"You're not my mother," Kanae said.

This time, her voice was steady.

The woman with her mother's body, but eyes just like Kanae's, said nothing.

"You're not real," Kanae said. "I'm making you up."

The woman smiled and extended her hand towards Kanae. Kanae tried to back away, but she realized that her back was already pressed against the wall.

"Don't be afraid," the woman said. She reached out to stroke Kanae's cheek. "If I'm nothing more than a nightmare, how could I possibly hurt you?"

"I don't know," Kanae said.

The woman's hand felt warm, just like her mother's always had. But Kanae wouldn't let herself be fooled by that. She was already losing touch with reality. She couldn't let herself get attached to a figment of her own reality, just because it looked like someone that she knew.

"But I'm not going to let you," Kanae said.

"Don't worry, I don't want to hurt you," the woman said. "I came here to help you."

"Then why did you talk to me like that?" Kanae said.

"No one has ever treated you that cruelly before, have they?" the woman asked. "You poor thing."

Kanae didn't know why this woman's personality had changed so suddenly. Only a few moments ago, she had been tormenting Kanae. What made this woman think that she had any right to comfort her now?

"I don't want your pity," Kanae said. "I just want you to leave me alone."

"But don't see, Kanae?" the woman asked. "If you never suffer, you'll never discover who you really are."

She reached out, grabbed Kanae's hands, and pressed them together. Kanae almost screamed when she felt something starting to move in between her palms. She could feel the gentle fluttering of a butterfly's wings against her skin.

"What is this? What are you doing?" Kanae asked.

Instead of answering, the woman took her hands off of Kanae's and slunk backwards into the shadows.

"Wait! Mother, don't go!" Kanae shouted.

She opened up her hands and a butterfly flew it. It's dark blue wings, speckled black, glowed faintly in the darkened attic. The light made it clear that the woman was no longer in the attic with Kanae. She had disappeared without a trace. Kanae was alone again.

Akio wouldn't have left me like that, Kanae thought indignantly to herself. And he certainly wouldn't have gone on talking about nonsense for so long, either.

He had been the first person worth listening to that Kanae had met in a long time. In a way, she had always known his interest in her wasn't completely innocent. He was an intelligent man. There was no doubt he had picked up on Kanae's position of privilege within Ohtori Academy. Kanae hadn't minded that, though. Every other boy she'd dated had been keenly aware of the fringe benefits of being in a relationship with her. Most of those boys, however, had been the sons of wealthy donors and benefactors. They came from the sort of families that her parents rubbed shoulders with regularly.

Kanae always assumed that she'd end up with a man like that. It had been pounded into her head since childhood when her mother would read her fairytales. The prince and the princess always fell in love in the end. It was meant to be. From an early age, there were many boys in Kanae's year she could have easily been "meant to be with." Akio, however, had never been one of them.

He had arrived like a whirlwind, some tropical storm from a far off coast that had somehow slipped under the radars of the nation's top meteorologists. Kanae couldn't even remember what his position at the school had been. It hadn't mattered. From the very beginning, he had the sort of confidence that could have gotten him any job in the school he wanted, just by asking for it, short of Kanae's father's.

So, from the very start, Akio must have known that Kanae was his ticket to the one thing that he wasn't able to have. She hadn't been bothered by the fact that he was using her. In fact, she had liked knowing that she had something that none of the other girls who were chasing after Akio did. There had been something almost magical about being introduced to a man who her father had hand-selected for her. A man who was already enamored with her before even learning her name.

At first, she had been expecting him to be bland and boring, in spite of all the wonderful things she had heard about him. In Kanae's personal experience, she had found that most good looking men didn't have to be particularly intelligent to succeed. Still, when she sat down and had her first conversation with Akio, Kanae was pleasantly surprised. She had been sure that he was only going to talk about how well he got along with her father and how excited he was to be joining the family.

That hadn't happened, though. While he had paid lip service to Kanae's father, he chose to focus almost entirely on Kanae. He asked about her likes, her dislikes, her thoughts on the engagement, and what she planned on doing with her future. It was all things that her father hadn't even taken into consideration when he had betrothed her to Akio in the first place.

When Kanae ran out of things to say, he started talking about his own passions, particularly his love for the stars. In spite of it being a topic Kanae knew little about, the way he explained it in poetic, yet still accessible, terms managed to hold her interest. While the conversation had started with both of them on opposite couches, it ended with the two of them snuggled up next to each other.

But conversations like that happened less frequently as their engagement got longer. Sometimes, it seemed like Akio had lost interest in Kanae the second she had started to take interest in him. She had tried to deny it, both to nosy friends and herself. It was hardest to deny when her mother asked her questions about the engagement, though.

Was that why she had dreamt up such a horrible conspiracy? Now, Kanae laughed to about the idea her fiancé could have been cheating on her with her own mother. There wasn't any reason to believe something like that. Her mother may have always gotten along so well with Akio. That didn't mean anything, though. She was just jealous because her mother seemed to connect with Akio on a level that Kanae had never been able to reach with him. Kanae could listen to every single one of his stories, but her mother could engage with them.

She had never lost that sharp-tongued wit that Kanae had never even bothered to learn. Kanae's mother had always told her that she should value her bright, youthful radiance. She had talked about it like it was some sort of glowing, brilliant magic with the power to ensnare men and keep them under a woman's command forever. It was a temporary, almost contractual magic though. The shining golden flame would one day burn out, leaving nothing but midnight black ash in its place.

At least, that was the story her mother had told. At least, she had told it with her words. Never her actions. Kanae saw the way her mother used her darker edges, her world-weary shrewdness, and her poisonous turns of phrase to get whatever she wanted. Sometimes she wondered if all that talk about the value of Kanae's youth was all just something that witch had made up to keep her naïve and stupid forever, so she would never be able to stand up to her. After all, Snow White would have never had so much trouble with the evil queen if she didn't act so sweetly all the time.

However, Kanae's anger wasn't powerful enough to get her to change the way she acted. She would be willing to take an entire lifetime of her mother needling her about not wasting the "best years of her life" by "going out and misbehaving." Kanae knew that she was right. There was value in being quiet and demure. There was something undeniably wonderful about being wanted, not for anything she'd done, but simply for what she was. If sitting there quietly, nodding her head, and smiling through her darkest suspicions was what that took; then she would do it until the day she died. Maybe even longer, if that was even possible.