<div class="floatleft">(https://i.imgur.com/RK9d9kH.jpg)</div><strong>Name:</strong><em>Evie Connors</em><br/><strong>Date | Location:</strong><em>Sunny Afternoon  | Japan, Ishikawa Estate, The Nursery</em><br/><strong>Wearing | Carrying:</strong><em>Casual clothes, hidden knife</em><br/><strong>Tagging:</strong><em>Mai and Naomi Ishikawa</em><br/><strong>Notes:</strong><em>Takes place 19 years ago and includes backstory going back farther</em><hr/>Before Evie can stand, Hitoshi centers her with a stare and says, “Take care to execute your duties with more fidelity than the last individual in your position.” He reaches for a sweet, biting off a corner while searching Evie for a response.<br/><br/>She provides a confident smile, the most quintessentially American response that exists. “Naturally.”<br/><br/>Soon, she’s getting the tour, and Evie’s on her best behavior. They used to both do this, acting like perfect high society ladies who were only airily friends in the most dignified of ways; maintain respectable distance, address one another properly, barely glance at the other. Then the second Evie would get Mai pinned down in a coat closet or the back of an emptied limousine, she’d pin her and show her how she really felt with her feverish mouth and possessive hands.<br/><br/>Evie hasn’t lost a step, a perfect gentlewoman, or in this case, bodyguard. She absorbs the details of the grounds security while imagining taking hold of Mai in one of those blindspots.<br/><br/>It has to wait. First, the child. Evie’s afraid.<em>I’m going to hate her. I hate pretty much all little kids.</em>She has a hard time adjusting to the fact Mai’s had a child since they were last together. And Naomi is three, which means her husband wasted no time taking Mai to bed, the implication of which makes Evie want to kill Hitoshi more.<br/><br/>They step into the nursery, and there she is. Evie had expected to see nothing but a reminder of what Hitoshi did to the love of her life. For her to have his nose, his thin lips, or his dead eyes. But it’s more like someone had taken Mai and made a littler version of her, and even in the subtle ways she’s unalike, there’s little of her father there.<br/><br/>Naomi tucks behind Mai’s leg, peering out. Evie lowers herself to one knee, knowing the strangeness of her synthetic arm is always fascinating for children, who don’t know better than to not stare. She extends her hand—there’s some flesh on the pads of her fingers, the palm of her hand, though the joints are visibly mechanical and showing. They’d saved not just the skin but major nerves, giving her a natural sense of touch in the synthetic hand, at least the palm side and fingertips anyway.<br/><br/>Hearing the question, knowing Japanese though rarely speaking it, Evie smiles. “Ebie’s very nice to good little girls, but she’s never safe,” she tells Naomi in English. “That’s why she’s so good at her job.”<br/><br/>Glancing up at Mai, she feels her heart thudding harder. She’s not sure how she feels about the kid, about what she represents, but Mai loves her. Maybe that could be enough. “Ebie’s gonna take care of you and your mum from now on.”