The applause is still living in the walls when the crowd begins to break apart. Programs fold. Shoes scrape. A cough tries itself on, decides against it, and waits for the doors. I'm still in my seat, hands cooling where they gripped the armrests, eyes on a stage that looks the same and isn't.
"Come on," Tsubaki says, gentle as a handrail. Her voice has a floor in it for me to stand on.
Watari leans in with a grin that doesn't know how to be small. "Backstage," he whispers, like a password. "Let's go congratulate the star before she signs a major label."
I stand because my body remembers how, not because anything in me feels steady. The aisle swallows us into the current. Someone brushes my shoulder. Someone else murmurs, "Was that Arima Kousei?" and lets the question fall between seats like a coin. I watch the narrow band of carpet in front of my shoes and follow it out of the row, out of the hush, into the lobby's brighter air.
The lobby smells like paper and perfume and the last breath of a piano that thinks it's done for the night. Volunteers collect program scraps like leaves. A girl in a black dress holds her violin case like a sleeping cat and stares at the poster of performers as if a new name might appear if she is polite enough.
We slip along the side wall toward a corridor marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL, because Watari believes rules are stories with alternate endings. Tsubaki moves with purpose. Her hand hovers near my sleeve, not touching, just close enough that the option exists. She keeps looking at my face when she thinks I'm not looking. It's the kind of worry that doesn't want to embarrass you by being obvious.
The backstage corridor is all fluorescent honesty. The lights hum. The floor is clean in a way that makes you walk softer. Smells stack on each other: wood polish, rosin, sweat, a quick gust of outside air from a loading door that doesn't quite seal. Two cellists slide past, cases bumping like cautious dinosaurs. A boy with hair still sprayed into performance shape stares at his phone and frowns as if pixels owe him something.
We stop near a gray bench that remembers every coat it's ever held. I sit without thinking about it and immediately feel the wrongness of the angle, the way the cushion gives too easily. It's not a seat that expects you to rest; it's a seat that expects you to wait.
Watari turns a circle and plants himself facing the exit to the wings like a dog at a window. Tsubaki stands next to me, hands in her jacket pockets, shoulders squared. She looks like she wants to catch a falling object and is making her arms into a net ahead of time. Her eyes flick from the door to me, back to the door, back to me. Every third glance she softens her mouth as if remembering to smile so I will remember to breathe.
"You good?" she asks, low.
I nod. It's not a lie exactly. It's not the whole weather report either. My chest is a map with too many cities circled and all the roads erased. "I'm okay," I say, and hear the trance in my own voice.
She tilts her head. "Okay like 'hungry' or okay like 'if you blink wrong you'll start floating off the floor'?"
"The second one," I admit.
"Cool," she says, like it's a perfectly normal thing to be. "We'll keep you attached."
Watari straightens suddenly, chin up. "Incoming."
She arrives like the rest of the night has been holding its breath for this exact door to open.
Kaori pushes through the wing curtain with her violin still in one hand, the bow in the other, ribbon halfway surrendered, cheeks flushed in a way that makes the bad hallway lighting look kind. Her hairline is damp at the temples. There's a smudge of rosin dust on the black of her sleeve. She's smiling with all her teeth and most of her soul.
For an instant, everything she did on stage is still radiating off her—like she carried the echo out here over her shoulder. Then she sees us, and the echo turns into light.
"There you are!" she says, as if we were the ones who disappeared and accidentally made her worry.
Watari launches first because he can't not. "You were incredible," he says, hands already drawing shapes in the air to measure what words can't. "Like—like you hijacked the room and drove it somewhere prettier."
Kaori laughs the kind of laugh that doesn't need an audience and gets one anyway. "Kidnap is such a strong word," she says. "I prefer 'borrowed with intent to return'."
"It was great," Tsubaki says, and her voice has the kind of warmth that's really a blanket. She adds, "You scared the metronomes," and Kaori loves that enough to do a small bow just for her.
I'm still sitting, somehow. My knees don't believe in standing yet. My hands feel the seam of the bench through my skin, one stitch at a time. Kaori looks me over like she's checking the weather on my face. Something thoughtful passes through her smile, then settles.
"Hey," she says to me.
"Hey," I manage.
She shifts the violin to her other hand. The bow trembles a little in her fingers and then behaves. She hides the micro-shake with motion, flipping the bow once between her knuckles as if fiddling with a pen. If I didn't spend years staring at hands until the bones told me their secrets, I might not have seen it. But I see it. I put a name to it and then take the name back because names stick to things you aren't ready to own.
"You... um," Watari tries again, because silence is an unnatural habitat for him. "You—"
Kaori saves him. "So," she says, light and theatrical, presenting the moment like a magician's scarf. "Did you like it?"
She turns her head toward Watari when she asks, even gives him an extra flourish of eyebrows like she's courting the soccer star. But her eyes don't leave mine. They hold steady, the way you hold a note that matters. There's a question inside the question, and it's not about tempo or phrasing. It's about whether this is real, and if it's real, whether I'm in it with her.
Watari thumps a palm over his heart. "I liked it so much I forgot how to blink. Ten out of ten. Would attend again."
Tsubaki's mouth curves. "It was great," she says, simple, stubborn praise. She glances at me when she says it, as if she wants my answer to have something firm to stand on.
Kaori waits.
The last time a version of this question existed, I didn't answer it well. I remember the boy I was then—half-shadow, half-quiet, all wrong timing. How he swallowed words because they felt dangerous in his mouth. How he let air do the talking and then pretended that was safer for everyone. Memory presses a hand to my shoulder and doesn't push, just reminds.
I don't want to fail the same test twice.
"It was..." My voice almost trips on the word, finds it, carries it carefully. "Breathtaking."
It isn't eloquent. It isn't analysis. It's the truth with the shortest possible sentence wrapped around it. Regret and relief are both in there, folded small so they don't scare the moment away.
Kaori's smile changes. It doesn't get brighter. It gets honest. She exhales a breath I didn't know she was holding, and for a heartbeat the hallway stops being fluorescent and becomes something like afternoon again.
"Okay," she says softly, and there's more in the word than it can hold. Then the mischief returns like it was waiting around the corner and jumps back on her face. "Good. I hate when friends lie to me about being boring."
"You were a menace to the page," Watari says reverently.
"Pages are suggestions," Kaori replies. She lifts her violin and tucks it under her arm the way you tuck a book under a coat when it starts to rain. "Besides, if I don't give the judges something to argue about, what will they do with their pens?"
"Probably knit with them," Tsubaki says. "You gave them enough yarn."
Kaori grins, then remembers to breathe. The breath hitches, not from nerves now but from reality—like her body is catching up to the sprint her spirit ran while the rest of us were seated. She smooths the breath into something even. If I weren't watching, I might have missed the correction. I'm watching.
"So," Watari says, pivoting to his natural habitat: plans. "There's a crepe place around the corner that owes me a reward for being supportive. Flavors with ridiculous names. We could—"
"Crepes," Kaori says, eyes wide in mock reverence. "The noblest of thin food."
Tsubaki gives me that quick, quiet check again. I'm standing before I realize I decided to. The bench exhales a small apology as I leave it. I'm steadier than five minutes ago, still not something a staircase would trust.
Kaori watches me stand like it matters. "You good?" she asks, and the question is the same shape as the one she asked about the music except it's about me.
"I'm... here," I say. It feels like the correct unit of measurement.
"Here is a great place to start," she says, and tucks her bow under her arm to free a hand. She reaches up and reties her ribbon without a mirror, a knot done by memory. It's crooked but loyal.
People flow past us to and from doors with EXIT signs that glow like opinions. A mezzo-soprano cruises by humming scales under her breath. Someone laughs in a dressing room and instantly hushes, as if joy needs to whisper where nerves live.
Watari is still lobbying for crepes, promising toppings like oaths. "Banana caramel gravity defier," he says. "You've never seen physics humiliated so deliciously."
Kaori points the bow at him. "You had me at 'defier'." She pivots the point toward us. "Sawabe-chan? Arima-kun?"
Tsubaki glances between the two of us like a referee checking for injuries. "I'm in," she says. "As long as we sit. Somewhere not fluorescent."
"Deal," Kaori says, then pretends to frown sternly. "But only if you all promise to make fun of me if I start talking about music like it's a math test."
"Impossible," Watari says. "Math doesn't make people cry."
"Speak for yourself," I murmur, and all three of them laugh.
Kaori shifts her case and the motion costs her a tiny wince that she erases by smiling through it. It's nothing. It's everything. The scientist in me files it the way you file a lab result you don't like: accurately, reluctantly, against hope. I don't put it down between us. Not here. Not with the crepe plan floating, not with her eyes bright like this, not with Tsubaki watching me the way you watch the sky for sudden weather.
We move toward the door at a human speed, not the magical one performers develop for slipping between stage and life. Kaori waves to the accompanist as he passes; he salutes with a sheet of music like a flag. A judge weaves through the hallway toward the exit, sees her, opens her mouth, shuts it, nods once, leaves with her pen held like a truce. The corridor smell shifts as someone opens the loading door and the outside sneaks in—night air, street dust, the faintest suggestion of rain that changed its mind.
"Wait," Kaori says, and stops us near a bulletin board crowded with posters. She leans close to a flyer advertising a community concert with cartoon notes smiling like they know something.
"I like when paper is optimistic," she declares. "It has the worst chances and still tries."
"We can tape your name to every lamp post in the city if you want," Watari offers.
"I'd prefer every bakery," she says.
Tsubaki smiles. "Focus, star."
Kaori straightens, and for a heartbeat her eyes flick to mine again. Not a stare. A check. The kind you do when you're on a bike and your friend is just learning and you pretend you're not ready to grab the seat if they wobble.
"I'm really glad you came," she says. It isn't the breezy banter voice. It's close to the one she used on stage when she talked to the silence between notes. "All of you. But—" Her mouth tips. "Especially you, Arima-kun."
Words do what they want in my throat. "I—" I don't try for clever. "Me too."
She beams, satisfied with the math of that.
Watari can't contain motion and starts walking backwards, ushering us with his hands like a very enthusiastic crossing guard. "Come on, before we lose the table to a family of twelve."
We head for the exit that spills into the side alley. The door pushes in easy and breathes out cool air. Outside, the city is busy remembering how to be ordinary. Neon smears itself into shallow puddles. A scooter hums. Somewhere down the block a convenience store chime sings three notes that almost mean something.
Tsubaki falls in beside me as we cross into the night. "Still floating?" she asks, not joking.
"A little," I say.
She nudges my shoulder with hers. "Keep the altitude. We'll handle gravity."
Up ahead, Kaori is half turned, walking sideways even though sidewalks prefer you to pick a direction. She's talking to Watari about crepes with the seriousness of a treaty and the playfulness of a dare. Every few steps she touches the violin case, not like she's checking it's there, but like you touch a friend: casual, grateful.
We reach the corner and pause at the light. The red hand holds us politely. A bus exhales. Kaori slides her bow into the case with that same subtle tremor hiding in the swing, and when it's settled, she lets out a breath that's more than breath. It's a moment washing off the edges of her so the next one can stick.
"Today was—" she starts, but then stops and shakes her head as if words are too linear for what she means. "Thanks," she says instead, to the air between all of us.
I could tell her I noticed the ways the piece misbehaved and how she made it right with nerve instead of exactness. I could say the balcony swallowed the overtones on the repeat and she found a way to fill them back in with her hands. I could say the room will remember how it felt when she bent the end of the phrase and everyone's attention leaned forward like a plant finding light.
What I want to say is simpler and harder: You're here. I'm here. You asked. I answered. This time I did not fail you.
The light changes. The crosswalk gives us permission. We go.
Kaori steps off first, because of course she does. Watari follows with the gravity of a man protecting pastries. Tsubaki matches my step without showing her math. I'm moving through a city that looks the same and isn't. The air tastes like the kind of night that lets you make a small promise without being punished for ambition.
At the far curb, Kaori turns and walks backward for three steps, facing us, ribbon a little wild, cheeks still pinked from the lights and the sprint. "I'm buying the first one," she announces. "No arguments."
"I will absolutely argue," Watari says, which means he won't.
"Then argue with your second crepe," she says, and laughs.
We laugh too, because the sound makes a shape big enough for our different versions of this moment to fit inside it.
And even as the city pulls us along toward warmth and sugar and a table where hands will learn where to be again, I feel it—the quiet shadow that never announces itself, the one that lives in small corrections and stolen breaths. It doesn't win this scene. It doesn't get to. But it sits on the curb and watches us pass, patient.
Kaori looks forward again and leads us around the corner into a street that smells like butter and late-night. The violin case bumps her knee and doesn't mind. Tsubaki leans closer for a second, reading me without making me read her back. Watari lists toppings like a prayer.
"Breathtaking," I think again, more certain. Not just the playing. The fact of her. The fact of this.
We disappear into the softer light of the cafe strip, and the hall behind us keeps our applause safe in its rafters for later, in case we need to borrow some.
For now, she is smiling at the menu like it's full of secrets, and I'm here to hear them, and Tsubaki is near enough that the ground won't vanish, and that is enough.