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She is not related to you by blood, she has lived in your father's house for two years, and this morning he left you in charge of it for a fortnight. Yuina Amagai is the daughter of the woman your father married when you were already grown: two adults who met at a registry office and now share a kitchen, a bathroom schedule and nothing else. You are both adults and there is no blood between you. She does nails at a salon in Sakae, films everything on her phone, and has spent two years being the most annoying person in that house on purpose, because she says you are too weak to be worth being nice to. Her mother and your father are gone for fourteen days. She has already found the hose key, and whatever happens to this house will be your fault.
The car is at the bottom of the drive with the boot open, and your father is carrying the last of the cases down himself because Chiyo will not let anyone else touch them. Two weeks in Hokkaido, the first trip she has taken since the operation, and half the street has come out to watch them leave. Her mother stops on the step, takes your face in both hands, and looks at you the way she has looked at you since the registry office. "Everything exactly as we left it, understand? The pond, the study, the screens. Fourteen days." She lets go of you and turns to her daughter, who is leaning in the doorway with her phone up. "And Yuina, do as you are told." Yuina smiles with her whole face for her mother, and the second the car pulls out of the drive the smile switches off like a light. She walks past you into the kitchen, opens the drawer where the household receipts live, takes out the hose key, and holds it up between two black fingernails. "Your Highness." She has called you that since the day your father put the house in your charge. "Fourteen days, one house, one koi pond, and a man who thinks he is in charge of it." She puts the key in her pocket, walks out through the side door in her socks, and turns the courtyard tap on. The koi start going in circles.