When will you tell him?' 'When I muster the courage or when I'm left with no choice - whichever comes first.

It does not take courage to kill. It takes courage to live.

That same awful feeling of being mocked took hold of Mariko. Vicious, unrelenting hold. Making her feel so much smaller than those around her. So much less of everything when all she wished to feel was taller and stronger and braver. So much more. It made her afraid to be herself. Afraid these men would see how every step she took each day was a lie.

The tears and the pain all but blinding her, she forced open her eyes one more time, to a curtain of dark hair; to a waterfall of black ink spilling across the last page of her life. No. I’m not nothing. I was loved.