"Mother! Up here!" Kanae cried out.
"Oh, hello there, Kanae," her mother said.
There was something too casual, almost callous, about how her mother had greeted her. Akio certainly wouldn't have done that. He would have been relieved to have finally rescued her. But Kanae was in no situation to be picky about who came to save her.
"What's going on? How long have I been up here? Am I in the Chairman's tower?" Kanae asked.
"You shouldn't ask so many questions at once Kanae," her mother said.
Kanae couldn't believe what she was hearing. Her mother had never been nurturing, or even particularly kind. She'd taken to her role as the Chairman's wife with the pragmatism of a businesswoman, which included the way that she raised Kanae. Sometimes Kanae worried that her mother viewed her as an asset to be profited off of, instead of her daughter. But this was a new level of harshness.
"Am I in the Chairman's tower?" Kanae repeated.
She decided that the question needed to be answered the most urgently.
"Look around, where else could you be?" her mother asked.
It was true. Her mother was standing in one of the hallways outside of her fiancé's office. The stars and cosmos outside Kanae's window were probably just an illusion. One that it would be best not to tell her mother about.
"Is Akio around?" Kanae asked.
"Why do you ask?" her mother responded. "You don't honestly think he's coming to save you, do you?"
"Why wouldn't he?" Kanae asks.
Her mother laughed. A cold and knowing sound that made Kanae wonder if this person was even her mother at all. She looked like her, but her mother couldn't possibly treat her this monstrously.
And why would she doubt that Akio loved her? The two were so close, always spending time together, even when Kanae wasn't around. Surely, Akio didn't say bad things about her behind her back. A man like him would never do something so crooked and cowardly.
Of course, the two of them probably did spend an awful lot of time without her. Sometimes there were even moments when her mother's hands would linger far too long on her fiancé's arms. There were moments when she'd pull him into a hug when a simple handshake would have sufficed. Had she needed to kiss him on the cheek at Kanae's birthday party earlier that year? Akio had barely touched her once that night. What made her mother think that she had the right to do something so presumptuous?
"Mother," Kanae said. "If I ask you something, will you promise not to get angry with me, even if it seems rude?"
"I can't promise that," her mother said. "But now that you've brought it up, you might as well say it."
"Are you in love with my fiancé?"
Kanae was horrified as her mother's crimson lips twisted upwards into a sinister grin.
"Who wouldn't be?" she asked.
"What?" Kanae said.
She couldn't believe it. She had been harboring suspicions about her mother for a while, but she had never thought that her mother would have been cruel enough to admit it.
"I saw him, I blushed, and I went pale at the sight of him," her mother said. "When we shook hands, I felt like I had finally gotten hold of a long lost specter from the past, even though we had never met before. I know that it was only a few years ago, but at that moment, I felt like a much younger woman."
Kanae looked up at the ceiling, desperate to pull herself away from the conversation. There was something wrong with everything that was going on. It wasn't just the things her mother was saying that weren't right. Even the way that Kanae was processing them felt wrong. Those horrid words kept echoing in Kanae's mind, long after they had left her mother's lips, smeared with that garish scarlet paint.
"Perhaps, he made me think of a boy that I once knew. It was right around the time that I first met your father. He was just as weak-willed and easy to control back then as he is now."
"But you and father have always gotten along so well," Kanae said.
Her mother laughed. "Of course we have. I wouldn't have gotten us to where we are today, Kanae, if I hadn't gotten along with that man. But this was back before I was the Chairman's wife. I was just a girl who felt lucky enough to have two young men after her affections. Your father and I had all of the same classes together. We were best friends, but he was desperate to change that. I wouldn't have been surprised if he would have come to school one day with a sword and challenged the other young man to a duel. It was like something you would have read about in history class. But he always more like a little brother to me than anything else."
Kanae didn't understand why her mother was telling her this story, but she hoped that would become clear soon. Kanae was getting tired of receiving so many discordant pieces of information about her situation when she wasn't even looking for answers in the first place. All that she wanted was to get out of the attic.
"I don't care about some boy you met in high school!" Kanae said. "Just help me get down from here!"
"Oh, 'boy' was hardly the word for him. He always felt like a man to me, even though he couldn't have been more than a few years older than I was," her mother continued. "Mysterious and dangerous, but oh so charming. Was it cliché? Yes, of course, but I was just a teenage girl. You should know. You are right now, after all."
For some reason, that stung Kanae. Ever since her engagement, she had started to consider herself a young woman. What made Kanae's mother think that she could talk down to Kanae like she was still just a child?
If her mother had noticed that her barbed words had hurt Kanae, then she didn't show it.
"But he broke my heart. If I had been older, I'm sure that I would have expected it. Maybe, in a way, that pain was what aged me. That betrayal made me realize that I could never trust a man who had any sort of power over me. If I ever wanted to be truly happy, I would need to find someone that I could control."
"Daddy?"
"Yes, your father. We dated for a year or so. The relationship was easy, but passionless…on my part, at the very least. He proposed to me right before we graduated."
"Did you accept?"
"How could I not? His family was wealthy and he had always been kind to me. We're not that different, you know. I know that you think I'm some wretched old hag now, always telling you what to do. But we used to be the same, you and I. I had those same wide-eyed dreams of being a princess that you do. Well, marrying your father was the closest that I was ever going to get to obtaining that sort of power."
"Is that why dad picked out Akio for me? So I could have that too?"
"No, you ungrateful little bitch!"
Kanae shrank back from the trap door. She wasn't used to hearing words so harsh from her mother.
"Don't crawl back into your hole like some scared little mouse! You have everything I ever could have wanted. I married a man I didn't love so that you could live the life I always dreamed of having. You think that idiot could have picked out a man like Akio all on his own? He would have picked some donor's ineffectual son. Probably someone who reminded him of himself."
"Wait, it was you who picked out Akio?" Kanae asked. "But why?"
"Think about it, you silly little girl!" Her mother chided. "I can't believe my own daughter, the one that I've worked so hard for, could turn out to be such an ambitionless, whiny little brat."
"Mother!"
"Mother!" Kanae's mother repeated in a mocking tone.
It was becoming clear to Kanae that her mother was only here to torment her, not rescue her. This woman was treating her so cruelly that she was beginning to doubt whether or not this was her mother at all. She started trying to close the trap door subtly, but her mother noticed what she was doing. Before her mother could climb up, Kanae panicked and slammed the trap door shut.
Unfortunately, Kanae's mother wasn't giving up. First, she pounded on the trap door, screeching for Kanae to open it again. Kanae was tempted to sit down on top of the door, but this woman was her mother. Despite her suspicions, there was no legitimate reason for Kanae to believe that she wasn't. So, Kanae shrank back into the corner and watched as her mother crawled up into the attic.
It was a strange and concerning sight, seeing her mother slither across the dusty floorboards with her long black dress trailing behind her. It made her almost look like a slug, or maybe a snake. A parasite, or a predator? Kanae wasn't sure which one her mother had truly become.
"You can't just shut me out like that! This story isn't over yet, Kanae. You don't get to choose where it ends," her mother snarled. "Don't you want to know what happens to the woman in the story?"
Kanae shook her head back and forth. "No. No, I don't!"
"Over the years the young girl turns into a bitter middle-aged woman, trapped in an unfulfilling marriage. Her only source of excitement is a younger man who reminds her of the boy she once knew but forgot the name of long ago. This man seems to know her better than any lover she has ever been with, almost as though they've been together before. But that couldn't be possible…could it?"
"What are you talking about?" Kanae asks. "What do you mean? Is this some sort of metaphor? You have to be making this up!"
"You don't seriously think that you had the gravitational pull to make that star I pulled down from the cosmos revolve around you, do you?" The monster asked.
"Please, I don't understand what you're saying!" Kanae pleaded.
"Yes, you do, Kanae. We're all trapped in his orbit. Open that trap door one more time, see what you find. Better yet, try to climb through it. Look out through that broken window. Or better yet, look down at your arm. It's already healed."
Kanae did as she was told, even though she didn't trust her mother anymore. She just needed someone, anyone, to give her direction. The skin on her forearm had already closed up and there wasn't a bloodstain anywhere in sight. Kanae poked it, to test to if it was an illusion. Nothing about the way that Kanae's arm looked changed at all, but when she applied pressure to it, she could feel the shards of glass digging into her arm once more.
"Now look at my eyes," her mother commanded.
Kanae did as she was told once more, only to see that her mother's eyes were the same shade of green and the same shape as her own. Kanae and her mother had always had similar features, but these were perfect reduplications of what Kanae had seen in the mirror so many times before.
"You're not my mother," Kanae whispered.
"No, I'm not. Do you know who I am?"
"You're a monster!"
"Maybe I am. We have yet to find out."