Archive of Our Own ^omega

Inko grows up alone, for the most part.

It’s not that her parents don’t love her. They’re just busy, that’s the thing. Tokyo is a land of dreams and opportunity, a place where CEOs and glamorous fashion icons make connections over sake and gourmet sushi. Where everything is expensive, and a family of three squeezes into a one-bedroom apartment with no windows and a landlord that won’t turn the heating up. Where little girls go to bed before their parents come home and wake up long after they leave. Where Inko gets used to meals eaten alone and decides her own family won’t be like this when she grows up. Not if she can help it.

So she tries. She’s friendly and bright and makes sure to smile at strangers, because god knows most of the people here need it. She gets a job after high school just so she can move out. That ends up being at a department store selling premium lipstick to women twice her age. It’s not a bad gig. She has friends, and sometimes when things don’t sell very well she gets to take home the extras.

It’s comfortable. Day in, day out, she sells lipstick and eats convenience store bento and smiles at strangers.

Then Hisashi shows up.

At first it’s nothing special, really.

He’s not bad looking. He’s tall and well-mannered and hangs around the make-up section pretending he wants to buy a present for his sister. Inko knows he’s pretending. He doesn’t listen to a word her co-workers say, only really pays attention when it’s her doing the talking. He buys whatever she suggests. He’s responsible for half her commissions by the end of the month, even if their conversations always do segue into her hobbies and dreams for the future.

He asks her out in summer. She’s not surprised, not really, but her colleagues tease her because she blushes as she says yes. Hisashi takes her to an amusement park and they hold hands and kiss on the Ferris wheel.

It’s cliché. It’s perfect. It’s the kind of thing you only see in movies. Inko’s never had a boyfriend, but she thinks she wouldn’t mind him being her first.

“You don’t have to work,” Hisashi tells her six months into their relationship. They’re having dinner in his apartment, sitting across each other at a wooden table meant for two. “Keep at it if you enjoy it, by all means. But I could support you if you want.”

Inko stops chewing her noodles, surprised. “But Tokyo’s expensive,” she says with her mouth full. “I— don’t you need to keep your savings? What about rent, and food, and—”

He smiles and wipes soy sauce off the corner of her mouth with his thumb. “I can afford it.”

She goes pink. The way he looks at her sometimes makes her feel younger than she is, like a smitten schoolgirl who doesn’t know the first thing about love. That’s not too far off the mark, she supposes. “Your business must be doing well.”

“It is,” he says simply. He doesn’t like to talk about work. “I just want to take care of you. I love you.”

“I love you too,” she says. Her heart flutters in her chest.

He kisses her neck later, while she’s doing the dishes. They end up going to bed together. It’s her first time doing this, but he’s gentle and intimate and she wakes up the next morning feeling warm and rumpled and loved.

She ends up quitting her job. That leaves her with more free time than she really knows what to do with. She tries taking some classes, painting and pottery and other fun little hobbies. She’s not very good at them, if she’s being honest.

But Hisashi doesn’t care. He’s genuinely delighted with every wobbly clay sculpture she brings home. Never complains about giving her money, although she tries to be frugal regardless. It’s nice. She feels free in a way that’s brand new and exciting.

They spend most nights together now. She likes being around him. And he really likes interrupting her cooking to whisk her off to bed. A lot of dinners get burnt. He never seems to mind, though. He just laughs while she laments her ruined stew and reminds her that the ramen place down the street always delivers.

This is probably love, Inko thinks when he looks at him. She hopes it is, anyway. She could really get used to it.

A year goes by without her really noticing.

She’s kind of nauseous after breakfast. Hisashi’s at work. Inko’s watching a cooking show, hoping to find something exciting to make for dinner tomorrow. But the oysters on screen are making her stomach turn, so she turns off the TV and takes a few deep breaths.

“Maybe not seafood,” she says to herself. She’s been doing that a lot lately. Talking to herself. The apartment’s kind of quiet in the daytime. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but sometimes it seems a lot bigger than it really is. The childhood memories that come with that aren’t the best, so she can’t help but want to chase them away with a little noise, even if she sounds like a crazy person.

She’s nauseous the next day, and the next. Her period doesn’t come when it’s supposed to. That’s not that unusual, but she really pays attention when she realises she’s a whole three weeks overdue.

“That can’t be right,” she says to her reflection in the mirror. She doesn’t look pregnant. Her stomach’s still flat and she fits into her blouses. “Maybe I’m just stressed. We’ve been using protection. That’s normally enough, right? Unless it isn’t. Oh my god, am I having a baby? No, I can’t be having a baby. But what if I am?”

She runs to the pharmacy, and forgets her coat at home.

The thing about pregnancy tests, she soon finds out, is that they’re kind of hard to read. The little blue indicator always shows up so clearly in the movies but the one in her hand just looks smudged.

“Is that supposed to be a second line?” she whines alone in the bathroom. Four other sticks are on the counter. She’s had three bottles of juice and is steadily working on a fourth. “I need to get my eyesight checked. Please get darker! I have to know, oh gosh, what if I’m a bad mom? I’m only twenty-three. But a baby! But what if Hisashi doesn’t want it— but what if he wants to get married!”

The idea of herself in a wedding dress makes her giddy. So giddy, in fact, that her breakfast decides it wants out of her stomach. She spends the rest of the day throwing up.

By the time Hisashi gets home, Inko feels like all her insides have dissolved. “Hi,” she croaks at him from the couch. “I haven’t started on dinner yet. Just give me a second.”

He frowns. His palm feels pleasantly cool against her forehead. “Are you feeling alright?”

“Sure!” she says with forced cheer. “I’ll be fine once I get some food in me.” Her stomach makes an odd noise. “Or maybe I’ll skip dinner, actually. I think something I ate doesn’t agree with me.”

“How long have you been feeling like this?”

“A few days,” she admits. Hisashi sighs.

“You should have said something sooner. I think you need to rest,” he says and gently pushes her so she’s lying down. “I’ll get something delivered. Do you think you can handle some soup at least?”

“Soup sounds good,” she says, grateful. He looks so tall leaning over her like this. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

“Of course not.” He bends to press a kiss to her cheek. “You’re my woman. I’ll take care of you. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

Inko’s stomach turns again the next morning. She’s getting used to it now, though, so she gets out of bed and wanders around the apartment alone. Her thoughts seem to be stuck in a loop. Mechanically she makes herself a mug of tea and drinks it without tasting a drop. Hisashi’s at work, although he’d promised to come home early today to check up on her.

“A baby,” she whispers with a hand on her stomach. She hasn’t told Hisashi yet. She still isn’t completely sure. There’s no real evidence beyond a missed period, some nausea and the recurring idea that her body’s not acting the way she expects it to.

She hopes, though. Imagines her stomach getting too big for her clothes, growing a little life inside her. She’ll have to buy a new wardrobe. One for her and one for a brand new human, with little socks and hats and diapers and mittens. Tiny hands and downy hair. Part her, part Hisashi.

Inko cries. She hugs herself and prays.

When she misses a second period, she cries again.

“Yellow would be a good colour for the baby’s room,” Inko says to herself, surveying their apartment with her hands on her hips. They can convert his study, probably. His books will need a new home, along with his desk and that armchair he likes. “Maybe we should start looking at new apartments, actually. A two-bedroom. Ooh, or maybe a house.”

The front lock clicks. Inko’s in Hisashi’s arms before he’s got the door all the way open. “Why, hello. Did you miss me?”

“Yes,” says Inko guilelessly. Hisashi smiles and kisses her forehead.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better. You worried me for a while there, you know.”

“I was just feeling under the weather,” Inko says, heart skipping. “Actually, about that—”

Something buzzes in Hisashi’s pocket. He sighs, and then gently pushes her off of him so he can answer his phone. “Sorry, Inko. I have to take this.”

“Oh, okay,” Inko says. Hisashi’s already walking away to lock himself in the study. He doesn’t come out again for twenty minutes. By the time he’s done with his call, Inko’s had time to panic about how best to tell him about their baby.

She doesn’t get to, though. Hisashi’s got his blazer halfway on already. “I’m sorry, my love. Work called. It’s an emergency, I’ll need to stay late.”

“Oh.” Inko deflates, but accepts the kiss he presses to her cheek. “Uhm, okay. Good luck. Do your best.”

“I will,” Hisashi says.

The front door shuts with a snap. The apartment’s suddenly silent again. Inko sighs, and morosely goes to brew herself some tea.

He doesn’t come home for two days.

Inko’s worried sick, as one would expect. Maybe something happened to him. Maybe he got into a car accident, or he’s stranded somewhere, or maybe he’s sick and suffering in the hospital and can’t muster up the strength to tell her. She calls and texts with increasing desperation until the apartment door finally opens, and Inko’s so relieved that she bursts into tears on the spot.

“Where have you been?” she wails as he drops his briefcase on the floor. He looks tired and unusually unkempt. “I almost called the police. Why didn’t you answer any of my calls?”

He sighs. He’s not wearing the shirt he left home with, she notes absently. “I was busy, Inko. I told you, I had work.”

“I thought you were dead!”

“You’re being dramatic.”

Her relief gives way to indignation. “Dramatic? You can’t just disappear for two days without warning and expect me to be fine with it. I was worried, you jerk.”

“My thoughts were occupied,” he says, strangely flat, shrugging his blazer off and folding it over one arm. “There was an emergency, and I dealt with it.”

“Well you could have at least sent me a text—”

“I have important things to do, Inko. Your fretting is really the least of my concerns.”

Her mouth snaps shut. Hisashi pinches the bridge of his nose, and then lets out a long breath. “Forgive me. That came out sharper than I intended.”

Inko covers her face with her hands. She hates the way she looks when she cries, hates letting herself seem so vulnerable and hurt. Gently, strong arms wrap themselves around her and Hisashi folds her into his chest. “Forgive me, Inko. I appreciate that you care.”

“You scared me,” Inko says shakily and lets herself melt into him. “Please just let me know where you are next time. Tell me you’re safe.”

“I will.”

“Promise,” Inko sniffles. “God, I was so worried something terrible had happened. What would I do if I lost you?”

“You won’t,” Hisashi murmurs soothingly into her hair. “All’s well, my love. I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”

“You should meet my parents!” Inko realises over lunch. Hisashi’s been extra nice to her lately, perhaps to make up for being so inconsiderate last week. This is the first Sunday he’s been free in a while. “They would like you. I told them we were seeing each other but they don’t know much about you yet.”

“If you like,” Hisashi says good-naturedly. “I’d like to congratulate them on their work.”

“What work?”

“You, of course.”

Inko tries not to blush too hard. “You’re terrible.”

“And you’re delightful.”

“I’m gonna throw my napkin at you,” she tells him. It’s an empty threat. This restaurant’s too fancy for her to even think about acting so uncouth. Hisashi always brings her to these expensive places that she’d never set foot in on her own. She probably sticks out like a sore thumb.

Hisashi looks right at home, though, with his fiddly pasta and designer suit. Classical music barely covers the sound of clinking cutlery. “Do they know that we live together?’

“I mentioned it, I think. I don’t know if they remember.”

A waiter stops at their table. It’s the third time he’s done that in twenty minutes, and he places a hand on the back of Inko’s chair and leans forward. He’s probably in his late teens, but he’s slicked his hair back in an effort to look a couple of years older. “May I offer you some wine, miss?”

Inko leans away on instinct. “Uhm, no thank you. Hisashi?”

“No,” says Hisashi. His tone is clipped. “Please stop interrupting us. We’re trying to eat.”

“Of course, sir. I just want to make sure the lady is happy,” the waiter says and backs away. Hisashi watches him go with his mouth set in a straight line. Inko fiddles with her napkin and clears her throat.

“Are you alright?”

“He’s flirting with you.”

“Maybe,” says Inko, because she’s normally naïve but that waiter had been laying it on a bit thick. “He’s only a kid, he probably doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

“You’re clearly taken,” Hisashi says. His fingers drum rhythmically against the table. “If he keeps that up I’m going to kill him.”

“Hisashi.”

He hums and goes back to his food. “You’re mine, Inko. Really, other men should respect that. What were we talking about?”

“My parents. I should meet yours too,” Inko says, cutting up her chicken into bite-sized pieces. “You never talk about your family. I’m curious about them.”

“I don’t have a family, actually. My parents passed away a while ago.”

Inko puts both hands over her mouth. “Oh, Hisashi, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

He just shrugs and sips his wine. “I don’t think about them much. I did have a younger brother, but we parted on bad terms.”

“You should make up!”

“He’s dead.”

Inko’s heart drops. “Oh. I— oh.”

Hisashi puts down his glass with a sigh. His hand looks so much larger than hers when he squeezes her fingers. “Don’t get upset. I don’t mean to sound callous, it just happened a long time ago.”

“No, it’s,” Inko says. It’s difficult to talk around the tightness in her throat. “That’s so sad. That must have been so hard for you. I can’t imagine, you lost your whole family, and— and you just picked yourself up like nothing happened.”

Hisashi studies her face intently. “You’re sad for me.”

“Of course I’m sad for you.” Surreptitiously, she dabs her eyes with her napkin. “I’m so sorry I made you talk about it.”

“It doesn’t bother me. Smile, darling. There’s no need to worry.”

A hand touches her shoulder, making her jump. Hisashi’s expression turns murderous for a split second as Inko turns to look up at the waiter. “Is everything alright, miss?”

“Uhm,” says Inko, unsure what to say because the boy seems genuinely concerned. He looks from her to Hisashi almost accusatorily. “Yes, thanks.”

“We are trying to have a conversation,” Hisashi says. His expression smooths out into a somewhat plastic smile, but at least he’s not glaring anymore. “I appreciate the gesture but my companion is just being sentimental.”

The waiter actually rolls his eyes at the word companion. “I was just making sure.”

“I really am fine,” Inko says. “You can go now.”

“Don’t come back,” says Hisashi.

The waiter gives him a smile that’s more like a grimace. He does as he’s told, though. Hisashi studies his fork with deceptive calm. “Strike three. He’s dead.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Inko says, casting around for something else to attract Hisashi’s attention. “Listen, it means a lot to me that we, I don’t know, get to know each other more. If I can’t meet your family, then maybe… maybe I could meet your friends instead? Or your co-workers?”

“No.”

Inko falters. “Why not?”

“I’d prefer you didn’t mix with them.”

“But—”

“Leave it, Inko.” Gently, he reaches across the table to tuck her hair behind her ear. “You and I are enough. Things are fine the way they are.”

“Okay,” Inko says quietly. Her food seems kind of unappetizing now. Sighing, she picks at the salad and tries to ignore the smiles the waiter keeps sending her way.

“And what a touching scene that was,” says the lady on the TV. “It always warms my heart to see a family reunited after so long. Up next, we have a special guest! Meet a woman who caught her husband cheating — with her brother!”

Inko huffs at the screen. Hisashi hates reality TV. He says it’s all mindless drivel and made-up drama. He’s right, of course, which is why Inko makes sure he’s left for work before indulging in soap opera nonsense. She settles back against the couch with a mug of warm cocoa in her hands. It’s snowing outside, but the heating’s turned up enough that she can’t really feel it.

The segment’s guest looks like one of those ladies who’d call management because the cashier forgot to say good morning. Inko knows the type. She’s dealt with them before. “I just knew there was something up when my ex started getting secretive about his social life. He wouldn’t take photos with me anymore. He’d say he was just talking to his boss, but he always took calls in another room. He never let me look at his phone.”

“Maybe he just didn’t like you snooping,” Inko snorts. Hisashi likes his work life to stay private too. His phone never leaves his person.

“And he wouldn’t let me meet his friends. He told me I wouldn’t like them, but I thought he must not want me to ask them any questions. Once he told me he was having dinner with his co-worker, but when I ran into her in the supermarket she told me they had never met up at all.”

“I imagine his friends must have known about the affair,” says the announcer. “Did he decide to limit contact so none of them would spill the beans?”

“I bet he did. He’d disappear for days at a time, always claiming he had work, even on the weekends. Weirdly enough I noticed my brother kept cancelling family plans too.”

“Oh,” says Inko under her breath. “But Hisashi really does have work. He wouldn’t lie, even if he doesn’t like to talk about it.” And maybe he’s ashamed of his friends. Maybe he doesn’t have any, and he doesn’t want Inko to know.

She changes the channel. Some guy’s explaining how to properly butcher a chicken. Inko winces at the crack of avian bones and pushes thoughts of infidelity out of her mind.

Hisashi comes home kind of late, saying he’s already had dinner. “Client meeting,” he says when she asks. “Go ahead without me. I’m going to go take a bath.”

She puts his dirty clothes in the laundry hamper for him. The pockets are empty except for his wallet and car keys. Humming quietly, she fixes herself some instant noodles and waits for him at the table. “Hey, did you take your phone into the bathroom? It wasn’t in your pants.”

“I did,” he says, sitting across from her.

“Isn’t that bad for it?”

“It’s a good phone. Splash-proof.”

“Oh.” Hisashi’s busy texting someone. Inko cranes her neck to peek at his phone. “Who are you talking to?”

He shields it from view. “A client.”

“Okay. Uhm. What’s my contact icon?”

“Hm?”

“The picture of me you saved with my number. Is it cute?”

“I didn’t give you one.”

“What? Why?”

Hisashi smiles. “Because I don’t want anyone ogling my lady.”

“But we’ve never taken any photos together. We’ve been together a whole year, that’s sacrilege.”

“I don’t photograph well.”

She pouts at him. It makes her feel ridiculous, but it usually works. “Please?”

“No, Inko,” Hisashi says and pats her on the head. “I don’t like photos. I’m going to go to bed, I have an early day tomorrow. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” she says. It’s barely ten p.m.

She pays attention, after that.

It kills her to be suspicious. It feels like the gravest insult to feel such distrust, to analyse everything Hisashi says even though he’s given her a home and comfortable life. He’s just always so distant. He listens and indulges her but it’s like talking to a black hole, throwing her feelings in and getting no information in return.

He won’t tell her what he does at work. She asks him, once, but he throws in so much business jargon that she doesn’t really get much of an answer. He won’t tell her where he goes either. He doesn’t scare her like he did the first time, disappearing without warning, but it’s not uncommon for him not to come home for a few days.

“Maybe I’ve been too naïve.” It’s brisk outside but the sun is shining. Inko stands on the balcony wrapped in a blanket and lets the frigid breeze whip her hair around her face. “I’ve never been with a man. How am I supposed to know what’s normal and what isn’t? Mom and Dad never used to see each other. They were always working.”

But they used to talk, at least. They shared things and argued and gave each other the silent treatment sometimes. Hisashi doesn’t even get mad. She’s only ever seen him with the same expression, this sort of indulgent smile that looks more amused than actually happy.

“Maybe I’m not enough for him,” she whispers into her blanket. “Maybe I’m more like a pet. Or a toy. You can have more than one toy.”

She still hasn’t told him she’s pregnant. Has never found the right time, although maybe that’s not all there is. The pregnancy doesn’t worry her. Hisashi does. She doesn’t know how he’ll take it. The best case scenario is that they get married and raise the baby together. The worst case is that he doesn’t want it.

She’s not getting rid of her baby. That’s out of the question. She already loves it, already wants to be a mother to the mysterious little life inside her. But if Hisashi doesn’t feel the same way, then it’s back to being on her own. She’s done it before, she supposes. But it’s a scary thought. She hasn’t had a job in years and she’s grown to love this apartment.

“Okay. I’m getting ahead of myself.” Shaking her head, she wraps the blanket tighter around her shoulders and breathes. “I don’t even know if he’s cheating. He’s always been like this, I’m just noticing it now. And if he is, he might stop once I tell him about the baby. Maybe he wants to be a dad. And if he doesn’t, then I’ll figure that out when it comes to it.”

Breathe in, breathe out. The world feels a little more stable. She can tell him. “And even if I don’t, he’ll sure as heck find out eventually,” she says to herself. She’s about nine weeks in. She’ll start showing in another month or so.

Time seems to go by slowly that afternoon. It’s already dark by five. Hisashi comes home in time for dinner, bearing a flower in a plastic sleeve. It’s a red rose. That warms her a little, and she breathes in its perfume as he hangs up his coat and shrugs out of his suit jacket. “How was work today?”

“Acceptable,” he hums. “And what did you do?”

Worried about the future, she thinks. “I painted a little out on the balcony.”

“Weren’t you cold?”

“I brought a blanket.”

Hisashi takes her hand and leads her into the living room so they’re not standing in the doorway aimlessly. “That sounds pleasant. You must show me what you painted later.”

“It was just this dog I saw in the park across from us,” Inko says. He loosens his tie and undoes his top shirt button, exposing his Adam’s apple. Inko’s eyes trace the hint of stubble leading down from his jaw. “I wanted to tell you something.”

He smiles at her. It’s a soft smile, almost encouraging. “What is it?”

Inko freezes. There’s lipstick on his collar.

“It’s,” she blurts out, gears in her head spinning madly when Hisashi gently prompts her. “I, uhm, I cleaned your liquor shelf. That French brandy you have is going to expire in a month. You should finish it before it goes bad.”

“Oh dear,” he says. “Thank you for warning me. That’s good brandy, it would be a shame for it to go to waste.”

“Yeah,” she says faintly. It feels like her ribs are constricting and cutting into her lungs. “That would be sad.”

“I’ll get to work on that tonight,” he says and kisses her on the cheek. “With your help, perhaps?”

“Uhm, no thank you.”

“Yes, you prefer wine. I’d like a bath. Care to join me?”

“I’m alright.”

He leaves her standing there by herself. She takes several deep breaths and tries to calm the rapid pumping of her heart, and then goes shakily to the bedroom.

She can hear running water from the en suite bathroom. Hisashi’s left his dirty clothes neatly folded on the bed, incriminating little stain clearly visible on the inside of his collar. With shaking hands, Inko picks it up to look, holds it right up to her face so she can convince herself it’s real.

It’s a deep red. Rich and coppery, opaque and completely matte. Inko tries to imagine the type of woman who would wear such a daring shade; confident and dangerous, with a crisply-lined pout. Someone who would roll her eyes at Inko’s sheer, girly lip glosses. Maybe a foreigner, or maybe a tall Japanese woman with sharp features and a long slit up the side of her dress.

It’s getting hard to see through her tears. Inko tries not to sniffle too loudly, just wipes her eyes and reminds herself to breathe. Perhaps because she still doesn’t believe it, or perhaps because she just likes to torture herself, she presses her nose to the fabric and sniffs. She expects to find some trace of perfume left as a parting gift on Hisashi’s skin.

It doesn’t smell like perfume. It smells like rust.

Slowly, she draws her face away. “There’s blood on his shirt,” she murmurs into the otherwise quiet room. The realisation that it’s not lipstick feels like a physical weight being removed.

The clothes go into the laundry hamper before Hisashi gets out of the bath. He wanders into the kitchen wearing a polo shirt and khakis. He never does dress down, this man. “What’s for dinner?”

“Couscous,” she answers on autopilot. He likes when she makes food from far away, although he probably finds it less exotic than she does.

After dinner she runs her fingers down the side of his neck, and he takes that as an invitation to pick her up and bring her to bed. It’s nice, although her heart’s not really in it. Afterwards she curls up on her side and allows him to wrap his arm around her.

There are no wounds on his throat. If he’d cut himself shaving or something there would have been a mark. A scratch, at the very least, for it to have made a big drop of blood like that. And it’s not like he has some sort of healing quirk, either. His quirk is fire-breathing.

The stain had been near the very top of the collar, almost as if it had dripped down his neck and into his shirt. But his head and face are completely fine.

So if it’s not his blood, she thinks, whose is it?

Hisashi doesn’t come home for dinner again the next night. The tasteful cream walls of the apartment seem like they’re closing in on her somehow, so Inko decides that tonight is not the night she stays at home like a good almost-housewife. She calls her friends and makes a reservation at a yakiniku place downtown. Her old workmates are delighted to see her even though she’s given them such short notice.

Everyone comes except Rina and Ken. Rina’s visiting her in-laws, they tell her. Nobody knows where Ken is.

“He doesn’t even answer his phone anymore,” says Sakura, delicately picking up a strip of sirloin with her chopsticks. “We do still try to keep in touch but he never comes to our outings.”

“Maybe he feels self-conscious,” says Haruka from across the table. “He used to kind of stick out, being the only guy in the makeup department. He must be uncomfortable with the idea of getting drunk with so many pretty girls.”

Hana snorts. “You know he’s only ever had eyes for Inko.”

Inko blinks. Sakura throws a roasted peanut at Hana but misses. It goes sailing somewhere out of their little booth. “You shut up. Inko’s a taken woman, remember?”

Haruka giggles into her beer. “Ken did used to have such a crush on her, though. Everyone tried to goad him into asking her out but he was too shy.”

“And then Hisashi swooped in,” Hana continues. “Poor Ken left the job.”

“We all left the job,” says Sakura. “Except you, Miss Senior Manager.”

“Right after, though,” Hana says emphatically. “Like, he resigned the day after Inko did and disappeared to wallow in heartbreak.”

Inko picks at her rice. She’s the only one of them without a beer, having made an excuse about a sudden delicate stomach. “I never knew he felt that way.”

“It was his fault for not telling you,” says Sakura, matter of fact. “It’s not your fault someone else asked you out before he did. That’s no reason to sulk and ignore the rest of us, anyway.”

“We’d hoped he’d show up this time,” Haruka admits. “Since you’re here.”

“But Inko’s a taken woman,” Hana says and waggles her eyebrows ridiculously. “How’s the domestic life? Been busy?”

“Kind of,” Inko says, wondering if there’s an appropriate way to say that your boyfriend may be cheating on you and also may have come home with someone else’s blood on his shirt. “I’m really sorry I haven’t kept in touch lately. I never realised living with someone would take up so much time.”

“We never get to see Rina either,” Haruka says and waves down a waiter for another beer. “I guess that’s just what married life is like.”

“It’s odd,” Inko muses. “Coming home after work used to be the most boring part of my day. I suppose since Hisashi’s always around I just got used to it being just the two of us. I barely go out anymore unless it’s for errands.”

“Lucky,” says Hana. “Bet you never get lonely. And your man’s such a looker, too.”

Sakura throws another peanut at her. Inko laughs a little uncomfortably, heart heavy at the realisation that she’s really not any less lonely than she used to be as a little girl waiting for her parents to come home.

There are six missed calls and fourteen unread messages by the time she thinks to check her phone.

They’re all from Hisashi. Variations of where are you and are you alright and please answer that make her cringe with guilt in the back of the taxi. It’s nearing midnight now. She’d forgotten to tell him where she would be. He must be worried sick.

She runs for the lift almost as soon as the driver arrives at her building, anxious to get back so she can apologise to Hisashi in person and assure him she’s perfectly alright. When she opens the door the apartment is dim. There’s only one lamp on. Hisashi’s sitting silently on the loveseat, still wearing the crisp navy suit he’d left for work in. His tie sits loose around his neck.

“I’m so sorry,” Inko says and goes to him the moment she’s got her shoes off. “I thought I’d be home before you finished work and I just didn’t think to check the time.”

He stares at her. His face is completely blank, features seeming much harsher now that he’s not wearing that indulgent smile he always gives her. “Inko.”

“Yes,” Inko falters. He’s just looking at her, eyes lightly chilled in a way that makes goosebumps break out on her arms. “I, uhm, I didn’t mean to worry you. I’m sorry, I really am.”

“I imagine you are,” he says, tilting his head very slightly. “You understand that this isn’t acceptable, yes?”

“Yes,” she says, whisper quiet. Hisashi hums, like she’s a slow child that’s finally understood a question.

“You cannot just leave without telling me,” he continues. “I need to know where you are, and with whom.”

“I was safe,” Inko says, worrying at the hem of her sweater. “I went to a restaurant downtown.”

“Who were you with?”

“Hisashi—”

“Tell me,” he says, voice carefully calm. “Tell me who you were with.”

“My old workmates from the department store.”

“Which ones?”

“Hana, Haruka and Sakura. Rina and Ken didn’t come.”

“Alright,” says Hisashi, relaxing very slightly. Inko’s shoulders remain stiff. When he’d come home after disappearing that time, she’d been torn between kissing him and throttling him. Right now she just feels like a piece of meat about to meet the business end of a butcher knife. “This won’t happen again, will it?”

Slowly, Inko shakes her head. Hisashi’s demeanour warms by degrees. “You’re allowed to see your friends. You just have to tell me first.”

“Okay,” Inko says. Hisashi stands. She’s never minded before how much he towers over her. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” Hisashi coos. Gently he places his fingers under her chin, tilts her face up so she’s looking him in the eye. “You’re my girl,” he says, finally smiling at her again. “I have to take care of you. That means keeping tabs on you. Just to keep you safe, that’s all.”

She nods. The sweetness with which he takes her hand is jarring, a sudden, artificial departure from the icy rage he’d been barely controlling a second ago. “Come along, my love. I think it’s time we went to bed.”

Inko goes. She offers no resistance when he tugs off her clothes, obediently lifts her arms when he slips one of his softest shirts over her head like he’s dressing a life-sized doll. He pulls her close to his chest and turns out the light. His heartbeat is strong and immovable under her ear, his grip on her hand tight enough that she doesn’t dare pull away.

She dreams of drowning that night. When she wakes, there are finger-shaped bruises on her wrist.

“Hi, Rina. I hope you’re not busy, I just thought I’d call to see how you’re doing.”

Rina’s voice is tinny over the phone, but still as pleasant and lilting as Inko remembers it. “Oh, hi! I’m sorry I missed dinner last night. I’m still in Okinawa for the week.”

“Yeah, the others told me,” Inko says. She’s wandering around the apartment in her bathrobe, drawing all the curtains to let some light in. “In-laws, right?”

“Yup. My mother-in-law loves me, I’m pleased to say. She was more excited to see me than her own son.”

Inko smiles. “How sweet. Are you guys close?”

“Yup! Hubby was planning the trip solo but I kind of missed his family so I told him I’d come with. It was either that or go vacationing on my own, I guess.”

“He was going to let you go somewhere alone for a week?”

“Yeah, so unromantic, right? It’s kind of fun, though. Sort of makes me feel young again.”

“He, uh. He doesn’t get worried? About you being away from him for so long?”

“Not really. Japan’s pretty safe, after all. I just text him off and on to let him know I’m alright.”

“I see,” Inko says, eyeing the bruises on her arm. They don’t hurt much but they’re starting to turn an ugly purple. “What if you forget?”

“Then he’ll call or something, I guess. It’s not really a big deal.”

“Right. You’re a grown up, you can take care of yourself,” Inko says faintly.

“You alright, Inko?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. Say, have you heard from Ken? I tried calling him too but he didn’t pick up. Did he change his number?”

“I couldn’t tell you. Last I saw him was the day he quit. I hope we didn’t offend him or something. Hana was super pushy about him asking you ou— I mean, about, uhm.”

“They told me about that,” Inko says, a little bashful. Ken was always unfailingly nice to her. She might have said yes to him, if he’d said something before Hisashi had. “I feel bad now. I wish I’d noticed.”

“You’re not a mind-reader. Anyway, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. It’s been, like, a year since I last saw him. I think he’s been pretty clear about not wanting anything to do with us.”

“Maybe he’s just been really busy.”

“Too busy to even pick up the phone? I doubt it. He’s avoiding us, and nobody knows why.”

Twenty minutes later their phone call leaves Inko with an unpleasant heaviness in her stomach. Shivering at a stray draught, she tugs the sleeve of her bathrobe down to cover her wrist and tries to remember if Ken ever used social media. He had a Twitter, she thinks. He used to like taking photos of his food and tagging her in animal memes. Now his timeline is nothing but links to articles and clickbait-looking Youtube videos. He doesn’t even reply to tweets directed at him.

Inko’s thumb hovers over the direct message icon for a good two minutes before she sighs and goes back to her own profile. She’s not sure she can blame Ken for avoiding her, not when she’s become so reclusive without even noticing. She’s barely seen anyone this year. First the whirlwind romance had occupied her entirely, and then the thrill of moving in together, and then the baby. She’s shut herself off from everyone but Hisashi.

“But that’s going to change,” she says under her breath, and then louder again. “I’ll get back in touch with my friends and start getting out more. I’ll tell Hisashi about the baby and we’ll work through whatever’s come between us. I can have healthy relationships. I don’t have to hide myself away all day.”

She’s already made a start with her ex-coworkers. She can see how her old high school friends are doing, too. Even if Hisashi doesn’t want her meeting his friends, she can introduce him to hers. There are three classmates she’d been particularly close to. Maybe they’ll be up for a mini alumni reunion.

Only one of them replies the next day.

Inko frowns at her phone as she’s making dinner and thinks. Miko’s up for lunch, but the other two just ignore her. They might just be too busy to talk to her right now, but something about this feels familiar. Do you think the boys will want to come? she texts Miko one-handed.

Maybe!! I haven’t seen either of them in a while tho. They don’t answer my calls :(

Inko checks their social media out of curiosity. They’re fairly active; there isn’t much info about what they’re up to nowadays, but they do both seem to like sharing tabloids pretty regularly.

Very regularly, in fact. Every post is exactly two weeks apart.

Brows furrowing, Inko goes back to Ken’s Twitter and checks the timestamps. It’s the same. Every tweet comes two weeks after the last, dating back to about a year ago. That’s about the time he quit.

“Did he get taken over by a spam bot?” Inko mutters, forgetting about the lasagne for a second. A closer look makes it obvious that his feed is weirdly generic, like it’s not being run by a real person. Her ex-classmates’ are the same. “Surely couldn’t all have lost their accounts in, what, three months? And they’ve all fallen off the radar.” There are no recent photos of them, either. There are landscapes and food pictures, but no selfies or birthdays or parties with friends.

Methodically, she scrolls through the social media of all her old classmates. A worrying pattern starts to emerge; a lot of them seem to have fallen victim to the same automated posts, and they don’t interact with other people in public anymore. Several of her close friends have been hit. All of them are male.

“What the hell happened here?” she says to herself. The oven beeps at her to let her know it’s ready. She sets the lasagne to cook on autopilot.

Hisashi’s all smiles when he gets home. He’s in a crisp grey suit today, expertly cut to exaggerate the taper of his waist. “Something smells delightful.”

“It’s lasagne. You’re home early.”

“I just couldn’t stay away from you any longer.”

“How sweet,” Inko says, glancing at her hands to make sure her sleeves are rolled all the way down. Hisashi presses a kiss to her cheek. There’s no trace at all of bad feelings from last night. She’d wonder if she dreamt it if she didn’t have physical proof on her arm. “Do you,” she starts, and then stops.

Hisashi turns to her. He slips his tie over his head and puts it on the counter. “Do I what?”

Do you love me still, she’d been about to say. What a stupid question. “Do you have a Twitter or Facebook something? I realise I never asked.”

“I do not. Why?”

“I just noticed something weird going around. A bot, I think. Some of my friends have had their accounts hijacked and their accounts don’t seem real anymore.”

“Is that so,” Hisashi says. He smiles when she looks at him, slow and crooked like he’s thinking of something funny that he won’t tell her. “It’s a good thing I don’t bother with social media. I suppose I’m an old man in that regard.”

“You’re barely thirty,” Inko says, which makes Hisashi smile even wider.  “I was thinking of inviting some of my old high school friends over this weekend. Only Miko’s replied, though. I can’t get a hold of the others.”

“Perhaps they don’t want to be contacted.”

“I wonder if it’s something I did,” Inko sighs and gathers cooking utensils to be put into the dishwasher. “Maybe I offended them somehow. I haven’t been keeping in touch.”

“You didn’t do anything,” Hisashi says. “Leave the crock pot there. I’ll handle it. You shouldn’t be lifting heavy objects.”

“It’s not that heavy,” Inko says, and then pauses. “You’ve never washed the crock pot before.”

“I do know how to do dishes.”

“That’s not what I meant.” She glances down. Her tummy’s only slightly larger than normal. Certainly not enough that she looks pregnant and too fragile to carry a pot. “Uhm. Thanks, I guess.”

“You’re welcome, my treasure,” Hisashi says. “Have a seat on the couch. I’ll rub your shoulders. Let me pamper my lady tonight.”

On Tuesday, Miko says she’s in the mood for Italian. She might like that fancy restaurant, Inko thinks, the one with the rustic food and expensive wine. Hisashi made the reservation the last time they went there, but if she calls them today she may be able to get a table for the weekend.

Nobody answers. Sadly that’s something Inko’s starting to get used to. The place is on the way to the butcher’s, though. She can stop by and make a booking in person while she’s out doing the shopping.

There’s an offer on pork belly today. “Chinese it is,” Inko says to herself. The butcher wraps it up for her neatly in brown wax paper, and, that done, she walks to the Italian place to make the most of the brisk winter sun.

It’s closed. The windows are smashed in and the place is swarming with police cars.

Pace slowing, she approaches a policeman standing just outside the cordoned-off area. He’s got his arms crossed, one stationary figure amidst the hushed activity. “Excuse me. What happened to the restaurant? Is everything okay?”

“I’m not really allowed to say,” says the officer. His nametag reads Yamazaki. “But I’m afraid this place won’t be open for business for a while.”

“There was a death last week. Friday, right before they opened for dinner,” says one of the bystanders. He has a lanyard around his neck with a media tag. “One of the waiters. They’ve only just confirmed the identity of the body.”

Officer Yamazaki scowls. “You are not supposed to be revealing that information to the public.”

“She’ll find out in tomorrow’s Shimbun anyway,” says the reporter. “Story first came out a few days ago. It happened when they’d closed between lunch and dinner shifts. The dead guy came in first to open the place up for dinner. He was alone. By the time the rest of the staff showed up twenty minutes later, he was a corpse. Unrecognisable. They knew it must have been him since he was wearing the uniform, but we’re not allowed to publish hearsay. Now he’s been officially identified, and I have a story.”

 A flash goes off somewhere behind the police barrier. People in masks and blue uniforms are marking out the ground with little numbered plaques. “Oh my god,” Inko says almost to herself. “How awful. I was just here a little while ago. It looked so normal.”

“It was grisly,” says the reporter, ignoring the warning look Officer Yamazaki gives him. “Poor bastard ended up face-first in the meat grinder. That’s why it took so long to figure out who he was. Check the papers from Saturday. I did a pretty good piece, if I say so myself.”

“Quit scaring her,” scowls Officer Yamazaki. “Sorry, miss, but you really shouldn’t be here. You should head home and be with your family.”

“Of course,” Inko says faintly. It’s hard to tear her eyes away from the sombre-faced workers milling about like ants, but the breeze ruffles her hair to remind her that the rest of the world is waiting. She nods to the men and goes home, head in a fog as she silently mourns the death of someone she didn’t know.

Hisashi notices how rattled she is when he gets home. She’s trying to make dinner, but he draws her out of the kitchen and strokes her hair until she gathers her thoughts enough to talk. “I saw the most awful thing today, Hisashi. I tried to go to that restaurant, you know the Italian one with the difficult name? They’re closed. Someone died there, in a really horrible way.”

“Is that what’s bothering you?” Hisashi says and hugs her. “Yes, I saw that on the news. It was truly unfortunate.”

“We were just there a few weeks ago,” Inko says, chewing her lip. “Everyone was happy. It felt safe, like nothing bad would happen.”

“It did.”

“Yeah. It’s so surreal to think we might even have seen him that day. He was a person with a life, and now he’s gone.”

“And so young, too,” Hisashi says soothingly. “It really is strange to think how fragile life can be. So you must promise me that you’ll be safe always, alright?” he says and draws away so he can look her in the eye. She nods. “Poor thing. You’ve had a scare today. Leave dinner, we’ll order in and watch that nature documentary you like.”

She’s grateful for the distraction, and by the time she checks the news the next day, the article she’s looking for doesn’t upset her as much as she’d expected. Body of dead restaurant worker identified, says the headline. The accompanying photo is one she recognises. It’s the waiter who’d served them, the one who’d flirted with her and kept trying to offer her wine. He was only nineteen.

He’d been killed when his co-workers were away between shifts, just like the reporter had said. The police don’t know if it was an accident or a murder. The security footage from the whole week is corrupted somehow, and they can’t tell if that was done deliberately or if the cameras had just failed without the management noticing.

“God, that poor thing,” Inko sighs. Hisashi was right. Life is so fragile it’s frightening, and looking at the face of a smiling dead boy makes her almost ache to know what he would have looked like if he’d been allowed to live.

So young, Hisashi had said.

But the identity of the body just came out today.

Inko rereads the article. The restaurant’s staff alerted police that the corpse may have belonged to Tanaka, as he had been tasked with opening the restaurant for the dinner shift but had failed to show up. However, police declined to release this information until it could be verified, concerned the publicity would interfere with their ongoing search for him. Tanaka’s family filed a missing person’s report on Saturday. They were unable to identify the body from the restaurant due to extensive damage to the face, but DNA testing finally revealed the results yesterday evening. This concludes a four-day search.

“How did he know how old the victim was?” she says out loud. “Did I tell him? No, I couldn’t have. I didn’t know myself. Maybe he knows someone at the restaurant and he heard second hand? But he said he saw it on the news.”

Tanaka had died on Friday. That was the day Hisashi had come home with blood on his clothes.

Her stomach twists. Slowly, Inko puts her phone down, the news blurring into black smudges until the screen turns itself off. It couldn’t be. She’s just drawing connections that don’t really exist, trying to make sense of the few facts she knows.

Strike three, Hisashi had said. If he keeps this up I’m going to kill him.

The man –boy— who’d flirted with her is dead. The co-worker who used to like her hasn’t answered his phone in a year. Her closest male friends from school now look like automated spam bots, and the thing they all have in common is Inko.

Bile crawls its way up her throat. It’s not morning sickness, this time, because that always comes with a wash of fondness for her troublesome little child. Now her vision swims so all she can make out is colours and shapes, sleek black furniture and purple-blue bruises on her wrist. Her heart pumps like it’s trying to send all the blood in her body to her ears. Rising, she stumbles into the bathroom to splash water on her face, hoping the cold will make her skin feel less like it’s on fire.

“Calm down,” she tells her reflection. She looks terrible, eyelashes wet and cheeks flushed. “You’re jumping to conclusions. He hasn’t done anything to make you suspect him, just like he hasn’t really done anything to prove he’s been cheating on you. You’re jumpy because you’re nervous about being a mom, that’s all. Calm down.”

Breathe in, breathe out, repeat. There has to be an explanation that makes sense. Hisashi guessed, somehow, that the person who died had been young. The only other people who knew were the restaurant workers and the police. She doesn’t think Hisashi has any connection to the restaurant, seeing as nobody seemed to recognise him when they went the first time.

The police, on the other hand. Hisashi never talks about where he works, and he won’t let her meet his friends or see his phone. That would imply he has something to hide. But that may not necessarily be a bad thing; if he’s some kind of police investigator then he must need to keep his work confidential. Maybe that would explain the blood, too. Crime scenes are probably messy, especially when someone’s fallen into an industrial meat grinder.

“That must be it.” Saying it out loud makes the words seem more real. Already her heartbeat calms and the ringing of her ears dies down. The closest police station is ten minutes away. She could even check, if she were so inclined.

Maybe she will. Seeing Hisashi will calm her nerves, give her certainty that whatever half-formed criminal images she had of him a second ago aren’t real. She’ll tell him one day, what she thought, and he can laugh at her for dreaming up nonsense.

He’ll appreciate lunch. It’s half-past ten now. That’s more than enough time to make him something nice. She just has to make sure she’s got the right place in mind. Hisashi doesn’t answer his phone when she tries to call, so she looks up the number for their district’s station and hopes they don’t mind talking to civilians.

Someone picks up on the third ring. Inko says good morning, already feeling more cheerful. “Sorry to bother you. I just wanted to ask if there’s a Hisashi there?”

“I can check for you. Hisashi who?” says the woman on the line.

“Midoriya. Hisashi Midoriya.”

There’s silence for a good few seconds. “Who is this?”

“Uhm, his girlfriend.”

“I’m transferring you.”

The line cuts out before she can say a word. Tuneless jazz music plays the whole time she’s on hold, and she sits on the edge of her bed and chews her fingernails. The next person to pick up is a man, probably middle-aged and definitely a smoker. “Superintendent Sasabe speaking.”

Inko sighs. “Good morning. I’m just calling to ask about someone. Hisashi Midoriya? He’s about a hundred and ninety centimetres. His hair’s kind of wavy, and—”

“Hisashi Midoriya.” There’s a pause yet again, like the speaker’s choosing his words. “I know who you’re talking about.”

“Oh. I…I just wanted to know if he was there.”

“Is he going to be?”

“What?”

“I’m asking if he has business with us. They didn’t say he’d be coming.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think? His goons.”

“Goons,” she echoes. “Do you mean his employees?”

Sasabe snorts. “If that’s what you wanna call them. Who is this?”

“I… his secretary.”

“What, he killed the last one already? No, don’t answer, I don’t wanna know. If this is about Matsuoka trespassing on your turf, he didn’t mean to. He’s new. It’s handled now, we’ve backed off and you can keep doing what you were doing, alright?”

“Wait,” Inko says, words coming out without express permission from her brain. “Wait, what about Tanaka? The dead boy, the waiter?”

“Jesus. I don’t know what he did to piss Midoriya off, but we’ll rule in an accident, alright? Tell him to go harass the Shinjuku station instead of mine. He gives everyone the creeps.”

Sasabe hangs up without saying goodbye. Inko stares out the window, seeing nothing, and slowly puts down the phone.

“He’s a criminal,” she says softly. “The father of my child is a murderer.”

She manages to stop crying by the time he gets home.

Her eyes are still red and puffy, though. She tells him it’s allergies when he asks her what’s wrong.

“You really have to make sure not to touch your face after dusting,” he says and tucks her hair behind her ear. She tries not to flinch at his touch. These hands have always been gentle with her, save the one time she’d dared go out without his permission.

Tanaka hadn’t received the same treatment, though. And neither have the friends she may never see again. “How was work?”

“The same as always.” He looks so perfect and poised as he unbuttons his cuffs, smile charming and voice soothing and deep. “How was your day?”

“It was… good,” Inko manages. “I was thinking of bringing you a bento but I realised I don’t actually know where your office is.”

“I move around a lot,” Hisashi says and pats her hand. “That’s a sweet thought, though. Thank you.”

The evening’s as normal as it could possibly be given the circumstances, but Inko wakes up a few times at night with hazy nightmares of bruises and grinding bones. Hisashi sleeps soundly. She stares at the wall and thinks of the child she’s still keeping a secret, thinks about their future with a trapped mother and a father who wouldn’t think twice about ending a life.

She can’t let her baby end up like that. She can’t watch an innocent mind be warped into the person that Hisashi must be.

Inko realises, as she’s making her tea the next morning, that she has to leave.

1. He may have killed Tanaka
2. He may have made my friends disappear
3. He hates when he doesn’t know where I am
4. If I leave him, he might kill me

Inko goes over the list in her head again and again until the words start to sound meaningless, going through the motions of housework while her mind oscillates between disbelief and fear. She messes up dinner twice. Manages to make something edible by the time Hisashi gets home, but barely tastes it as they sit across from each other in a too-big apartment and he tries to tell her about his day.

“Do you ever miss being single?” she asks when the silence stretches on for too long.

Hisashi’s chopsticks stop halfway to his mouth. His expression goes sharp, and he takes his next bite almost as an afterthought. “I do not. Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering,” Inko says weakly. The way he’s looking at her is calculating, eyes slightly narrowed and head tilted like he can see what’s going on in her brain. “It’ll be our anniversary in a few months.”

“Two years well spent.” His tone is deceptively pleasant. “I assume the same goes for you.”

She nods. “You’ve been kind.”

“You deserve it,” he says and smiles. “You’re a lovely woman, Inko. I’m glad you’re mine. I’d be a fool to let you go anywhere.”

He hasn’t blinked once in the past minute, she realises belatedly. Uneasy, she nods again, and stuffs some food in her mouth so she doesn’t have to talk any more.

He’s not going to let her go without a fight. Staying out for two hours without telling him made her feel like he was about to lock her in a cellar. She goes through make-believe conversations in her head, tries to figure out if there’s anything she can do to make him let her go.

I’d be a fool to let you go anywhere, he’d told her. Knowing what she knows it sounds a lot less romantic than it should.

It’s frightening, the thought of telling him she’s leaving, but she still has to leave. The next best option is to slip away. Disappearing while he’s at work will save her from having to confront him. It’s cowardly. It’ll break his heart, but that’s just something she’s going to have to live with.

She buys a map of Japan – a physical one, one she can throw out without it being traced, knowing she’s being paranoid but unable to stop herself. The paper is both worrying and comforting, a reminder that she’s really doing this. She scrawls notes over it in Sharpie, and hides it under the fridge when Hisashi’s home.

He can’t be allowed to find her, she decides early on. If he does he’ll manipulate her into coming back somehow, and she doesn’t know if she’s strong enough to say no to his face. That’s if he doesn’t get angry, of course. For all she knows he might take it as an insult and make her pay for that somehow.

She can’t stay with someone she knows either. Assuming she’s right about what happened to her friends, it’ll be a death sentence for them. Nobody can get hurt because of her. She’ll let Hisashi kill her himself before that happens.

By that logic, she realises, nobody can know where she is.

Nobody. They might tell him by accident. Or he might beat the information out of them, or he’ll find some way to trace them back to her. She can’t even go to the police. By the sounds of it they’re afraid of Hisashi too. If he asks them where she is, they’re going to tell him in a heartbeat.

Running away doesn’t just mean cutting ties with Hisashi, then. It means halting contact with pretty much everyone she knows, even her parents. Her friends, her old boss, the butcher who gives her discounts… they’ll all have to forget she exists. If she chooses to do this, it’s all or nothing. Getting caught is not an option. It’s either disappear entirely, or stay and have their child be born into a life of violent crime.

It’s going to be hard, raising a kid on her own. She hasn’t even gone to a doctor yet to make sure her pregnancy’s going okay. “Either I give up everything I have,” she says, hand resting on her belly. “Or I let Hisashi ruin my baby forever.”

(The choice is easy, in the end. She picks her child.)

First thing’s first. She needs to see a doctor.

She visits a women’s clinic while Hisashi’s at work, antsy and hopeful as she sits in a plastic waiting room chair. They weigh her and take a blood test and tell her to wait. She jumps when a nurse calls her name.

The doctor, a middle-aged lady with a pixie cut, smiles and asks the usual questions; what’s your name? How old are you? Why have you come to see me today?

Inko tries to keep her voice steady. “I think I’m pregnant. This is my first doctor’s visit since I found out. I’ve never had a baby before.”

“I see. What symptoms are you experiencing?”

“Morning sickness. Cramps. I’ve missed three periods, so far.”

“Goodness!” says the doctor. “Well, we’ll need to do some of the usual tests. A pap smear, for one, and a pelvic exam. Let me get my Doppler and we’ll see if we can get a heartbeat.”

Inko’s shirt is rolled up to expose her abdomen to the chill of the clinic. It’s very slightly distended even though she’s lying down, and the doctor pokes and prods with gloved hands while Inko prays everything will be alright. A walkie-talkie looking thing is pressed to her belly. “Well, you’re definitely pregnant. Reaching the end of your first trimester, too.”

“I’m a bit over ten weeks, I think.”

“Sounds about right. I hear a little heartbeat. It’s strong,” the doctor says, which makes Inko’s own heart swoop with joy.

“Is my baby healthy?”

“So far, I think so. The tests will find out for certain.” The doctor pats her hand and sits down. “You really should have come to see me earlier, dear. There are lots of things to be done. Where’s the father now, by the way? He didn’t come with you?”

“He’s at work,” Inko says. The mention of Hisashi dulls her excitement a little. “He… was wondering if the baby would end up like him.”

The doctor furrows her brows. “Well, I suppose so. Half of their genes will come from him, you know.”

“Of course,” Inko says, smiling weakly. She rolls her shirt back down and sits up. “When will I know if I’m having a boy or a girl?”

“You can do an ultrasound when you’re about eighteen weeks along. That’ll be your first ever photograph of your child.” She reaches for a calendar on her desk and counts off the weeks under her breath, stopping when she gets to forty-five. “You should be meeting them sometime in July.”

“In the summer.” Inko imagines cradling a newborn in her arms, basking in a pleasantly hot day. “Is, uhm. Is the rest of the pregnancy going to be hard?”

“That varies from person to person, I’m afraid. Many find the first trimester to be the worst. Others say it’s the second. You can expect mood swings, swelling, cramps, bloating, bladder weakness, acid reflux…”

Inko’s face falls. The doctor laughs and pats her on the hand again. “Don’t worry, dear. It’ll be worth it in the end. You and your husband are going to be absolutely overjoyed when your tiny darling is born.”

“I don’t doubt that. I’m just nervous, I guess.”

“Don’t be,” the other lady says soothingly. “Everything will be alright. The people around you will be there to help.”

“They sure will,” Inko says, and wishes she meant it.

Hisashi’s extra sweet to her for the next few days.

He doesn’t leave her side when he gets home. It makes her uneasy, a little bit, when he brushes his hand against her stomach. She takes to wearing large sweaters that hide her figure, and tries in vain to remember if she’d thrown away those first pregnancy tests where he wouldn’t see them. Her secret map stays hidden under the fridge. Its surface gets covered in more nervous scrawl every day as Inko tries to figure out where she can go.

Tokyo’s a bad bet, most likely. If Hisashi’s the kind of kingpin she imagines him to be, he’ll have her found in no time at all. The best place to go would be a city, where she can get lost in a sea of faces, or a tiny village where he wouldn’t think to look for her at all.

Anywhere she’s already familiar with is crossed off the list. She can’t be seen with relatives or friends, so their hometowns and favourite vacation spots are vetoed as well. For a moment she considers going overseas, but that would mean learning a new language and worrying about visas. She doesn’t have time for that. There’s a baby on the way.

Musutafu’s as good a place as any other, she decides eventually. It’s urban enough that she can disappear, but not expensive enough that she won’t be able to get by on her own. The easiest way to get there is by train. “But what if someone sees me?” she frets over her coffee. “There will be attendants and policeman. One of them might tell Hisashi.”

She’s getting paranoid, maybe. But she keeps waking up at night for no reason, and everything she does now is shrouded in dread. What happens when the baby comes. What happens when Hisashi gets tired of her. What happens if some man tries to befriend her and Hisashi makes him disappear. Every thought now centres around Hisashi, around his smile and his hands and all the things he won’t tell her.

She gets a car. It’s a hideous second-hand thing that she buys with the very last of her savings, the only money she has to her name that Hisashi won’t notice go missing. It stays with the dealer until she’s ready to get it. In the meantime she rips up her map and throws it away in a public bin, pawns off all the things she doesn’t immediately need. Making space for a new wardrobe, she tells Hisashi when he asks. Makes it seem like she’s getting ready for spring. What she’ll really be needing is maternity clothes, but that’s not something he needs to know.

By the end of December, all her things fit into a large suitcase and a duffel bag. She goes through the motions of life as normal, spends Christmas with her friends and the new year with her parents (with Hisashi’s permission, of course). It’s her way of saying goodbye. They can never know where she’s going, but this will be the last time she sees them for longer than she wants to think about.

Her last goodbye is to Hisashi. It’s almost romantic – they have a candle lit dinner in the apartment that’s been Inko’s home for almost two years. He showers her in compliments and peppers kisses all over her face, tells her she’s the most valuable thing in his life and promises he’ll be there for her for as long as he lives.

She cries, then. Thinks about how he’s made her feel cared for and loved, and how nice it’s been having someone in her life like this. He wipes her tears away. As he holds her she wonders if she’s been wrong all this time, if he’s innocent of the things she’s blamed him for.

That night she lies awake and tries to figure out if she’s making a mistake. She thinks of the long and scary road ahead of her, and how hard it’s going to be doing all this alone.

But she’s made her decision. The preparations have been done. The only thing that matters now is her child, and she’ll do everything she can to protect them from the life Hisashi leads.

The next day, Inko packs her things, takes a taxi to her car, and disappears.

The highway stretches ahead of her. The sun hangs bright but fragile in the winter sky, making everything look crisp and brand new.

As she takes the open road with her beat-up Toyota and her baby coming to life inside her, it occurs to Inko that this is what it means to be free.

The first night, she ends up in Yokohama.

She buys a convenience-store bento and camps out in her car, reading a brand new map under the yellow light of a streetlamp. She’s starting to like maps quite a lot.

“There are six months until you come out of me,” she says around a mouthful of rice. A truck rumbles by in the distance. “That means six months to move around, but I want to be in Musutafu by July. I’ll need a place to stay and a crib and your clothes and diapers. We may have to skimp on the toys a little. I have,” she says and checks her purse, “two hundred thousand yen. All the money I own, in cash.”

That’s not a lot. Enough to cover monthly check-ups, with her health insurance, with some left over in case of an emergency. She can sleep in the car, so shelter isn’t an issue, but she’ll also need food and water and gas. A lot of gas, since she’ll be moving around Japan until she’s sure Hisashi’s not looking for her.

He’s probably called ten times by now. Inko wouldn’t know, seeing as she threw her sim card away and left her phone behind. She’d left out some brochures for a hostel in Sapporo, too. Hopefully that’ll fool him into checking there first if he decides to come after her.

She hopes he doesn’t. He looks at her sometimes like he owns her, like she’s a favourite trinket to be kept to himself. She can just imagine him sitting on the sofa with his tie loose, waiting for her to come home like he did that night. This time he doesn’t get to yell at her, though. Everything she owns is gone from the apartment. He must know she’s not coming home.

“I thought I would feel more guilty,” she sighs to herself, pushing the seat back so she’s reclining. Luckily she had the foresight to bring a thick blanket with her. If she shuts her eyes and listens to the sounds of the city, she can pretend night sky shines right through the roof of her car. “This isn’t so bad, I guess. Just like this, me and you.”

In the morning she heads to Nagoya. It takes all day and she’s exhausted by the time she arrives, so she gets a burger and sleeps in the car and figures she’ll start making plans tomorrow. When she wakes, she drives around for a bit until she finds somewhere quiet, then parks the car under a tree and wanders into a convenience store to see if they’re hiring.

They say no. Undeterred, Inko goes from shop to shop looking for work, getting turned down until a ramen place tells her they need a waitress. She asks to start immediately, and works there for two weeks and saves every spare yen until it’s time to move on.

The next city she goes to is Kyoto. A little diner hires her, this time. It pays more than the ramen store but the work is harder, and she goes to sleep every night feeling exhausted and sore. She wakes up sore, too. The back seat of her car is lumpy and too small to stretch out, but at least it’s better than being outside.

She takes leftovers so she won’t have to buy food. A customer sees her wrap an abandoned pork cutlet in tin foil. “It’s for my dog,” Inko tells him with a sunny smile. He nods and doesn’t question it and goes back to his lunch.

Later, Inko unwraps it in the safety of her car. It’s cold. For some reason, that makes her burst into tears.

Osaka comes next. She’s steadily moving south, chasing warmer weather because the inside of the car is freezing. Public baths are a godsend. Partly just so she doesn’t look obviously homeless, but mostly because soaking in hot water is downright luxurious after being on her feet all day. She’s taken two jobs this time. It beats hanging out in the car, and one of them even gives her free food.

In Kochi, she takes a short break. Her joints are killing her. They’re swollen and ugly and her stomach’s finally starting to show, and all the unpleasant symptoms her doctor had mentioned decide to come at the same time. She cries for two days in her car. Finally, she gives in and gets a motel for a night.

She sleeps like the dead for sixteen hours. She also takes three hot showers, just because she can, and by the time she gets back to her car she’s decided to never take a bed for granted ever again.

By the time she gets to Hiroshima, her tummy’s too big for her t shirts. It’s finally time to break out the shirts she’d stolen from Hisashi’s wardrobe. She feels guilty wearing them, but they’re warm, she doesn’t feel like she’ll bust a seam from bending the wrong way.

A little hospital in the suburbs catches her eye. They help her make an appointment for an ultrasound on the weekend. In the meantime she discovers a goldmine; the bakery that hires her lets employees take home the food they don’t manage to sell. Every day she has something filling to eat, and she savours each pastry and hopes that her baby is happy with what they’re being fed.

She can barely sit still before her doctor’s appointment. They rub cold gel on her stomach and prod her and take her blood, and after half an hour of talking they finally get to see what the foetus looks like. “It’s a boy,” the doctor tells her with a big grin. “Healthy little guy. Check out his tiny hands!”

Inko cries. She can’t help it; this is the first time she’s ever had a concrete image of her child. Her son. He’s a perfect, grainy blob of life on the screen, and she sniffles and laughs and sniffles some more as the nurse hands her a tissue.

“Any idea what you’re gonna call him?” the doctor asks.

She thinks of her grandfather. “Izuku,” she says. It feels right.

She keeps moving.

It gets both harder as easier as winter wears on. The places change but life more or less stays the same, with hard work and discomfort and all her savings hidden away under her shirt. Her stomach steadily gets bigger. People make way for her on sidewalks now, sometimes offer their seats or give her free things when she looks especially tired. She spends most of her time at work. Two jobs at a time, usually, although it’s hard to convince most employers to hire someone so visibly pregnant. She tells them a new excuse every time. My husband passed away. My mother is sick. We’re very poor and we need the money. The doctor said it would be alright to move around.

It’s exhausting, of course. But one night Inko sits in her car with the door open, wrapped in a blanket so she can look at the stars. She’s not lonely, she realises. She’s been alone for a long time, but the thought of that doesn’t hurt at all.

The days get warmer. Frost gives way to weak sunshine and flowers unfurl their petals and start to wake up for the year.

Inko’s lost count of the places she’s been. Staying on her feet is starting to get difficult, so she tries for desk jobs when she can. They’re easier on her, but require her to stay longer in each city. The call centre she’s working at only hires her on the condition that she stay until the end of the month.

It goes alright. She’s got a decent amount of money saved up now, because she holds onto almost everything she earns. The only things she really spends on are doctor’s visits, food, and gas. The first two are mostly for Izuku’s sake. The last is just so she can continue wandering and not be found.

There are a couple of close calls, though. Once a policeman finds her sleeping in her car and demands to see her license. He insists on calling a family member of hers to come collect her, but she cries so hard he backs off. He makes her promise to go to a motel, though. That takes a chunk out of her savings. It’s kind of a setback, but at least she enjoys having a bed and shower for the night.

The second time is much scarier. It happens somewhere in Niigata, where she’s just started her third day serving drinks at a bar. A man keeps staring at her. She tries to ignore him at first, but as she hands him a shot of tequila he grabs her sleeve and asks if she’s running from home.

She leaves Niigita that night. Doesn’t bother asking for her pay, just gets in the car and goes.

After that she’s more careful. Calls herself something different each place she goes, tries her absolute best not to stay still for more than two weeks. It’s almost like a game, when the fear wears off. The rules are picked up as she goes along. The only objective is not to get caught.

So she keeps going. Works and wanders and prays that Izuku is healthy. Hisashi always stays in the back of her mind, but Inko decides she has more important things to worry about. Musutafu is her next stop. She’s already got an apartment building in mind, a tiny shoebox room with barely enough space for a bed and a stove. The baby things are safely in the trunk of her car. Underneath, at the very bottom of the suitcase, is her first ever ultrasound of Izuku.

Early in the morning of the forty-first week of her pregnancy, Inko starts up her car and gets ready to go to her last destination. Izuku kicks in her belly.

“Be patient,” she tells him. “We’ll get to see each other soon.”

It hurts.

It’s the worst pain she’s ever experienced in her life, even with the epidural and the doctors and nurses fluttering around her. It hurts that nobody’s there to hold her hand, as much as she’s sure her parents would have loved to be here for this. As much as Hisashi would have loved to be here for this, to remind her to breathe and push when the doctor says she can see the baby crowning.

The delivery lasts for eight hours. She’s exhausted, and she forgets it immediately when they put her son in her arms.

He’s hideous. Covered in placenta and blood, with a doughy face and high, wheezing cry. “Ten perfect little fingers and toes,” the doctor tells her proudly. “You did well. And all by yourself, too!”

Inko bursts into tears. Her whole body is numb and she’s thirsty and she just wants to sleep. “He’s gorgeous,” she says, and kisses her baby again and again and again.

Izuku blossoms into a beautiful little cherub.

Maybe Inko’s biased. This is her son, after all, so she could just be hard-wired to think he’s the loveliest thing in existence.

It’s true, though. Izuku has these bright green eyes and the softest, chubbiest cheeks. He cries a lot, which he probably got from her. She’s enamoured even though nothing really happens for the first couple of months. He just sleeps and eats and Inko stays in her tiny little rented room with him, immensely glad she got a new phone just to take photos with.

She doesn’t get to sleep much. Not that she really slept well before, with the anxiety of constantly moving, but Izuku needs feeding every four hours and has a powerful set of lungs for such a small body.

Inko can’t be mad at him. It must be hard not being able to say what you want. She’d always thought she’d just know, like all mothers have some innate sixth-sense to detect their babies’ needs. They don’t. Inko has to guess until Izuku stops wailing. She cries every night for a month because she thinks she’s a terrible parent.

When Izuku smiles at her for the first time, she’s absolutely smitten.

He starts to babble incessantly, staring intently at whatever enters his field of vision. Inko’s read that’s a sign of intelligence. He loves to grab things and look at them close-up, and usually also put them in his mouth. He puts pretty much everything in his mouth, actually. Inko can’t take her eyes off him for a second or he’ll start trying to eat her lipstick.

Izuku’s worth it. Whatever she had to do, all the running and hiding and being poor and afraid, Izuku makes it worth doing. She’s never going to let anything happen to him. She’ll shield him from all the bad things in the world if it kills her. As long as Inko still draws breath, Izuku’s going to be protected.

Eventually her savings run out and she has to go back to work. She ends up in the same department store chain she started off at, go figure.

It’s a desk job, this time. The pay’s alright, although she has to take extra shifts. The main reason she chose it is because they have free day care, and every morning she drops Izuku off and kisses him goodbye before he crawls off to play with the other kids.

Picking him up after work is the absolute best part of her day. She loves being at home with him, reading him baby books that she gets from the library. She can’t afford much beyond the necessities. Izuku doesn’t seem to mind, though. He’s happy to grab her fingers and chew the ends off his feetie pyjamas. For his first birthday he gets a stuffed animal. He shrieks with such joy Inko’s sure the neighbours can hear.

A boy in the office likes her, she finds out second hand.

His name’s Tachibana. He’s tall and shy and tries to leave snacks on her desk without her noticing. It’s refreshing, in a way. Blessedly normal. She invites him out for coffee and sits across from him while he blushes and stutters into his cup.

“You know I have a son,” she says with all seriousness. “He comes first. He always will.”

Tachibana fiddles with a seam on his pants. “I like kids.”

Inko smiles. “Alright then. Let’s have lunch tomorrow. Come get me at noon.”

Izuku’s first word is ‘green’.

It sounds like gwee. Inko doesn’t know what he’s talking about, at first, but he grabs her face and looks into her eyes and says it again.

She cries, obviously. And then kisses his face over and over until he squirms and complains.

Tachibana gives her flowers on Valentine’s day. He’s so embarrassed about it that Inko’s immediately endeared. She rewards him with a kiss and the poor guy turns red enough that she almost feels bad for laughing.

Izuku starts walking, and then he’s unstoppable.

He gets into everything, the lady at day care complains. He’d opened the pantry somehow and found all the baby biscuits and handed them out to his cohort like some tiny freckled Robin Hood. Inko thinks this is funny until he starts doing the same to her. He empties out her purse three times in one day, so Inko puts him in his crib. He rattles the bars and hollers, demanding to be let out of jail.

Tachibana gives her son an All Might action figure for his second birthday. Izuku stares at it with wide eyes, and then immediately sticks its head in his mouth.

“I liked heroes as a kid,” Tachibana says. “I was too weak to ever think about becoming one, though. Maybe Izuku will grow up to be a hero someday instead.”

“Maybe he will,” Inko says and leans her head on his shoulder.

Izuku sneezes flames.

Inko’s breath catches in her throat. She knows where he got that from. Knows where his freckles and intelligence came from too, although those had been easier to ignore.

Izuku turns to look at her, awestruck. “Mama! Mama, did you see that? There was fire!”

It takes a second before she remembers how to speak. “I sure did, baby.”

“I got a quirk!” Izuku says and bounces with glee. “I got a fire quirk! I can breathe fire!”

“I’m so happy for you,” Inko says and forces herself to smile. 

Tachibana’s there the whole time. He never does calm down, but it’s kind of sweet how easy it is to make him blush. One day, after work, he traces his fingers along her palm and very quietly asks if she wants to get married.

Well, he’s kind. And Izuku could use a dad.

She says yes.

Izuku’s ecstatic to start kindergarten. On his first day, Inko tells her boss she’ll work from home. She wants to be around just in case things don’t go so well and Izuku needs her to pick him up.

He hugs her goodbye and scampers off to see his classroom. Inko walks home alone, humming under her breath and hoping that her baby gets to make some friends.

She stops dead when she gets to the door. Her apartment smells like metal.

 Hisashi’s sitting on her sofa. In front of him, in a bloody pile on the floor, lies Tachibana. His neck is bent at an awkward angle. His engagement ring glints between Hisashi’s fingers, catching the sunlight as he examines it from every side. “Not even a diamond,” he says. “I do hope he made more of an effort for yours.”

Numbly, Inko shuts the door behind her. Tachibana’s face-down, stained so red she can barely recognise him. The smell makes bile rise in the back of her throat. “Hisashi.”

Hisashi smiles. “Hello again, treasure. I’m home.”

The clock ticks.

Birds sing somewhere outside. The pool of blood slowly seeps outwards and stains her floor. Hands shaking, Inko leans back against the door and slowly slides to her knees. Tachibana had been so kind. So young. The face of the dead waiter flashes through her mind. She wonders if he’d been killed the same way, unsuspecting and broken at Hisashi’s feet.

Hisashi stands up. His shoes leave red footprints as he walks to her. Very gently, he lifts her into his arms and carries her to the sofa. She seems to weigh nothing to him.

“I’ve missed you so dearly,” he tells her. He hasn’t aged, not a day. “Poor thing. You must have been so lonely, out there for so long.”

“How did you find me?” she whispers. He props her against the arm of the couch so they can talk face to face. “I ran from you, I— I tried to disappear.”

He nods. “I will admit I did lose track of you for a while. You had me worried, Inko. I couldn’t find you until you’d settled down here. Not for want of trying, of course.”

“Why?” She should be crying, she thinks. She just feels heavy and numb. Exhausted. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“I told you that you were mine,” says Hisashi like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “It hurt me, when you left. But I understood. Perhaps I’d pampered you for too long and you needed a taste of independence. I thought you’d come back, once things got too difficult, but you exceeded my expectations. You’ve done very well.”

Inko curls in on herself. Hisashi’s looking at her with such tenderness, as though he’s genuinely happy to see her. “Why now?”

“I heard that he asked you to marry him,” Hisashi says, nodding at Tachibana’s corpse. “Which would be unacceptable, of course. I was also quite anxious to meet my son for the first time. I’m a bit annoyed with you, I must say. You could have at least brought Izuku around for a visit.”

The cold knot of dread in Inko’s stomach tightens. “Don’t you touch him.”

“I’m not going to hurt him. He’s mine.”

“He does not belong to you,” Inko says, hands balling into fists. “He’s his own person. He’s sweet and smart and kind and he’s nothing like you.”

“That’s enough now, my love.” Hisashi pats her knee soothingly. “I enjoyed our little game quite a bit. You’ve had enough of playing at freedom, for now. I think it’s about time we settled down and became a family again.”

Inko slaps him. 

She doesn’t know why she does it. All she really registers is the ringing in her ears, and the white-hot swell of rage that fights to get out of her chest. Hisashi’s jaw is slack. She’s never raised her hand to anyone, not once in her life.

“I was not playing at freedom,” she hisses as he slowly raises a hand to touch his cheek. “You think I care about myself? I don’t. I ran because I knew I needed to keep Izuku away from you. You’re a sociopath. You’re the reason all my friends disappeared, aren’t you? Ken? That boy from the restaurant? I don’t care if you say you won’t hurt him. You’ll ruin him. You’ll turn him into you.”

Hisashi stares at her. “You’ve grown.”

“I have,” says Inko. “And it doesn’t matter how many times you find me. I will run from you until my very last breath if I think you’ll be bad for my son.”

Very slowly, a smile spreads across Hisashi’s face. “Oh, Inko. Every time I think I’ve understood you, you go and do something to make me love you more.”

She leaves the apartment alive, which is sort of surprising.

The same can’t be said for Tachibana. Hisashi says he’ll make the body disappear. Inko doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to leave him in their home, their space. But it’s three o’clock and Izuku needs to be picked up from kindergarten, so Inko steels herself and goes.

Izuku comes barrelling into her arms the moment the school bell rings. Seeing him eases some of her nerves, makes her head feel less fuzzy and numb. “Mama I made a friend his name is Kacchan he can explode stuff and he gave me a leaf and teacher said I was a good boy!”

Inko hugs him. “That’s great, sweetheart.”

The schoolyard is full of other parents picking up their kids. It feels like they’re watching her so Inko hurries Izuku along, takes his hand and leads him down the street away from their eyes. “Are we going home?”

“No, honey,” Inko says, giving him a tired smile. “We’re going to go to a hotel today.”

“What’s a hotel?”

“It’s a big building with lots and lots of rooms. There are beds and fluffy pillows.”

“Okay. Is Uncle Tachibana coming?”

“No.”

“Why are we going to a hotel?”

Inko falters. “We’re celebrating your first day of kindergarten. I thought it would be fun to spend the night somewhere else. I’ll be right there with you, so you don’t have to be scared, alright?”

Hisashi’s booked them some fancy resort in town, but Inko checks them into a motel instead. It’s tiny but clean. Izuku tests the bounciness of the twin bed, and then lights up when he notices the TV. “Mama! Mama look! Can I watch?”

“Sure,” Inko says and turns it on for him. He finds a hero cartoon channel. She leaves him to it and goes to take a shower. It’s hot enough to turn her skin red, but somehow she doesn’t feel quite clean.

Her phone’s sitting at the bottom of her backpack with their clothes. Hisashi hasn’t tried to call her. He knows her number, though. She knows he does. Just like he knows everything else. Probably has for years. He’s just let her think she’s safe all this time, let her have her peace with Izuku before he swooped back in to remind her that he never did let her go.

They can’t go back to the apartment. Can’t stay in Musutafu, now that he knows where they are. She thinks about running again, about nights spent in a second hand car. A different one, because she’d sold her old Toyota to cover their first year of rent. They’ll have to keep moving all over Japan just like she did in the old days, except this time it’ll be for a lot longer than six months. Staying in one place is how Hisashi had found them, after all. They can’t settle down until Izuku’s grown up.

She won’t be able to get a steady job. She’ll need to get all the part-time work she can, because she’s supporting two people now, not just her. She won’t have any time for Izuku. He’ll have to fend for himself and get used to moving schools every month, or learn to read and write on his own or when Inko has the time to teach him.

He’ll grow up homeless. No friends, no education. No steady source of food. No memory of what it’s like to sleep in a bed or have heating in winter.

She either lets a murderer have them both, or she puts her baby through hell.

“Mama?” says Izuku. “Why are you crying?”

Inko buries her face in a pillow. There’s a pause, and then tiny hands tug on her fingers until she stops hiding her face and looks up. Izuku’s pudgy face is creased with worry. “Mama? What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

“No,” she says, trying to control herself for her son’s sake. It doesn’t work. Looking at him feels like sinking slowly into grief, and the tears come out on their own.

Slowly, Izuku wraps his arms around her neck. “It’s okay,” he says with a steadiness far beyond his years. “Don’t cry, Mama. I love you. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

Hisashi calls while Izuku is at school the next day. Izuku had wanted to stay home with her, bless him. She’d made him go, though. He’s not missing his childhood because of her.

She picks up on the third ring. Hisashi’s voice is deep and smooth, just like she remembers it. It’s a voice she’s going to get used to hearing again. The thought makes her feel impossibly heavy. “Good morning, Inko. Your home is as good as new.”

Inko says nothing. She knows she’ll never be able to step foot into that apartment again, not without seeing what had been left of Tachibana. There’s a soft rustling on the other end of the line, and then a chuckle. “My. Izuku’s doodles are downright precious.”

“He’s talented,” Inko says quietly. “He started talking at eight months old.”

“I expect nothing less of my boy. Has he got his quirk yet?”

Inko swallows. “He breathes fire.”

“Hm. That’s not all he’ll be able to do, in time.”

Inko doesn’t ask what that’s supposed to mean. “There’s a Starbucks outside of the motel I’m in. Come meet me. We can talk.”

Hisashi arrives precisely at noon, dressed in a sharp suit with his hair slicked back. He looks like he’s ready for a date. Inko feels slightly triumphant that she’s only wearing a sweater and jeans, but Hisashi tells her she looks lovely and pulls her chair out just like old times. He gets a black coffee for himself and hot chocolate for her. She stares at her whipped cream and thinks.

“One of the things I’ve missed the most is when you used to make coffee,” Hisashi says with a smile. “You always made yours far too sweet but insisted I try it.”

“How many people have you killed?” asks Inko abruptly.

Hisashi takes a second to answer. “More than I remember, I’m afraid.”

“My friends?”

“Yes.”

“My co-worker?”

“Yes.”

“Any others I don’t know about?”

“A few,” Hisashi admits. “Nobody you really cared about. I just didn’t like the way they looked at you, really.”

“Does that make it any better?” Inko says steadily. “You’re not going to do that anymore. You cannot kill people for my sake. The idea of someone dying because of me, in any way, makes me sick to my stomach.”

Hisashi toys with a napkin. He rips it up into little pieces and scatters them on his side of the table, apparently deep in thought. “I suppose that’s something I could do. Unless they’re really asking for it.”

“Unless they’re asking for it,” Inko echoes. “You think nothing of ending a life. Would you have killed me, if I made you angry? Or Izuku?”

He has the gall to look offended by that. “Of course not. You’re my family. I take care of what’s mine, Inko. I would never hurt you or Izuku. I think my protectiveness over you is evidence of that.”

Somehow, that doesn’t convince her. “What do you do for a living?”

“A lot. Most of it you don’t want to know about.”

“You can’t expose Izuku to that. Not ever. Izuku’s a good boy. I won’t let you take his kindness away from him.”

“He could have so much, Inko. I’m the head of an empire.”

Inko sets her jaw. “No.”

Hisashi drums his fingers against his mug. Inko dares him to argue, already prepared to throw her hot chocolate in his face. “Alright. Maybe someday, if he chooses, he can inherit my business.”

“He won’t. And you will not breathe a word of it to him. If anyone’s going to tell him what you’re like, it’s going to be me.”

“You’ve become cruel.”

“I’m protecting my son.”

He watches her. “The way you’re talking,” he says slowly, “implies you’re not going to run away any more. Am I correct?”

Inko glances out the window. It’s a lovely day. Heaviness settles itself across her shoulders, and she sips her drink without any real interest. It’s delicious. “He’s only a child. I don’t want him to be near you. I don’t want him to become like you. But I can’t subject him to the life I’ve lead. Being hungry and poor. Moving schools every week. Living out of a car so we can run at a moment’s notice. I can’t do that to him. I can’t watch my baby suffer like that, just to get away from you.”

“He doesn’t have to. I could give him stability. Money. Whatever he wants.”

“I know. And you’ll make his life absolute hell if I say no.”

Hisashi smiles. Doesn’t even care about the awful things she’s saying to his face, because he thinks he’s won their years-long game of cat and mouse. “So you’ll come back to me? Be my woman again?”

“I am not yours,” she says. “I am never going to love you again, Hisashi.”

He sighs. “Perhaps you’ll learn to. And I do look forward to being a father.”

“You’re not allowed to spend any time around him when I’m not there. I don’t trust you.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then I’ll run,” Inko says, sounding braver than she feels. “Even if you chase us, even if I have to kill myself trying. I don’t want him to grow up a nomad, but if we have to get away from you, we will. I’d rather be responsible for him having an awful childhood than allow you to turn him into you.”

“I could keep you where I want you.”

“Or you could keep me without a fight.” He raises an eyebrow, and Inko takes a deep breath, lets it go. “You said you wanted to be a family. We can do that. But it has to be on my terms. Do whatever you want with me. Keep me wherever you like. But Izuku has to be safe and happy. He has to grow up normal, like the other kids.” She pauses, blows from steam from her cup. Her voice remains steady even though the words make her heart feel like lead. “It kills me, coming back to you. But I have to do right by my son.”

Hisashi regards her appraisingly, like he’s evaluating her on criteria she can’t see. “You’ve blossomed. Motherhood really suits you, my love.”

Slowly, he reaches across the table to link their fingers together. She doesn’t resist. “I’m tired of running from you, Hisashi. I just want my baby to have a home.”

“He will,” Hisashi says soothingly. “We can get married and you can see your parents again. Izuku doesn’t even have to change schools. We’ll get a house in Musutafu.”

“Okay,” Inko says, voice whisper-quiet.

He lifts her hand and kisses the tips of her fingers. “Your struggle is over, my darling. You’ll never want for anything again.”

The first time Izuku meets Hisashi, he hides behind Inko’s legs and refuses to talk. Hisashi comes prepared, though. He buys them ice cream, which Izuku rarely gets to have, and that warms him up immediately.

The next time they go to the park. Then Hisashi buys him some toys. Over time he becomes a semi-regular presence in their lives, and Izuku stops being surprised when two people come to pick him up from school instead of one.

He asks about Tachibana once or twice. Inko tells him he went overseas. Hisashi never does say what he did with the body, and Inko knows better than to ask.

They buy an apartment in the suburbs. Izuku’s little mind is blown by all the extra space, and he’s thrilled that he has his own bed and toys and even a computer. “Thank you!” he cries and hugs Hisashi’s legs. Hisashi just pats his hair and smiles.

They get married. It’s a tiny civil ceremony with barely any guests. Izuku’s the ring bearer. He doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on but he likes his little suit, even if he does complain endlessly about the tie.

Life goes on. Inko falls back into a life of relative comfort, occupying her days with her son now that she no longer has to work. She keeps in touch with her friends this time, though. Keeps a close eye on them to make sure they’re all safe. Keeps an even closer eye on Izuku, resigned to the fact that she needs to spend the rest of her life shielding him from Hisashi’s influence.

Hisashi, surprisingly, stays true to his word. He never does once tell Izuku why he disappears for days on end, but he always comes back with something new and shiny and fun. Izuku would be spoiled if he weren’t such a sweetheart.

He develops a love for heroes, which annoys Hisashi for some reason. Inko, naturally, encourages it. Before he turns ten Izuku has an entire bedroom full of All Might merchandise. Hisashi tries subtly to draw Izuku’s attention to other things, but it never works, to Inko’s pride.

And Izuku’s happy. That’s the most important thing. He’s doing well at school and he has a few friends. He chatters endlessly about his Kacchan, another little boy who lives down the street. They play together on weekends. Every time Izuku brings him over, every time they hold hands or chase each other around the living room, Inko’s relieved. She’s made the right decision, she thinks. She’s given her son a home.

She learns to live with Hisashi. He acts the same as he always did, fake romance and subtle control. She thinks of the girl five years ago who thought this was what it meant to be with someone. Never again. His affection is see-through, she now knows. It doesn’t matter. She has what she needs from him. She’s only here for the sake of her son.

It’s not always pleasant, and on bad days she still gets nightmares about the things he’s done because of her. On those days she feels like getting into the car and driving away to a brand new city, aching to sleep under the stars with no idea where she’s going and only a few coins in her pocket.

But she doesn’t. Izuku brings her back every time. He touches her hand or climbs into her lap, and Inko’s immediately brought back to the present. She has Hisashi to thank for one thing, she supposes. If she hadn’t met him, she wouldn’t have Izuku.

And Izuku’s perfect. Honestly, if she had the chance to start over, she’d do everything the same. Just for him.

“But nobody knows where the power actually comes from,” Izuku says. He’s somehow managed to squirm around so he’s upside down on the couch, head dangling over the edge and almost brushing the floor. “He just goes all smash! Whenever he wants! You’d think his bones would break from the strain, but nope!”

“He probably trained for a really long time,” Inko says, folding laundry and listening with half an ear. Hisashi’s off on one of his business trips, so it’s just her and Izuku for the week. “I bet he used to hurt himself all the time when he first started out.”

“Maybe,” Izuku hums. He flops over so he’s lying down, and then wriggles closer to put his head in her lap. “Do you think middle school’s gonna be harder than elementary?”

“Yes, but you’ll be alright. You’re very clever, and you’re going to be a hero.”

He grins. “Heroes aren’t scared of anything. Not even teachers.”

“Sometimes fear is just a part of life,” Inko tells him. “Being brave means doing what’s right even when you’re afraid.”

“I know,” Izuku says, picking up a clean sock from the pile and tugging at some loose thread. “And sometimes you can be brave without even realising it, I think. Even when you don’t think you’re strong.”

“That’s right,” Inko says and taps his nose. “Some things you have to protect. And they’re so important that you don’t even notice the fear.”

Izuku blinks up at her, thoughtful. “Was it scary? When you had me alone?”

“Very. But like I said, I knew I had to look out for you. I didn’t care about being scared. There were more important things to worry about.”

“Okay,” Izuku says and smiles. “I wanna be like you when I grow up. I wanna protect people and not care about being afraid.”

Inko kisses his hand. Izuku rolls off the couch and sits on the floor so he can help with the laundry, leaning against her shins with his legs curled up under him. Sunshine filters through the window. Summer’s slowly coming to an end. School will start again soon and Izuku will get another year older, and someday he’ll outgrow her and she’ll have to look up to meet his eye. Someday he’ll be someone’s hero. He’ll be clever and kind and strong and won’t need her anymore, and he’ll go out into the world and do great things and make her proud.

That’ll be far off in the future, though. For now they sit together in the living room, comfortable and warm while Inko teaches Izuku how to properly fold a shirt.

Here it is, she thinks as she looks at her son. This is it. This is love.