Chapter 57 - The One Quietly Watching

Michi hadn't spoken much since that night in the studio. She still went to her classes as usual, still smiled in front of her parents, still answered every question at the dinner table the way she always had, but Bayu—who had grown up learning to read his sister since childhood—knew perfectly well that something was wrong behind that thin, forced smile.

He didn't ask right away. Bayu wasn't the type to push someone to talk before they were ready, a restraint he'd learned the hard way after his first, clumsy attempt to interrogate Rimba in this same basement months earlier. But this time, he pointed his old habit—following political news, digging through the track records of public figures purely as material for casual class debates—toward one name that had kept appearing on his social media timeline these past few weeks: Surya Pratama.

That night, in his room, Bayu sat for hours combing through old news archives, political discussion forums, even old posts from anonymous accounts that had once buzzed with gossip about young politicians' private lives, his desk lamp the only light left on in the whole house. He found something that caught his attention—an old opinion piece, written not long after Surya and Maharani's divorce, that vaguely mentioned how the politician was suspected of once pressuring other parties through unofficial channels to smooth over his personal affairs, including making sure his ex-wife "didn't say much to the media" during their separation.

There was no solid legal evidence in the article, only speculation and anonymous testimony that had never been further verified. But to Bayu, sitting alone in the glow of his desk lamp, the pattern felt far too familiar to what he'd lately suspected was happening to his sister.

The following afternoon, he went to the campus basement studio without telling anyone, finding Rimba alone as usual, sitting in front of the keyboard with an empty stare.

"Swara," he greeted, closing the door behind him. Rimba turned, startled to see his girlfriend's brother show up without Michi.

"Bayu? What's wrong?"

Bayu didn't rush to answer. He stepped inside, pulled out an empty chair, and sat across from Rimba with a manner far calmer than usual—no longer the interrogating tone from before, but something heavier.

"Kak Michi hasn't told me anything," he finally said, "but I know she's hurting because of you. And I'm also pretty sure this has something to do with your father."

Rimba's jaw clenched. "This isn't your business, Bayu."

"Wrong." Bayu's tone stayed flat, but this time there was no hostility in it. "This is my business too, because the one hurting is my sister." He pulled out his phone, showing the screen with the old article he'd found the night before. "I don't know the details—what threat your father made against you. But I know this isn't the first time he's played the people around him for his own interests."

Rimba stared at that screen, his eyes quickly reading sentence after sentence, his chest tightening again remembering the conversation at the hotel café a few weeks earlier.

"Why did you go digging for this?" Rimba asked quietly, his voice trembling between shock and shame.

"Because I don't like watching someone I'd started to consider pretty serious about my sister suddenly turn into a sacrifice for someone else's problems." Bayu put his phone away, looking straight at Rimba without blinking. "You think that by distancing yourself from Kak Michi, you're protecting her? All you're really doing is making her think she's not important enough for you to trust."

The line struck him dead center. Rimba lowered his head, his hands clenching over his thighs, unable to argue with a truth he'd been avoiding for weeks.

"I'm scared, Bay," he finally admitted, a tone he rarely let out in front of anyone besides Michi, his voice dropping lower than usual. "I'm scared that if I stay close to her, my father's just going to keep looking for ways to use her, or worse, drag your family's name into my mess."

"So the solution is you quietly pulling away, without even telling her why?" Bayu shook his head slowly, not unkindly, but firm. "That's not a solution, Swara. That's just making two people suffer alone, separately." He rose from his chair, walking toward the door, but stopped for a moment before actually stepping out. "I'm not going to tell Kak Michi about this. That's your right to explain yourself. But if you keep staying silent until everything falls apart, don't blame me if I end up stepping in myself."

He walked out, leaving Rimba alone with the question he had been avoiding all this time—no longer whether he was capable of protecting Michi from his father, but whether silence itself might turn out to be a deeper wound than the honesty he had feared from the very beginning of all this, all along.

He sat there for a long while after Bayu had gone, the old article still glowing faintly in his mind even though the phone screen was long out of sight. There was something almost unbearable about hearing his own fear laid out so plainly by someone who, only months ago, had barely tolerated his presence in this same room. He thought about how easily Bayu had seen through the excuse he'd built for himself—that distance was protection, that silence was mercy—and wondered how he'd managed to convince himself of it for this long. Somewhere underneath the shame, a smaller, steadier thought was starting to take shape: that maybe the bravest thing he could do wasn't finding a way to shield Michi from his father at all, but finally telling her the truth and letting her decide, together with him, how they were going to face it. It occurred to him, sitting alone in that empty studio, that he'd spent so long trying to be nothing like his father that he'd ended up copying the one habit that mattered most: deciding, on someone else's behalf, what they were allowed to know.