What happens to me…

(Akane's PoV)

—

'If Shin gets his family back...

...what happens to me?'

The thought lit itself somewhere under my ribs while I was still smiling at him, still holding his forehead against mine, still warm with everything true about this moment — and I hated it instantly.

I hated its timing, its smallness, its shape.

He'd just gotten his parents back in the span of one evening, he'd just said yes with his whole broken face, and some cold little creature in the basement of me was already counting exits.

Already asking who I'd be to him once that enormous silent house filled up with the people it belonged to.

Once he had a mother and a father again, a family that wasn't a girl with a snake on her chest and a criminal record waiting to happen.

I pressed the thought down. Hard. The way you press down a lid.

'Not tonight. His happiness comes first.' I thought.

I had almost forgotten about the existence of my other half, the bad one.

"Now," I said, easing back from him. "I guess that I need to tell you about the 'greatest' part of my 'adventure', right?"

Shin straightened, wiped his face with his sleeve, and gave me his whole attention. He was wrung out, swollen-eyed, and he still turned toward mine like it was the only thing in the room.

"I guess... yeah," he smiled softly.

I took a deep breath.

"Let's start with Kenji." A pause. "So... he walked me to a bus stop ten minutes from school. Away from everyone. And then he told me what he's been building." I kept my voice flat. "He's spent the past year collecting evidence against our father, Shin. Real evidence. He got into the house's old camera archives and gathered years of footage nobody knew still existed. Everything that happened inside those walls. And the money side, too —fraud, layers of it, enough to end him. He says the company can be saved. The man can't. And he means to take him down completely."

"And let me guess... he needs you," Shin said quietly.

"He wants me to testify." The word came out of my mouth like something with edges. "Against our father. For the abuse. In a courtroom, under my real name I tried to erase. And he says—" my grip tightened on the mug "—he says my mother has already promised to do it. That she kept everything. The photographs, the birth records, proof I existed in that family. And that she—"

My voice caught.

But I made myself say it.

"He says she loves me, Shin. That she cried before sending me that message. That the money — all of it, four years of it — was the two of them. Their help. Her share of that household, carved off in secret, moved through his hands, every single month, to keep me alive. He even said that he could put me in a room with her for a reunion. Wow."

I was trembling. And I didn't even realize it.

I could feel it starting in my hands and moving up my wrists — a fine, humiliating tremor — and I did what I always do: I pressed my elbows into my knees and kept my face flat, and none of it worked, because Shin's eyes had already gone to my hands.

He didn't say anything. He just reached over, slow, and closed one warm hand over both of mine.

"If I had known," I said, and my voice came out low and shaking despite everything, "that he was behind that money... I would have gone out and worked fourteen hours a day, Shin. I'd have stacked shelves and washed dishes and slept four hours a night before I used one yen of it. I built my whole life on the idea that I owed that family nothing. That I'd gotten out clean. And now I find out the floor I've been standing on for four years was theirs the entire time." The tremor ran up into my shoulders. "I didn't get out. I've been living in their palm and calling it freedom."

"Akane—"

"I'm okay. Let me finish." I took a breath. Held it. Let it go. "At the end, he said... he said that once it's all over, he'll apologize to Kurone. Personally. And if that's not enough, he'll turn himself in. He said that like he was ordering food. Like her whole life will return to normality with a sorry." My jaw tightened at the memory. "So I told him life isn't that simple. And I slapped him as hard as I've ever hit anything in my life. And he took it without even flinching. And then I walked away without looking back. That's all, Shin. Now you have all of it."

Shin was quiet for a while. His hand stayed over mine.

"About your mother," he said finally, gently, not even asking about Kurone. "He offered to put you in a room with her. So. Same question you gave me." His thumb moved once over my knuckles. "Would you want to see her?"

"No." It came out fast and flat. I didn't have to reach for it.

Shin didn't seem surprised.

"I can't find a proper reason to meet her, even though his words left a big mark in me." I stared at his hands on mine. "What would I even walk in there for, Shin? What's the reason? Four years of secret money — fine. It's real. I'll carry it. But before those four years there were so many where she was in that house, watching, staying, choosing him — and at the end of them she looked at her own bleeding child and told her she wasn't her daughter anymore." My voice stayed flat, and it was the only thing holding it together. "You don't forgive years of that because someone cried over a phone. I'm not ready. I don't know if I'll ever be ready. And that has to be allowed to be the answer."

"It's allowed," Shin said. "The door stays where it is. Nobody pushes it. Least of all me."

The exact grace I'd given him, handed straight back, word-shaped the same way.

I nodded, and I let one long breath out.

Then I realized I wasn't done, and the last piece was the heaviest one in my pocket, and there was no order left to hide it behind.

I took a big breath.

"Now comes the hard part to tell you," I said. "Kurone."

Shin went still under the lamplight.

"What happened to Kurone," I said, and I made myself hold his eyes while I said it, because he deserved my face and not the top of my head. "What Kenji did to her... I already knew, Shin. Not since this morning."

His body twitched.

Just once — a small, involuntary jolt through the shoulders, like a current — and then nothing.

He didn't respond. He didn't ask how long. He sat there with his hand still over mine and his face going through something in complete silence. I watched the pang land in him in real time: the meeting, the corridor, the field, the whole day rearranging itself around the fact that I had been carrying the answer the entire time, three steps away from him, saying nothing.

The silence stretched, and I gave him the rest before it could go wrong.

"She... asked me not to tell you when we had arrived in class that day," I said quietly. "Because she knew exactly how you'd react. And I—" my fingers curled under his hand "—I couldn't allow that either. I'm sorry for not telling you, Shin. But I want to be honest about all of my reasons, not just the noble one. Part of it was protecting her privacy, part was protecting you from every situation, and part of it was me. I wanted to handle it myself. Alone. Without dragging you into my family's sewer. It's what I've always done, and I did it again, on instinct, even after everything we promised each other." My voice thinned. "I know you have every right to be angry that I hid something this big. I just — I didn't know what else to do."

Shin didn't speak.

I watched him not speak, and I made myself endure it without defending myself further. Because I could see what was happening behind his face, and it was honest.

There was pain in there. Real pain— a boy who'd promised no secrets discovering the person he'd promised it with had held one this size. I saw the betrayal-shaped thing rise in him. 

That was the hardest part to say to him, and... even if he was about to hate me for that, I didn't care.

But then I saw him wrestle it.

I saw him take it apart with his own hands, the way he does — slowly, fairly, piece by piece.

'Her trauma, not yours to tell. Kurone begged her. She was protecting three people at once, and one of them was you. She never once lied — you never asked, and she never denied. And this morning, the moment it touched your life, she promised you everything by nightfall — and here it is. Nightfall. Everything.' I could almost read his thoughts like a book.

I watched him arrive.

"It stung," he said at last. His voice was low and a little rough. "I'm not going to pretend it didn't. For a second there, it — yeah. It stung."

"I... know," I said, looking away for an instant.

"But you never lied to me." He said it slowly, like he was checking each word for cracks and finding none. "Not once. You kept a wound that belonged to someone else because she begged you to, and because you knew how I would've reacted. The second I found out, I did exactly the thing she was afraid of. You were both right about me." A tired, broken breath of a laugh. "And now that I found out, you put it on the table. All of it. Even the reason that doesn't make you look good. Especially that one."

He turned his hand over and laced his fingers through mine.

"So no," he said. "I'm not angry. It hurt for a second, but then I understood, and both of those are true, and I'd rather tell you both than pretend I'm only one of them."

Something in my chest came loose all at once.

"Okay," I whispered. "Okay."

"Okay." He squeezed my hand. "Is that everything you wanted to tell me, Akane? Are you sure there's nothing more? I swear that I won't get mad."

"That's everything," I said. "I promise, Shin."

And then, Shin tugged me sideways into him, and I felt relieved.

We ended up lying along the couch, too tired to move to the bed, my head on his chest and the blanket dragged over us and his hand doing its slow work through my hair, and I felt his breathing lengthen toward sleep under my ear, felt his exhausted body finally let the day go.

That was the only logical answer I could receive from him.

Silence. The kind of silence when you don't know what to do. 

You just put a stone on top of another and let time pass to see how many things they endure before falling.

We remained like that for minutes until he broke that silence.

"Hey, Akane," he murmured, already half under. "I thank you for everything. But... next time... no matter how hard the truth is... tell me. No secrets." Shin held me even tighter, like he was saying a scared 'please, you're the only one I trust.'

"That's the deal," I whispered. "I promise."

And then, Shin kissed me and rubbed my right cheek with his thumb.

"Thank you, Akane." He whispered.

"I love you, Shin. I... was just... scared," I said.

He smiled. 

"Let's not talk about this anymore, Akane. Let's stay like this for a bit until dinner, okay? I want to focus on us now," He said.

"...Okay," I said, resting my head on his chest, tracing little patterns with my index fingers.

Shin kept caressing my head softly.

All the tension had to go away before we returned to normal conversations, and that was the only way...