It’s raining again—the slow, soaking kind of rain that crawls under collars and makes everything feel heavier. You walk home alone, coat open, hair plastered to your skin, your phone still warm in your hand from the call that gutted you. Your mother’s voice still echoes in your head, sharp and cold as always, slicing into your spine: “An A? Not even an A-plus?” As if excellence were your birthright, as if anything less than perfection was some kind of personal betrayal. You don’t cry. You haven’t in years. That sort of softness was burned out of you a long time ago, somewhere between your first gold medal and the first time your father walked out of your recital halfway through because “meetings don’t wait.”

From the outside, nothing looks broken. You still have the grades, the poised laugh, the curated Instagram feed. You still sit at the center of every room—fundraisers, networking mixers, badminton tournaments where you win even when you haven’t practiced in weeks. Your parents’ legacy is stitched into everything you wear, and everyone knows your name before you speak.

But lately, you're slipping. Just enough for you to notice. You’ve started submitting assignments late, coming to class unprepared, snapping at group members, missing meetings with professors. Your professors still smile politely, but they’ve stopped praising you. Your so-called friends—beautiful, polished, dripping in generational wealth—don’t ask if you’re okay. They don’t notice the difference. Or maybe they do, and they just don’t care.

You haven’t told anyone that even the silence of your own apartment feels suffocating now. That sometimes you forget to eat unless it's at a table where you're expected to perform. That the weight of being “flawless” is starting to rot something inside you.

And just when you think you might scream—a car pulls up beside you.

It’s an old model, secondhand, but well-maintained. The kind of car you wouldn’t look at twice if you hadn’t spent years glancing at it every morning in high school. The window rolls down, and you know the face before you see it.

Yuta Yamamoto.

Of course.

The boy who was always second. Always just behind you. The one with the earnest eyes and frustrating calm, who smiled even when you stole every spotlight he ever reached for. The one who got applause for coming in second, while you were scolded for not being first enough.

You grew up under chandeliers and piano teachers and the crushing weight of legacy. He grew up under ceiling fans and second jobs and a family who held each other close in every storm. You had tutors. He had a part-time shift. You had silence for dinner. He had laughter and too many elbows at the table.

You beat him. Again and again. In grades, in debate, in everything that mattered. But somehow, he was always the one people remembered. Not for shining—but for staying kind. And that infuriated you more than you’ll ever admit.

You never liked the way he looked at you in high school—not with competition, not even admiration, but with something worse. Something softer. Like you were a book he wanted to read, not a test he needed to pass. Like he saw you, even when you weren’t performing. Especially when you weren’t.

Now, you're both in your last semester of law school, both of you on full scholarships. While yours is symbolic, his is a reward of hardwork. You sit across rows from each other, see each other daily. Where once he lingered in your shadow, now he walks beside it—and sometimes ahead of it. You notice how his name comes up in professors' praise. You notice how classmates gravitate to him without needing anything from him. You notice how he never flinches when you snap at him in class, how he meets your bite with silence that somehow sees through you. His window is halfway down, and he leans slightly, brows drawn together just enough to show concern but not pity. And for the first time in weeks, someone actually looks at you like you’re not fine.

"Get in. You’ll catch a cold", his voice cuts through the rain—gentle, solid, impossible to ignore.