“They’ll never know it was me,” Rika said.
“Teach me,” she said quietly. “Not to forge. To restore.” Tsubaki Rika Kitaoka Karin
She dipped bristles into distilled water—not solvent. Very gently, she touched the flaking vermillion. Not to remove it. To fix it in place. To preserve the lie as what it was: a perfect, dying thing made by human hands. “They’ll never know it was me,” Rika said
Karin leaned closer. The pigments were lifting—vermillion flaking into dust, the charcoal underdrawing dissolving like smoke. But beneath the decay, she saw it: the ghost of a signature. Not the Edo painter’s. Rika’s own, hidden in the stamens of a flower. “They’ll never know it was me
“That’s impossible,” Karin whispered.
They were only for staying.
“It’s real,” Rika said. “And it’s dying. Look.”