The room smells like alcohol swabs and a sweet, tired kind of soap. There is always a curtain pulled back halfway, never fully open. The blinds are up just enough to let the afternoon look in without touching anything. A monitor glows to my left, green lines making hills out of my heart. The hum is steady. The cuff has left an imprint on my upper arm from this morning's vitals; if I press, I can feel where the edge bit into me.
Mom sits close, on the visitor chair that squeaks when you shift. Dad stands, then sits, then stands again, hands rubbing together like he is trying to warm them. They both have their bakery smell clinging to their sleeves—butter, sugar, a shadow of cinnamon. It comforts and makes me feel far away at the same time.
The door opens with a soft magnet click. The doctor enters, older than the room, with the careful energy people bring to fragile places. White coat, sensible shoes, folder under his arm. He doesn't smile first. He looks at me, not through me, and that is something I notice.
"Good afternoon," he says. His voice is dry and even. "May I sit?"
We nod. He takes the second visitor chair and sets the folder on his knee. He looks at the monitor for one second, then back to my face.
"I want to review where we are," he says. "And then talk about next steps."
I nod again. My mouth is dry. My tongue finds the sore where I bit it yesterday when the nurse adjusted the IV. Mom's hands fold on her lap. Dad's tapping stops.
The doctor lifts a page. "Your diagnosis is confirmed Frederich's Ataxia. Your clinical picture has progressed faster than we normally see at your age." He doesn't say "wheelchair," but the chair is at the foot of my bed, folded, a punctuation mark waiting to be used. "Your recent fall was consistent with fatigue and orthostatic changes. The scan shows no intracranial bleeding. The bandage is precautionary while the laceration heals."
I touch the edge of the wrap at my temple the way you test a loose tooth. It's tender. I say, "Okay." My voice comes out thinner than I planned.
He continues. "Standard of care has traditionally been symptomatic support. Physical therapy. Nutrition. Monitoring the heart and endocrine system. Some centers considered aggressive procedures." A pause. "In your case, I do not recommend surgery. The risk profile is not acceptable."
Mom lets out a breath like she has been under water for a count of ten. Dad's jaw moves, once.
The doctor smooths the page with his thumb. "However," he says, and his eyes shift from the paper to me again. "There is something new. It has completed review and received approval for priority distribution. It is indicated for severe cases like yours."
I feel a small, clean silence inside my head. It's the kind of space that opens when a door in a hallway swings and you wonder what's behind it.
"What is it?" I ask.
"A pill," he says. "Oral therapy. The trade name is Skyclairs." He lets the name sit. "The mechanism is targeted toward mitochondrial function and oxidative stress pathways relevant in Frederich's Ataxia. In plain terms: it aims to slow or halt progression, and in some patients we are observing functional improvements—stability, coordination, stamina."
The words are simple. They feel heavy anyway. Pill sounds like something you can hold. Surgery sounds like something that happens to you. Time stretches and contracts at the same time.
Mom leans forward. "Is it safe?"
"So far," he says. "In the data we have, adverse effects have been minimal and manageable. Fatigue, mild gastrointestinal upset, transient headaches. We monitor liver enzymes. Thus far, the benefit-to-risk profile is strongly in favor of using it, especially in patients with rapid progression."
Dad's voice is careful. "Would she qualify now?"
"Yes." He doesn't hesitate. "You are in the priority group. We have a pathway to initiate immediately."
Immediately. The word is a door that opens onto another door. I feel my fingers curl under the blanket and press the sheet. I am aware of my legs. A buzzing line down the right calf that comes and goes. The way my left foot doesn't quite obey when I ask it to flex. The memory of the floor rushing up last week. The sound the blood made in my ear when it hit my cheekbone. I can't stop the picture; I can decide how long I look at it. I look away.
"What about surgery?" Dad asks. It comes out like a reflex born from older conversations.
The doctor shakes his head once. "It should not be on the table." He says it plainly. "Not until we've given this medication a proper trial. To be direct: surgery is not an option I would consider at this time. Skyclairs should be first, and early."
Mom's hands cover her mouth for a breath. When she lowers them, her smile is wet and shaky. "Thank you," she says. She says it twice, quieter the second time.
He nods, as if accepting thanks is not the point. "We will start with a titration schedule," he goes on. "Low dose, increased to target over two to three weeks. We'll draw baseline labs today and schedule follow-up in clinic each week for the first month. We'll assess gait, coordination, fatigue, and any side effects."
"I'm in the hospital now," I say. It sounds obvious, but I'm asking something under it: will I stay?
"You can start as an inpatient," he says. "We'll observe the first doses. If tolerated, we'll transition you to home with instructions, follow-up, and a number you can call any hour." He looks at me, not my parents. "You won't do this alone."
My throat tightens for no medical reason. I nod, short.
He turns a page. "Expectation setting," he says. "I want to be clear. We are seeing stabilization and improvement in many patients. We are not calling it a cure. The goal is to slow the disease and give you back function where possible. The degree of improvement varies. We measure progress over weeks and months, not days. That can be frustrating. It is also honest."
Honest is good. Honest hurts less later. I think of walking down the hospital corridor and singing quietly to keep the walls from listening. I think of sitting on the floor when my legs wouldn't answer and being so angry at them for not wanting to be legs anymore. I think of the way Kousei looked at me then, the fight in his eyes like a hand reaching through glass. I don't let the thought finish. I put it back in its box.
Mom reaches for my hand and squeezes without shaking. "If it gives you time," she says, looking at me like I am five and also an adult, "we will take it."
Dad clears his throat. "What do you need from us?"
"Consent," the doctor says, lifting a single sheet. "And your attention to the dosing schedule. Food interactions are minimal. We'll coordinate with physical therapy to take advantage of any gains in stamina or balance. The earlier we pair movement with medication, the better the outcomes we're seeing."
He holds out the form. Mom looks at Dad. Dad looks at me.
"It's your body," Dad says. His voice cracks in the middle and steadies. "We follow your lead."
There are moments when the room becomes a photograph. The light, the angle of a hand, a pen about to write. I can feel that before this sentence is finished, this image will be added to the shelf where I keep things I will not let erode. I take the clipboard. The paper is heavier than a normal sheet. The line for my name is long. The pen is the kind that scratches a little. I sign.
The doctor nods. "We'll begin today," he says. He stands, smooths his coat, and does a small bow of his head that feels like respect, not ceremony. "A nurse will be in shortly to start labs and the first dose. Ask any question at any time."
He leaves. The door closes softly. The room exhales.
Mom wipes her cheek with her knuckle and laughs without sound. "A pill," she says, like she is afraid if she says it louder it will change shape.
Dad sits at the foot of the bed and finally stops moving. He looks at the wheelchair and then turns it so the folded arms face the wall, like you might turn a picture that is too much to look at for the moment.
I stare at my hands. The nails are short. The half-moons are pale. There is a faint tremor in my right ring finger that only I would notice because I am watching for it. I curl my fingers and uncurl them. I imagine holding something small and warm, like a firefly. I imagine it glowing even when it seems too dim to matter.
"Kaori," Mom says. "How do you feel?"
"Hungry," I say. It is partly true and partly code for I don't want to cry right now. She laughs and covers her mouth again. Dad laughs once, like a cough that remembered it could be a laugh.
The nurse comes in with a tray—vials, labels, a new cuff, a small paper cup with the first dose, a printed sheet with bullet points. She checks my name and birthday, twice. She ties the tourniquet, finds the vein on the second try. I watch the blood fill the tube and think, That is me, traveling. The pill sits in the cup, ordinary and decisive.
"Water?" she asks.
"Yes, please."
I put the pill on my tongue. It tastes like nothing. I swallow. The cup is cool against my lip. The nurse smiles in the way people do when they are careful not to own your moment. "We'll keep an eye on you," she says. "If you feel anything strange—headache, nausea—press the call button."
"Okay."
When she leaves, the room is itself again. The monitor hills go on. The blinds keep pretending it's gentle outside. Mom reaches for the pastry bag she brought and pulls out a melon pan like a magic trick.
"Only if your stomach is ready," she says.
"I'll try," I say. I break off a corner and let it sit on my tongue for a second. It tastes like home, and then like the hospital again because now everything does. I eat it anyway.
Time is still a moving thing. The pill is a small stone thrown into it. The ripples have not reached me yet. They will.
I think of school hallways and chalk dust and the way desks get warm under your forearms by third period. I think of music rooms and a boy with tired eyes who keeps showing up and pretending he's not tired so I won't have to be brave alone. I think of stairs, and ramps, and a line on the floor where I will put my foot down and then another foot and measure what it means to move forward.
Mom squeezes my hand again. Dad looks up and catches my eye. He nods like we are in agreement about something we haven't said out loud.
"Okay," I say, to them, to the room, to the small pill making its quiet way toward whatever it will do. "Let's see."
—
Koharu's crayons are the loudest thing in the room.
She's on the rug with her legs kicked back, tongue peeking from the corner of her mouth, grinding red into a sun that definitely asked to be yellow. The living room smells like polish and old scores and the hint of smoke I pretend not to track in from the balcony. I lean one hip against the piano and listen to Nagi test the keys like she's afraid of waking something that bites.
"Lighter," I say, and she obeys—good wrist, small hand, sound thinned until it's ribbon, not rope. The piece isn't the point. The touch is.
Yesterday's applause is still in her eyes. So is the fear. Jazzed nerves, the kind that make kids talk too fast. She's not talking now. She watches my face in the shine on the fallboard and tries to read what I won't write.
He looks dead. That's the sentence that's been stomping around my skull since last night. The boy. My boy. Fourteen going on forty-five, posture like he never actually stands up all the way anymore. He used to run in here; now he arrives like a tide coming in after a bad storm.
Yesterday when he drifted past my door to drop off something for Koharu, the wind carried a whisper of whiskey with him. First time I've smelled that on him. Or really any kid that young for that matter.Not much, not sloppy. Just enough to put a film over my throat. He doesn't even look like he takes the time to wake up anymore, just peels himself off the last thing he did and stumbles into the next.
I used to rant to him about the men I dated. The flaky ones. The ones who thought a gig was a personality. He'd sit at the edge of the couch with his knees together and his hands folded and the kind of serious, hungry attention only motherless boys give. I'd say, "Don't be like that." He'd nod like I'd asked him to practice a scale.
Now I look at him and think, There you are. A teenage version of the wrecks I used to throw out. Shady eyes. A schedule built like a trap. A girlfriend he orbits so tight he's turned into a moon.
"Sensei?" Nagi says, soft. She's stopped playing. The ribbon hangs in the air and then disappears. She has those little bear clips in again. Red. They tilt with her head when she's trying to look brave.
"Hm."
"Will... Arima-sensei be competing at Maihou?" She asks like a civilian peeking into a temple: careful, guilty to even want to know. "It's only a few weeks, right?"
I grind a half-cigarette out in the saucer and don't bother with a lecture about the piano lid being a bad ashtray. "He hasn't mentioned it," I say. It comes out flatter than I mean. "Not once."
She blinks. There's a part of her that can't imagine ignoring a mountain and calling it a hill. "But... isn't it important?"
"It used to be," I say, and if my voice has an edge, it's mine to sand later. "Don't hit the piano." She pulls her hand back before it lands another nervous tap.
He's avoiding anything that could steal seconds from his little watchlist. Avoiding the word competition the way smokers avoid the word cancer. He smiles when he has to, answers questions when cornered, pops a perfect test out like a vending machine so teachers leave him alone, and then turns his face away and you can see the vacancy behind the glass. The kid is smart. Too smart. A deceptive little liar when he wants to be. He's learned how to be missing while standing right in front of you.
Koharu has started humming. Off-key. My fault. I hum, too. Her sun gets another red layer and becomes a wound.
"Play," I tell Nagi, because the room needs something better than my head. "Something that doesn't prove anything."
She chooses a prelude and treats it like a rumor she's not sure she should repeat. The sound slips around the furniture and the framed photos and catches on the cracked spine of a Czerny, old friend and ex-convict. I watch her left hand—how the thumb tucks, whether the wrist stays supple on the turn. It does. She's quick. She's careful in the exact places that matter and careless in a few that will make her interesting if she survives herself.
"How was I yesterday?" she asks without turning. It's a child's question disguised as professional interest.
"Fine," I say, and then I hear how cruel that is and add, "Good. You did the thing you promised the piece. You didn't show off." She exhales enough to move a hair in front of her ear. "And you didn't break when the room told you who it was."
She nods. Then, tentative: "Arima-sensei was out of it...."
"That's not about you." I fish a lighter from my pocket, flip it, close it again. Fidget, not addiction. The balcony is five steps away. I stay put. "Don't build a religion out of someone else's absence."
"Oh." She sounds like maybe she was halfway through writing a prayer book.
The Maihou flyer is folded under a Bach Inventions book on the side table. Bright paper, bright promises. I think about picking it up and hearing my own voice ask the question I've been avoiding. Are you entering. Are you planning. Are you going to act like the person we taught you to be or the stranger you're trying on. I don't. Every time I try to steer him back to this river, he looks at me like I've asked him to help bury a body.
"He can play as perfectly as a seasoned pro," I say, mostly to myself. "He could walk into that hall and make the judges feel like they remembered how to breathe. And he'd do it from three rooms away."
Nagi stops. The last chord floats and lands. "You think he hates it," she says. Not really a question.
"I think he hates what it did to him. And for him. And because of him." I lean my shoulder deeper into the piano. "When your relationship with something is built under a whip, you have to break your back to stand up straight in front of it."
She turns on the bench and looks at me with that careful, fox-bright face. "Then why do you still...?" She gestures around the room, around me, at the smoke, the scores, the kid on the floor drawing our little family like the world is a simple shape. Why do you still chase him with it, she means. Why did you put me in his path.
"Because sometimes the thing that broke you is the only thing that can teach you how to heal." I say it before I can decide whether I believe it today. "And because I've watched the piano keep people alive. Not happy. Not always. But alive."
Hiroko Seto, patron saint of stubborn instruments.
She ducks her head. Her bear clips glint. "I want to ask him about Maihou," she whispers. "But I think he'll just... pretend he didn't hear me."
"Smart," I say. "You're learning."
I collect the lighter and cross to the balcony. Slide the door with a care that keeps Koharu from looking up. The evening air is cold enough to make the back of my throat grateful. I light up and let the first drag fill the space between thinking and saying. Somewhere two floors down, a couple argues about takeout with the weary intimacy of people who always end up eating the same thing anyway.
He's fourteen. Fourteen. And yesterday, if I'm not inventing it, his sweatshirt carried the ghost of a bar I used to haunt—oak and sugar and proof. Not much. Not the sloppy kind. Just the kind you drink when you need a ritual, when your hands need to hold something heavier than a phone. The smell made a quiet little anger rise up in me—the old kind, shaped like men with instruments and lies. I smashed that anger down because he isn't them and because I'm supposed to be better by now.
He used to come to me with paper cuts from turning pages too fast. Then he came to me with eyes that had learned how to go empty on command. Now he comes to me in flashes, and if I blink I miss him. Innocence, then pain, now this practiced hollow. And yet... lately, something else has crept in. A thin thread of up. Sometimes when he says her name the light moves under the skin of his face like a fish under ice. Sometimes he walks like he remembers gravity is a thing you can play with. Still... a thread doesn't make a rope.
I go back in and snap the lighter closed. Nagi has started again on her own, something brighter to clean the air. She looks over, half-expecting the shoe.
"You were good yesterday," I tell her again, because it bears repeating and because she needs to hear something that isn't about him. "And you'll be better next week. Work the inner voice in that passage; you're letting it starve."
She nods, already adjusting her hand, hungry to be corrected. I watch her mouth the way teenagers do when they're solving a puzzle out loud.
"Sensei?" she says after a minute. "If Maihou matters and he's... that good... why won't he go?"
Because he's done. Because he's busy building a life that doesn't admit witnesses. Because the piano holds a mirror he can't afford to look into right now. Because he is trying not to be owned by something that used to own him. Pick a reason, kid. They all hurt.
"He's changed," I say. It's the safest truth. "For the worse, mostly. He's..." I search for a word that isn't melodramatic. "... somewhere else."
"Because of his girlfriend?" Nagi's voice is level. Not jealous. Cataloging.
"Because he's fourteen and living through something, and he decided to carry the building by himself." I meet her eyes in the fallboard again. "He was always going to be too much of an adult when no one was looking."
Koharu has switched to blue. The sun is now a planet and all of us are dots. She hums louder. "Look!" she commands without looking up. "We're all together."
I look. She's given Nagi the biggest smile. Kousei is a stick with hair drawn too carefully. I feel my throat go strange.
"He's looked a little better lately," I hear myself say, almost defensively. "Bit more up." The next words don't need lungs to exist. But still.
Nagi turns on the bench and sits sideways, knees together, hands folded—exactly the way he used to sit when he was little and I told him stories about the road. "Do you think he'll ever... come back?" she asks.
"To piano?"
"To... himself," she says.
I take the question like a stone and weigh it. The easy answer is a lie. The hard answer is a wound. I choose the only one I can live with. "If he does," I say, "it won't be because someone dragged him. It'll be because he decided to walk."
She nods as if that's the lesson she came for.
"Keep playing," I add, because talk is cheap. "Maihou isn't the only stage in the world. But it's a good one to practice for."
She sets her fingers and begins again, this time with a little stubbornness in the line, which is what I wanted all along.
I watch her hands and hear his in them—the part of his touch that survives even in kids he doesn't mean to teach. I think about calling him and asking him if he's sleeping, if he's eating, if he remembers how to pretend for strangers. I don't. He'll answer in that tired, polite voice and tell me not to worry, which is exactly the wrong thing to say to me.
I fish the flyer out from under the Inventions and flatten it with my palm. The bright paper grins up at me, alive with dates and promises. "A few weeks," I say to no one.
He hasn't brought it up once.
He could play it perfectly.
He might not show up at all.
I tuck the flyer back under Bach and let Nagi's careful, bright sound hold the room together. For now.
—
I hear the melodica before I see her.
Thin notes slip through the stairwell door—airy and a little reedy, like a whistle trying to be brave. The roof is bright with winter light and a wind that tastes like disinfectant. The safety rail throws long lines across the concrete. Laundry from the pediatric ward flaps on a cord someone strung between vents, colors snapping like flags in a wind too clean to belong to the outside world.
Kaori sits on the bench near the edge. The wheelchair waits a step behind her like a shadow that learned to park itself. She's bundled in a cardigan that's almost too big, sleeves rolled twice. A little boy in a dinosaur tee holds the melodica's tube to his mouth, cheeks puffed, while Kaori's fingers walk the keys. A smaller girl stands on tiptoe beside her, clapping when she thinks the song ends and clapping when it doesn't, just in case.
"Good breath," Kaori tells the boy, gentle. "Don't explode."
He tries not to laugh into the tube and produces a honk that makes all three of them crack up. The laugh costs her color; it always does now. She's paler than yesterday. But the smile is real.
My feet slow. For a second I just stand there, letting the picture land: her hands still sure, pressing plastic keys because a bow is too heavy and the angle for a shoulder rest wouldn't hold. In the other life, I spent so much time inside my own storm that I kept missing scenes like this—small, ordinary, holy. I was always a half step away, watching the shape of the moment instead of being in it.
Not this time.
She spots me, and something warm stitches through her face. "Hi..." she says, like she's been waiting all morning to use the word.
"Hi..." It comes out warmer than I planned. I don't look at the wheelchair. I look at her. I hold her eyes.
The little girl points at me. "Is he your boyfriend?"
Kaori's mouth flattens into a fake-serious line. "No," she says, then tips her head. "Definitely not... He's a villain."
The kids gasp like I grew horns. It's a game, and they want me to lose.
I put a hand to my chest. "Maybe I am," I say. I give them my most tired, suspicious look and lower my voice. "Be careful. I steal snacks."
The boy narrows his eyes at me with great responsibility. "We don't have snacks."
"Then you're safe," I say. "For now."
Kaori tries to hide her smile and fails. A nurse opens the roof door to call the kids back for group time. They wave at her, then at me, and run off, the melodica's tube trailing like a small pale tail. The door swallows their chatter. The laundry snaps twice and settles. Somewhere below us, an elevator dings and dings again.
Silence doesn't feel empty next to her. It feels like a seat we know how to share.
I cross the last steps and sit beside her. The bench is cold through my uniform. Our shoulders touch. She doesn't move away. Up close I see it—the fine shimmer at her temple, the way her breath pauses a fraction too long before each exhale. I slide my hand over hers. Her fingers are cooler than mine. She keeps them still for a heartbeat like she's testing the weight of the contact, then curls them, slow, back around mine.
"Those two are menaces," I say.
"They're my orchestra," she says. "I'm the tyrant conductor."
"Then I guess I'm the villain who carries your baton."
"That's dangerous," she murmurs, pleased.
Wind lifts the ends of her hair. I tuck one piece behind her ear without thinking. In the other life I would have let it tickle her cheek because touching would have felt like breaking a rule I wrote myself. In this one, I don't leave things to chance. I don't leave hair in her eyes. I don't leave words unsaid.
She glances at my hand. "You're warm," she says softly, like she's noting a fact for later.
"Stay there," I say. "I'm good at being a hand warmer."
Her fingers tremble once under mine, a little lightning that she can't hide. The tremor used to scare me because it sounded like a countdown. It still scares me. I don't let go.
"I keep messing up," she says to the rooftops. She looks at the spot where the kids sat like their laughter might still be pooled there. "It's not the violin. My hands feel... clumsy." She mimics a scale with her right hand and shakes her head. "My brain knows what to tell them, and then they take the long way to do it."
"It's still your music," I say. "That's what matters."
She tilts her chin at me. "Even on a melodica?"
"Especially on a melodica," I say. "It tells the truth. No pretty reverb to hide in."
A corner of her mouth folds up. "You're insulting my melodica."
"I'm insulting the instrument for being honest," I say. "I'm grateful you are too."
She goes quiet. The laundry flaps once, twice. The sky is a kind of thin blue hospitals always seem to order in bulk.
"Are you okay?" I ask, because she isn't, not really, but the ritual matters.
She breathes out, a small white flag of condensation. "I'm scared," she says, so softly I almost miss it.
"Me too," I say. The truth sits down between us and behaves.
"I hate that my body keeps... doing this." She looks at her lap. "Everything that used to be automatic, I have to ask permission for. Sometimes it says no. It's like having a friend who keeps forgetting your name."
I squeeze her hand. "Then let me be the one who remembers it for both of you."
Her eyes close a moment. When they open again, there's light in them. Not the old summer kind. A winter light, clean and stubborn. "Villain," she says, "don't leave my side."
"I won't."
The words come out before I can think, and they land so steady I almost don't recognize my own voice. In the other life, everything I said to her felt like it was routed through fear. Now it moves through something else—resolve, maybe, or a kind of shamelessness I got used to by losing too much.
She leans into my shoulder. Weight like a bird that decided the branch would hold. I breathe her in—soap and hospital air and something that still smells like sunshine. I count the rhythm of her breaths without meaning to. I always count now. It's not about numbers. It's about not missing the time we have.
"The doctor said the new pills are starting soon," she says after a while, voice careful. "They explained it like... like putting up scaffolding around a building while you fix it. Not forever. But enough to climb."
I nod. My throat tightens. I keep my face calm because I want her to see calm. Inside, the words are a storm: We're so close. Just hold on. Please hold on. "You always did look good on a climb," I say.
She smiles without looking at me. "I'll make the nurses race me in the hallway."
"They'll file a complaint. 'Patient too fast.'"
"Villain assisted."
"Obviously."
The door thumps open again as someone comes up, then closes quick when they see us and decide to try another roof. The hospital hum wraps around us—the thousand machines that keep the day going. In my head, a different noise tries to push through: the noise of a boy on a stage who stopped playing because a voice from a rooftop in an old winter caught his hands in midair. For a second I taste snow. Then it passes. The taste that remains is the plastic tang of a melodica and the salt of skin.
"You used to look away," Kaori says suddenly, not accusing. "When the heavy things showed up. You used to stare at the floor like the answer was hiding in the scuff marks."
"I know," I say.
"You're not doing that now."
"I don't want to miss anything," I tell her, and it's the simplest thing I've ever said.
She studies my face the way she studies a new piece—not to judge it, but to find where it breathes. "Okay," she says. "Then I won't miss it either."
We sit. We let the quiet make a home over our knees. She turns her hand so our fingers interlock. It feels like a knot in a rope that's been fraying for years finally got tied right.
"Do you remember," she says, almost a laugh in it, "when I called you a Friend A the first time? You looked like you'd swallowed a bee."
"I was trying to play it cool," I say.
"You failed completely."
"I'm getting better at it."
"You are." She nudges my shoulder with her shoulder. "It's annoying."
"You like it."
She doesn't deny it. Her head tips to mine for a second and rests there. The bench creaks like it approves. Down below, a siren starts, fades, is replaced by birds who have decided the city belongs to them again.
I look straight at the wheelchair because not looking won't make it vanish. Then I look back at her. If we only count what's broken, we'll miss what's holding.
"I'm here," I say.
"You're here..." she echoes.
"Even if the wind tries to push me off the edge," I say.
"Then I'll pull you back by your sleeve."
"You have tiny hands."
"They're very determined."
We're both smiling now. It feels strange and perfect and undeserved and exactly ours.
She shifts, winces, breathes through it. I adjust so she doesn't have to ask. My arm around her shoulder is an answer to a question she hasn't said out loud. She relaxes under it like the question is satisfied.
From nowhere, the old panic tries to climb up again: if I blink, if I leave, if I think about anything but this, I'll lose it. I let it come. I let it pass. I'm not leaving.
She draws a small circle on the back of my hand with her thumb, absent and tender. "Stay until the cold wins," she says. "Then stay a little longer."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Villain.." she says again, quieter, softer, like the word has changed jobs and now means something useful, "don't ever leave my side."
"I won't," I say, and mean it with a steadiness that feels like a promise I finally learned how to keep.