Junichiro forgot how many times he’d forgotten.

Some days, it was the passcode to the staff entrance. Other days, it was the color of his wife’s hair. When he held his daughter’s school jacket and sniffed the faint scent of cherry blossom softener, he sometimes forgot she was now too old for kendamas.

He’d been a surgeon. One of the best in Kyoto Prefecture. Steady hands, perfect recall, no room for error. But that version of him dissolved the day the diagnosis arrived like a rude letter slipped under a locked door. Alzheimer’s. Not a whisper of it in the family line. Just him. Lucky him.

Now, at fifty-five, Junichiro worked the graveyard shift at a museum in Osaka—partly because he needed something to do, and partly because it let him wear a uniform and felt important. The guards’ locker room had a mirror, and he liked how the jacket squared his shoulders. If he stood still long enough, he looked like someone who had not been erased.

The museum at night was quiet in a way that pressed inward. The air didn’t echo. It folded. He patrolled with a flashlight and a laminated map of halls he already knew but might forget. Samurai helmets. Ancient pottery. Imported clocks from the Dutch.

And behind him, always a whisper of footsteps, just out of sync with his own.

He told himself it was imagination.

Except he’d met imagination before. A long time ago.

Ryan.

That name shouldn’t have meant anything. It wasn’t Japanese. Wasn’t even real. But it clung to him like a cold breath in winter. Ryan had worn a mask—simple, white, blank. As a boy, Junichiro imagined him sitting cross-legged at the foot of his bed, offering advice in a voice that sounded like his own thoughts, only cleaner.

The bullies disappeared that year. Not violently. Not publicly. They just didn’t show up again. One by one. Quiet absences. And Junichiro never asked too many questions.

He'd told himself they were bullies. That was the script.

Now, years later, Ryan stood once more at the foot of his memory, silent.

—

Asami, his daughter, was everything Junichiro claimed to want: brilliant, young, already in university on a scholarship that shimmered with promise. She ran track like she’d been born to outrun the world. When she laughed, it filled the apartment like wind through open blinds.

But lately, people talked. Whispers over bent backs and thin coffee. That Junichiro was living off her winnings. That the old doctor had faded into the background, propped up by his daughter’s spotlight.

He smiled politely when he heard it. But the mask behind his smile began to itch.

On his fifty-sixth birthday, Asami cooked him dinner. Fried chicken, miso soup, a cake with sliced fruit. She hummed while chopping onions. Junichiro sat at the table, watching her.

His hand trembled slightly. The kind of tremble you could pass off as tiredness. But not if you looked closely.

“I’m proud of you,” he said, and meant it. In part.

The rest of him watched the knife in her hand and saw an imbalance being carved into permanence.

That’s when Ryan walked in.

Not physically. Just… there. In the corner of the kitchen, barely lit by the overhead light. Mask as white as sugar. Still, as always.

“Stop,” Junichiro said aloud.

Asami turned. “Did you say something?”

But it wasn’t her voice he was hearing anymore.

—

Afterward, he sat in silence. The smell of dinner was still warm. The floor was sticky under his knees.

He didn’t cry. Couldn’t. His eyes blurred, but it wasn’t grief—it was something else. Something like memory peeling.

Ryan stood across the room. Unmoving.

“You made me do this,” Junichiro whispered.

The mask cracked.

Behind it: Junichiro’s own face, but younger, sharper. Cold around the eyes.

“No,” Ryan said, and this time the voice didn’t sound cleaner. It sounded exact.

“You made me,” Junichiro said again.

But the bullies… weren’t bullies. Now he saw their faces again. Not angry. Not cruel. Just better. Smarter. Quicker with answers. Brighter in teachers’ eyes.

He’d called them bullies because he needed a reason. Ryan was just the shape of that reason. A mask for wanting to win at any cost.

—

The courtroom was beige and humming.

They asked him for names, for dates, for motives. He could only offer fragments. “A hill near the river.” “Behind the library.” “They laughed at me, I think.”

When they asked about Asami, he shut his eyes and said nothing.

The court doctor said he was far enough along to forget the details. But not too far to stand trial.

So he did. And when the death sentence was passed, Junichiro nodded once. As if agreeing to something he’d written in a previous life.

—

In the cell, Ryan didn’t visit.

Junichiro stopped expecting him.

He’d taken off the mask anyway. There was no need to pretend anymore.