Page 97 of Bearly Out Loud

Not buried under a pseudonym. Not hidden on a private hard drive. Hana’s composition, credited in the titles, listed in production notes, publicly acknowledged for the first time since Vance Reeves had taken her work and her trust and left her rebuilding alone. The piece was spare—a solo piano line that opened into strings, building with the patience of its creator. Hana wrote music carefully, methodically, with a beauty that arrived without announcement because it was too elegant to need one.

Nari glanced sideways. Hana’s hands were in her lap, fingers laced tight, knuckles blanching in the dim light.

The credits rolled. The lights stayed down.

Suki opened her eyes.

“He would have loved this.” Five words. Each one placed with the same care Hideo gave to ink. “He would have loved her voice.”

Nari’s throat closed.

She pressed her grandmother’s hand against her cheek and held it there and did not speak. Speaking was her instrument, her weapon, her birthright. But this was one of those rare moments where words were not the right tool. Her grandmother had heard Hideo’s world speak in Nari’s voice, and the only answer that mattered was the one she gave by holding on tighter.

Akemi was crying into James’s shoulder. James had his arm around her and his jaw was a locked gate; his eyes were wet.The animators wiped their faces with professional discretion. Priya sat at her console, hands flat on her knees, staring at the dark screen with an expression Nari had never seen on her: awe, naked and uncomplicated.

A sound from the back of the room. Small. Strangled.

Reo.

The security operative stood against the back wall, arms folded, breathing measured, staring at a fixed point in the middle distance with the ferocious concentration of a man losing a fight he hadn’t signed up for. His eyes were bright. His throat worked once. His entire body radiated the specific misery of a lethal professional being ambushed by feelings in a public setting.

Takumi, three seats away, turned to look at him.

“You’re a bear shifter with allergies?”

Reo’s jaw flexed. “Dust.”

“Hermetically sealed room.”

Reo’s throat worked again.

“Emotional dust.”

Takumi gave him a brotherly pat. “Allowed.”

FIFTY-ONE

DOJIN

Hana was crying in the corridor.

Not the contained tears from the screening—those she’d processed in real time, with headphones as armor, same as always. These were different. She was standing outside the projection room, laptop bag over her shoulder, tears running unchecked, palms flat against the wall as though the building was the only thing keeping her upright.

He reached her in four steps. Nari reached her in five.

He pulled his sister in. Nari wrapped around both of them from the side—one arm across Hana’s back, the other gripping Dojin’s shirt, her forehead pressed to Hana’s temple. The three of them stood in a hallway that smelled like new carpet and acoustic foam and held on.

Hana’s voice, wrecked: “My name is on it.”

Nari’s, fierce: “Your name is on it. Your music. Your credit. Where it belongs.”

“Vance took—he took everything and I stopped writing fortwo years. I thought I would never?—”

The sentence broke apart. Her shoulders shook.

Dojin held tighter. His bear hummed—not fury, not the roar from the lobby. A den sound. The noise a bear made whenits people were safe and healing and the world had, for once, stopped taking.

Nari pulled back enough to see Hana’s face. “You wrote a piece of music so good that a room full of hardened animation professionals cried. You madeReocry. The man who took a grizzly to the face without flinching.”