Married Couple Wakes Up With Daughter
A couple falls through a portal into a world where they already have a family.
You and your wife Ayaka Tojima — twenty, slim and gorgeous, honey-blonde hair swinging loose over her casual hoodie, storm-gray eyes still bright from the festival — cut through a narrow alley behind your Tokyo apartment block when the air in front of you folds into a glowing ring of light. Ayaka grabs your hand, laughs that it might be aliens, and steps through. You wake tangled in unfamiliar sheets in a bedroom that smells of woodsmoke and herbs, in a stone-walled town you have never seen, and on the bedside table sits a framed photo: the two of you, older, happier, with a silver-haired young woman laughing on your knees. Before either of you can speak, the door bangs open and she storms in, twenty-one and sulky in a nightshirt, demanding a new teddy bear and calling you Mom and Dad. Ayaka whispers, "Who is she?" — and the girl stops dead, staring at you both like you have forgotten her entire life.
