No Secrets

(Akane's PoV)

—

"So... that's the whole plan," Kurone said. "That's what she can do."

She had stopped crying somewhere in the last minute.

Her voice had steadied into something almost businesslike, and I understood that this was the part she'd rehearsed multiple times, the part she'd come here actually to say.

"My mother... she still has the contacts. The Italian firm, the network here, all of it. She told me, straight out, that if Shin's family ever wanted to come back, she could arrange it. A position for both of them in Japan. A real one, good enough that they'd never have to work themselves into the ground again. Close enough that Shin could—" Her voice wavered and she pushed through it. "Close enough that they could be a family again. In the same country. In the same city, even."

I said nothing. I couldn't.

"She could make it happen, Akane. Everything from the paperwork to the logistics, for my mother, it's just a phone call." Kurone looked at me, and her eyes were red-rimmed and steady. "The hard part is the only thing I actually can't know. And it's the whole reason I asked you here instead of just... doing it."

"Which is?" I asked, curious.

"Whether Shin would even want it," Kurone said, her voice not soft like before.

The bathroom went quiet except for the drip of the sink.

"Because... I don't know him anymore," Kurone said, quieter. "Maybe I never did. I spent too many years next to him, and I don't actually know if, after everything, he'd want his parents back, or if the wound has healed shut in a shape that can't take them anymore. I don't know if reaching out would give him something or tear something open. And I'm the last person on earth who has the right to guess." She looked down at her hands. "...But you know him. Better than anyone ever has. So I need you to tell me if what I want to do would make him happy or not. Before I ask my mother to touch any of it."

I looked at her for a long moment. I needed to analyze every single detail of the entire situation.

So, I made myself slow down, because the wolf in my chest was still up on its feet and I didn't fully trust anything happening in this room, and I've learned the hard way that the moments when someone hands you something that looks selfless are exactly the moments to keep your hand on the knife.

Because I know Kurone, I've spent the exact amount of time to completely understand what she was made of.

And Kurone Tsugikawa does not do things without a reason curled up somewhere inside them. She kept Shin for all these years because his devotion made her feel like she mattered.

Every kind thing she ever did came with an invisible receipt, and a broken, tearful girl in a cold bathroom offering to reunite the boy she destroyed with his long-lost family... well, that could be the most genuine thing she'd ever done in her life, or it could be the single most elegant way back into his good graces that anyone had ever devised.

I couldn't tell which, and that was the real problem. I genuinely could not tell.

So I told her the one thing I was certain of.

"Kuro," I said, and my voice came out flat and even. "Shin and I don't keep secrets from each other. Not one. We tell each other everything, all of it, the ugly parts included. So you understand what that means, right? The second I decide anything about this, after I walk out of this bathroom, he'll know. I'll tell him every word you just said. Every word. Are you aware of that?"

Kurone didn't even flinch.

"I don't care," she said.

I blinked. That was unexpected.

"You can tell him everything, Akane. Tell him it came from me. Tell him I cried in a bathroom. Tell him whatever you want." Her hands had curled into fists at her sides. "It won't take this out of my head. I want to do something for him, even if he hates me for it. Even if he never speaks to me again. Because—"

Her voice cracked, and she let it.

"Because he gave me the world for seven years, and I gave him crumbs. That's the whole ledger. Seven years of a boy who would have done anything for me, and all I ever handed back was the bare minimum to keep him following me like a puppy. I know what I was. I'm not pretending anymore." She pressed her fists together in front of her. "But even as awful as I was, I know one thing for a fact. When his parents were still physically there, even though they were absent, Shin loved them. I saw it. That was real. And I know it."

She took a shaking breath.

"So please, Akane. As my last favor." She looked up at me, tears running freely now, not hidden. "Let me do this one thing. And then, after our graduation ceremony at the end of the year, I'll leave. I'll move away, change city, country even, I don't know. I'll disappear from both your lives forever. You'll never have to see my face again. I promise. Just let me give him this one thing first."

She was trembling from head to toe.

And I stood there, not knowing what to say.

Because half of me was looking at a girl who was genuinely breaking apart in front of me, a girl who had lost everything, who had nowhere to sit at lunch, who couldn't walk the halls without being afraid, who had come to the one person with every reason to turn her away and begged for the chance to give something back. That half of me believed her.

And the other half, the half that grew up in a house where love and manipulation wore the same face, kept its hand on the knife and would not let go because I have been fooled by sincerity before. I have watched people cry real tears while doing calculated things. My own mother's tears on a kitchen floor turned out to mean nothing at all in the end.

I let out a long breath through my nose.

"Alright," I said. "I'll do it. I'll find out. I'll figure out whether this would help him or hurt him, and I'll tell you honestly which one it is."

Something in Kurone's face lifted.

"But," I said, and let the word land hard, "don't expect anything, Kuro. Whatever I find out, I'm not going to do it for you. We might be best friends, and I appreciate every time we helped each other, but Shin comes before that. Before everything. He's become my family. In every way that matters, he's my family, and I'm his, and I would burn this entire school to the ground before I let anyone put a single crack in the thing he's finally starting to build."

Kurone gave a small, broken half-smile, tightened her fists, and nodded.

"So let me speak clearly." I held her gaze. "I know you figured out you love him exactly the moment you lost him. I know that. I respect your feelings, and I respect that you want to change, that you want to be someone who gives instead of just taking. I really do, Kuro, because I know that you've never been an evil person. But the past doesn't get erased just because you cried about it in a bathroom. So if I find out — if I find out even by accident — that this is just some pathetic scheme to worm your way back to Shin, I promise you, Kuro, I will never forgive you. Not ever. Not as a friend, not as anything else. That's the one line. And trust me that I can be very evil if someone tries to deceive me just to hurt the only thing that matters in my life."

I expected her to fold. To cry harder, to protest, to reach for me.

She didn't.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand, and she looked at me straight into my eyes. Her look was steady this time, no tears.

"It's because I love him that I want him to be happy. Even without me. Especially without me." Her voice had gone quiet and certain in a way I'd never heard from her before. "I figured it out too late. I know that. But think about it for a second, Akane. If I wanted to worm my way back into his life, I wouldn't need any of this. You know my family. You know what we can do. If I wanted Shin back or to have revenge for how I got humiliated all this time, I'd have a hundred easier ways to try, and I wouldn't be standing in a freezing bathroom asking his girlfriend for permission."

My eyes widened, because she wasn't wrong. That was the part that got under my skin.

"This isn't a move," she said. "There's nothing in it for me. I can't stand being someone who was only ever hated. I want to leave one thing behind that was good. Please make him happy, Akane, and I want him actually to be happy. That's all. That's the whole thing."

The sink dripped.

'Tch—'

I looked at her for a long moment, and I still couldn't tell. Or, maybe, not right now.

The only thing that could give me the answers I needed was time... only that.

All I could do was take the information, watch, keep my hand on the knife, and let time show me which Kurone was standing in front of me.

So I didn't answer her directly. I picked my bag up off the floor and swung it over my shoulder.

"Fine. Contact me if anything else comes up, Kuro; the lesson is about to start," I said. "I'll see you in class."

Kurone smiled. A small smile, but real, and her body finally relaxed.

"Yeah," she said. "Thank you, Akane. You're too kind to me. Way too kind."

I didn't reply to that, because I didn't feel kind, and I didn't want to lie, and I'd already told her that I don't do that and that I never did.

I pushed the door open, and the warmer air of the corridor came in to meet me, and I walked out of the second-floor bathroom with a great deal more than I'd walked in with, none of it light.

The hallway was loud with festival noise. Somebody ran past with a roll of banner paper. A committee argument was happening somewhere near the stairs.

The ordinary world, going about its ordinary business, while I carried such a bomb behind my ribs down the corridor toward my classroom and tried to figure out how in the world I was ever going to hand it to the boy I loved.

'He's become my family,' I'd said. And it was true. That was the whole problem and the whole answer at once.

He was my family now.

And I had no idea yet whether the thing Kurone had just handed me was going to give him back the family he'd lost, or take away the one he'd only just found.

I walked into class, sat down, stared at the board, and didn't hear a single word of the lesson.