Chapter 3: The Bottle of Yesterday's Courage

"You're back," Ms. Sakamoto said, without surprise.

"Your products are defective."

"My products are precise. You're the one who's defective." She said this kindly, the way a doctor tells you to lose weight. "What happened to your hand?"

Kenji explained. Ms. Sakamoto listened, polishing her glasses on her apron.

"The talent was real," she said. "The problem is you wanted a shortcut to mastery. Mastery costs time. The packet gave you the destination without the journey, and your body couldn't survive the trip." She replaced her glasses. "This is, generally speaking, the human condition."

"Then what's the point of any of this?" Kenji gestured at the shelves.

"The point," said Ms. Sakamoto, "is that people keep coming back. Which tells me the products aren't the problem."

On a bottom shelf, half-hidden behind a tower of instant ramen, was a small glass bottle with a handwritten label: YESTERDAY'S COURAGE -- 200ml. Shake well. Do not operate heavy machinery.

"That one," Kenji said.

"That one is dangerous."

"More dangerous than permanent hand damage?"

"Different dangerous. The other products gave you something you'd lost. This one makes you do something you're afraid of." She paused. "Right now. Today. Whatever you've been avoiding."

Kenji bought it for 500 yen, the most expensive item yet.

He drank it on the same platform where he'd missed the train two weeks ago. It tasted like black coffee and adrenaline.

Within twenty minutes, he was standing outside Yuki Hasegawa's apartment.

Yuki. His ex-wife. The woman who had looked at him across a courtroom table and said, "The worst thing about you isn't that you're lazy. It's that you're lazy about us."

He rang the doorbell.

She opened the door in sweatpants and a university T-shirt, holding a mug of tea, and her face went through seven expressions in two seconds -- surprise, annoyance, curiosity, suspicion, sadness, anger, and finally, the one that hurt most, indifference.

"Kenji. It's nine-thirty on a Wednesday."

"I know. I'm sorry. I need to say something."

"You could have called."

"If I'd called, I wouldn't have said it. I have approximately --" he checked his watch, calculating the courage's half-life "-- maybe forty minutes before I lose my nerve entirely."

Something in her face softened, just slightly. She stepped aside.

Her apartment smelled like jasmine and new paint. There were books he didn't recognize on shelves he hadn't built. A man's jacket hung by the door, and Kenji's stomach dropped, but the courage kept him upright.

"You were right," he said. "About everything. I was lazy about us. I was lazy about my whole life. I had a novel in me and I threw it away. I could play piano and I quit. I had you and I --"

His voice cracked.

"Kenji," Yuki said softly.

"I'm not here to win you back. I just needed you to know that the failure was mine, and I see it now, and I'm sorry."

Yuki set down her mug. Her eyes were wet.

"The jacket is my brother's," she said. "He's staying while his apartment is renovated."

Kenji felt the courage draining, a warmth leaving his chest like bathwater cooling.

"Oh," he said.

"But Kenji? You should go. Because what you just said -- you need to mean it tomorrow, too. When the brave version of you wears off."

She knew. She'd always known him better than he knew himself.

He walked home in the cold, the empty bottle in his coat pocket, wondering if he'd remember any of this in the morning.

He did.

Every word.