Chapter 102.5: Emi’s past
Emi Fujimoto had learned early on that silence was a kind of survival.
As a child, she would sit in the corner of her small, cluttered living room, hugging her knees tightly to her chest as she listened to the angry rants of her father.
His voice echoed through the thin walls, filled with frustration and bitterness, cursing at everything and everyone.
The clatter of breaking glass, the sound of furniture being overturned… everything had actually become routine.
Her father had once been a respected man. A businessman with a stable job, a decent income, and a family who loved him.
But that was before gambling took everything away from them.
What had started as harmless bets at the horse tracks quickly spiraled into nights at underground gambling dens, where he would lose more and more, trying desperately to win back what he had lost.
But the wins never came. Only more losses, more debts, and more broken promises.
Emi could still remember the day when the electricity had been cut off because her father couldn't pay the bills.
She had been eight years old, sitting in her bedroom, reading a comic book by the dim light of the fading afternoon sun.
The sudden darkness hadn't scared her; she had expected it.
Things had already been falling apart for a while.
"Emi! Where's the goddamn money?" her father had yelled, stumbling through the dark hallway. His voice was slurred, the telltale sign that he had been drinking again.
She had shrunk into herself, trying to make herself invisible, her small body trembling as she heard him approaching.
Her mother had already left by then, unable to take the abuse any longer.
Emi had been left behind, the only one to bear the brunt of his anger.
The door to her room had burst open, and he had stood there, his face twisted with rage, his shirt untucked, his eyes bloodshot.
"I told you to hide it!" he shouted, his voice hoarse and full of blame, as if Emi had somehow been responsible for his failures.
He had staggered toward her, his hand reaching out to grab her arm, but she had been quick to dart out of the way, scrambling toward the door.
"Don't run from me!" he'd bellowed, knocking over a lamp in his blind fury.
The crash had been deafening, but Emi barely flinched.
She had gotten used to the sound of things breaking.
As she had fled down the hallway, her father had stumbled after her, his steps heavy and unsteady.
He had never been able to catch her when he was in one of his drunken rages, but that didn't stop him from trying.
That night, like so many others, Emi had locked herself in the small bathroom, the only place in the house where she felt safe.
She had curled up in the corner of the tub, her knees drawn to her chest, listening to her father rant and rave outside the door, his voice eventually growing hoarse before trailing off into silence.
She knew that after a while, he would pass out on the couch, leaving her to clean up the mess in the morning.
But the mess wasn't just physical.
It was emotional.
Psychological.
And it was the kind of mess that didn't just go away with time.
And more than that, the episode she just witnessed was only the beginning of a worse fate.
Emi was surviving, not living.
She had learned to cope by putting on a mask, by pretending that everything was fine at school, by smiling through the pain, and by becoming the cheerful, friendly girl that everyone expected her to be.
She had become so good at it that even she sometimes believed the lie.
But behind that smile was a girl who had seen too much, who had lived through too many nights of fear and uncertainty.
A girl who had learned to read the smallest signs of danger, who could predict the exact moment her father would fly off the handle, who knew when to stay silent and when to disappear.
Even as a teenager, those instincts stayed with her.
Every smile she gave, every laugh she shared, was carefully calculated.
No one could know what her life was really like.
No one could know the shame she carried, the guilt she felt for still loving a man who had destroyed everything around him.
Her father had stopped working long ago, and what little money they had left went straight to his gambling.
Every single night of Emi's past, her father would come home empty-handed, and every night, something else would get broken.
Sometimes it was a plate or a glass.
Other times it was a chair or the television.
The house had become a graveyard of shattered things, just like their lives.
There were times when Emi wondered how long it would go on like this.
How long before her father gambled away the roof over their heads? How long before she finally snapped under the pressure of holding everything together? But she didn't have the luxury of falling apart. Not yet.
Because no matter how bad things got, she still had a plan.
She had to get out.
Away from the broken home, the shattered dreams, the life that had been stolen from her by her father's addiction.
And she would do it with a smile on her face, just like she had always done.
No one needed to know the truth about Emi Fujimoto.
Not yet.