Of course she couldn’t. That’s why I came prepared.
I shoved a copy of the newspaper article from back then in front of her.
“This is a lie! I can’t believe it!”
The thing that’s unbelievable is her head. She doesn’t investigate something so simple. When exactly does she plan to use her brain?
“Kazuki lied to me…”
“Do you really think your husband was the only one lying?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’ve been saying it all along. Mom and Dad knew. They knew, and they didn’t tell you. Do you really not understand what that means?”
Our parents seemed to have had an aversion to the idea of my sister and Satoshi being together. Maybe it was because Satoshi was raised by a single parent after his mother passed away. I don’t know their exact reasoning, but it seems that way.
Even as parents, it’s unthinkable that they would silently allow their daughter to be so obviously deceived. Any decent parent would reject a man as insincere as Kazuki.
In the end, our parents were just as despicable as anyone else in this story.
“So they both knew and kept quiet?”
“Do you remember when I was acting out back in junior high, and you were in your second year of high school? Do you remember all the fights they had back then?”
“Yes, but what does that have to do with anything?”
It has everything to do with it.
Even though Satoshi, the one directly involved, remained silent, I couldn’t stand it. I protested nightly, demanding that our parents take responsibility and tell you the truth before it was too late.
But you just sat back and watched, thinking your little sister was merely going through a rebellious phase. It’s honestly pathetic.
“That fighting was all about you.”
“I… I didn’t know.”
“Do you remember the day you brought that fraud Kazuki home? That was the day I protested to Mom and Dad, demanding they tell you the truth immediately. Every night after that, I pleaded with them to act before it was too late… but it was already too late.”
When my sister told Satoshi she’d “become a woman” and moved on, he managed to keep a calm face in front of her.
But when he was alone, he was utterly broken.
If I hadn’t found him on the way home that day, he might have died. That’s how far gone he was.
“I don’t even know why I’m alive. I should have died back then,” he said, his eyes red and swollen from crying.
“If I had just told her the truth—that I was the one who saved her—would anything have been different?”
He broke down completely, despair written all over his face.
All I could do was hold him tightly. I cradled his head against my chest and stayed with him until he calmed down.
That was the first time I’d ever wanted to kill someone.
“I didn’t know any of this…”
“Yeah, you didn’t. You were the only one who didn’t. Didn’t you notice how your elementary school classmates avoided that topic?”
“What?”
“They all knew—or at least suspected—but kept quiet because they figured Satoshi had his reasons for not speaking up.”
“That’s a lie!”
“That’s why everyone knew you were being tricked by a fraud.”
“This can’t be true! It’s all lies!”
By the time my sister started dating the fraud and quickly lost her virginity to him, it was too late for the truth to come out.
Once they’d crossed that line, even those who knew the truth had no choice but to stay silent. To reveal it then would only make them complicit in enabling the fraud.
“When you started calling Kazuki your ‘hero,’ didn’t anyone tell you, ‘But isn’t Satoshi your hero?’ Didn’t they?”
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