would be playing while Kaori sat in a room with a bandaged head and a wish to be performing instead.
"Arima," Kaori says, and the way she says my name tells me I let the silence last too long. "What?" " What's with the face?"
"Nothing," I lie. "Again."
We play. We fight inside the music and outside of it and between notes, and in the middle of the friction there's the clean click of something aligning for a few seconds at a time. It would be easier if it were just bad. It would be easier if she were wrong and I were right. Instead it's this: two people who know each other's shadows well enough to stand in them and still get burned.
At some point she throws her free hand in the air. "Why are you so stubborn?"
"Because you're reckless," I say, more tired than sharp. "Somebody has to put railings on your bridges."
"Railings," she repeats, disgusted. "It's a waltz, not a crosswalk."
I close the lid halfway and rest my wrists there, knuckles pale. "You want a partner who dissolves when you shine," I say. "I won't do it."
Her eyes flash. "No!"she says, and the fury is clean, "I want a partner who'll sing with me like he's not afraid he'll vanish!"
The room goes very quiet. Even the hallway hushes, like the building just remembered it has ears. I look down so I don't have to show my face. When I breathe out, it fogs the lacquer a little and my reflection fuzzes into a stranger.
She's panting, a tiny, shallow saw of air coming and going. She doesn't apologize. She steps closer to the stand and flips the page with a finger, the gesture smaller than the sentence she just said.
Jeez Has Kaori always been this demanding?
"From C," she says, calmer. "Together."
We make it to the end of the movement on that shaky truce. It sounds like two people building a bridge with different blueprints and still meeting in the middle, bewildered and a little proud.
The bell sounds faintly down the hall. She drops her arms and stretches, bow hand high, tendons bright at her wrist. "Again after class," she says, already packing the violin like it's a wild animal that happens to love her.
"Sure," I say, even though what I want to say is don't run, don't push, don't disappear on me today of all days.
We lock the room. Outside, the corridor has emptied into a dull hum. Watari reappears like he never left, already walking backward in front of us. "Great show," he says. "I laughed, I cried, I wanted my money back."
"Get a life," Kaori says without heat.
Watari leans in. "Lunch?" he asks me.
"Later," I say. "I've got... something."
"What something?" Kaori asks immediately.
"Errand," I say.
She studies my face like she can hear the gears grinding behind my eyes. "Don't flake on the second session."
"I won't."
I watch her go, bag bouncing against her leg, hair catching the light, the snatches of a tune humming at her mouth like a private joke. The clock in my chest ticks a little louder. I hate it. I'm grateful for it. I want it to be wrong.
—
The lanterns look like they're breathing. Red, then orange, then red again as people shoulder past and the paper skins flex. The air is sesame oil and sugar and the faint chemical halo of novelty toys. A kid tugs on a rubber mask that won't quite be a fox and keeps laughing anyway.
Hiroko walks like someone who has decided the night owes her something. She is in a plain yukata she's pretending not to know looks good on her. Her daughter—hair a stubborn yellow bob, eyes serious as a librarian's—is glued to her side with one hand and holds my wrist with the other, like I might float away if she lets go.
"You look worse in festival light," Hiroko says, not bothering to be kind about it. "Usually it tricks people."
"Good evening to you, too," I say.
She buys three sticks of yakitori and hands me one without asking. "Eat."
I do. The salt hits my tongue and the meat tastes like a decision I didn't have to make. Her daughter peers up at me as if she's checking for a pulse. "You blink slow," she announces, as if reporting a weather condition.
"I'm conserving energy," I tell her.
We drift past goldfish in plastic tubs, water slapping lazy against blue tarps. Someone misses a ping-pong ball toss and cheers anyway. A group of boys in matching happi coats practices a drum pattern on their thighs, getting it wrong and right and wrong again. Above it all, somewhere, a flute tries to be brave.
Hiroko doesn't touch her stick. She watches me chew like she's counting. "You said yes to the gala," she says finally, as if we've been talking about nothing else all along.
"Mm."
"That wasn't a question." She flicks the skewer toward a game stall like it can puncture the night. "Why now?"
I could say because a girl asked me and I am incapable of refusing her when she's lit from the inside with the idea. I could say because the person I was when I left the stage at Maihou is not someone I am willing to remain. I could say because I am running out of the kind of time you can waste.
Instead I say, "Do you ever feel like you don't get to pick the thing that pulls you?"
Hiroko's mouth tilts. "Every day."
"It's not really about me." I toe a gravel divot in the dirt. "It doesn't feel like it, anyway."
She watches the crowd move around us, finds the spaces between bodies like she's reading a score. "That's a pretty way to hide," she says.
I flinch because she's not wrong. "Maybe."
She tosses her untouched skewer to a teenage boy who looks at it like someone handed him a winning lottery ticket and then runs away before she can change her mind. When she turns back, her face is clean of jokes.
"Let me teach you," she says.
The words are simple and heavy at once. They drop between us like a stone in shallow water, splash proportional to the size of the circle in my chest that they hit.
I look at her. She looks right back, and in her eyes I see none of the smugness she likes to use when she catches me out. I see worry and a kind of angry care that has nowhere else to go.
"I mean it," she says. "Not the old way. Not scales until your hands forget they're meat. I'll stand behind you like a wall so the wind can push and not knock you over. We'll shape it until it's yours. I'll take the hits first."
Her daughter looks up at her, surprised by the softness she's hearing. I know what I'm seeing, too. This isn't professional. This is a person swinging a door wide that she usually guards with a dog.
I swallow. The yakitori salt sits like a stone at the back of my tongue. "Thank you," I say, and my voice is already the apology. "But I don't know about piano anymore."
Hiroko doesn't blink.
"It may be time for something new.." I add, and I hate the way it sounds like a line I read somewhere to make a breakup feel like a graduation.
For a second the lantern light makes her look like a painting. Then her expression tilts into something like a sad smile and she says, very gently, "I see."
Her daughter's fingers tighten on my wrist, then loosen, as if she understood something and wishes she didn't.
We move again because standing still makes people bump you. Hiroko buys a paper fan she doesn't need and waves it once like a white flag. She shoves it into my free hand. "You'll need that," she says, not specifying for what.
"Air?" I ask.
"Excuses," she says.
I try to smile. It shows up only halfway. "I thought you approved of unconventional youth."
"I approve of youth that doesn't set itself on fire just to see if the room looks prettier in the dark," she says, and then smirks like she didn't say something that landed too close to true.
We stop at the edge of the green where kids are trying to learn how to keep the sparklers from dying too fast. I watch the little orange-bellied lights circle and sputter and fail and get revived by a frantic breath and fail again, and I feel the shape of what she offered me and what I refused settle into my ribs like a new shelf that might hold something if I'm careful.
"Hey," Hiroko says, because she has mercy after all, "you're buying the next thing. My generosity has limits."
"What am I buying?"
"Canelés," she says, deadpan, and when I snort she punches my arm lightly, like maybe my laugh was the thing she was trying to purchase all along.
Part 2
The road home is mostly downhill, so I let the bike coast and my legs rest while Kaori perches on the rack behind me, hands light at my waist like she's testing how much trust the air can hold.
"Faster," she says, because she can't help herself.
"Wind resistance," I say. "Physics."
"You're just slow, Arima."
"You're just bossy."
She laughs, and I feel it through my spine more than I hear it. The night has that summer softness that makes streetlights look like they're wearing halos. Cicadas chant somewhere we aren't. Houses slide past in quiet rectangles. We hit a patch of gravel and she tightens her fingers for one second, then loosens, and I pretend I didn't notice.
Two blocks from the river she tips her chin toward the sky. "The stars are pretty tonight," she says. "It's like they're speaking to us."
Deja vu opens its hand and I step right into the old shape. The line lands in the same place in my chest it always does. For a heartbeat I can see two versions of this street layered over each other like paper held up to the light.
I'm not a singer. My voice is flat and a little tired, but it finds the first notes anyway. "Twinkle, twinkle..."
Her body goes still with surprise; then she laughs, delighted, little sparks on the air. "Oh-ho," she says, and slips in under me, easy. "Little star..."
We sing too quietly for anyone else to hear. We miss more notes than we hit. It doesn't matter. Under the thin spread of stars the world shrinks to the circle of light our bike throws and the cadence of our voices pretending to be braver than they are. For a minute we're kids and the future is a long hallway with all the doors open.
At the corner by the vending machines she hums the last line against my back and rests her cheek between my shoulder blades. It steals some of my balance. I don't tell her to sit up. I don't say anything at all.
We turn onto the street with the bakery.
"Wait here," she says, already hopping off. "Don't move."
"Tempting," I say, which is not the same as promising. The doorbells jingle her inside. Warm light spills out and drags the smell of butter with it. The glass is fogged with the day. I could leave. If I push down on the pedal now, the street will take me and the night will fold over the empty space where I was and nobody would know how close I came to staying.
The inner door opens and a shape fills it like a mountain learned to walk. Mr. Miyazono blots out half the shop. He's even bigger in person than the memory that belongs to a life where everyone ended the same way. Broad shoulders, forearms thick from lifting dough and trays and who knows what else. For two heartbeats he tries to wear a scary face. It doesn't fit him.
Kaori's Father
His eyes find me. Recognition snaps into place like a lid on a jar. "Arima.. kun?"
My mouth goes dry. "Good evening," I say, as if formality can slow time down.
He breaks into a grin that could power a small town. "Well, if it isn't Arima-kun!" In two strides he's out on the sidewalk and his arm is around my shoulders and I'm a twig under a friendly bear. "You got taller," he says, then squeezes like he's testing the claim. "Barely."
"Dad," Kaori says from behind him, resigned, "you're going to snap him in half."
"You think with how many baguettes I lift," he says proudly, and squeezes again to prove whatever point baguettes can make.
"Please," I manage. "Mercy."
The inner door swings again and a woman with a flour-smudge on her cheek appears balancing a tray with one hand and a towel with the other. Her eyes spot mine in recognition. Then "Oh, Arima-kun!" she says, as if she's been expecting me all day. "Come in, come in. You must be starving. You look starving. He looks starving, doesn't he?" She doesn't wait for an answer. She's already turned and is fussing with empty plates like a magician preparing to produce rabbits.
They pull me in like tide. The shop is half-closed and still humming. Glass cases blink with the last rounds of the day. The air tastes sweet and warm. My shoes squeak a little on the clean floor, apologizing for themselves.
"Sit," Mrs. Miyazono says, as if there were any chance I wouldn't. She plants me at the dining table behind the counter and starts building a small mountain. Canelés, their burnt-sugar shells glossy like lacquer. Melon pan. A wedge of something delicate and layered. A savory roll that smells like cheese pretending to be a meal. A rice ball appears out of nowhere and into Kaori's hand, who bites it like she's been waiting since breakfast.
Mr. Miyazono plops into the chair opposite me and rests his forearms on the table like he's about to negotiate a treaty. "We used to go to your concerts, you know," he says, cheerful. "When you were little. With the slick hair and the small jacket? Your mother would bow and you would bow and my wife would cry and I would pretend I wasn't."
"I didn't cry," Mrs. Miyazono says, wiping at the ghost of a mascara line with her towel. "Much."
"Every time," he says, fond, and then turns back to me with the same fondness, like I'm a cake that came out level. "You can't just stop playing in the middle of a performance, though."
I freeze with a canelé halfway to my mouth.
"It's like flushing all your effort down the drain," he says, not cruelly, just like he's discussing weather. He pantomimes turning a faucet handle. "Pwoosh."
Mrs. Miyazono nods, serious as a judge. "Like spoiling a perfect sponge cake because your cream tastes like crap," she says. "All that work. Pfft." She throws imaginary cream over her shoulder with flawless form.
I swallow a laugh before it betrays me. "Duly noted," I say, because what else do you say when two people who smell like sugar scold you for ruining desserts.
They both lift an index finger at the same time.
"But," says Mr. Miyazono, grinning.
"But," says Mrs. Miyazono, brighter still.
"Unconventional youth," he declares, as if he invented the category. "I love it!"
"It's all the same once it's in your stomach, right?" she says, pleased with herself.
"That's not how cake works," Kaori says around a mouthful of rice.
"It's exactly how cake works," her mother counters. "Ingredients, heart, maybe a mistake or two—eat and be happy."
Mr. Miyazono reaches across and thumps my shoulder, this time more gently. "Don't let the old men at the table tell you what music is," he says. "They sit. They judge. You live."
I bow my head a little because a full bow would be too much and because if I look him in the eye right now something will crack. "Thank you very much," I say. The words feel too small for the size of their kitchen, their table, their ridiculous generosity.
"Eat," Mrs. Miyazono insists, shoving the canelé closer until it's a moral imperative. "We're testing a new recipe. Tell me if it has enough rum."
"Mom," Kaori says, scandalized and delighted. "He's fourteen."
"So are canelés," she says, which makes no sense and is perfect.
I bite. The shell gives with a satisfying crackle and the inside is custard and air. For a second the part of my mouth that does work goes quiet and the part that just wants to be alive wakes up. I nod before I've finished chewing. "It's... really good."
"Ha!" She claps once, triumphant. "See? Artist approved."
We talk about nothing heavy. They pull stories off shelves and set them on the table like more plates. Mr. Miyazono tells me about the customer who tried to return a baguette because it was "too French." Mrs. Miyazono tells me how she once dropped an entire sheet of choux buns and saved two—"the bravest two"—and how they tasted better because they knew what loss was. Kaori throws in little bits, her feet tucked under her chair, eyes bright.
The whole time I can feel the outline of a room that looks nothing like this one stuck in my chest. Dust and silence and a piano that keeps its own weather. The contrast hurts and heals in the same breath. I sit in the middle of it and try not to give myself away.
When we finally stand, there's a paper bag in my hand I don't remember agreeing to. "For breakfast," Mrs. Miyazono says, as if I eat those. "And lunch. And something sweet for after, because life is hard and people are stupid."
"Mom," Kaori says again, and the second "mom" is softer.
We step out into the night. The bell does its tired ring. The street is the same as we left it, but the air feels warmer, like the bakery exhaled all over the block.
Behind us, I hear Mr. Miyazono murmur, not quite quiet enough, "So that boy is Arima-kun."
"He's a nice boy," Mrs. Miyazono says. There's a pause that holds more than a sigh. "But those eyes."
"Yeah," he says.
Kaori links her fingers through the strap of my bag and tugs me toward the corner. "Don't get a big head," she says lightly. "They feed every stray that wanders in."
"I'm not a stray," I say.
"You are exactly a stray," she says, and bumps my shoulder with hers.
We're supposed to go home after that. It's late and the heat is a little sticky and the sidewalks are filling with the kind of quiet that means families are finishing dishes and turning off lights. Instead the night takes a left. Watari texts a pin, Tsubaki says "we're not going in, just near," and somehow we're ducking through a gap in a chain-link fence with a bag of snacks and a box of cheap sparklers.
The pool is the municipal kind—rectangle, blue tiles, still water holding a flat version of the sky. We sit on the concrete lip with our feet nowhere near the surface and pass a lighter like contraband. Nao, Tsubaki's friend from the next class over, is here too; she rolls her eyes at everything we say and then laughs anyway like she can't help herself.
Watari snaps a sparkler alive and whips it through the air like a sword. "Behold," he says. "I create the sun."
"You create the number one reason we're going to get kicked out," Tsubaki says, but she lights hers off his anyway and draws careful circles like she's tracing a halo around someone's head.
Kaori strikes one and holds it vertical, patient, watching the first orange bloom catch and then collapse into the fizzy hiss that means yes, now. She brings it close to her face and it paints gold across her cheeks. When she laughs the sparks look like they're joining in.
Nao sits beside me and leans back on her palms, eyes on the sky. "If we get caught, I'm blaming Watari," she says.
Watari salutes with a burning stick. "I accept this destiny."
"Destinies don't accept you," Tsubaki says. "You accept them." She draws a wobbly star and pretends she meant it to wobble.
I light mine. The first seconds are always too bright, and then it settles into a steady hiss and starts eating itself. I watch it burn down toward my fingers. It's beautiful and a little rude, the way it won't slow no matter how much you want it to.
Across from me Kaori and Watari are laughing at something I missed, their sparklers accidentally crossing so the sparks swap paths. Her hair catches a few stray points of light and keeps them for a second longer than it should. She looks alive in the exact way that hurts to look at for too long.
I think of her parents, of the big hand clapping my shoulder, of the lecture about cakes that turn into solace halfway through. I think of Hiroko under lanterns, the offer I turned down because the honesty hurt less than the hope. I think of the clock I don't want and how loud it gets when the world goes quiet.
Tsubaki sits down next to me hard enough to make the concrete thunk. "Hey," she says.
"Hey."
"You okay?"
I look at her sparkler. It's almost gone, a stubborn glow chewing through the last stub of wire. I look up at the stars so I'll have someplace to put my eyes. "Yeah," I say, and my voice is steady enough to pass. "I'm okay."
She doesn't believe me; I can feel it. But she doesn't call me on it. She knocks her shoulder into mine once, a gentle check that says I see you, idiot, and then holds her dying sparkler out to light a new one off mine.
We keep going like that—burn and light, burn and light—until our box is empty and the night smells like spent fireworks and chlorine. Watari tells a story about a coach who thinks pasta is a performance-enhancing drug. Nao admits she can't whistle and then does, perfectly, to prove she can't. Tsubaki insists the constellations look like badly drawn animals and refuses to be convinced otherwise. Kaori sings two lines of an old song and then refuses to sing the third just to drive me crazy.
We don't touch the water. We don't talk about the gala. We don't talk about Maihou or parents or labs or the way I left a teaching offer on a table like it was a napkin. We talk about nothing because nothing is the only thing light enough to hold right now.
When the last sparkler curls into black wire we sit with our hands on our knees like we're waiting for something to tell us to stand. Nobody does. Eventually we pull ourselves up and climb back through the fence and promise not to text about this in case someone's mom has counterintelligence.
On the walk home Kaori drifts closer than usual. Not touching—just there, in step. It's small and it's everything. At her corner she turns and salutes me with two fingers like a soldier who never learned the rules. "See you tomorrow," she says.
"Yeah," I say. I want to say something else. I don't.
She goes. I go. The night holds all our shapes for a while and then lets them go the way sparklers do—bright, brief, smoke in the air long after the heat is gone. I tuck the paper bag of pastries tighter under my arm like proof of something I can't name and keep walking until the street forgets to be kind and I remember how to be alone.