A few days later, on Saturday evening.
After Kikuchi-san and I got off work, we were meeting at a café in Omiya.
“Huh?! You met with the editor?!”
“Y-yes. I went to Jinbocho for the meeting…”
“Ohhh…”
I let out a breath. Just a specific place name really made it sink in. Kikuchi-san was getting steadily closer to her dream.
✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦
“How are things going?”
“They said they’ve read everything that I’ve posted online so far, and they can use the first part as is, so they want me to keep writing it, with the plan for it to be published…”
“They’re planning to publish it?!”
“They said that if I could make it in time, it might be good to try aiming for a September publication date.”
“Hold on—this was a serious discussion!” I was getting more and more enthusiastic.
“Um, they said that of course, it depends on the quality of the story, but we had to establish a deadline, or we wouldn’t get anywhere…”
“I see… Wow, your book’s getting published…”
Kikuchi-san seemed somehow hesitant, her eyes lowering. “So…I tried telling them.”
“Hmm? Telling them what?”
“…That I wanted to completely change the model for Alucia’s character.”
“Huh?” My cup made a cold clink against the saucer.
She was clearly doing this out of concern for Hinami. That made sense.
“But…then…” The brilliance of that story would be lost.
After the cultural festival, we’d interviewed multiple people to build Alucia’s character. Kikuchi-san’s insight and the spirit of the creation were all there in her.
“I think that if I leave things as they are…I won’t be able to continue the story. The Alucia inside me now…is inseparable from Hinami-san. And if I still don’t know the truth, I really can’t.”
Meeting up with an editor, who then suggested a specific publication date—hardly anything could be more exciting and desirable for an aspiring novelist.
But even with wonderful things falling into her lap one after another, Kikuchi-san remained gloomy. It was like she’d been cursed instead. “Even if I keep writing, if I don’t know the depths of her character, I won’t be able to resolve all the threads I’ve introduced.”
She was just that determined to take her creation seriously as an author. When she’d made the decision to seriously pursue her dream of being a professional, and when the talk of publication fell into her lap, she must have decided—
—that she would be sincere with her stories.
“But…”
Would she be able to give up so easily on what she’d been writing all this time?
“Don’t you still want to write Alucia how she originally was?” I asked.
Kikuchi-san pressed her lips in a line for just a moment, then eventually opened them. “…Honestly, I do want to write it. But I figured that it doesn’t have to be right now.”
“How so?”
“If the publication of this book goes well, then they might put out a new book of mine, right?”
“Well…that is possible.”
“And honestly, if I really want to make a living as a novelist, if I want to be like Michael Andi…I think I need to become someone who can write on for a long time.” She spoke smoothly, without pausing to think. “And I think I can.”
She was giving me her reasons very clearly, and she was talking a lot more than usual.
As I listened to what she was saying, I was thinking.
“I don’t have to put everything I want to write in my first book.”
It had been less than six months since we had begun dating, but I’d been trying to take our relationship seriously, so I could tell.
“If there’s going to be another chance, then I should actually get used to writing before I put my feelings into that story—”
She’d thought about all this long before she decided to tell me.
“I still have lots of time, so I was thinking it would be best for me to work hard at what I can do right now.”
She must have repeated it over and over in her head.