【Novel】To be continued～Chapter 1 — Despair in Everyday Life～

April 2025, Tokyo.

The silence of midnight was broken by the cold, mechanical click of a mouse.

On the screen, the words “Purchase Complete” appeared.

—A ticket to Bali, September 2025.

As I stared at the blue light glowing from the screen, burned into my eyes, I noticed my fingertips trembling slightly.

“…This is the right choice.”

My quiet words disappeared into the damp air of my room.

Perhaps this was the last instinctive struggle of a woman who had believed that the brightest seasons of her life had already passed, and that she had entered the stage of simply enduring what remained.

My mind and body had fallen apart.

And the only place that could save me was that island I had returned to for nearly twenty years.

Not because I wanted someone to comfort me.

Not because I was running away.

I moved my fingers across the keyboard in the stillness of the night because I wanted to find my own wings again.

Because I wanted to return to myself.

Looking back, my body had already reached its limit.

It all began in the summer of 2024.

The season when I was about to turn 46.

My name is Rio.

I have worked for many years as a specialist handling numbers at a healthcare-related company.

The company proudly declares its mission is to save people's lives.

But behind that admirable philosophy, the reality inside the organization was far from ideal.

The cracks within an organization slowly consume the people inside it.

The organization’s distortion began to take a toll on people’s lives.

More and more colleagues became mentally exhausted and took leave from work.

And then, one day, one employee never came back.

That moment shattered something deep inside me.

After the police investigation was completed, the company handled the situation with surprising speed.

And on the notice board, only a few cold words remained.

I stared at that empty space filled with indifference and found myself unable to speak.

I wanted to change those days.

Perhaps I should have simply changed jobs.

But somewhere inside me, I still held on to a fragile hope—that maybe, someday, this company would change.

I compiled a brutally honest internal report exposing what was happening within the organization.

No one asked me to do it.

It was an impulse I could no longer control.

But my body had already begun its own rebellion several days before I submitted that report.

One day, while I was out shopping, I suddenly felt a dull pain in my leg.

When I returned home, it had swollen abnormally red, and I could barely walk.

I visited a nearby clinic.

Then a university hospital.

I underwent examination after examination.

But the only answer I received was four words:

“Unknown cause.”

For more than six months after that, I was unable to walk on my own feet.

My body had gone far beyond its limits, and I was forced to work from home.

Even while enduring constant pain, I continued to deliver work with the same level of quality as before.

And yet, the evaluation I received from the company was the lowest possible.

“Because you cannot come to the office, there are limits to the work you can handle.”

With those unreasonable words disguised as an explanation, the career and pride I had built over the years were dismissed so easily.

Beyond anger, what remained was emptiness.

Struggling in the darkness, I endured that unreasonable treatment for an entire year.

I truly believed my life was over.

I believed it with all my heart.

Every day was filled with despair and loneliness.

The tears never seemed to run dry.

Then, one day, when a slightly warmer breeze passed through the air, I visited a newly opened pain clinic.

The doctor was a woman with short hair and a straightforward way of speaking.

From a specialist’s perspective, she calmly explained the true cause of the pain that even the orthopedic doctors had failed to recognize.

That day, my treatment began.

Recovery came one small step at a time.

As I slowly regained my daily life, I asked her to prepare a medical certificate so that I could properly explain my condition to the company.

The pain that had been treated vaguely until then was finally organized into medical terms.

For the first time, I was able to present it to my company as a fact.

The suffering I had endured—dismissed again and again as something psychological or “just in my head”—was finally acknowledged as a physical reality.

But it was not only the medical certificate that saved me.

Because of her warm and approachable personality, I found myself naturally talking with her about my work, my worries, and my heart.

Without realizing it, I had begun sharing the things I had kept buried inside.

My life, which had been standing still in the darkness, finally began to move forward again, even if only a little.

—I was not someone whose life would end here, consumed by this unreasonable organization and trapped in this darkness.

The sea of that island.
The winds that embraced it.

They would wrap around everything I had lost and heal me.

I could reset.

I could surely return to the person I had always been.

“People have to find happiness while they are still alive.
Not someday.
But now.”

That was why I did not want to lose sight of the things my heart truly whispered, “I want this.”

If I still had paid leave, I would use it.

If I could go, I would go.

I would think about everything else later.

That was the feeling I carried when I clicked the mouse in the silence of that midnight.

I had no idea that this single ticket would become the beginning of a countdown.

A countdown that would lead me to Sanur, Bali, and to three unforgettable days with a tall man whose words went beyond language.

A countdown that would completely rewrite the story of my life.

At that moment, I still had no idea what was waiting for me.

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