I grabbed a conglomerate heiress's hand and stopped her anger.
Even I only started thinking about why I'd done it after I'd grabbed her.
Koyomi's wrist was startlingly thin, and cold.
It was the first time I'd been the one to take her hand. Always, I was the one being looked after, having teacups set down for me, having gloves laid out. It was always Koyomi who offered, and I just received.
That hand, I'd stopped.
"...My god?"
Koyomi looked up at me with her gray eyes. Her face was bewildered less by being grabbed than by the fact that I didn't want this.
Without quite being able to put it into words, I opened my mouth.
"Please don't. Don't cut off that company."
"Why?"
Koyomi's voice grew just slightly sharp.
"That person laughed at your story, my god. And still you defend him?"
"I'm not defending Shota."
I shook my head.
"That company doesn't just have Shota's father. There are lots of people working there, right? At the factory, hauling materials, printing, families eating on those paychecks."
Koyomi fell silent.
"Those people didn't laugh at my stories. They don't even know my name. They live their whole lives somewhere that has nothing to do with what Shota did to me."
A line from a story I'd written suddenly surfaced in my head.
Live, even if you have to crawl through the mud—that was what I'd been writing all along. That I'd fully affirm the people who tried to live even when they were miserable, even when it never paid off. That I wanted to be on the side of people at the very bottom of this world, covered in mud, still waiting for tomorrow.
For the sake of a guy like that, Koyomi was trying to crush someone's livelihood from above, out of a personal grudge. People who hauled materials at the factory. People who typed up invoices. People feeding their kids on those paychecks. A great many people who didn't know my face or my name.
"That's the complete opposite of everything I've been writing."
Through my palm, I felt the strength draining from Koyomi's hand.
"Him laughing at me is his problem. It's no reason for me to crush his father's company. Much less a reason to drag down the lives of people working there whose faces I don't even know."
I gently let go of the hand I'd been holding.
"I'm glad you feel that way, Koyomi. I know you're really angry for my sake. ...But please don't use that anger to sink people who have nothing to do with it into the mud. I don't want to think my god is someone who'd do something like that."
As soon as I said it, I felt embarrassed. When I was the one being called a god.
Koyomi didn't move for a while.
Eventually, Koyomi set her phone down on the desk.
She gently closed the gray documents, too.
"...You are an unfair person, my god."
Koyomi said it softly. Her hair fell over her lowered cheek, and I couldn't see her expression.
"I had decided I would never forgive anyone who laughed at you. I thought that was how I would protect you."
When Koyomi raised her face, her eyes were moist. Not sub-zero. They were those eyes with light in them, the ones she had when she talked about my stories.
"And yet you worry about the families of the person who laughed at you."
Koyomi smiled. With a face on the verge of tears.
"Because you are that kind of person—I think that is why your stories moved my heart."
I couldn't say anything.
What I'd been writing probably wasn't great writing. They were unpolished, gritty stories that it was only natural to laugh at. But the live I'd written in them, at least, wasn't a lie. And Koyomi was the person who'd found that lack of lies before anyone else.
Then I had to live the way those words said. So I wouldn't be ashamed of the live I'd written.
"I understand. I will not lay a hand on that company. If that is what you say, my god."
Koyomi put the gray documents away in the desk drawer.
The blade of the personal grudge had been returned to its sheath. I was relieved.
This was fine, I thought. I didn't want to see Koyomi destroy someone's life. I didn't want to let her hands get dirty with something like that. My god was the person who'd read my stories in the deepest place. Those hands weren't meant for sinking people.
But just as she was closing the drawer, Koyomi added one thing, in a small voice.
"—Even if I do nothing."
Across her profile surfaced something I didn't know, like a quiet certainty.