I didn't turn on the light.
The music room held the last scraps of evening like a cupped hand. Dust moved in the thin strip of gold from the curtain. The piano sat there the way it always had. Not a monster. Not a shrine. Just a thing that knew too much about me.
I stood in front of it and tried to breathe in a way that felt real.
Kaori's voice looped in my head—bright and sure even when she joked. Your piano. My violin. Not just once. Practice. A real duet. The words were simple, but they pressed into the quiet like a sign nailed to a door. "Perhaps," I had said. I had meant it. I still did.
But the moment the room went still, the rest of my life crowded in.
My mother's metronome ticked from a place that wasn't here anymore. The memory was sharp and small, the way a thorn is small. Her voice counted in perfect time. Numbers stacked up until they built a cage. I had broken that cage long ago. That part of my story was over. Still, the shape of it lived in my hands and in how I stood. I could feel it and not be ruled by it. That was what "over" meant now.
Another sound rose on top of that one: the faint, steady beep of a hospital monitor. It cut through the metronome like a thin knife. That sound didn't belong to my mother. It belonged to Kaori. There was a picture that came with it even when I didn't want it to. Pale light on her skin. A laugh that ended in a cough. The way she pretended not to be catching her breath because she hated being seen as fragile. Her hand waving like the motion itself could hold me together.
I closed my eyes. The sounds stacked and fought. Tick. Beep. Tick. Beep. I pressed my fingers into the edge of the keybed and counted my own breathing until both faded back into walls and dust and evening.
"She asked you to play," I said to the quiet, because saying it out loud made the room feel less like it could swallow me whole. "And you said perhaps."
The word hung there. The room accepted it.
I could feel the old mistake trying to climb back into my chest—the one where I shut every door and called it strength. After she died, I had done that. I had taken my hands, made them tools, and aimed them at everything but music. School and labs and a thousand papers that added up to a map of a disease we kept missing by inches. I told myself that was how I honored her. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. The truth was simpler: I couldn't stand to play without her. Not then. I was a kid. I was drowning. You can't ask a drowning boy to hold a song in his mouth.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was soft and small and real.
Home. Tsubaki's text. No extra punctuation. No pressure. Just a line thrown from the house next door to say, I'm here. It didn't pull me out of my thoughts. It gave me a floor to stand on inside them.
"Thanks," I typed back. Then I put the phone face down on the closed lid, like I was setting down a glass of water.
I stood with my palms on the cool wood and let myself remember the part I never let in when people were watching.
In my first life, I was helpless when it mattered. I didn't know what Friedreich's really was. I didn't know what to look for, who to call, how to fight something you couldn't see. I watched. I held her hand. I cried in bathrooms. I said it will be okay without a map to that place. I was just a kid. I'm not angry at that boy. He did the only thing he could do. He loved her. He broke. He tried to live with the break.
Later, after she was gone, I learned the language of the disease. I learned the shape of proteins and the way a gene can fold wrong and keep folding wrong. I learned how to read charts and talk to people who sat on money like it was a dam. I learned to ask for trials and write proposals and stay awake until the sun came up and the numbers stopped looking like ants. It took years to turn grief into that kind of work. By then it was too late for her. I told myself the work still mattered because it would help someone. That was true. It just wasn't enough to heal the one wound that had made me do it in the first place.
Now I was back here. The house was the same. The room was the same. My hands were older than they looked. They remembered more than their skin did. The weight wasn't fear. It was history.
I tried to picture the practice room at school like Kaori wanted. A small upright. Fluorescent lights that hummed. Her violin case open like a mouth. Her hair stuck to her cheek if she laughed too hard. Me on the bench. My hands where they belonged. The picture made something ache and something else breathe.
Then another picture pushed in beside it. A whiteboard with timing lines and arrows. A list of names—doctors, professors, a lab tech who always ate too many red candies and shook with sugar when she pipetted. Emails with subject lines that meant hope or meant not yet. A budget that looked like a cliff.
I swallowed. My heart picked up. I didn't try to slow it this time. I let it run. I let the chaos do what it wanted for a minute.
Memories crashed into each other. Kaori waving at the street corner. Kaori in a bed with wires sticking to her skin. The smell of rosin. The smell of alcohol wipes. Tsubaki's birthday messages piling up in an inbox I was too numb to open. A stock graph I had stared at for a whole day in the old life while waiting for a call from a board that never came. The sound a crowd makes when the thing nobody thought would happen happens and you were the one person who did think it would. A headline from a future week. A score from a future night. Names of companies that would rise like rockets and then burn. Names of games where the ball took a strange bounce and made a new history.
I hadn't asked for that part to come back with me. It came anyway. Foresight sits in your head like a live wire until you either grab it or move away.
I took my hands off the piano and pressed my thumbs into my eyelids until patterns bloomed. I could feel a decision trying to form and I was scared of it, not because I thought it was wrong, but because I knew once I said it, I would have to live it all the way down.
"What if this isn't punishment?" I asked the room. I wasn't talking to the room. I was talking to the part of me that still wanted to curl up and stay small. "What if this is a second chance?"
Silence answered. Not empty silence. The kind that's waiting.
I opened my eyes and looked at the keys. They were a long straight line. A road. I imagined laying another line on top of them: a timeline. This note for now. That note for the week I need to make the first call. Another for the month I need to have money in place. Another for the day we run the first test and dare to breathe.
Back then, I didn't have any of that. I had no maps. No money. No plan. I was a boy looking at a storm and hoping it would not notice the person he loved. It noticed anyway.
Now I had different tools. I had what years had carved into me and what this second start had placed in my pocket like a folded paper with answers scribbled on it. Knowledge lived in me in a way it hadn't before. So did the shape of the near future—numbers, scores, headlines that hadn't been printed yet but would be if I stopped pretending otherwise. I could turn those things into fuel. Not because I liked the idea of gambling with the world, but because this was the world I had been given: one where I knew some of the turns in the road.
A thought came that tasted like iron and made my teeth hurt. If you use it, you can't lie about who you are. You can't say you're just a kid. You can't say you don't know what to do. You can't pretend the choice isn't yours.
I rested my forehead against the cool black of the lid and let that sink in.
I remembered a day from the old life when I had stood in a hallway outside a meeting, hands shaking, waiting to be told no. I remembered promising nothing to no one because promises were heavy and I was already tired. I remembered the moment the no came, soft and polite, and how the floor didn't open and the sky didn't fall. Only a line inside me did.
I straightened. I didn't want that line to break this time. I would rather carry something heavy than carry nothing and call it safe.
I let the plan arrive in pieces instead of grabbing at it all at once.
First piece: accept the role. Not musician only. Not scientist only. Not neighbor or friend only. All of it at once. The boy I was and the man I became had to stop trying to be two different people. I had to be one person who could sit at a bench, pull data apart, answer a text, and say I will not run all in the same day.
Second piece: money. It felt ugly to think about while standing in front of an instrument, but ugly didn't mean wrong. Labs run on money. Trials run on money. People who say otherwise are lying or rich. I knew some of the near future. Not everything, not enough to play god, but enough to pull out what was solid. A market swing here. A company that would rise on a product that hadn't even teased yet. A game where the ending would shock everyone but me. I hated the taste of it and loved the fact that it could build time. I would do it, but not like a gambler trying to fill a hole. I would do it like a builder who knows exactly how many bricks he needs.
Third piece: work. Knowledge wasn't magic. It was a map with incomplete lines. I would still have to fill the gaps the right way and in the right order. I would need to start earlier than anyone else would even think to start. I would need to find people I could trust to move fast and keep quiet. I would need to turn what I remembered into protocols that worked in a different timeline with different variables. I would need to accept failure without letting it dig the old hole.
Fourth piece: Kaori. Not as a symbol. Not as a cause. As a person with a laugh like sunlight and a habit of saying the thing no one else would say. I would have to hold her the way you hold a song—steady, careful, honest. I could not turn her into a project. I could not turn her into a promise I made to myself and forgot to check with her about. She was a girl who wanted to play music with me. If I did this right, she would stay a girl who wanted to play music with me, and not a name written on the top of a folder.
My heart slowed while I put these pieces in a row. The chaos didn't vanish. It just clicked into shape. Like notes in a bar when you finally find the count.
I pulled out the bench and sat. The wood creaked a little and the sound made something old in me flinch and then relax. I lifted the fallboard. The keys took the last of the light on their surface and turned it into a thin white line.
I laid my hands on them without pressing down. I could play. I knew I could. The weight that kept me away wasn't fear anymore. It was respect for what these keys had carried for me and what I was asking them to carry again. They had been a door, then a wall, then a tombstone. Maybe now they could be a table where I set my tools in a neat row and said, This is the work. Let's begin.
A laugh bubbled up out of nowhere and it wasn't a happy sound, but it wasn't a cruel one either. It was the sound you make when you finally tell the truth to yourself in a room where no one can hear you argue back.
"I was just a kid," I said to the empty house. "I didn't know anything."
The next words came softer, and the room leaned in.
"I know things now."
I pressed one key. Middle C. The note struck the wood and hung there like a thread. I pressed another, a clean third above it, and then let them die. I didn't need more than that. I wasn't trying to play a piece. I was marking a place on a map. Here is where the road turns.
"I'm going to save her," I said. My voice didn't shake. It surprised me a little that it didn't. I said it again because the second time made it feel like a vow and not a wish. "I'm going to save Kaori."
I let all the reasons crash into that sentence and dissolve there. The child who couldn't. The man who learned too late. The neighbor next door who always texts at the right time. The girl who asked for a duet and meant a bridge.
A picture showed up then that I didn't try to push away: Kaori in a practice room, head tipped, bow hovering, listening to the way I breathe before I touch the keys. In this picture there were no wires. No beep. Just her, here, alive, impatient in the way she gets when she loves something too much to wait any longer.
"Soon," I told the picture. "But not too soon. Right."
The plan inside me didn't look like a list. It looked like a staff with notes spaced just far enough apart to make sense if I kept the tempo steady. There would be days I would hate. Days where I would think I made the wrong bet. Days where a graph would make my stomach fall. Days where a phone wouldn't ring and I would pace a line in the hall with my hand in my hair until I remembered to drink water. There would be nights I would choose work over sleep and then have to choose sleep over pride so I didn't turn into the machine again. There would be moments when Kaori would catch me watching her and ask why I looked like I was trying to memorize her, and I would need a sentence that told the truth and didn't scare her.
All of that lived in the vow too. A vow that doesn't include the ugly parts isn't a vow. It's a hope with makeup on.
I lifted my hands and lowered the fallboard. The soft thud felt like a period at the end of a long, ragged paragraph.
The house had gone dark while I stood there deciding who I was going to be. I turned on the hallway light and it cut a warm path to the kitchen. I didn't go. I stayed in the doorway of the room and looked back at the piano as if I could see the future sitting on it like sheet music. I couldn't. That was fine. I had enough.
On the other side of the wall, a faint sound came through—our twin porches settling, maybe, or Tsubaki moving around her room, or just the old bones of the house telling the night it was here. The noise made me feel less like a single point in a vast dark and more like a person in a place.
My phone buzzed again. I picked it up.
Sleep, Tsubaki wrote. Tomorrow you can overthink again.
I smiled into the screen. Trying, I sent back. Then, after a second, I added, Thank you.
No heart emoji. No extra marks. She didn't need them to understand. She sent a single dot. It looked like nothing. It looked like enough.
I locked the screen and held the phone in my hand like a small stone. The chaos had not left me. It would not leave. That was okay. It would live beside the work. Some days it would be louder. Some days it would be a hum barely bigger than the lamp. The point wasn't to win against it. The point was to keep moving with it singing and not let it choose my steps.
I went to my room, but I didn't lie down right away. I stood by the window and watched the thin slice of sky between roofs. A star showed up—a timid thing at first, then a pin I could hang my eyes on. I thought about luck for a breath and then put the thought away. I wasn't going to lean on luck. I had other supports now. Knowledge. Time. Foresight. A plan built like a long song, steady and honest. A promise said out loud to a silent room.
I lay down and didn't close my eyes for a while. I wasn't afraid of sleep. I just wanted to feel the shape of the vow sit in me until it fit. You can tell yourself you'll do something and mean it in the moment and still lose it when morning comes. I wanted this one to survive morning.
When I finally let my eyes fall, I saw a practice room, small and ugly, with a girl in it who refused to be small or ugly no matter where you put her. I saw a bench and my hands. I saw a lab years earlier than it should exist. I saw numbers that matched because I made them match. I saw Tsubaki in a doorway with a cupcake because she couldn't help herself. I saw a stage in the far distance with two people on it and a hall full of breath waiting to be taken away.
"Second chance," I whispered to the dark. "Redemption."
The words didn't float away. They sank and held.
"This time I save her," I said. "This time I do."
The house settled again, tired and kind. Somewhere a car passed. Somewhere a dog barked and stopped. In the next room, the piano kept being what it had always been: wood and string and memory. It was heavy. It was honest. It would be here in the morning.
So would I.
——— KAORI ——
I didn't go straight to my room. I tiptoed through the entryway, set my shoes side by side like they were listening, and leaned my violin case against the wall. The house smelled like dinner that had already happened and a little like laundry soap. The quiet felt kind. It pressed on my shoulders in a way that made me notice how light I still was from the stage and how tired I'd become since.
I touched the latch of my case and smiled before I could stop it. Finally. I met him.
I've watched Kousei Arima from far away for years—video clips, whispers, the story of the boy who made the piano speak when he was small and then stopped. In my head, he was a color no one else could see yet. Today he was a person at a table with crepes and a too-careful voice, and eyes that looked like they had already lived two lives and were trying to decide which one to use on me.
I carried the case to my room and let it fall gently to the rug. The bow hair caught the light when I opened the lid; it looked like a strand of moon. Rosin dust rose up—home, every time. I checked the bridge with one finger, as if the violin might tell me more about the afternoon than memory could.
"Your piano," I whispered to the empty room, testing the words like a note before I play it. "My violin."
He said perhaps. I heard it. He tried to make it small, like a leaf, but it was a stone dropped into water—circles moving out, and out, and out. Perhaps means yes when you're me. Perhaps means I'll meet you halfway and don't run and if you ask again, I'll say it louder.
I flopped onto my bed and stared at the ceiling until it blurred. The day ran back over me in little loops: the hall's hush before the first sound; the way the high A looked yellow in my mind (sunflower—always sunflower); the crepe place laughter; Watari's dramatic fainting; Tsubaki's careful eyes; Kousei's mouth shaping praise like it might break if he didn't hold it right. I laughed into my pillow, muffled and stupid-happy, and then the laugh hopped into a cough that stole a breath before I could catch it.
I sat up too fast. The room tipped a little. My hands shook for a moment—just a tremor, like a startled bird. It passed. I put my palm flat over my chest and waited. Not tonight, I told whatever in me always wants to interrupt the best parts. Tonight is mine.
If I look for it, the shadow is always there. I don't look unless I have to.
A thump from the hallway—Mom moving a chair, probably. "Kaori?" she called softly, like she didn't want to bother me if I had fallen asleep.
"I'm home," I called back. "Everything was good."
She made the soft approving sound she makes when she wants me to know she heard. The house settled into itself again.
I lay back down and let Kousei back in. Up close, he wasn't what I'd drawn. He wasn't some perfect story. He was pale around the edges and warm in the center like someone who forgot the sun until it surprised him. When I said duet, the air changed around his shoulders. Fear? No. Not fear. Weight. He can play. Anyone who's watched him knows he can play. The weight was about... history, maybe. A door he closed and left closed so long he forgot where he put the key, and then I walked up and tried the handle like a thief and—click.
"Perhaps," he said.
I grinned so hard at the ceiling my face started to hurt. "That's a yes, Arima," I told the light fixture. "That is such a yes."
My phone lay on the nightstand like a polite dog. Watari had sent a selfie with a caption full of nonsense and flexing emojis. I sent back three violin bows and one rude cat. Tsubaki had texted home. I liked the simplicity of it and sent a single note emoji in return. Then I opened a blank message to no one and typed Practice. School room. Borrow, not steal. Yellow high A. Arima breath before first chord. I didn't send it, obviously. I just needed to see the words sit in a line.
I rolled onto my side and studied my violin in the open case. If instruments could smirk, mine would be smirking. "Yes, yes," I told it. "I know. I'm obvious." The case, being a case, kept all my secrets like it always has.
I thought about the way Tsubaki looked at him after he said perhaps—surprised, protective. She knows some old version of him I haven't met yet. That's fine. I have time. I can learn him like I learn a piece: first the melody, then the shape under it, then the part that looks easy but is actually where the heart lives. People are not music, but I like to pretend they are. It makes me kinder.
Under everything, the old truth hummed: in canon, in all the little futures I imagined for myself, I wanted to meet him. It was a wish I kept like a pebble in my pocket. Let me meet Kousei Arima. Let me make him look up. Let me make him hear color again. Today the wish happened like a door I didn't even have to knock on. Someone opened it and said, Finally. Come in.
I sat up again and let my feet find the rug. The tremble was gone. My chest felt normal, not tight. I moved slow on purpose, a truce with a body that likes to surprise me when I'm happiest. I wiped a dot of rosin from the belly of the violin and made a face at the dust it left on my fingertip.
"Tomorrow," I told the room. "Or the next day. I'll ask again, and he'll still say yes."
I could see it—the ugly little practice room with its buzzing light and scuffed bench. Me standing too close because I can't help it. Him fighting a smile because he thinks he hides better than he does. The first time we miss each other on a count and both pretend we meant to. The second time we don't miss and laughter falls out of me like something breaking in a beautiful way. His hands on the keys, careful at first and then not. The look that comes over his face when he forgets to be careful.
I don't know why his eyes felt older than the rest of him. I don't know why it felt like he was seeing something through me instead of at me for a second. I should be scared of that. I'm not. It just makes me more sure I picked the right boy to open a window with.
I closed the case and latched it. My hands didn't shake. I stood and stretched my arms over my head until my shoulders popped. The window showed a thin slice of night and one bold star. I stuck my tongue out at it for daring to try and be romantic without my permission.
"Finally," I said to the glass, because the word still tasted good. "I met you, Arima."
I pressed my fingertip to the pane like I could draw a line from here to wherever he was—two streets over, one street, I didn't know. In my head the line found him at a piano in a room without a light on. I imagined him breathing like he'd been running. I imagined him saying something to the quiet and the quiet not telling me what it was. That's alright. He can keep one secret for now. I'll take the rest later.
"Don't run away from me," I said softly, and then I smiled because he didn't look like he would. He looked like someone who had already decided something and was just figuring out how to carry it without dropping anything else.
I turned off my lamp and let the dark be gentle. My body reminded me I'd been standing and leaping and holding up a violin for longer than a clock wants you to. I reminded my body that living is the whole point. We made peace the way we always do—me promising to listen, it promising to give me one more dance before it complains.
Under the blanket, I tucked my hands under my cheek and let the day play itself again, smaller now, softer. The note that used to run away stayed this time. The boy who used to be a story was just a boy, and that made him better. The future sat at the edge of the bed like a cat, pretending not to care.
"Your piano," I said into the pillow, not sleepy at all and somehow already dreaming. "My violin."
Tomorrow I'll call it practice. Tonight I'll call it finally.