Chapter 44 - An Echo Down the Line

"You think you're the one who's been hurt the most here?" Bayu's tone stayed controlled, but every word came out sharp, cutting straight through the breath caught in Rimba's throat. "You only know your own anger and your own pride. You never once tried to find out why Kak Michi hid that band from you so desperately. You never even asked."

Rimba sat frozen stiff in his desk chair. His fingers gripped the phone so tightly his knuckles went white. "What do you mean, Bayu?" he asked, choked, his voice nearly a whisper against the cold hum of the studio's air conditioning.

On the other end of the line, Bayu paused for a moment, as if carefully weighing his next words before releasing them. "You only knew Kak Michi as the neat, perfect conservatory student in Professor Hans's eyes. But you never knew that behind that grand piano, she was carrying an enormous fear every single time she was near you. She was scared, Swara. Scared that if you found out she played drums in an indie band, you'd look down on her. That you'd leave her because of your high classical music standards."

The sentence struck Rimba like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky.

"She never once meant to play games with your trust," Bayu continued, his tone still flat but no longer entirely under control. "She just got trapped between two worlds she loved equally: your grand classical world, and the free world where she could be herself without any pressure. And the night you threw her out... you destroyed both of them at once."

Rimba couldn't answer. The oxygen in the room seemed to vanish all at once, leaving behind an unbearable tightness crushing his chest.

"She flew to Vienna, and it wasn't to go have fun chasing some new stage," Bayu's voice dropped lower still, but landed with precision. "She left with her heart shattered into pieces, holding back tears alone at the airport, carrying the weight of guilt because the person she loved most threw her away just like that without wanting to hear her explanation. If you keep feeding your ego and your past trauma just to judge her... get ready to lose Kak Michi forever, Swara."

Before the call could cut off entirely, Bayu's voice broke in again, calmer this time but still firm. "I'm sending you her address in Vienna. Not because I trust you completely now. But because Kak Michi deserves the chance to hear your explanation in person, if you're actually serious about going after her." A text message containing the address of an apartment near the conservatory landed on Rimba's phone the very same second.

Click.

The call cut off unilaterally. A soft, grating busy tone rang in Rimba's ear, replacing Bayu's voice on the other end.

The phone slowly slid from Rimba's grip, falling onto the pile of score paper on his desk. The man sat frozen in his studio chair, staring blankly at the studio wall covered in scrawled musical notation. Bayu's words kept spinning endlessly through his head, shattering every last defense he had worked so hard to build.

All this time, he had felt like the victim of a betrayal. He had used his old wound—the rotten image of his father's double life—as a shield to judge Michi without mercy. He had let the ghost of his past punish someone who had actually loved him sincerely. Michi wasn't his father; the girl had never once meant to play games on a foundation of lies—she had simply gotten trapped in the fear of losing herself.

Now, the mirror in front of him lay shattered into pieces, revealing a truth far more painful: that his greatest fear of deception had turned him into someone cruel, someone who had disregarded the purest, most sincere honesty he'd ever been offered. He thought of every excuse he'd told himself over the past two weeks—that he was protecting his own dignity, that he was simply enforcing a principle he'd sworn to as a boy—and saw them now for exactly what they actually were: a grown man hiding behind an old wound so he wouldn't have to feel the new one.

Outside the studio, the night's drizzle grew heavier, tapping against the window glass in a slow, drifting rhythm. Rimba rose from his chair with unsteady, dragging steps. His feet carried him outside toward the studio's wet veranda. He tilted his face up toward Yogyakarta's gray night sky, then reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out a small object he had kept tucked away tightly all this time—a guitar pick belonging to Michi, left behind on his desk months ago.

He clenched the pick tightly in his palm until its plastic corner dug into his skin, letting the physical pain match the ache in his chest, a small, deliberate penance for two weeks of silence he could never fully take back.

On the other side of the world, in the middle of the freezing city of Vienna, he knew his girl was struggling alone to piece her own broken heart back together, unaware that thousands of kilometers away, the wall he'd built against her was finally starting to come down. And that night, under a downpour that disguised the tears of his own regret, Rimba made a major decision: he would not let distance, ego, and his own foolishness rob him of the one and only home where his soul truly belonged.

He stood there on the wet veranda for a long while after that, letting the rain soak through his shirt without moving to find shelter, running through every version of the apology he was going to have to make—none of which felt like enough, none of which felt like they could undo the look on her face the night the mask fell away. But standing still, doing nothing, felt like the one thing he could no longer afford. Somewhere behind him, on the desk he'd just left, Bayu's text still glowed on his phone screen, an address in a city he'd never been to, waiting for him to be brave enough to use it. He went back inside eventually, dripping onto the studio floor, and started searching flights to Vienna before he could talk himself out of it.