Yuna's POV
The call was at three in the morning.
I had written it in my notebook in capital letters with a box around it, which was the system I used for things I absolutely could not afford to forget, and then spent the rest of the day alternating between trying not to think about it and thinking about nothing else.
The morning had been the market.
The afternoon was theoretically recovery, which in this house looked like sitting in the living room while Lily conducted a very detailed retelling of the Dodong sighting to Uncle Ramon, who listened with the focused engagement of a man hearing important news, and Aunt Rosa moved in and out of the kitchen making comments about the price of vegetables and whether that particular vendor had always been that stingy with the kangkong or if something had changed recently.
I sat on the couch with my notebook open and pretended to work on something.
What I was actually doing was thinking about how to write a love song for Ryo Ishikawa.
Which was a sentence that still felt slightly unreal every time I assembled it.
Ryo Ishikawa.
My favorite artist.
The person whose songs I had listened to in the city late at night when I couldn't sleep, whose particular way of putting words to feelings I had never quite managed to put into words myself had always made me feel like someone understood something I hadn't said out loud.
I had written for him twice before, through the pipeline, under the alias, the way I wrote for everyone.
Both times I had told myself it was just another job.
Both times I had worked harder than I would have admitted to anyone.
And now his team had specifically asked for me — for the alias, for the voice behind those tracks — because apparently something in what I had written had been worth coming back for.
And they wanted a love song.
From me.
Who had just turned down a confession yesterday with absolutely zero romantic experience to draw from.
I stared at the blank page in my notebook and wrote: what does love feel like at the top in very small letters.
Then I stared at that for a while.
Then I closed the notebook, because dinner was ready and Aunt Rosa was calling, and some problems were better approached on a full stomach.
Dinner that evening was sinigang — the leftover kind, which was somehow always better than the first day, the broth having had time to settle into itself overnight.
Uncle Ramon said this was because soup had a memory, which Aunt Rosa dismissed, but she didn't disagree with the part about it tasting better.
I ate and let the conversation happen around me without requiring too much of me, which was one of the things I had slowly learned to do in this house — how to be present without performing presence, how to just exist alongside these people and let them be loud and warm and entirely themselves.
Uncle Ramon talked about something that had happened at work.
Lily reported on a disagreement she'd had with a classmate over whose drawing of a horse was more accurate, and presented her case with the conviction of someone who had given this significant thought.
Aunt Rosa made comments.
Asked questions.
Refilled things before they were empty.
At some point in the middle of it, I found myself watching them — really watching, the way you do when something normal suddenly looks interesting because you're paying attention to it for the first time.
The way Aunt Rosa and Uncle Ramon moved around each other.
Not dramatically.
Not in any way that looked like a scene from something.
Just quietly, practically, constantly.
She handed him the ladle without him asking because she knew he was about to reach for it.
He scooted his chair slightly without looking up when she needed to get past to the kitchen.
When Lily said something that sent the table into laughter, they caught each other's eye across it the way people do when they've been laughing at the same things together long enough that the look itself has become part of the joke.
It wasn't romantic in the way songs usually described.
It was something more worn-in than that.
Something that had been used every day until it fit exactly right, the way an old wooden chair fits the person who has always sat in it.
I ate my sinigang and thought about that for a while.
After dinner, Lily settled into the living room and turned on a movie at a volume that made conversation difficult, which suited me fine because I didn't want conversation.
I took my notebook to the kitchen table and sat there in the dim light, writing things down and crossing them out and writing them again in different words, trying to find the shape of what I was looking for.
Not the big version of love.
Not the sweep-you-off-your-feet version.
The version that was just there.
The version that showed up every day without announcing itself.
The version that was so quiet and so consistent that you could live inside it for years without noticing how much it was holding you up, the way you didn't notice the floor until you thought about what it would be like without it.
I wrote two words at the bottom of the page: like breathing.
Then I drew a small box around them, because they were going somewhere.
I didn't know exactly where yet, but they were going somewhere.
By two forty-five I had moved back to the living room.
The movie was over, Lily was asleep on the couch and had been carried to bed by Uncle Ramon at some point I hadn't fully tracked, and the house was quiet in the deep, particular way it got in the very late hours when even the dog had run out of things to bark at.
I had changed into a clean shirt.
I had washed my face.
I had attempted something deliberate with my hair that was a slight improvement on what it usually did on its own.
My phone was propped against a stack of books on the coffee table, angled so the camera caught me and not the slightly water-stained ceiling above me.
My notebook was open beside me.
Pen uncapped.
I looked around the living room — Aunt Rosa's favorite chair in the corner, the family photos on the walls, the decorative plates with their sincere quotes, the crochet project mid-row on the dining table visible through the doorway.
This was not the setup I would have designed for this conversation.
There was no professional background.
No clean studio lighting.
Just the living room of a house in a provincial town at two forty-eight in the morning, with a slightly uneven plaster ceiling and the faint sound of a rooster somewhere outside who had dramatically miscalculated what time it was.
But it was what I had.
And I had learned, over the past several weeks, that this town had a way of giving you things that worked even when they didn't look like they should.
My phone screen lit up at exactly three.
I answered it.
Mia appeared on screen.
She looked exactly as put-together as I had imagined from her voice on the phone — smooth hair, clean background, the calm composure of someone for whom a three AM call was simply an item in a schedule rather than an event.
She smiled when she saw me.
"Yuna.
Good morning.
Or I suppose good night, depending on how you're counting."
"I'm counting it as morning," I said.
"It's more motivating."
She laughed, soft and genuine.
"Fair enough.
Can you hear me clearly?"
"Perfectly.
You?"
"Loud and clear." She settled slightly, folding her hands on the desk in front of her.
"Thank you for staying up for this.
I know the time difference is not ideal."
"It's fine," I said.
"I do some of my best work at bad hours."
"That's what your manager said about you, actually."
I made a mental note to have words with my manager about what he chose to tell people.
"So," Mia said, leaning in slightly.
"Let me give you some context before we get into specifics."
She walked me through it steadily — the album, where it was in production, the overall direction of what Ryo was going for this time around.
The previous album had been bigger, more produced, more constructed.
This one was supposed to be closer.
More personal.
The kind of thing that felt like it had been written by a person rather than assembled by a process.
The love song was going to anchor the second half of the record, she said.
It needed to be the kind of thing that people heard and thought: yes, that is what it actually feels like.
Not the fantasy version.
Not the movie version.
The real one.
"A lot of people think," Mia said, "that to write about love convincingly, you have to have been in it yourself.
That if you haven't had the experience personally, the writing will be hollow.
But I don't believe that.
And Ryo doesn't believe that either.
What you need is understanding.
The ability to see it in other people and recognize what it actually is rather than what it's supposed to look like."
I thought about the spoon.
About the chair moving without anyone asking.
About the look across the table during laughter.
"I see it," I said.
"Not in the way you might expect.
But I see it all around me here.
In the people I'm living with.
In the way they are with each other."
Mia's expression shifted into something warmer.
"Tell me."
So I told her.
About Aunt Rosa and Uncle Ramon — the spoon, the chair, the way they had been doing the same small things for each other for so long that neither of them noticed anymore, which was exactly the point.
About Lily and her enormous, unashamed, completely uncomplicated crush on the neighbor's son, the way she talked about him like he was simply the most interesting person in the world and saw no reason to hide it.
About the way people in this town looked out for each other — the vendor who knew which day Aunt Rosa came and set aside the best tomatoes, the neighbor who left extra guavas at the gate sometimes, Kai knowing where to find me in a market I didn't know without being asked.
The small, constant, ordinary ways people chose each other every day without calling it love because it was just what they did.
Mia listened to all of it without interrupting.
When I finished she was quiet for a second.
Then she said:
"That's the song."
"I haven't written it yet," I said.
"No," she said.
"But you already know what it's about.
The rest is just finding the words."
There was a movement on her side of the screen.
A figure appeared beside her, sliding into frame, and then Ryo was there.
In real life, on a video call, on my phone propped against a stack of books in my aunt's living room at three in the morning.
I had heard his voice on songs so many times that hearing it now out of context felt slightly disorienting, like a word you'd read a hundred times in books suddenly being said out loud.
"Hey," he said.
He looked exactly like himself, which sounds obvious but wasn't — there was no performance in it.
He was just a person at a desk somewhere, a little tired, a little calm, looking at the screen with a straightforward attention.
"Hey," I said, and my voice came out even, which I was quietly relieved about.
"Mia told me what you said," he said.
"About the people you're living with."
"Yeah."
"That's exactly what I was looking for."
He said it simply, without drama, like he was confirming something he had already suspected.
"The thing I keep trying to explain to people," he continued, "is that I don't want a song about falling in love.
I want a song about having it.
About what it looks like when it's been there a long time and it's stopped being a big thing and started being just the way you live.
Like you were describing."
"Like breathing," I said.
He looked at me.
"Yeah," he said.
"Exactly like that."
I wrote it down in the notebook beside me, not because I had forgotten it, but because writing things down was how I made them real.
We talked for a little while longer — about the tempo, the general shape of what the track might feel like, whether it should be sparse or built-out, whether the vulnerability should be stated or implied.
Ryo had opinions but held them loosely, asking questions more than directing, which told me he trusted the process more than he needed to control it.
By the time we wrapped, it was close to four.
Mia ran through the terms clearly and efficiently — alias confirmed, publishing with the label, royalties split per the existing contract, confidentiality until release, my identity stays where it had always been, which was nowhere anyone could see.
Same as always.
Same as every other job.
Except it wasn't the same as every other job.
Because this one was for him.
And this one, I was realizing somewhere quietly, was going to mean something to me in a way I wasn't going to be able to put a clean boundary around.
The call ended.
The screen went dark.
I sat in the living room with my phone in my hand and the notebook open on the cushion beside me and the house completely quiet around me, and I thought about what it meant to spend your whole life giving your best words to other people and having them go out into the world attached to someone else's name.
I thought about how I had always told myself that was fine.
That I was fine with it.
That the work was the point and the name was just a detail.
I thought about that for a while.
Then I picked up the pen.
Opened the notebook to a fresh page.
At the top I wrote: like breathing — and underlined it once.
And then, in the quiet of my aunt's living room at four in the morning while the house slept around me, I started writing a love song for the person who made me feel like maybe I had always understood love without ever having been in it.
I didn't let myself think about what that meant.
Not yet.
I just wrote.
To be continued.