Sixteen-year-old Caroline has everything people envy: loving parents, close friends, just the right amount of hardship, and a youth that sparkles every day.
It takes her seven years to finally believe she's one of fate's lucky ones.
Until she finds button-shaped icing on a cookie.
Until the black cat speaks again, looking at her with something close to pity, and asks:
"Haven't you seen enough?"
Until she sees a door deep in the mirror: the fourteenth door, the one she locked with her own hands, then hung the key around her own neck.
The truth is, she never won seven years ago.
She was simply moved to a more elegant cage, into a deception that automatically mended its cracks as she grew. In this world, her parents love her dearly, but the recipe for that "love" contains the swallowed souls of other children. The world has given her hardships calibrated to be just bearable, because true suffering was filtered out long ago. She has lived inside a "perfect illusion" made just for her. And the mother who gave her all this now stands gently by her side, smiling as she asks:
"If you expose the truth, where do you think you can go? You'll lose your happiness, and the happy person you've become along with it."
Caroline looks at the familiar yet unfamiliar face in the mirror and finally understands: this is no longer a game of hide-and-seek with a monster. It is a farewell to all the happiness she's known for seventeen years. She has to answer one question:
To prove that she's real, does she dare destroy with her own hands the only beautiful life she has?
