Natasha was gone, but Bella's days looked much the same as before—except that the two of them were now talking on the phone with a frequency that would have seemed excessive to anyone watching. Any small, random thing became an excuse to call, and whatever it was could reliably occupy the two of them for a good half hour.
In her spare time, Bella continued following the Yashida family's situation from a distance.
She couldn't see where it was all heading—and neither, it seemed, could anyone else. The circumstances were simply too chaotic to extrapolate from.
Shingen Yashida had exhumed his father's body and ordered a formal forensic examination. The coroner's report, when released publicly, confirmed it: the old bastard had been dead for several days longer than the official announcement had stated. His death had been concealed using advanced technology. Shingen immediately went on record declaring the will invalid—a dead man couldn't sign a will—and asserted his own uncontested right to the family's corporate holdings.
Meanwhile, as the family's third-generation heir, Mariko Yashida fought back through every media platform available to her. She gave impassioned interviews about the bond she and her grandfather had shared. Nobody was entirely sure what she'd said to Logan, exactly, but she kept showing up beside him at public events—and somehow the man, who had the attention span of someone recovering from a significant head injury, continued to follow her lead. She leaned hard into the family legend that the old patriarch had once vowed: If a daughter, marry her to you; if no daughter, a granddaughter; if no granddaughter, a great-granddaughter. The obligation, she argued, now fell to Logan.
Logan, baffled but apparently not displeased, found himself with a fiancée and—on paper, at least—a claim to billions of dollars in assets.
That development drew out a third party: Mariko's former fiancé, Japan's Minister of Justice. He came forward with his own counter-claim, insisting that the patriarch's family decree had named him, not Logan, as the intended husband. As a senior government official, he had the judiciary infrastructure to back that argument up.
Shingen, who had spent years building ties within the yakuza and quietly accumulating corporate leverage, was mobilizing his shadow network to reassert control.
Mariko, supported by a coalition of the old patriarch's loyal lieutenants, was fighting back in the court of public opinion—and winning with a certain demographic. The young, the idealistic, and the people who simply liked watching a pretty face on the news tended to side with her.
Japan's media industry had not been this energized in years. New stories broke daily. Allegations emerged weekly. Everyone had a theory and everyone was watching.
Bella watched too. She didn't participate. It wasn't her affair anymore.
On the fifth day after Natasha's departure, Bella reached out to an acquaintance she had encountered some weeks earlier: a middle-aged American film star she had met at a department store, in town to shoot a commercial.
His name was Bob Harris.
She'd done her homework. The past three years of Harris's financial records told a quiet story of decline. His wife maintained the lifestyle they'd built in their better years—school fees, household expenses, the unspoken demands of American middle-class comfort. It added up. And Harris, despite the credits on his filmography, hadn't worked enough to cover any of it. He had no assistant, no entourage, no support structure at all. A man of his standing showing up alone in a country where he didn't speak the language, for a whiskey commercial, said everything about where things stood.
He was a has-been. Not a failure—once genuinely talented—but the industry had moved past him.
Which was, Bella reflected, exactly what she needed.
Her plan was to persuade him to step away from acting and become Sadako's agent instead.
Bella could pull strings with a handful of studio executives, but she couldn't personally manage every layer of the industry. The entertainment world ran on relationships, favors, and procedural knowledge—and when a low-level gatekeeper decided to make someone's life difficult, they had plenty of legitimate tools to do it with. Against that kind of quiet obstruction, the talent and the executive suite were both helpless. What you needed was someone who knew every rule and every person who enforced them.
For that role, you needed someone fluent in Hollywood's internal logic, trustworthy enough to actually work with, and experienced enough to have seen all of it before. Harris checked every box. He was a genuine industry veteran, he was hungry, and he was, by all appearances, decent.
She asked him to meet her at a Western restaurant. She arrived five minutes early. He was already there.
She extended her hand. "Mr. Harris—thank you for making time for me. I hope this wasn't an imposition."
He took it lightly and let go. "Miss Johnson?" He'd forgotten her first name. Just the surname remained.
The man didn't know what to expect from this meeting—but he was bored in Tokyo, and anyone who spoke English at all was a welcome sight.
Johnson. Bella found it faintly amusing, but didn't correct him. There wasn't going to be enough overlap between her life and his for it to matter. The same was true for Natasha. What they called her was irrelevant.
She got to the point. "Mr. Harris, I have a friend—Japanese, female, around twenty. She's interested in pursuing a career in Hollywood. I'd like to offer you the position of her agent."
Harris stared at her.
He had been bracing for a commercial offer, perhaps, or a character part in some low-budget production. An invitation to abandon his career and become a talent agent was the last thing he'd expected. His first instinct was to refuse.
Bella continued before he could.
"I know this isn't what you were expecting to hear. And I understand you love what you do. But..." She paused, choosing her words. "The industry has changed, Mr. Harris. People want sensation now. They want spectacle—explosions, visual effects, plots they can follow without thinking. Everything moves faster. Audiences want fast food, fast entertainment, fast everything. The craft of acting—the kind you built a career on—has become secondary to all of it."
He nodded slowly. There was no dispute in his expression—just recognition.
An actor who truly loved the art knew what it could be. Playing a role meant inhabiting another life, seeing through different eyes, collecting experiences that no real biography could provide. Harris was that kind of actor. He'd found something genuine in the work.
But the industry had calcified. Capital chased maximum returns, pouring money into marketing and distribution while skimping on the one thing that actually made a film worth watching: the screenplay. Producers repeated their successful formulas in tight circles, too cautious about market risk to try anything new. The scripts that emerged were shallow, riddled with plot holes, built to be forgotten.
Writers, directors, and producers were all working in shackles. For an actor of Harris's caliber, that was doubly damaging—with nothing on the page, there was nothing to perform.