The applause from the audience is a distant, meaningless roar, like the sound of the ocean from a shell pressed to my ear. My entire world has collapsed into the four square inches of a postcard. The forged, venomous words stare up at me, a snake coiled in my safe harbor. Reo Kisaragi is the one who caused your accident. He is lying to you.
Reo is at my side in an instant. His eyes find the card, and I feel him go utterly still. The warmth of our shared victory on stage, the triumph of our ad-libbed promise, evaporates, replaced by an arctic cold.
"Don't," he says, his voice a raw, jagged whisper. "Arisa, don't look at it. It's a lie."
But the ink is already seeping into my mind, the poison already spreading. It looks like my handwriting. How can it look so much like my handwriting? He must have traced it, practiced it. He had found a way to weaponize my own most trusted anchor against me.
Haruka-senpai is descending upon us, her face flushed with success. "You two! You were transcendent! Now get ready for Act Three, the finale!"
I can't move. I can't breathe. How can I go back on stage and play the part of a princess who trusts her knight when the foundation of that trust has just been dynamited?
Reo makes the decision for us. He gently takes the poisoned postcard from my trembling fingers and slides it into his pocket. He then turns to Haruka-senpai, his face a mask of polite, princely composure that doesn't betray the sheer fury I can feel radiating off him.
"Haruka-senpai," he says, his voice impossibly calm. "Tsukimi-san is feeling unwell. A sudden wave of stage fright. I believe it would be best for her understudy to take over for the final act. Please, convey our deepest apologies to the audience."
Before Haruka-senpai can even process this, Reo has his hand on my arm, and he is steering me away from the stage, away from the lights, away from the catastrophic aftermath of Itsuki's attack. We move through the backstage labyrinth and out a side door, into the cool evening air.
We don't stop until we reach the rooftop.
Our sanctuary is quiet now, deserted. The celebratory noise of the festival below is a muted, festive hum. The sky is a deep twilight blue, pricked with the first few stars. But the peace of the place feels tainted, violated.
"He stole it from my room," I whisper, my voice hollow. "How did he get into my room?"
"The landlord, the spare key, picking a lock… it doesn't matter how," Reo says, his voice tight with a rage he's struggling to contain. "What matters is that it's a lie. He's trying to isolate you, to make you doubt the only thing you have." He turns to me, his eyes dark with an urgency that borders on desperation. "Arisa, listen to me. This feeling you have right now? The trust you feel in me? It's real. Your instincts, the ones that helped you on the stairs, the ones that knew where to look during rehearsal—they know the truth. You have to believe them over a piece of paper."
But doubt is a subtle, creeping poison. The logical part of my brain, the part that wakes up fresh every morning with no emotional context, rears its head. How do you know he's not the liar? Itsuki has been nothing but polite to you. Reo is the one with the intense, overwhelming connection. Maybe it's a connection born of guilt.
Tears well in my eyes. "But I won't remember this conversation tomorrow, will I?" I say, my voice breaking. "I'll wake up. I'll do the video. But then I'll find that postcard. I'll have no memory of our play, of our promise, of this. I'll just have that one, terrible sentence in my own handwriting. And I… I will have no choice but to believe it."
The full, horrifying brilliance of Itsuki's plan settles over us. He hadn't just sabotaged the play; he had sabotaged tomorrow. He has engineered it so that when I wake up, my first encounter with the idea of Reo Kisaragi will be as a potential enemy, the cause of my pain. He's turning my own system of trust against itself.
The silence that follows is the heaviest I have ever experienced. Reo just stares at me, and I see a profound, soul-deep despair in his eyes. He is completely helpless. He can build me a new routine, write a new script, but he can't stop me from reading the words that are waiting for me on my own nightstand.
"We have to get it," I say, a frantic urgency in my voice. "We have to go to my house right now and destroy that postcard before I fall asleep."
Reo's face is grim. "He wouldn't be that sloppy. He knows we saw it. He would have gone back to your room and switched it, putting the original back. When you look, you'll find nothing out of place. He'll wait. He'll wait a day, a week, and then one night, when we least expect it, he will swap it out. Or he has more forgeries ready. We can't search your room every single night. The doubt… it will always be there now. A time bomb."
He's right. The attack isn't just the forged message; it's the constant, looming threat that it could appear at any time. The trust has been fractured.
I slide down to the ground, my back against the cool concrete of a ventilation unit, and pull my knees to my chest. The princess dress feels ridiculous now, a costume for a fairy tale that has turned into a horror story. I will go to sleep tonight, and the girl who wakes up tomorrow will be betrayed by my own hand.
Reo is quiet for a long time. Then, he sits down on the ground, not too close, but near enough that I feel his presence like a shield.
"Okay," he says, his voice stripped of all emotion except a raw, steely resolve. "Okay. We plan for it."
"Plan for what?" I ask, my voice muffled. "We can't stop him."
"No," he says. "But we can prepare for the interrogation."
I look up at him, confused.
"Tomorrow morning," he explains, his eyes fixed on the distant city lights. "You will wake up. You will watch the video. You might read the real postcard, or you might read the forgery. Either way, you will come up to this rooftop, because that is the core of the routine. You'll be confused. Scared. You'll be looking at me like I am a monster." He finally turns to look at me, his gaze so intense it feels like it could physically hold me together.
"So I will treat it like an interrogation. I won't touch you. I won't assume anything. I will stand on the other side of this roof. I will answer every single question the postcard puts in your head. I will bring evidence. I will have Nami on standby to be a witness. I will have a written, signed testimony from your brother. I will treat you not like the Arisa I know, but like a skeptical, terrified stranger I have to win over from scratch, with nothing