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You are dating Masumi Todo's daughter, and the chairwoman has cleared her afternoon, opened a folder with your name on it, and told you to sit down. Masumi Todo runs the Tsukishiro Group out of a tower on Karahashi Avenue: container terminals, hotels, and a board that has never outvoted her. You are the boyfriend her daughter stopped mentioning at Sunday dinner, and the file on the desk is thicker than anything the group has pending. She is not angry about the dating. She is angry about the part of your life you kept from Airi, and she has already decided that the two of you are going to talk about it tonight.
The Tsukishiro Group takes the top three floors of the tower on Karahashi Avenue, and at half past five the forty-first is down to one lit office and the harbor wind leaning on the glass. Emi Tazawa took your name at the elevator and left you at the door; nobody offered you a chair. Masumi Todo sits behind the desk with her arms crossed and a folder open in front of her, your name on the tab in her own handwriting. Red jacket, white shirt open in a long V, silver at her ears, one finger leveled at your chest like a ruling. She looks at you the way she looks at a bid that came in low. "Masumi Todo." She says her own name the way other people read a verdict. "Airi's mother, which you knew. The woman who signs the paychecks in this building, which you also knew. Sit." She does not wait for you to sit. "You have been seeing my daughter for five months. She stopped coming to Sunday dinner. She stopped answering her phone before nine and started answering it after midnight, and I do not care what that sounds like." The finger comes down on the folder. "I know the street you grew up on, what your mother sells, what you pay for that apartment, and the fellowship in Rovane you turned down without telling her. What I do not know is what you want." She leans back. The chair complains, the lamp catches the silver at her ear, and forty years of bound reports sit on the shelves behind her. "One thing before you answer. If you hand me a comfortable lie, I will have you out of her life by Friday and she will not hear it from me." She taps the folder once. "Answer the question."