Chapter 51: The First Cut Is Invisible

The first damage never looked like damage.

Touko understood this instinctively. Real harm did not announce itself. It settled in quietly, rearranging a person’s thoughts until they no longer trusted their own footing.

She chose timing carefully.

Not during a crisis. Not during success. She waited for an ordinary week. The kind people forgot later.

Kei left for work as usual. He smiled at Touko. Reminded Rurika to eat properly. Kissed Yui on the cheek. Nothing in his routine changed.

That mattered.

Touko began with absence.

A meeting reminder that never arrived. A calendar invite that vanished before it could be accepted. An email marked as read before it was opened.

Nothing dramatic. Nothing provable.

Mizuki Aoyama arrived at work already uneasy, though she could not say why. Her stomach felt tight. She checked her phone twice on the train, convinced she had forgotten something.

At her desk, she opened her inbox.

No new messages.

That felt wrong.

She checked again.

Still nothing.

The office buzzed around her. Chairs scraped. Someone laughed near the printer. Kei walked past her desk and nodded politely, distracted.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning,” she replied, too quickly.

Her voice sounded wrong to her own ears.

She opened the project file she had been working on. The one she was sure had a follow-up scheduled. She scrolled through notes. The reminder was gone.

Had she imagined it?

Mizuki frowned and typed a message to her supervisor.

Just checking if the timeline for the report changed? I might have missed an update.

She stared at the screen after sending it, heart racing slightly.

Ten minutes passed.

No reply.

Touko moved on to doubt.

A short, anonymous note arrived in the department’s shared feedback system. Vague. Polite. Unaccusatory.

Some confusion lately about task ownership. Might help to clarify roles.

No names. No accusations.

Just enough.

Mizuki read it twice, then a third time.

Was that about her?

She replayed the last few weeks in her head. The late meetings. The help she offered. The way she lingered, unsure when to leave.

Maybe she had overstepped.

She sent another message.

Sorry if I caused confusion earlier. Happy to step back.

She deleted it.

Rewrote it.

Sent it.

Across town, Touko checked nothing. She didn’t need confirmation. Systems worked when designed correctly.

That evening, Kei came home quieter than usual.

“Tired?” Yui asked.

“A bit,” he said. “Work stuff.”

Touko looked up from her book. “Is everything okay?”

Kei hesitated. “Yeah. Just… small misunderstandings. Nothing serious.”

Rurika watched him closely. Too closely.

Touko noticed and gently shifted the conversation. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

At work, the missed messages multiplied.

A forwarded email that arrived without context. A request phrased ambiguously, easy to misinterpret. Mizuki responded carefully to everything now, rereading her words until they lost meaning.

She apologized once for a delay that wasn’t her fault.

Then again.

By Friday, she was apologizing preemptively.

“Sorry, I just wanted to make sure this was okay.”

“Sorry if this is redundant.”

“Sorry, please let me know if I misunderstood.”

Her coworkers reassured her casually.

“It’s fine.”

“No worries.”

“Don’t stress.”

Their kindness made it worse.

It confirmed her fear that she was, in fact, stressing too much.

Touko introduced inconsistency next.

A task completed by someone else without telling her. A document revised after she submitted it, changes minor but noticeable.

Mizuki stared at the edits, pulse quickening.

They hadn’t told her.

Why hadn’t they told her?

She asked Kei once, carefully.

“Oh, that?” he said. “Someone else adjusted it. Probably nothing.”

Probably.

That word echoed in her head all afternoon.

At home, Rurika paced more often now. Her anxiety mirrored Mizuki’s without her realizing it. Touko watched both with the same detached attention.

One night, Rurika whispered, “She’s getting closer to him.”

Touko replied calmly, “No. She’s losing balance.”

“How can you tell?”

Touko thought of the apology emails. The shrinking posture. The way Mizuki had stopped making eye contact in the last photo uploaded to the company site.

“She’s starting to doubt herself,” Touko said. “That comes before distance.”

The final adjustment was silence.

Messages left unanswered just long enough to feel intentional. Not ignored. Delayed.

Mizuki checked timestamps obsessively. She began drafting messages she never sent.

She stayed late to compensate for mistakes she wasn’t sure she’d made.

Kei noticed her exhaustion.

“You should head home,” he said one evening.

She smiled too brightly. “I’m fine. Sorry if I slowed things down today.”

Kei frowned. “You didn’t.”

She nodded anyway.

“I’ll do better,” she said.

The words surprised even her.

By the end of the week, Mizuki Aoyama was apologizing for existing.

She apologized when entering rooms.

She apologized when speaking up.

She apologized when she stayed quiet.

At home, Touko wrote nothing in her diary.

There was no need.

The first cut had done its work.

Invisible. Clean.

Effective.