Face-Slapping18 min read
A Red Wine Bottle, a Photo, and the Reckoning
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1.
"I am a bastard," I said once to myself in the dark when I was five and had not yet learned how shame could be tuned into armor.
"That's not a word you should know yet," my mother snapped, cursing the phone in her hand. "Call him again. Call until he comes."
"Who's he?" the concierge asked once when she dragged me to a hotel with a nervous laugh and one of her usual schemes.
"His name is Dempsey Cao," my mother answered, eyes shining with the fever of someone who'd convinced herself a castle is only a check away.
He came sometimes. Not always. He liked the convenience of a secret. He liked a tidy life with a wife and a believable story. He liked the idea of paying for comfort. He did not like responsibility.
"Today is Nini's birthday," he told my mother the first time he forced himself into our tiny apartment. "I must go back."
I climbed onto the couch and peered at the wads of bills on the coffee table. I was five. I had practiced the expression of a child who owns no illusions. "Are you rich?" I asked him bluntly.
Dempsey Cao blinked, the life of a powerful man folding into a childlike pause. "Yes," he said, awkward.
I handed him the bills. "I don't need so much. Will you sit with me?"
He sat; he read a torn supermarket cartoon book in a dull voice. I leaned my head against his arm.
When he left, he took a piece of sponge cake. "This is for your birthday," I told him, which, by the accident of calendars, it was.
The next morning there was a doll taller than me on our doorstep. I kept that doll for months like proof that the world sometimes delivered gifts even if adults were soft at the seams.
2.
My mother, Frankie D'Angelo, was all spectacle. She loved the stage of misery the way some people loved applause. When she found out his wife—Helena Vasquez—had given birth to a daughter the same day as me, she did not wail for love. She plotted.
"You will marry me," she told me once in the bargain of a night that smelled of cigarettes and cheap lipstick. "He can't leave us. He won't. I'm good at making noise."
He didn't, at least not at first. My existence became a lever: a few visits per month, a string of bills slipped through the door, a cold glance in the elevator. For a while those visits were the only proof I had that some man with a name could look at me and not look away.
Then my mother got pregnant with my brother. "This is it," she crowed. "A son. Now watch—watch them fold."
She was right in one way: my father moved us into a larger apartment. He did not move away from his life with Helena and Kylie Alvarado, his legitimate daughter. He simply made sure the two families could exist without tripping over each other.
My brother, Everett Stewart, was small and fierce at first. He would latch onto my finger like a lifeline. When he was five he would climb into my bed during thunderstorms and murmur, "Kiana, I'm here." He was my shelter. He was my debt.
3.
When I left for FD University, majoring in finance, it felt like air after a long dive. I sent money home and hired a woman to cook for them. I called Everett every week. "Wait for me. Four years," I told him. "I'll get you out."
He said, "I'll wait," and sold me that trust with the sound of a child's breath.
Two months later—because mothers make mistakes that echo like storms—Frankie D'Angelo lost at cards and went straight to Helena. "Ten thousand," Helena had said. "Take it and go." The calm, cold voice of a woman who had the fortress of money and the right last name. She offered fifty thousand and, in exchange, took Everett.
"Everett will be fine," my mother said on the phone, more pragmatic than proud. "He'll have a bed, a nanny, a name."
"Will she tell them?" I asked. "About his allergies? About peanuts?"
"Of course," Frankie lied in the same breath she accepted the money.
For a while the calls from Everett contained cheery complaints. The nanny was strict, the food too fancy, the sister Kylie a little cold. Then his voice grew quieter. The words got smaller—"I'm okay"—and then, one day, the line went dead.
4.
"Someone gave him a tart with almonds," my mother wailed into the phone later. "He was allergic; he had those hives when he was small."
"He was two when you fed him peanut porridge," I said. "You remember."
"Yes, yes, I remember," she sobbed. "I told them. They said they'd watch. They said—"
"Did they watch?" I asked.
Dempsey Cao told me afterward, with the flat tone of a man who believes that facts can be arranged into absolution, "The nanny forgot to tell him. The pastry had almonds. He had a reaction. It was an accident."
"He was alone that night?" I asked, because I needed to know whether my little brother had tried to call for me and failed.
"Yes."
I stared at a photo I had kept: Everett, twelve, smiling with a gap where a tooth once was, his eyes like twin crescents. I carried his smile with me like a wound I would not touch.
5.
I studied, I worked nights, I sent money secretly. I worked my way through a master's degree. When I came back, I was not the same kid with the cartoon book. I worked in a small investment firm, filing surveys and pulling together market research until Joel Brooks noticed me.
"You're FD?" he asked, surprised. "You shouldn't be here answering surveys."
I smiled the kind of smile you learn to use as armor. "I like to start from the ground."
Joel moved me up. I learned models, I learned to build numbers into arguments. In six months I was an assistant. In a year I was leading our team's projects. Joel took me to meetings with big clients. That's when the door to the larger world opened—one bright, impossible night at a gala.
6.
The gala was at the Four Seasons. I had stolen a look at the new season's gowns online, rented a wine-red GUCCI sheath I could never afford, and walked into a room where people wore names like badges.
A man with a high, lazy charm walked by and I made a nervous mistake: I linked his arm and pretended he was someone I knew to get me past the door. He smiled and stepped with me into a universe of chandeliers and whispered deals.
"That was bold," he said. He was young, clean-laced, had eyes like a map you wanted to read. "Thank you for the escort."
"You're welcome," I said. "Are you Samuel?"
"No," he said, smile turning into a look that made me feel both seen and ridiculous. "But I can be."
He was Samuel Lopes—young heir to Starflare Group. His engagement to Kylie Alvarado was the sort of arranged thing that families like ours engineered for profit, not love.
When I walked past him later and found him laughing over pineapple slices, I teased him about the collision at the door. He blushed and told me he liked that I could laugh at the world. He told me about H aut-Brion and grapes and the ocean. I nodded like I knew. I pretended to be an expert in wine and jazz and things I had read in the middle of the night.
"I'll see you tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow," I said. "Nine a.m., your office."
7.
You learn what a man wants by listening. Men like talkers who make them feel right. So I listened for hours, took careful notes, and I made myself into someone who could speak Samuel's language.
"It's not theft," Joel told me when he discovered I was courting Starflare for a bid. "You're positioning. It's smart."
I positioned until a project worth millions rested on my notes and my charm. I positioned until Samuel paid more attention to me than was professional. He began to look at me differently. He began to bring little, careful things: a vinyl record, a ticket to a jazz evening, a reference to a wine I had once praised offhand.
8.
Not everyone in my life was kind. Damien Reed, my new manager in Development, was the sort of man who believed his ability to sign checks gave him a right to everything behind a woman's polite smile.
He would "accidentally" brush his hand against me in corridors. He would linger at the edge of meetings and tell me, low, "Twenty minutes in the lounge." He expected women to be flattered and available, like trophies that walked and spoke.
I played at being naive because it was a weapon. "You're mistaken," I said once to his approach in the lounge. "I'm just a colleague."
This made him want me more. Men hate the things they cannot own.
9.
Kylie Alvarado arrived at Lichen Group six months later, fresh with a foreign degree and a polished sense of entitlement. She was loud in a room that wanted silence; she used her title as armor. She hated me in a way that left no subtlety.
"You're new," she told me the first day she bumped into me at the company stairs, voice crisp with disdain.
"Yes," I bowed politely. "Good morning, Ms. Alvarado."
She made office life harder. She made Damien bolder. The rumor mill greased the idea that I climbed on men's backs to achieve my place. They did not look closely at numbers or work. They looked at friendships and borrowed appearances.
I played the game they taught me. I let them see me in ways that made them underestimate me. I never let them see the ledger in my head.
10.
The day of the big release, Kylie wore a custom Dior sky-blue gown. She intended to be the sun; she wanted attention and triumph.
I did not intend to compete, but I also did not intend to be invisible. I had a tailor make a nearly identical dress; not to humiliate her, but because she had never learned to fear the person she dismissed.
When she saw me in a similar gown in the banquet hall, she lunged.
"Get out," she hissed, fingers grabbing the fabric at my shoulder. The seam split like a confession. My dress slipped down. For a minute there was a small, bright space of privacy turned public.
I felt hands. I felt the floor tilt. I felt humiliation as a room of people focussed like a jury. Samuel took off his jacket and wrapped me. "Are you okay?" he said.
"Yes," I said, though a flash of rage burned in my throat.
Kylie tore at me, a shriek of claws. The crowd made a circuit to the lounge. Damien, intoxicated with power and wine, followed on a different path. He found me waiting later, quiet as a trap.
"Talk to me," he murmured. "Just a private chat."
"You mean another of your offers?" I said. "No, thanks."
He waited. He smirked. As he reached, I slipped away and a commotion stormed a distant room—Kylie's high-pitched screams. People ran to see a tableau: Kylie stumbling out, accusing Damien of assault in a half-drunk screech. Security swarmed. He was fired the next day.
11.
Samuel started to lean into me like someone finding a harbor after months at sea. He was careful, hesitant, and incredibly soft. He began to bring me things not to display but because he wanted me near. He asked me to meet his family in small, private ways. We moved slowly, but it was honest—until it became complicated.
"Why didn't you tell me you were the daughter of Dempsey Cao?" he asked gently one afternoon, reading the confession in my face like a wrong page.
"Don't call him that," I told him steadily. "He's someone who lost my brother because he loved comfort more than courage."
He flinched. "Your mother—"
"My mother is Frankie D'Angelo," I said. "A woman with a voice and a habit of gambling. I don't expect kindness from the world."
"Your name—" he started.
"Kiana," I told him. "Kiana Lombardi."
"Okay," he said, and if he paused, he did not let the world stack between us. For a while, we were two people trying not to trip on each other's flaws.
12.
But bones of families are heavy things. Obama of arrivals were made. My mother, in her capacity as an engine of chaos, stormed into a celebration for Samuel's father's birthday like a comet, offering bribes and noise and a pink purse. She was loud. She wanted to be seen. She wanted to be accepted as what she was not.
"Get her out," my father mouthed to me, red with shame.
"Let her say hello," Samuel's uncle Ernest Bell said, smiling thinly as he absorbed the spectacle. He had the soft cruelty of someone who had seen plenty of theater and knew how to use it.
My mother, in front of a room of polite faces, shoved a thick red envelope forward. "To the elder," she announced. "From a proud mother."
Everyone watched. Dempsey Cao's face went grey. Helen Vasquez's lips tightened into a blade.
13.
Samuel withdrew. He pulled back as if he'd been burned. We did not speak for a week. I told myself I did not need a man who could not stand the storms I came from. He told himself he had been weak and returned.
We tried. We fumbled. I gave him my notebooks—my small, ridiculous confessions of the way I had learned him. He read them quietly, and I hoped honesty might be a bridge.
It was not.
14.
Then came the things I had been preparing for years in quiet. While Samuel and I found ways to be honest, I had been gathering evidence. I had found, with Pedro Sims, a private investigator, a paper trail that went back years: unmarked accounts, wire transfers, a nanny who had disappeared and reappeared in a different town with a different name.
Kiyoko Cox—the woman who had once cooked in Dempsey's home—had, after Everett's death, been given a new name and a new life in a distant place with a bank account bearing strange deposits. I tracked her to a small town and found her stubborn and avaricious. She wanted money. She wanted her cut. I let her talk.
She told me that Helena had been a cold, pragmatic woman who never wasted an opportunity to secure the family. "She thought a child was a liability," Kiyoko told Pedro in a shuttered café. "We were told to make sure the problem never came back."
I learned how they planned it. How an almond tart was blithely placed and how a body could be convinced to swallow one more bite under instruction.
15.
I gathered everything. I kept it quiet. I mapped payments and emails and a circle of people who were willing to be useful for a price. I fed the trail to a prosecutor and to Ernest Bell in private—Ernest had always had a bone for justice, even if he dressed it up as family duty.
"You're playing a dangerous game," he warned in low voice. "Once you light a flame, the house will burn."
"If the house burned by itself," I said, "I'm just opening a window."
16.
The punishment had to be public. It would not be enough for Helena to be quietly removed. She had to be shown what it means to lose everything in the light, to feel faces turn away, to have the applause that had once welcomed her replaced by the silence of a court.
The day arrived at a charity luncheon in a bright, glassed ballroom that Helena had loved for the sheen it gave her life. She sat at the head table, polished and sure, Kylie by her side, Samuel across from her. Dempsey Cao sat stiffly, as if aware that his ledger would now be read aloud.
Ernest Bell was there, immaculately dressed, and at his side sat a woman in grey who looked like someone who had walked out of a courtroom—me.
I rose when they called my name. "I'd like to say something," I announced. I felt the room tilt. Heads turned. Phones leaned forward.
"Why are you standing?" Helena said over her shoulder. "This is not—"
"This is for Everett," I said. "For the child you put to death."
Her face arranged into a practiced mask of outrage. "You have no proof."
"I do," I said. My voice did not shake. "And the proof will be shown."
I signaled to the public prosecutor. Pedro had prepared copies of bank transfers, voice recordings, and a video clip that would make everyone in the room lean forward as if into wind.
"Here," Pedro said into a microphone. "We have the recording of the conversation when Kiyoko Cox was paid. We have the surveillance footage of the kitchen staff. We have the transactions from the anonymous account Helena controlled. We have the confession of Kiyoko Cox that she was asked to force-feed that tart."
Someone in the room laughed—too high, shrill. Kylie looked like she might faint. Dempsey's cheeks emptied like a plate being scraped.
"Mistake," Helena spat. "You're lying."
"Listen," I said quietly. We played the recording. The room shrank to the size of a pinprick as a woman's shaky voice—Kiyoko's, now sober with fear—admitted: "She said if the boy ate it, she would be taken care of. She promised money."
There was the sound of napkins sliding into laps. People who had once smiled now stared. A few began to whisper. A man near the back stood up and started filming.
"This is preposterous!" Helena snapped. "You will be sued for defamation."
"Bring the lawyers," Ernest said softly. "We have the evidence."
Helena's face moved through colors. Arrogance curdled into anger. "You're crazy," she hissed. "You think I killed a child? You—"
"Do you remember the night the boy died?" I asked, quiet as a judge's hammer. "You arranged it. You bought the tart. You had a woman there who owed you. You thought money could buy a quiet life."
"I did not!" she screamed.
At that moment, the prosecutor stepped forward with the compiled file and a printed contract that linked Helena's account to Kiyoko's deposits. The room went very quiet, like a tide pulling back.
"You are under arrest," the prosecutor said. Officers in plain clothes moved. Cameras flashed. The luxury of the room turned into the brightness of interrogation lights.
Helena's reaction was merciless to watch. She started as if struck. Her hands trembled. She tried to smile, then to say something that sounded like denial. Then she looked at Dempsey. "You—" she whispered.
"What did you do?" I asked. The words were simple.
She turned on me. "You wouldn't know what it's like to survive with a mother like that. You wouldn't know what it's like to fight for a place." Her voice had become raw. "You have no right."
"You took his right," I said. "You took a child's life to preserve a family's image."
Her bright face had fallen into ruin. "It's a lie," she cried. "It's all lies. They will see."
But around her there were faces that had once laughed at her jokes and accepted her invitations. Those faces were now mirrors, reflecting disappointment, disgust. Phones recorded. A woman near the head of the table whispered, "I supported you. How could you—"
Helena's denial gave way to a brittle fury; then to a broken, pleading voice. "Please," she said, grabbing at the prosecutor's sleeves, "you don't understand, I—"
"People understand," said a woman whose booth had hired Helena's services. "You used the poor to hide your crimes."
The murmuring grew. Someone started clapping—not in support, but in a thin, sarcastic rhythm. Heads turned. Kylie slid down in her chair, mouth open like a child who had seen a storm.
Helena's face contorted into an animal's cry. "I will not go like this!" she screamed. "I will not—"
Officers moved in. They handcuffed her. The sound in the room was a mixture of camera shutters and a few gasps that truly were cries. For a moment she paused, handcuffed and trembling, and the mask of power peeled away like a dried paint.
"This is for Everett," I said again, and there it felt like a verdict had been handed by the whole room. I had wanted people to watch her fall, to learn the shape of a woman's descent from social throne to the pitted floor. I wanted the ones who had smiled with her when she arranged charity gifts to see how quickly their applause could become evidence.
Helena screamed as they took her out, eyes wild, then collapsed into silence as she was escorted away. She went from a throne of approval to a path of defeat before everyone. The crowd reacted in different ways—some women in the room cried softly, some muttered about justice, some tapped their phones like hungry magpies collecting proof.
Outside afterward, a reporter asked for a statement. I said, "One child's life was stolen to keep an image. That image is broken now."
Over the following days, the backlash was theatrical. Helena's friends were sheepish. The papers printed hammering headlines. Dempsey's boardroom filled with lawyers and apologies, and the man who had always loved comfort looked at me not as a child he left, but as someone who had pulled the curtain.
17. (Punishment aftermath — public collapse continued)
It didn't end with the arrest. The law moved, and the trial became another stage for the public's appetite for watching justice and cruelty collide. There were witnesses—Kiyoko's confession in court was a long, halting scream of a woman who had been bought and then terrified into silence. The judge read facts from a list of transactions, times, messages. Helena's legal team argued and tried to push blame away from their client. "She was under pressure, your honor," her defense repeated like a mantra, as if pressure made a killing permissible.
In the gallery, Kylie watched like someone who had lost a kingdom. She shrank in her seat as evidence unfolded—phone logs, transfer receipts, emails—each one a nail. Her world was collapsing around her and she could do nothing but cover her mouth and whisper apologies to no one in particular. Dempsey sat ashen, mouth a hard line, fingers knuckled white until his sternum ached. The board members who had once pretended not to see now sat with their faces flushed. Some whispered among themselves; some stared at the floor; one woman openly sobbed. For the first time many of them understood that a reputation bought on silence is a house built on sand.
Helena's behavior through the trial was a study in the stages of despair. At first there was shocking arrogance—"This is a setup," she announced to the cameras, high-heeled and undeterred. Then, as each piece of evidence was read, her composure cracked. Denials turned into deflections. A day after a witness exposed a bank transfer linking her to Kiyoko's account, she sat in the witness chair and her voice shook as she tried to improvise excuses. By the third day, she was pale, murmuring to her lawyers. On the sixth day she began to cry openly—first for herself, then for her family. It was the most human part of the spectacle; she had wrung others dry and now had to drink from a cup of her own making. In the final hearing, when the judge read the sentence—guilty with a death sentence commuted and a long suspended sentence—she crumpled. She tried to stand and plead, but the gavel struck and the room fell into a hush punctuated by wet, exhausted sobs from her side.
The public reaction was vicious. Social media churned. A handful of erstwhile friends posted statements of betrayal. An older philanthropist who had shared seats with Helena at charity events posted a short line: "I regret not having asked more questions." The board of Dempsey's company issued a carefully worded memo expressing regret and promising reforms. Shareholders, who had been comfortably uninterested in morals before, suddenly studied governance with the zeal of a new religion. The legal consequences for some of Helena's minor accomplices included fines and community service; for Kiyoko, whose testimony had been both the cause and the instrument of her own downfall, a smaller prison term for her direct involvement. People in the industry who had smiled with Helena at dinners now refused her calls; invitations stopped coming; seats she had reserved for herself at galas were filled by others.
I watched as each person connected to her tried to bargain with reality. There was a night when Kylie came to me, raw and broken, and said, "I didn't know." My reply was not mercy. It was fact. "You did know enough to keep your silence," I said. She wept and tried to apologize, but words had no power to bring Everett back, or to heal the darkened place where a child's laugh had once lived.
Helena's arrest and trial did not bring Everett back. It did, however, rip apart the cozy lie that money could heal all injuries. The punishment was public, messy, and complete. She was stripped of social grace and legal cover; her cries turned into newspaper columns. Watching her crumble made the city feel less comfortable, but it felt like justice—raw, not pretty, but honest.
18.
After Helena's fall, the house of cards at Lichen Group shook. Dempsey's position weakened; many of the board's supporters left. Kylie, who's been counting on that marriage and that pedigree, lost her child and then her prestige when the paternity and legal storms came. She vanished for months.
Samuel and I were—surprisingly—left in clearer light. He had been naive, pulled by the currents of family expectations. When everything fell, he felt hollow with guilt and bewilderment. He tried to salvage us; he tried to reconcile the man he wanted to be with the son he'd been raised to be. We tried too, until his family and their need for stability pulled him into other currents he could not resist.
19.
"What do you want?" Samuel once asked me in a small, honest moment. We were at a cheap noodle shop, and he looked young and tired.
"To be honest," I said, "to be allowed to make choices without my past used like a brick."
He folded his hands. "I can't promise beyond what I am. I can try."
"It won't be enough sometimes," I said. "But I'll try anyway."
He tried. For a while we were ordinary, and the ordinariness was gold.
20.
After the trial, I did something I had been planning for years: I gathered accounts, people, and a small fortune of support for a new venture. Lichen Group had been my school; the city had my ledger. I left with my head held and the remains of my father's company behind me.
Dempsey begged me to stay. "We can make this right," he said, voice hollow. "I can hand it over."
"You weren't there," I said. "You are not the one who should be forgiven."
He stood small. That was the sentence he had earned.
21.
Kiyoko Cox ended up in prison for a stretch. She muttered about her greed while I watched the papers. Cynthia Barnett, Helena's cousin who had helped drug my dessert at a banquet, was arrested soon after; the investigation into the network extended the net outward. Pedro Sims tracked payments and connections that made the whole system visible. Over time, those implicated paid fines, served sentences, or slunk away like insects from a lamp.
The city had been a theater and a courtroom. It had given me a public victory I had dreamed of at nights when I could hardly breathe. It had not healed Everett.
22.
One rainy evening, after the board crisis and the trials and the gossip had softened to hums, Ernest Bell—Samuel's uncle—took me to a small restaurant and handed me back the notebook I had given his nephew months ago. "He asked me to return this," he said.
I touched the pages that had been filled with my feeble attempts at knowing a man whose life had been made of yacht decks and wine cellars. I felt for a long time like I had been someone else who had learned to be a lover by study rather than natural grace.
Ernest smiled. "You fought better than most," he said. "You were honest when it mattered."
"I wanted justice for Everett more than anything," I admitted.
"You got it," he said.
"No," I said. "Justice came. But it hasn't brought him back."
23.
After that, I walked away from Lichen Group. I used the network I'd built to start a small fund. It was modest but honest—an investment firm that focused on community projects rather than the vanity of marquee deals. I refused to allow the city to grind me into cynicism. I wanted instead to make things that could not be broken by a scandal.
Dempsey watched me leave with a pride that felt like a stranger's. Frankie begged for money and made a scene at my car one afternoon, clambering onto the hood and weeping like a wounded animal. I closed the window, gave her two thousand and watched her slump onto the pavement. "Don't make me feel guilty," I said softly. "I am done being someone's insurance policy."
She called me a traitor, a monster, then a daughter. People like her are a weather: they blow where the wind is strongest.
24.
In the small moments after the fall and the trials, in the quiet hours when the city stitched itself back together, there came something I'd never thought I deserved: a kind of peace.
Ernest took me out for dinner more than once. We laughed too much. Samuel and I drifted apart like two boats passing in fog. He married another woman in the end; that life was not for me and perhaps not for him either. Kylie tried to rebuild, and the world was cruelly indifferent.
On a winter evening, I sat with a bottle of cheap Bordeaux and the photograph of Everett I had kept in my desk. I winded the cork out, took a sip, and I thought of the boy who had called himself my protector when he was five.
"I won't let his name be buried," I said, not to the wine, but to myself.
25.
Years later, the notebook that had once been ammunition became a ledger of changes—a list of investments that helped rebuild schools, a small scholarship in Everett's name, a fund for single parents. People would sometimes ask me how I could do such things after all the rancor, and I would answer plainly.
"What else do we have?" I said. "We have choices. We can let the past bury us or we can build something in its shadow."
At night, when the city lights silvered, I would pour a glass and hold Everett's photo. I would remember Helena's fall, the sound of the gavel, the way the courtroom smelled of paper and coffee, the way the city's gossip turned to a different subject. I would remember the man who came that night in the alley and broke the kidnap attempt: Ernest Bell, who had been a judge not by law but by heart.
I raised my glass once, then twice, and whispered to the small photograph, "We did it. You wait for me, always."
The End
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