Face-Slapping14 min read
A Year's Promise: The Year I Refused to Be Bought
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I woke in a dark room with half-burned red candles guttering on the wooden sill. The light was thin and trembled. I lay curled on a straw-filled kang, my face like a white cloth. My name felt wrong on my tongue; everything felt wrong.
"Where am I?" I whispered.
A shadow moved beyond the oiled paper window. Men laughed, voices thick with rice wine and the kind of rough jokes that spill out at other people's doors.
"This is my bed?" I said again, to myself.
Someone pushed open the heavy door. He filled the doorway: broad shoulders, a square jaw, a scent of smoke and earth. He caught me as I stumbled, hands firm at my waist. The smell of him—straw and sweat—made my chest tighten.
"Where do you think you're going?" His voice was low and steady.
"Let go!" I shouted, kicking. My foot found his belly; he went down with a grunt. For a moment I thought I had a chance.
"Don't be a fool," a man behind him sang out. "It's the wedding night. We should celebrate, ha!"
I scrambled for the cupboard and found a pair of scissors and a coil of red thread. The red safety thread that tied a bride to the house. My hand shook on the metal.
"This isn't my husband," I said, clumsily holding the scissors like a threat. "I—I'm not who you think I am."
For a long minute his eyes cut through me, sharp and unreadable. Then he surprised me.
"If you don't want to be my wife," he said, voice strangely small for such a big man, "stay. Or don't. I'm not the one to force you."
He left with a quietly defeated laugh. The other men stumbled away, leaving me with the scissors and the smell of their footsteps. I dropped the scissors and let myself sink to the floor. Memory crashed through me like cold water: my mother who loved money more than me, a home of hardness and quiet tasks, the sudden drowning in a modern pool and the impossible thought that I had been flung backward in time into another life.
"My name is Cadence Le," I told the still room. "If that's still me."
The next morning rain came against the paper window. From the yard a small drama was playing out—voices raised, pleading, anger. I pushed the door and stepped into the wet air. A woman knelt in the mud, begging a man in a black raincoat.
"Please, you mustn't throw us out," the woman cried. "My son just got married yesterday!"
The man—village leader, someone with a fat face and a habit of looking important—said something cold. Men with sacks and poles moved to the house across the courtyard, hauling out bundles, clamshell trunks, a crying child's threadbare blanket.
"He's a black household," someone muttered. "No proper residence. No papers."
I felt a heat in my chest that was not the sun. I could not watch people be cast out like that and do nothing. I walked into the rain, soaked within seconds, and faced him.
"I'm Cadence Le," I said. "My husband is Carter Cotton. Why are you taking their house?"
The village leader let his eyes sweep me like a dismissive wind. "You're only a girl. You don't know the rules. That house is for registered villagers."
"Then why does that man's cousin have a bigger house?" I asked. "Why are some people allowed and some not?"
He blinked. Men bristled at my audacity. A skinny, sour-faced man stepped forward and sneered, "You think because you can open your mouth you can make me give up what Uncle gave me?"
"Is that your name? Uncle's name?" I shot back. "Who signed the records?"
They took me seriously because I didn't fear them. I asked for a public explanation, for the record of who owned what, for a paper trail. In a week I was holding a hand-copied introduction letter to the county, pressed and stamped. We went to the village committee. When the clerk tried to tell us the stamp pad had dried up, I opened a drawer, found a red tin, and placed a thumbprint in the red on the signature line. I walked out with a document bound to prove Carter's household registration would be processed.
Carter watched me from beside me. He was a man of few words and stubborn decency. When I leaned on him on the path back, he shrugged one shoulder and let me. For a few small moments something like peace existed between us.
"Are you going to leave?" he asked once while we walked through ripening fields.
"Can I?" I said. "I cannot go back home. Not unless I steal myself the life I want."
"Stay a year," he said, simply. "If after a year you want to leave, I won't stop you."
"One year," I repeated, tasting the plan. It was an elegant compromise that opened a way for me to breathe.
We had hard days. Carter worked the fields under the sun; I cooked and mended and learned the rhythms of a house I had not built. People gaped at my modern face, at the way I moved with a city memory in my hand. My mother and sister from the world I had known—no, from my new life—appeared a few times. They had the habit of arriving when they needed money. When they did, I was ready.
"Where did you get that money?" I demanded when I found a crumpled handful of notes tucked into my sister Kendall Neves's pocket.
"Eh, I earned it," Kendall squealed. She was a simpering thing, used to living off others. "A man gave it."
"It came from Ezio Carlson," I said, naming the tidy city-man who had crawled into my life with promises. He had come to thank me ages ago when I had once pulled him from a river where he had been bitten. He had apprenticed to gratitude and the habit of arriving when a woman was vulnerable.
My voice had a bite. "You took his money in my name."
Kendall paled. "He said he'd help with my fees."
"You will give it back," I said. "And while you're at it, give me the names of anyone who thinks my name is a ledger."
Kendall fumbled and handed me the money. I left with the salt of a dog licking my heels and a plan like a bright coin in my pocket.
Not everyone was kind. Olga Richardson, who had always had a tongue like a fishhook, accused me of poisoning her sister with the fishcakes I had made for the village festival. For a week the whole village murmur rose like a tide, and once again the old fear of being a woman with nowhere to go pressed in.
"This is your doing!" Olga's brother, Frank Clayton, yelled outside our door. "My sister was sick—food poisoning!"
"I will go with you to the clinic," I said. "Take me now."
They tried to keep me in. Carter stood in the doorway like a wall. I finally walked into the clinic with a few neighbors. The old doctor—Cael Curtis—examined the woman and said that she had eaten a lot and was weak, that it might be a simple stomach complaint and not an intentional poisoning.
"Did anyone else eat the fishcakes?" I asked.
"Yes," several said. "Old Nan from the hill, the kids... why only my sister—"
"Could individual digestion make a difference?" I asked Cael.
"It can," Cael said. "Some foods don't play well together."
Slowly the blame thinned. People remembered seeing Olga eat the tomatoes from another stall before she had taken the fishcakes home. She had eaten in an odd combination; she had been hungry and greedy. Faces turned on her. She had lied for money.
She had lied to profit. She had wanted the village to pay.
That day at the hospital I learned that a quick mind and a clear voice could turn a room.
But there were bigger snakes in the grass. The village records had a hole. When I pressed, Carter's name had oddly been left without a proper plot of land even though the county meeting minutes, I learned, had shown he was supposed to receive half an acre. Something had been taken between the county office and the village ledger. The clerk had politely suggested it had been a mistake. The village leader, Anders Burgess, smiled too easily.
The itch under my skin woke into a burning need for justice. If people took houses and fields because they knew the names of the powerless, then I would bring them paper and men who counted. I could not let Carter and his mother Martha Brooks be cheated out of the life they had built.
I went to the county again. I found the county official—Wu, whose name was like a river—and put my plea as plain as a stitched hem. He had listened carefully and had checked the records: Carter's name had been recorded to receive land. The file noted Carter in a list. Someone at the village had altered it.
"That would be very bad," the official said, with the flatness of someone who had seen too much. "Very bad indeed."
We set a meeting at the harvest square. I gathered my witnesses: Lane Watanabe, the woodworker who had been kind; Gustavo Renard, a square-jawed friend who had laughed with us at festivals; Ellianna Yoshida, a soft-voiced supply clerk who had evidence of deliveries; and Cael Curtis, who would swear to dates. I carried the signed county paper in my bag, a small paper like an ember.
"Village meeting!" Anders Burgess announced that morning, standing in his yellow vest, as if it were his custom to call out every issue personally.
I called from the back of the crowd. "We need to examine the land registry!"
He blinked, and his control slipped for the breadth of a breath. He had been counting on the slow routine of things. With the county's man and a handful of neighbors, the secret was not secret.
"Do you have proof?" Anders asked, his voice like someone trying to keep a tired smile.
"I have proof," I said, and I handed the county paper to Wu, who read it and then pressed it into Anders' face. The crowd once idle prickled up. People looked at Anders with new eyes: curiosity, then suspicion.
"This says Carter Cotton was to receive half an acre," Wu read aloud, and the square ground listened. "It says the county approved it. How did this change in your book?"
Anders' eyes flickered like a trapped animal's. He had relied on small cruelties for a long time; he had thought the village would accept his corrections without paper protest.
"You listen here," Anders said. "That file could be wrong. Files are–"
"The signature is here," Wu interrupted. "And even if there was a clerical error, why was the field given to someone else? Why were the records altered?"
The square made a sound like wind through stalks. Someone pulled forward the ledger; Lane Watanabe pointed to the smudged ink.
"Someone scrawled over it," Lane said. "Someone has been changing the book."
I kept my voice calm. "Who benefits when Carter's land is taken? Who gets an extra plot? Show me the transfers. Show me who moved things."
Faces shifted. Martha Brooks, Carter's mother, stood with her hands clenched. "We did not know."
The man Anders relied on—the skinny cousin who had taken the room—began to sweat. In the crowd, murmurs turned to a chorus. No one had expected a woman with a strange city accent and stubborn eyes to turn the page.
"You used me," I said quietly to Anders. "You used Mrs. Brooks' unknown child as cover. The county approved at the time. You took a man's land and called it village custom."
Anders' smugness left like steam from a pot.
The next hour was a slow, delicious unmasking. I had witnesses who remembered when the ledger was correctly written. I had Lane who testified that he had seen Anders' cousin hauling sacks across the field the winter after the distribution. I had Ellianna who had been asked to add certain names to the local list in exchange for favors. I had the county official who would not let the record be dismissed. The crowd now pressed forward like a tide. Women with baby straps on their backs, men with sunburned noses, children with sticky hands—everyone felt the tilt.
Anders' face paled. He stammered. "You can't—this is nonsense. I did what I had to do for the village. It was for order."
"For order?" I scoffed. "For your pocket."
He tried to laugh; the laugh cracked. The villagers shuffled and whispered. I watched him go through the stages: denial, then outrage, then a kind of shrinking. A broad man from the outer hamlet—Frank Clayton—stepped forward and held a scrap of paper in his hand: a receipt Anders had asked him to sign. The signature on the receipt was Anders'; the money had never been used for repairs. The crowd hissed.
"Lock him out!" shouted someone. "Bring the ledger!"
"Bring the ledger!" called another. The village elder, who had been a buddy of Anders for years, could not hold the room any longer. People demanded accountability.
Anders found himself at the center of the circle like someone suddenly dizzy inside a ring of blinding lights. He was obliged to show his own ledgers and the new names he had written. He looked smaller page by page as neighbors read aloud the entries that proved his favors for kin. People snapped photos—two farmers held up small cameras and made the moment permanent.
"Do you deny altering the records?" I asked.
"No!" he burst. "No, I—I'm—"
"Why?" demanded Wu. "Did you put your name above the village? Did you call it justice?"
The sound in the square rose altogether then—voices angry and eager, a jury pressed into one body. Anders' face burst from steady color into flush, then a sick white.
"Give him the ledger," I said to Martha. She handed it trembling. The edges were sticky with the sweat of long excuses. Carter's name showed the gouged-over line like a scar.
A woman in the crowd—Isla Lundberg—stood up and spat, "He's always liked to feather his own nest!"
She had been one who had been pushed aside when Anderson favored his kin; she had held a grudge like an old stone. Her voice galvanized the cluster into a chorus of accusation. Anders' allies tried to talk, to smooth, to bargain. He looked around for a friendly nod. He found none.
Then came the worst hour for him, the moment he had once used on others but now had to endure. I took the county letter and laid it on the ledger and called out to the crowd in a voice that did not tremble.
"You see this?" I said. "This is what he erased. He takes from the poor and gives to his kin. He hides by making people 'unregistered'. He tells village women to beg. He takes what a family needs to feed children and puts it into someone else's pocket."
"Shame!" someone cried.
"Shame on you!" another yelled. The words built momentum. Anders' face went from denial to rage to a strange, hunted terror.
"Nobody is above the village," Wu said, his voice hard. "We will take this to the county. The law will decide. But the village can also decide: our voice matters."
A small group came forward and pressed the ledger into Anders' hands. "Read this," they said. "Read what you wrote."
He could not. He choked out staves of excuse. Someone took out a small camera and recorded him reading his own words aloud. He stumbled, misread a number, and the village laughed, not cruelly but with the shock of a buffalo losing its footing.
He went from indignant to imploring quickly. "I didn't mean—"
"You meant," a woman said flatly, "to make yourself larger than the map of this place. You misused our trust to make your cousin's house grow. When you do that, you poison people."
He fell into the sequence of reactions fate loves: first a forced laugh, then a shrill denial, then a thin plea, then finally a small cry. People who had once bowed now watched him tremble. A group of young men—hard-faced but not cruel—made him kneel in the square as the county man looked on.
"No!" Anders cried. "You can't—"
"You stole our ground," a farmer said. "You stole our chance to feed our children. You will answer. We'll not be silent."
He sank to his knees. At first it was disbelief: he had not expected this. Then the faces above him—the ones he'd dismissed, ignored, mistreated—presented a sharp mirror. "Please," Anders said, voice thin and cracking. "Please. I am sorry."
The crowd did not instantly roar in triumph. They felt, instead, the brittle justice of an exposure: he'd used the village as a tool. He had to be made small so the village could be whole again.
"Ask for forgiveness," Wu said coldly. "Ask the families you cheated."
He tried: a useless, shaking thing. The women who had been kept from their fields watched him. The boys who had seen their fathers cede ground to Anders laughed to thin the sharpness of triumph. Phones clicked. The video of him breaking and pleading would go beyond the square.
They dragged him up—poorly dignified—and made him sign a public declaration: he would return the land, pay restitution, apologize publicly, and stand down from the leadership post while an investigation took place. The paper he signed was blunt and final. He signed with trembling ink, then knelt and begged aloud for the village's forgiveness. The crowd watched him go through the motions of collapse: smile became confusion, became denial, became pleading.
"He used to laugh when we had nothing," an older woman said to me afterwards. "You made him taste what we felt."
He was not dragged away to jail that day—that is the work of courts—but he was humiliated in front of hundreds: the slow unmaking of his authority. The video spread to nearby towns; the humiliation stung for many weeks. He had expected to sit on a high saddle and have the village wheel at his feet. Instead he was reduced to a man repeating apologies into the record, weeping and begging, trying to stitch back a reputation that had been worn thin by his hands.
I watched him at the end—shrunken, hands shaking, trying to pick up the broken dignity he had smashed.
"Don't think this ends the hurt," I told the crowd. "Make the record right. Make the ledger true. And make sure no one can erase a family's right to live."
The ledger was corrected that day. The county reissued the paperwork, and Carter received his share. When Anders left, he was not dragged out with fists; rather, his name was written down with the sour ink of truth. People snapped pictures. They pointed. They told their grandchildren as a short story: "Don't take what doesn't belong to you."
The village changed. People stood straighter. Martha Brooks cried in the kitchen when she realized the field that had been promised was now a certainty. Carter came to my bed that night with a small bundle: a single lemon wrapped in cloth.
"You did this," he said, not boastful, not flattering, just steady. "You did it for us."
"I had a paper and a stubbornness," I said. "You had a name and a right."
We had a year's promise between us. The year marked the time I could breathe and the time I could find whether I would learn to stay. Love, I had decided, could not be nicked out of a ledger. It had to be something built, slowly, like a wall.
In the months after the ledger, other small storms came. My sister tried again to woo money from Ezio Carlson. He had a way of being earnest in public and needy in private. I told him, plainly, that his gifts could not buy my consent. He stammered and promised theatrics that meant nothing. I told him to leave me and my name alone.
"You think you're saving me," I told him, when he came at night, the way a man who believed himself rescuing a country believes he can buy its freedom with coins. "You arrived late. Leave."
He slunk away. He tried to make me the heroine in his own story. He was comfortable in the role until he wasn't.
The year I lived with Carter had beginnings and small warm things that were not in the ledger. He taught me the small domestic acts of a time where nothing was instant. I taught him to read in a different way—not from the fields but from scraps of calendar pages, from jokes and borrowed books. We argued, often without words: the way he would pick up a tool without asking, the way I would apply rules like mortar. We learned each other's edges.
At the edges, there were victories. The hospital episode faded into ridicule for those who had lied. Olga Richardson's family was made to apologize publicly for stirring the rumor of poisoning. She had to stand in front of the clinic and have her accusation echoed back to her in the space. "I lied," she had to say, "I wanted money." She folded under the weight of a truth she had tried to weaponize. The crowd watched, someone even filmed, the same wave of humiliation that had broken Anders' authority spread to her. She paled from confident to broken. "Please!" she cried. "Don't—"
Nobody beat her in the square. Nobody needed to. Public confession had the power that a fist does not.
When my mother and sister came asking again—this time, shamefully, for money to pay the man they'd borrowed from by blaming me—I took their handful of coins and threw them down in the dirt in front of the house.
"Take it back," I told them. "Take it and leave my name out of your debts. You don't get to trade me; I'm not a promise you can pawn."
They left, slamming a door on a life they thought they owned. I did not throw a stone at them. I only closed my fist around the future I had begun forging with Carter.
Weeks passed. We had small dinners, hot and honest. Ellianna Yoshida, the kind clerk who had once handed me a ledger with a look, began to be a friend. Arielle Bishop, the bright-hearted neighbor, brought tea. Lane Watanabe hauled wood. Gustavo Renard kept the cattle in his head and on his land.
Then one afternoon as the rice rose golden and the sky had that thin blue sliver of late summer, I found myself putting my hand in Carter's. He was steady; he had that same stubbornness as before, but something had softened in him—a willingness to be seen. He leaned in and said, simply, "I won't let you go."
"Time," I replied. "You have time."
He smiled, wide and slow. "I will wait," he said. "But I won't wait with my hands in my pockets."
We rebuilt a ledger not of paper but of acts: he carried the heavy barrels; I learned the right night to salt the cabbage to make it keep. We mended the torn things in the house and the torn places in the village. We fixed fences and mended grudges.
The year closed like a hem. People called me a city fool and then a quick clever woman and then, finally, one who held her ground. Carter and I were not lovers in the way romance novels promised, not at first; we were two people building a shelter.
Autumn came and with it a kinship that had nothing to do with contracts. The village stopped looking at me like a spectacle. The county office returned the corrected ledger. Anders Burgess' shame had to be lived with; it did not vanish in a soundless night. He came to the square with a low head once and apologized to the families he'd cheated; he looked small and frightened.
"Do you forgive?" someone asked in the square.
People murmured. Some did. Some made him recompense. He knelt and begged. He tried to bargain back his dignity and was forced to watch the village reclaim itself.
I had asked for the ledger because people had been using my name like a pocket. I got the ledger and the truth. I also won something I did not expect: a man who learned to open his hands.
"Do you ever regret?" Carter asked one night as we sat beneath the thin moon.
"Only that I didn't learn to be stubborn earlier," I said. "But then I wouldn't be who I am now. And I like who I am now."
"Good," he said, and kissed my forehead, quick and warm.
We did not become novel heroes. We became the sum of chores and cups of tea and the occasional grand battle against a man who thought a village was his ledger to write. In the end, what mattered to me was that the red ink on the ledger stayed true from that day on.
The End
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