Chapter 58 - A Talk With Mama

Maharani's dance studio was still lit even though the hour had grown late, dim lights illuminating the wooden floor her students usually used to practice Pakarena dance in the afternoons. The building was otherwise silent, the kind of silence that only settles into a place built for music and movement once both have gone quiet for the night. Rimba found his mother alone there, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the empty room, staring silently at the large mirror reflecting her own image back at her.

"Not asleep yet, Ma?" Rimba stepped inside, sitting down on the floor not far from his mother.

"Hard to sleep with a head this full of thoughts." Maharani turned, smiling thinly at the sight of her eldest son's tired face, far more tired than he usually let show. "You look the same way, Rim. What's wrong?"

For a few moments, Rimba simply sat still, staring at his own reflection in the mirror, trying to arrange words that had felt too heavy to say out loud for weeks.

"Papa's back, Ma," he finally said, quietly, the words coming out heavier than he'd expected. "He tried to use my name, even Michi's name, for his political campaign. When I refused, he said... he'd keep finding a way, with or without my permission."

Maharani's face didn't change drastically, only the light in her eyes dimming for a moment, as though she'd already suspected that shadow would resurface sooner or later.

"And now you're distancing yourself from Michi..." she continued quietly, not a question, but a statement she had already understood for a while now, from the shift in her son's demeanor lately.

Rimba lowered his head, his hands gripping the hem of his own shirt, unable to look his mother in the eye. "I'm scared, Ma. I'm scared that if I stay close to her, everything I love is going to end up destroyed too, exactly like what happened to you back then. I don't want to become like Papa. But I also don't know how to make sure I won't repeat the same mistake."

Maharani let out a long breath, shifting closer, placing her hand gently on Rimba's shoulder. "Rim, listen to Mama carefully." Her voice was calm, but full of a firmness that had always managed to settle Rimba's heart since he was a child. "Mama never left your father because love failed. Mama left him because Mama chose to stop enduring something that had stopped being healthy—for Mama, and for the two of you."

"But in the end our family still fell apart," Rimba countered, his voice trembling.

"What fell apart was Mama's marriage to your father, not love itself." Maharani looked at her son intently, unwavering. "You're wrong if you think love automatically ends in ruin, Rim. What destroyed our household was your father's choices—his decision to chase power, to lie, to never be honest about what actually mattered. Not because loving someone naturally has to end badly."

Rimba fell silent, letting those words sink in slowly, though they still felt somewhat foreign to his ears.

"You're not your father, sweetheart." Maharani's voice softened, gentler now than it had been a moment ago. "You've proven that over and over, even without realizing it. The way you look after your sister, the way you fight for your own dreams without wanting to touch Papa's dirty money, the way you tried to protect Michi, even if your method was wrong this time—all of that has shown you're different. The difference isn't that you're never afraid. The difference is that you still choose the right path, even while afraid."

"So what should I do now, Ma?" Rimba asked, his voice now sounding more like a lost child than the confident young composer who usually performed on stage. "If I get close to Michi again, Papa's just going to keep finding ways to use her."

"Distance isn't a way of protecting, Rim. It's a way of giving up." Maharani took both of her son's hands, holding them tightly, her grip steady and sure. "You can't control what your father does. But you can choose what kind of person you want to be in the middle of all of it—someone who runs and lets the person he loves get hurt because of lies, or someone brave enough to be honest, to stand beside them, and face whatever comes together."

Rimba looked at his mother for a long time, feeling something that had settled heavy in his chest for weeks slowly start to loosen.

"Michi must hate me right now," he murmured quietly, almost to himself.

"If she truly loves you, she'll hate a lie far more than a painful truth." Maharani smiled faintly, warmly, stroking her son's hair the way she used to when Rimba was still small. "Go home to her, sweetheart. Not with a perfect answer. Just with honesty."

That night, for the first time in years, Rimba felt a little lighter—not because his problem was solved, but because he had finally found the courage to stop facing it alone, in a room full of mirrors that had, for once, shown him something true.

He sat there with his mother a while longer after that, neither of them in any hurry to break the quiet that had settled over the studio, the mirrors around them reflecting two figures who, for once, looked less like a mother comforting a frightened son and more like two people who had both, in their own time, learned the same hard lesson about what love was actually supposed to cost. Maharani didn't offer him a plan for what to say to Michi, or how to word an apology that might undo two weeks of silence. She simply let him sit there, in the dim light of the practice room, until he was ready to stand up on his own and go find out, the way she'd let him find his own footing after every hard thing since he was a boy.