📚📚📚
MY daughter was thirty-eight when she came to me saying she had someone she wanted me to meet. Her first boy ever at thirty-eight. With her job as a pediatrician at a big hospital, she never had time for relationships. I’d grown used to that—just the two of us, working, eating dinner together, growing old side by side. So when she told me that, I had to admit I was blindsided.
She said he was a doctor too, working in Tokyo, but that he’d eventually inherit his family’s clinic. That’s when the alarms went off in my head. I braced myself for some arrogant, rich boy who thought he was better than her. But when I met him, he was soft around the edges—dopey, innocent, reminding me curiously of one of those steamed rabbit manju buns.
“I promise to make your daughter happy.” Poor Mr. Rabbit Bun was sweating bullets. His suit looked stiff and uncomfortable as he prostrated himself on all fours, bowing so low his forehead touched the floor. “I’ll be in your care.”
My daughter muttered something to the same effect.
Then, so did I.
✦ ✦ ✦
📚📚📚
“I just couldn’t leave him alone,” my daughter said that night as she scrubbed the flowery dessert plates we’d bought at a flea market years ago.
Makes sense, I thought.
✦ ✦ ✦
📚📚📚
THE morning my daughter and son-in-law left for their honeymoon, I had just finished a night shift. I unlocked the apartment—empty now for the first time in what felt like forever—set my keys down, kicked off my shoes, and reached for the light switch when it felt like someone had swung a baseball bat straight into the back of my head.
A home invasion? That was my first thought, but that didn’t make sense. The lights were off, but it was still morning, so natural light should’ve poured through the windows. Yet everything looked wrong—dark patches smudged the left side of my vision. Then, my legs gave out. I tried to brace myself with my left arm, but it was limp, dead weight. I crashed onto the cold, unforgiving floor of the foyer.
I knew these symptoms. From the episode of Family Medicine I watched just yesterday. From all my training as a caregiver. This was a stroke—or was cerebral infarction the right term? But who cared about that in the moment? My head pounded with a blinding, searing pain.
With my working hand, I fumbled through my purse for my phone. My fingers trembled as I dialed emergency services. I inputted the number. My thumb hovered over the screen, one tap away from calling for help…when I stopped myself.
A scene from Family Medicine flashed in my mind.
“Thanks to early detection and quick action, Mrs. A was able to save her life. Now, she’s on the road to recovery, with daily rehabilitation to get her back on her feet,” the upbeat narrator’s voice chimed in my mind. The camera on the screen had panned to an elderly woman, frail but surrounded by warmth—a pristine white bedspread and her family gathered around, smiling, loving. But I couldn’t feel happy for her. Not when all I could see in those happy faces was the face of my only daughter.
I knew her. If I survived this, no matter how devastating the aftermath, she would be there. No matter what it took from her, she would care for me for the rest of my life. Her bright new marriage, the job in which she found so much fulfillment, even the joy of maybe holding her own baby girl in her arms one day—she would deprive herself of it all if it meant she could help me cling to life.
Why? I always wondered. Why would she sacrifice everything for a mother who had barely given her anything?
But the answer was never too far from me. This was the same girl who used to look at me with sympathy as I cried, rubbing ointment into her burning, cracked skin. The same girl who waited up late every night for me, her desk lamp the only source of light to save on electricity, studying in the cold, in the heat, through everything, always waiting, always enduring.
That little girl, who had known nothing but pain, had grown into the most compassionate doctor. That girl, who grew up without a father’s love, became the most supportive wife. Her whole life had been one long winter, and now, finally, her spring had come. I couldn’t let anyone take that from her. Least of all me.
The strength left my body, and the phone slipped from my hand, clattering to the floor. My head hit the cold tile, the sharpness of the impact reverberating through my skull.
Enjoy your honeymoon, my precious, darling baby girl.
The last thought left me as a hot breath, swallowed by the chill of the floor beneath me.
✦ ✦ ✦
📚📚📚
WITH a sharp gasp, Sophie Olzon bolted upright in her bed, her mind swimming with freshly unlocked memories.
The clatter of something heavy hitting the floor broke the silence. Sophie turned her head to the source of the commotion, where, standing wide-eyed in the doorway, was Claire, the family’s plump and well-meaning maid. She stood frozen in place, a pitcher of water overturned at her feet.
“M-M-Milady!” she stammered.
“Good morning, Claire,” Sophie replied, her voice unnervingly steady.
“Y-Y-Y-You’re awake! I-I-I-I’ll inform the household at once!”
Like a toy ball hitting an odd bounce, Claire jumped, then shot out of the room, leaving the overturned silver pitcher spinning slowly on the floor. Water seeped into the carpet. The dark stain spread wider and wider, but Sophie barely noticed. She stared at it, her mind still racing with the reality she had just woken to.
Who had once been Mariko was now Sophie. And Sophie was…
She felt the back of one hand with the other. That texture—that awful, awful texture. She looked down, and what was there, in place of smooth, youthful skin, was something dry and cracked like the bark of a withered tree.
Her hands weren’t the only part afflicted. She knew it too well. This horrible, tough skin stretched across her entire body, hidden beneath her clothes, covering even her face. Boils and angry bumps marred her features, oozing a sickly yellow-green liquid that seeped through her pores.
“Milady.”
The door opened soundlessly, and a different, pale-faced maid with graying hair stepped inside. Her posture was unnaturally stiff, as though a metal plate were strapped to her back beneath her pristine uniform—a theory Sophie had held since childhood, often trying to prove it.
“Martha,” Sophie greeted.
The head maid, Martha, with her tightly wound silver-gray bun, aquiline nose, and thin lips set in a constant straight line, approached Sophie’s bedside.
“Pardon my imposition,” Martha said flatly, placing the back of her hand against Sophie’s forehead, a practiced check for fever. Satisfied with her findings, she leaned in closer, her voice dropping to a murmur, “I’ve put away your diary in the usual place.”
“My diary…” Sophie’s memories flooded back. I don’t want to be a monster. She had written those words, leaving the diary wide open on her desk as she made for the nearest window…
“Sophie!”
A voice, urgent yet lilting, pierced through Sophie’s thoughts. She looked up just as a woman in a fine crimson dress rushed toward her—her mother. That familiar teardrop-shaped mole, usually an elegant accent beneath her eye, was now streaked with real tears. The mother threw her arms around Sophie, held her tight for a moment, then pulled away to look at her face. Her fingers trembled as they brushed across Sophie’s forehead, her shoulders, her back, as if to confirm all of her was still there. “Oh! You’re okay! Thank goodness, you’re okay!” she cried, her long lashes fluttering shut as tears escaped through the gaps and rolled down her cheeks.
The scene hit Sophie with an unfamiliar sharpness, as though she were seeing everything clearly for the first time in her life. “Mother…” she whispered.
A deep, rumbling voice broke the moment from somewhere behind the mother. “When we heard you had fallen from the window, we feared the worst.”
Sophie’s beloved father stepped into view, emerging from the doorway as if he’d been hiding there, letting her mother rush in first. His platinum blond hair, tied into a neat ponytail, swayed slightly with each deliberate step. His emerald-green eyes shimmered with unshed tears. “You’re still with us—that’s all that matters,” he said, his voice soft but tinged with a deep relief.
For a moment, his lips moved as if he wanted to say more, but the words seemed to fail him. Instead, he added, “You’ll stay here and rest until you’ve recovered, my darling.” With a hand firmer than the mother’s but just as tender, he ruffled Sophie’s hair. “Get better. Get well. That’s all we ask of you.”
Caught between the intense love in both their gazes, Sophie felt a knot form in her throat. She opened her mouth to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. All she could manage was a quiet, broken sound. Here were the two people who loved her more than anything in the world. As the reality of what she’d put them through settled over her, she could no longer stop the tears.
“It’s all right, darling,” her mother soothed, gently stroking her head. “You don’t have to say anything. You’re here. You’re safe. That’s all we need.”
Sophie said nothing, just watching in silent agony as flakes of her dry, cracked skin floated down like discarded fragments onto the bed with every gentle stroke.