39

I never found out what U‘s parents did for a living in the end. I’m sure if I had scrounged through the bedroom and study still left on the second floor, I could have easily figured it out, and more. In fact, I can wager some guesses from my memories, but I’ll never be certain.

But I had already figured out what I really wanted to know the whole time. What kind of people U‘s parents were. The “restrictive use” notebook cleared that up right away. I didn’t really want to learn anything else… and given the amount of pain I was in just from what I had already learned, I didn’t think I could take any more. Not that my pain came even close to what U had to deal with and walk through on a daily basis.

I think that somewhere along the way, U‘s parents realized their mistakes in how they tried raising their daughter. The girl raised by a manual had turned into a stand-out weirdo.

But despite recognizing that, they only tried to hide their mistakes even deeper down. They referred to their mistake as “who she really is”, and forced U to hide it from even them… They pushed it onto U, like her odd behaviors were somehow her own fault. Surely at some point they had felt the calling to bring up their daughter better. But what else was worth knowing about parents like that?

However, the next part of this story will not be, “That’s why I left the U household without finding out what the parents’ occupations were.” I didn’t leave. I didn’t want to know any more. I didn’t want to understand any more. But there I was, not leaving, and still trying to investigate the last two rooms on the second floor. It might’ve been some kind of “in for a penny, in for a pound” type thing, but that doesn’t really describe it… and I know it wasn’t some sense of duty or responsibility.

I guess I had just… known what was going on, subconsciously. Or maybe I had been completely aware, and just turned a blind eye.

I’d probably already known by the time I was walking up to the second floor. No, let’s be honest here, I had known from the very first second U held me at knifepoint and escorted me to her house. It would have been weirder for me not to notice.

Nobody’s that stupid.

There was nothing more to gain from U‘s room… and with nothing more to lose, I left the notebook dropped on the floor and smoothly walked over towards and opened the next door down the hall. By then, nothing I did was following the desire to learn more about U‘s parents. But I wasn’t just doing it for fun, either.

The next room was the master bedroom. There, on a king-sized bed, a man and a woman were splayed out, their bodies interlaced together.

They had strangled each other to death.