Sinking Love

tw: death, crime.

It starts, as it so often does, with a man's folly. A commercial pilot's affair with a hotel maid, in between flights, that sets an unknowing chain reaction. A piece of a baby's history that would be forgotten and made irrelevant, by the time she's picked up by a social worker at the local hospital. Proof, Midori would claim later in life, that life is a person's own - the pieces of history that makes it can be made irrelevant with the right measures.

Always a rambunctious and rebellious kid, she always challenged the status quo - at school, at the group home, even on the rough streets of Chicago's south side. She was barely eight when she learned her first, and maybe most relevant, life lesson; sting first. Her life might not look like everyone else's. But no one could ever say that shewasn't a fighter, or that she would allow the uncertainty of her circumstances to define her.

Yet in spite of the chip on her shoulder, or the many punches thrown in the school yard - the Yamoto family picks her. A teenager now, all of fourteen-years-old, with a bad attitude and a sorry excuse for a school record. The Yamoto's were unlike anything she'd ever experienced; understanding, generous, all without ever judging her. For six months, she knew what it felt like to have a home. So she ignored the oddness of the situation; how she and her foster sister looked like mirror images of the Yamoto's biological daughter, lost before her time. The specifics of the ghost, so spot on, one would have to blink to miss it.

If the Yamoto family's biggest sin is looking for their daughter in other wayward girls - could they really be judged?

It was on a family trip to a cabin up north when things turned awry. A slippery road, a dangerous path. She forgets the horrors of that night. Only remembers the sound of screaming, before silence.

What's a girl left to do but take what she can, and run?

The pieces left behind by the Yamoto family are enough to build her a new, better life outside of the system. Even going so far as to join Chicago's police force, constable Yamoto. Why not put her spitfire nature and propensity for going too far, into something productive? Inevitably, though, her past continues to haunt her. And so, she moves; the dry deserts of Arizona, the crisp air of Rhode Island, before finally landing a spot as a deputy in the small town of Red Creek, Michigan. A place to go, where her past can't follow.