Sayuri stands in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom at 2 a.m., belly softly rounded with their second child, wearing nothing but the faint silver stretch marks that map every place her body has loved and been loved.
She stares at herself the way she used to stare at magazine covers twenty years ago: searching for flaws, waiting for the familiar voice that always told her she wasn't enough.
The voice is silent tonight.
She is forty-two years old and has never felt more beautiful.
Her breasts are heavier than they were in her idol days, nipples darker, areolas wider from nursing Haru and soon another baby.
Her waist is thicker, hips wider, thighs soft and dimpled.
There are fine lines at the corners of her eyes from laughing too hard at Mika's terrible jokes and from crying happy tears when Kai proposed with a simple silver ring he forged himself in the barn.
She used to hate this body for betraying her: for swelling when she wanted to stay tiny and camera-ready, for sagging when the spotlight moved on, for existing when her husband stopped looking.
Now she loves every changed inch of it.
Because this body gave Kai a daughter who has his stubborn chin and her smile.
Because this body can still make Mika (strong, unbreakable Mika) whimper and beg when Sayuri kisses her way down those powerful abs.
Because this body is the first thing Kai reaches for every morning and the last thing he holds every night, like he's afraid it might disappear if he lets go.
Sayuri cups her breasts gently, feels the pleasant ache that means they're filling again for the new life inside her.
She thinks about the girl she was at nineteen: starving herself for a debut that never came, smiling for cameras while men twice her age leered, believing love was something you earned by being pretty and quiet.
That girl would not recognize the woman in the mirror.
This woman wakes up tangled in two sets of arms and never once feels alone.
This woman can make the strongest woman in the village melt with a single slow lick.
This woman carried a stranger's hospital debt in secret for months because loving Kai meant loving every part of him, even the parts that still carried guilt.
Sometimes, in the quiet moments when Kai is out in the fields and Mika is bathing Haru and the house is still, Sayuri lets herself feel the terror.
What if this is a dream and I wake up back in that cold convenience-store apartment, counting coins for cup ramen while my husband fucks someone else in Tokyo?
What if I get too big, too old, too ordinary, and Kai's eyes start wandering the way every other man's did?
What if the baby comes and I turn into the invisible mother I swore I'd never be?
Then the terror passes.
Because Kai has never once made her feel ordinary.
He still looks at her like she's the only woman in the world even when Mika is naked beside her.
He still kisses her stretch marks and calls them "lightning bolts from the gods."
He still fucks her slow and deep when she needs to feel cherished and bends her over the kitchen counter when she needs to feel filthy, and somehow it's always exactly what her soul is asking for.
And Mika: God, Mika.
Sayuri smiles at her reflection, cheeks flushing at the memory of strong, callused hands spreading her thighs last night, of a rough voice whispering "You taste like home" while a tongue fucked her senseless.
Mika makes her feel safe in a way no man ever has.
Mika makes her feel powerful, because the strongest woman Sayuri knows loses every ounce of control the moment Sayuri's lips close around her clit.
They are not rivals.
They are mirrors.
One soft, one hard. One silk, one steel. Both finally, finally seen.
Sayuri presses a hand to her belly, feels the tiny flutter that might be a kick or might be her imagination.
I used to think I had to be perfect to be loved, she tells the woman in the mirror.
Look at me now.
Imperfect.
Pregnant for the second time at forty-two.
Covered in flour from dinner, smelling like earth from helping Mika in the fields, with bite marks on my neck and Kai's cum still leaking out of me from an hour ago.
And I have never been more loved in my entire life.
She smiles: slow, radiant, certain.
The girl in the magazines is dead.
Long live the woman who gets to wake up every morning in a bed that is never empty, in a house that echoes with laughter instead of silence, in a body that is finally, truly home.
Sayuri turns off the light, crawls back into bed between the two people who rewrote her story, and lets herself be held.
Tomorrow there will be diapers and rice planting and probably another round of Mika pinning her against the barn wall while Kai watches and strokes himself.
Tonight there is for this one quiet truth she finally believes with every cell in her body:
I am enough.
I have always been enough.
And the universe gave me a whole village of proof.
She falls asleep smiling, one hand on her belly, the other tangled in Mika's hair, Kai's steady heartbeat under her cheek.
The idols were wrong.
This: this messy, loud, overflowing life: is the real spotlight.
And Sayuri finally, gloriously, gets to stand in it forever.
To be continued…