Since Ayane's Trench Coat Incident, the tension in the apartment had thawed slightly, thanks to Makoto's apology message. But it hadn't disappeared, it had simply gone quiet and hidden, like water flowing underground.

  Yuna was polite but distant, spending more time in her room gaming. Ayane was cheerful but kept her hands to herself, her teasing cking its usual bite. Mika was a ghost, a presence felt in the neatly folded undry and the household budget but rarely seen.

  The only constant was Mafuyu, the engine that kept the household running. She woke up before everyone else to make breakfast and packed Makoto's bento. She cleaned the kitchen, did the undry, and watered the pnts.

  When Makoto came home te, she was always there, sitting on the sofa with a book and a cup of tea, waiting to heat up his dinner. "Welcome home, Makoto-kun," she would say, her smile gentle and unwavering.

  But Makoto started noticing small things: Mafuyu was pale tely. She moved more slowly, her hand often drifting to her lower back or her forehead. She wasn't eating much at dinner either, pushing her food around her pte while encouraging everyone else to have seconds.

  "Mafuyu-nee, are you okay?" he asked one evening as she cleared the table.

  "I'm fine, honey!" she chirped. "Just a bit tired. The weather is so humid tely, isn't it?"

  He let it go because he was tired too, he had a deadline and bugs to fix.

  ===

  Friday morning, Makoto was at the office. The neon glow of Shibuya at 10:00 AM always felt artificial to Makoto, like a filter pulled over a world that was actually quite grey. Inside Clitify's office, the air was conditioned to twenty-two degrees Celsius, smelling of ionized air and the expensive roasted beans from the breakroom espresso machine.

  Makoto sat at his desk, his fingers moving across the mechanical keyboard. On his screen, the Waifu Enginer logic trees were expanding. He was working on the Empathy Subroutine today.

  "Rookie, you're overdoing it again," Kenta's voice drifted over from his three-monitor setup while he was reviewing Makoto's code. "The comfort state is holding onto too many previous variables. If a user tells our waifu they're sad, she shouldn't still be bringing it up three hours ter when they're trying to py a game. It's too heavy."

  Makoto stared at the code. "I thought that was the point, Kenta-san," Makoto muttered, his voice sounding dry. "To make it feel like she actually cares. That she doesn't just forget because the conversation moved on."

  "People want the illusion of care, Makoto-kun, not the burden of a real retionship," Tokuya, Makoto's onboarding buddy, chimed in from the desk behind him.

  His voice was heavy with the cynicism of a man who had spent too long staring at code. "Real retionships are messy. They have consequences and daily chores. Our users pay for the part that feels good, not the part where someone stares at them with sad eyes for three hours because they had a bad day at work."

  Makoto felt a cold prickle of discomfort. He thought about the apartment and the undry he'd left piled in the corner of his office-turned-bedroom. He thought about the way Mafuyu had looked this morning, her skin pale under the harsh kitchen lights, her movements slower than usual as she packed his bento.

  He'd barely spoken to her tely as he'd been too busy checking his Sck notifications or worrying about the 11:00 AM stand-up meeting. He'd taken the bento with a distracted "Thanks, Mafuyu-nee," and hadn't noticed if she'd eaten anything herself.

  He looked at his phone. The group chat was quiet. Yuna hadn't posted a single meme in twenty-four hours. Ayane hadn't sent a single good morning selfie. Mika's only contribution was a link to a grocery list with three items marked URGENT.

  He felt a heavy, dull ache in the center of his chest. He was providing the money like a responsible man. But the house was becoming a collection of rooms rather than a home.

  "Let's go home a bit earlier today. Maybe I can buy Mafuyu something good, then give a massage to get her in the mood too." Makoto buried the thought and got back to the code.

  ===

  It was 6:30 PM. Yuna was at the university library, hiding from the world in a corner of the humanities section. Mika was in Yuna's room, the door shut, her presence signaled by the tapping of keys and her speech as she handled a newly found job. Ayane was at the track, punishing her body with sprints to outrun the frustration of her st argument with Makoto.

  Mafuyu stood in the center of the kitchen, clutching the handle of a mop.

  The air in the living room felt heavy. The summer humidity was beginning to seep through the window seals, cshing with the faint scent of the vender oil she usually used to calm her nerves.

  Mafuyu's head throbbed, a dull drumming behind her eyes that made the bright sunlight painful. "Just the floor," Mafuyu whispered to herself, her voice sounding small in the empty space. "Just the floor, then I can rest."

  She pushed the mop, her arms feeling like lead. Every movement required a conscious effort of will. She felt a strange, fluttering sensation in her stomach, not the sharp pang of hunger, but an unsettling dizziness that made the world tilt slightly every time she turned her head.

  Mafuyu reached for the bucket, bending over to wring out the mop. As she did, the smell of the cleaning solution, a citrusy chemical scent, hit her hard. Her stomach lurched, and she cpped a hand over her mouth, her eyes watering.

  "Not now. Not again." Mafuyu waited for the wave of nausea to pass, her heart hammering against her ribs. She'd been feeling like this for days. She'd told herself it was just the stress of the house, the tension between Makoto and the girls.

  She felt like it was her fault. If she were a better housewife, if she kept the peace more effectively... "If the meals were more perfect, maybe Makoto wouldn't be so stressed. Maybe Yuna wouldn't be so angry if I helped her clean the floor."

  "I was the caretaker. If I failed, the family fell apart." That was the logic her past had ingrained in her, that her value was tied entirely to her utility.

  Mafuyu forced herself to stand up. The room spun. The white tiles of the kitchen floor seemed to rise up to meet her, then recede into darkness. She gripped the edge of the counter, her knuckles turning white.

  "I need… to make dinner," she murmured. "Makoto-kun likes the ginger pork. I have to… defrost the meat." She took a step toward the freezer, but her legs felt like water. The sound of the refrigerator's hum suddenly became deafening, a roar that filled her skull.

  The world went bck around the edges.

  "Makoto…" she whispered, reaching out into the empty air for a hand that wasn't there.

  Then there was only the sound of the mop hitting the floor with a wet thud, followed by the soft, heavy sound of a body colpsing onto the floor.