“It was so perfect; I still don’t know what happened,” she whispered as her daughter left to answer the phone, their latest argument fading in the air. “One day, it was there. The next day, gone.”

She sighed as she looked out of her window, gazing at their house. She couldn’t even speak to those neighbors, her neighbors, anymore. Not after everything that happened. She hadn’t really forgiven her daughter for that either, she realized.

Her daughter was always…helpless in a way. It used to worry her, before. That’s why she’d asked if he’d look after her. He was a bright boy from a great family. Her daughter could do much worse. And he seemed interested in her little girl, even at that young age. Sure they argued some, but he was a maturing influence on her daughter, a good influence.

To be honest, she had become worried when the young man switched schools. Her daughter was not the best at selecting friends. The woman often worried about the influence of some of her daughter’s “sempai”. They seemed to run with a crowd of which no good mother would approve. Not that she was around much to stop it. When one is the only parent in a house, she makes the living where she can. And she didn’t worry about following the job because he was there to look after her daughter. He’d promised and his family considered her their daughter as well.

But her daughter, her daughter. She somehow got into trouble. And she didn’t go to him, she went everywhere else. The older woman didn’t know exactly what happened, but in the course of all of this, her daughter met the interloper.

At that point in their fights, and they argued about this often, her daughter will accuse her – actually dare to accuse her own mother – of not being fair. “You don’t know him,” she would say. “He’s not like that! He…cares about me.”

For some reason the fact that she didn’t know the boy was not enough reason for her daughter to stop seeing him. Why didn’t the girl see that she had been practically engaged, taken in by a family right in their neighborhood! The woman had always thought, always assumed, that her daughter would marry into that wonderful family.

But the daughter defied the mother. She became involved with someone with no name, no family. She seemed to adore him. She defended him to her mother. This act of disobedience, of rebellion was very strange, very foreign. Where was her quiet little girl who did as she was told?

It was so perfect. Igarashi-san shook her head as she listened to her daughter talk with “Kazuya” on the phone. She didn’t know this Hasukawa Kazuya. She didn’t even really know Miya anymore. She wasn’t sure what to do about that.

She was sure that she could no longer talk with the Koizuma family. She’s gone from being more than a neighbor to the upwardly mobile family to ducking into her home when she saw them coming.

It was so perfect. But it was something else now.