Sweet Romance13 min read
From Rich Heiress to His Only Home
ButterPicks14 views
I never thought a single blank exam paper could change everything. I folded mine with casual amusement and handed it in like it was a dare. I thought my father's money would always be a parachute. I thought I could play with fate.
"Got you a taxi, Kynlee," the driver said as I closed the test center door.
"No, thanks," I told him, and I walked out into a life I had never learned to live.
The first night outside my family's house, I discovered the small mercies I'd always ignored. I discovered hunger that sits heavy in the stomach, the sharpness of shame when a cashier glances at your frozen bankcard and then at you, and the terrible quiet when someone you used to call "Dad" hangs up on you without a second look.
"You have hands. Figure it out," Oleg Johnston had said, and the line went dead.
I flopped into a supermarket aisle and cried behind a shelf of cereal boxes until an employee told me to hurry along. I tried interviews at a bubble tea shop, at a convenience store, at a café. I failed them all. I learned what "entry-level" meant: you have to have less hesitation than the next person.
The sun beat down the day I wandered into the construction site. I was hungry enough to stare. He was there—tanned, muscle rolling under a stained T-shirt, dust-line running across his cheek—and when he looked up, his eyes startled me like sunlight through a crack.
"—you want some?" he asked, tucking the lid from his lunchbox with the same careful motion a person uses to keep warm hands from cold.
I nodded like a child.
He pushed the extra box toward me. "It's nothing special."
I devoured it greedily, grateful for a bite that tasted like life again. When I looked up to thank him properly, I found a face I couldn't have invented—handsome in a plain, honest way, and a little embarrassed at being looked at.
"I'm Kynlee," I said, digging too far into a role I had forgotten how to play: the spoiled girl who promises everything for a kindness.
"Ethan," he said. He smiled at me the way some people smile when they've decided they like something small and bright.
"You don't owe me anything. I'm going to... repay you," I said, half in jest, half to comfort myself. Then I lied like I'd always lied: "My father will pay you back tenfold when I go back home."
Ethan laughed softly, shading his eyes. "I don't want money. I want you. That's enough."
I scoffed. "You toad, dreaming of the swan."
We crossed the line to being ridiculous right there in the dust. But when he let me come to his small room that night, when he wrapped a T-shirt around my waist because his shorts were patched and it was the kind thing to do, I began to see the world from a different angle. There was a bookshelf wall in a one-room place that smelled faintly of detergent and grilled meat. The books stared at me like witnesses. He made three pots of hot water to let me bathe. He slept on a mat while I had the bed. He killed a fat cockroach with the kind of calm that made my heart ache.
He was not just handsome. He was careful in ways that money had never taught me to be.
"Do you want to come work with me?" he asked the second day. "You can carry water. It's not heavy. You can learn."
"Yes," I lied, because I wanted to be useful. Because I wanted to stay.
The site was barbaric in the middle of the summer—heat that made the air warp, a foreman who barked orders like someone trying to charm the sun into working faster. Paolo Castillo strutted in a business shirt and a clip-on leadership that smelled of cheap perfume and cheaper threats. He liked the sound of his own command voice. He liked deciding whose day would go wrong.
"Get moving!" Paolo barked one noon as workers tried to shield themselves. "You all will work until sundown. We don't have time for whining."
I couldn't stand it. I stepped toward him, my throat a dry river. "It's forty degrees! You can't keep people here like this."
Paolo turned on me with a grin that meant he had power. "Who are you? A pretty heiress trying to teach me safety?"
"I—" I swallowed my pride. "My father owns this project, actually."
Everyone stopped. The name had been a weapon I had never meant to use. Paolo laughed like a hyena. "Oh really? The famous Oleg Johnston? And what would Mr. Johnston say about his precious daughter lecturing supposed 'workers'?"
My hand shook as I called my uncle—my second uncle the one who picked up the phone—"Get me out of this."
But when Oleg's reply finally came it was a mixing bowl of business decisions. "If you can smooth this, do it. But don't make me look bad."
I felt the cotton of the air under my fists. I felt useless. I sat down with swollen pride and called my uncle to beg for help. He said the thing my father always said when he wanted to be the judge, "A taste of life builds character."
It did. It burned.
We worked. Someone fainted under the blender of heat. A man named Silas Dell—an older worker with the crooked back of a man who had built cities—nearly fell into the mixing drum and Ethan flung out like a human net to catch him. A rebar snapped, and it grazed Ethan's skull as he shielded Silas. Blood blurred like red watercolor down Ethan's face. I ran.
"He's in surgery!" someone yelled.
I ran to the hospital, gloves and ties already smudged into my skin. The smell of antiseptic strangled me. I found Ethan on a gurney, scalp stitched, the dark hair shaved, his face thin as paper. The surgeon's voice was a machine.
"You did the right thing bringing him. He'll be fine if he rests," the surgeon said. I pressed my palm to the bandage like a benediction.
"It was my fault," I told everyone, though it had been Paolo's orders, though the heat had been the heat, though I had only pointed a finger. I wanted to fix what could be fixed.
Silas and the men pooled their pockets and pushed coins and crumpled bills into my hand. I shook them away, but they pressed them on me until I accepted.
"Take it for the hospital," Chen—no, a local older woman called Maria outside the cafeteria, but here Silas—one of the men said, clenching the coins like prayers. "Don't let the kid have to beg."
I took those coins. I kept them like a promise.
I pawned my mother's necklace—an heirloom that had a story of its own—to pay for Ethan's hospital bills. A pawnshop lady with too-bright lipstick and a voice like a paper cut—Victoria Bright—eyed me up and down and sized the piece as if it were a rumor.
"This is worth little," she said, her voice all scales. "I'll give you three thousand."
"Three thousand?" I echoed, my throat empty as a cave.
She shrugged and went to make calls. Her clerk then made a call that froze me: "Police will want to speak to you about suspected theft."
I looked at her, stunned. "You called them?"
She clicked her nails, like she had used a chair and I had been the fabric she scraped.
"She stole it," the clerk said to the officers when they came. "Maybe she has a story."
I told them the story. I named my father. Victoria smirked, then nodded toward the officers as if she'd been a hero. My world reduced to the quiet click of a cell door as my father walked into the interrogation room with the calm hurricane of Oleg Johnston.
"You pawned your mother's jewelry?" he asked, and he whipped the artifact across the table. "Has my daughter no shame?"
I could feel my mother's weight in the metal. I could feel my own.
"I'm selling it to save him," I said. "Ethan is bleeding on an operating table and you lecture me about pride."
Oleg looked like he might have split in two: the man who runs corporations and the father who kept a list of punishments. The older, businessman voice called for a cold solution.
"Do what you must," he said finally. "But never again use our name to coerce."
I walked out with the money. I paid the hospital. Ethan woke with his head bandaged and eyes that had the depth of someone who had almost gone under. He did not weep. He pushed me away from the bedside at first, because honor was a stubborn animal, but when he finally took my hand he whispered, "You saved me."
"I had your panicked friends," I said. "And I sold a memory for you."
He smiled. "Don't make stories you will regret. I want you here, not a martyr."
I stayed. I learned to cook with pennies and to sew holes and to count the rice. The little things were the things love lives in: he tucked his T-shirt into a patched waistline because it was warmer that way; he knitted a straw of hope when I could not; and once, when I came home exhausted and shivering, he had stacked our meager cutlery as if the order of things mattered.
"You're puppeting your life around me," he teased once as we sat on the stoop.
"I have a plan." I preened like a peacock with borrowed feathers. "When I go back to my father's world, I'll buy you a house. I'll build us a skyscraper and we'll look down on this life like it's a stage."
He reached up and touched the corner of my eye like a man smoothing a map. "I want you. I don't want steel or glass."
"I am a swan," I joked. "You are a toad."
"Then I am the best toad you'll ever know," he said.
He was a toad I never wanted to let go of.
Ethan's accident made us small in the right ways. He healed and marched himself back to work, to earn, to keep his hands honest. He got a scholarship notice one afternoon—the letter that said he had been accepted to a top university. He had been top of his class, quiet about what he could do. In the glow of that package, he turned to me.
"Come to Beijing with me," he said and grinned. "We'll rent a little room near campus. When I'm free, I'll be with you."
I looked at the ticket to a life I had thought was only ever mine to sell. "I can't," I said honestly. "I have... baggage. My father will sleep on my mistakes."
"Then don't go if you don't want to," Ethan said, but his voice carried a small hurt. "I can't stop you."
That night I made a decision I couldn't speak aloud. I wrote a note, packed my things, and left a card with some money for him. I left because I was cowardly and because I still thought my pride could be bought back by distance.
Two months later, after a turbine of guilt and tutoring, my father slowed. He saw what I had touched by the edge of life and decided to act. Maybe it was shame. Maybe it was that he wanted his daughter back as a public trophy rather than a private problem. He called Paolo to account and, because money moves like blood in his veins, he moved fast.
The public firing of Paolo Castillo was the first punishment that felt like a door slamming on a hand that had tried to close it.
It happened in front of the site, with men gathered and machines groaning like bored beasts. Paolo strutted into the waiting yard, expecting the usual chorus of flattery. He found instead a stage. Oleg stood on a crate with his sleeves rolled up—presidential in a man's jacket smeared with dust.
"Oleg!" Paolo barked, smoothing a collar that no longer matched his bravado.
Oleg's voice cut off the air. "You have endangered men for deadlines, Paolo."
Paolo scoffed. "I make decisions. If you want coddling of men, go buy toys."
"Maybe you should answer for a different kind of harm," Oleg said, and pointed a finger at the foreman who had shouted the noon orders. "Ethan Conrad nearly died because of your insistence on squeezing labor beyond reason."
A murmur rose. Paolo changed his face from amused to affronted. "Are we holding a sermon now? He fell—storms happen—"
Silas, red bandanna knotted at his neck, stepped forward, his pipe voice steady. "He wasn't a storm. He was a directive every goddamn day."
"Paolo," Oleg said, each syllable slow enough to hear bump against the asphalt, "find a lawyer to challenge the worker's complaint all you want. But as the project owner, I will not be associated with someone who gambles with lives for profit."
Paolo reddened, then limned into anger. "You think you're better than me? You with your money and your lectures? You didn't sweat when you were my age."
"Maybe not," Oleg admitted. "But you will for this." He handed a thick file to the site manager. "These are the safety logs. These are the complaint emails. This is the video of you yelling for men to keep working at noon. I didn't have to dig far."
Someone fed the video into a rough laptop. The projector's light threw Paolo's face huge and jerky across the shipping container. The whole site watched Paolo's authority mocked by his own voice echoing through a garden of men who had worked in sun and rain.
"You lied to me," Paolo snapped, panic beginning to glow in his cheeks. "You can't do this—"
"Shut up," Oleg said. "You're dismissed. From this job and from any of my projects. And I'll make sure my industry contacts won't touch you for a very long time."
A chorus of whistles and catcalls filled the yard. Men—some who had once been under Paolo's whip—took off their hats and banged them on the ground in a percussive clack that felt like a verdict. Someone had already started filming Paolo with a phone. Heads turned away as Paolo's face lost its buffoonery and gained something rawer: the look of a man who had been stripped of his costume.
Paolo's reactions came quick—first disbelief, then a venomous attempt at denial. "You paid them, didn't you? You got them in on this stunt," he accused, pointing at Oleg. His voice seized and shook. "They won't stand by me!"
"They already did," Silas said, voice like old gravel. "We stood by you when you gave us water to carry and laughed when men went down."
Tears started to leak from some of the younger workers' eyes. "You made promises of overtime we never saw," gasped one of the lads. "You made threats."
"You're done," a chorus confirmed.
Paolo attempted to gather himself. "You're making a circus! I'll take you to court. I'll—"
"You will find no friends here," Oleg said. "The construction association will hear about this. Your name will be attached to a long list of black marks now. And when your bank calls about your loans, don't expect a human voice to speak kindly."
That line landed with the sound of metal hitting metal. Paolo staggered. His bravado cracked into an adolescent howl. He shoved a worker who had been pointing an accusing finger at him and the men shoved back. Phones flashed. Someone shouted, "Record him! Record him!"
Paolo's face broke into a new palette—pride had cracked into panic, panic into pleading.
"Wait! Wait!" Paolo grabbed Oleg's sleeve as if he could physically pull the man back from a verdict written in his past actions. "Please—I'll fix it. I'll give them—I'll give their families support. Don't do this."
Silas's hand rested on Paolo's elbow like a judgement. "Too late. You let blood run on concrete."
Paolo fell to the ground theatrically, as if auditioning for sympathy. But there was none. A woman who read the payroll ledger for the crew turned and spat the day's earnings in his direction. One worker recorded the moment and uploaded it live. Within minutes the video rattled out into the city—Paolo's downfall a small thunderclap in the church of the internet.
His last resistance came as a supplication: "I have a wife! I have—"
"Then feed her with honesty," Oleg said, and turned away.
Paolo scrambled up, stumbling past men whose faces had twin lines of hard-earned patience. A boy—no more than twenty—threw his lunchbox at Paolo's heels with a sound like a judge's gavel hitting wood. The lunchbox thunked and skittered away. Paolo's shoes left marks in the dust as he fled the site, his face the photograph of a man who had gambled on cruelty and lost.
The crowd dispersed slowly, not in a rush of triumph but in quiet relief. "He won't be working in this industry for a while," Silas said, wiping sweat from his brow, and the whole site seemed to agree.
That was one punishment. Public, combustible, and final in the way a broken reputation is final.
Victoria Bright, the pawnshop lady who had called the police on me, got her own slow, social judgment. News of her complaint had spread—people in that neighborhood liked to protect the small, honest transactions that kept them whole. A group of workers arrived one morning with a petition: they had video of her accusing a girl who had sold the necklace to save a life. They stood before her shop and recited the truth until her lipstick couldn't hide her guilt. The lawyer Oleg paid to begin a small civil claim did not aim to ruin her, but he made sure her report to the police would be documented as false. The local merchant association refused to do business with her for a month. That quiet exclusion was a different kind of public: one that cut at the belly more than the face. Her clerk was humiliated when customers refused to be scanned by her register, and oaths of "We buy from neighbors who don't call police on the desperate" followed her down the lane.
Two punishments, different like a knife and like frost.
I stayed, I learned, and I loved. Ethan and I were a slow-made thing. He would push me to study. I would make lunches and mend pants because I couldn't stand the thought of him patching himself up with pride alone.
"Why study?" I asked him once, late at night, bent over his borrowed engine of a laptop.
"Because it's how we make our choices," he said. "Because my life should be my choice, not just reaction."
He went to Beijing for school. I stayed for a while and then, because Oleg's temper had softened into a bargaining table, I found myself in front of a tutor Adrian Schmid had recommended. The man with the offhand grin who could make equations into stories—Adrian pushed and sometimes teased, and in a year of hard work, my grades did what people call "turnaround." I did not go to the exact place I'd once dreamed, but I went to a school that would let me stand closer to Ethan's world.
When I walked into the campus to find him after a year—when my sneakers hit that brick path and he stepped out of a crowd like he had always been waiting for me—he looked taller and cleaner, but the same. And this time I stayed. Not as a swan whose feathers were traded for convenience, but as myself.
We learned each other's schedules, library chairs, the way to make dinner when our pockets were empty. We argued with professors and we cheered at three-point shots. We shared an umbrella and a cheap hotel room on a night the bus schedule betrayed us. My father appeared one day in a jacket that smelled like an olive branch, and Ethan looked him right in the eye and said, "I will not be polished into being anyone's choice. I love Kynlee."
That was the sort of moment you imagine in a million quiet dreams. It was not loud. It was relentless.
Years passed like pages turning. I wrote stories as a reporter. Ethan built a small company that made domestic robots for people who needed a hand—because of the moment he once said, half-laughing, "She can't cook worth a damn." We married one afternoon in a small city hall, and the sun fell friendly on our shoulders.
He once stood on a stage years later, presenting the robot we had named "Helper" to an audience with lights and a million imaginations.
"Why make this?" a journalist asked.
Ethan smiled and—because his honesty had always been a kind of weapon for good—he said, "Because my wife didn't grow up doing chores. I wanted a machine to take some of the burden off them."
The lights flashed. I felt my cheeks burn. My life, from blank paper to this, had made a circle I hadn't seen coming.
He put his hand in mine, squeezed. "I might have started as a toad," he said quietly, as if that were our private joke, "but you chose to stay. I'm lucky."
I leaned into him then, against the sound of applause, and I knew I had chosen better than I had ever dared.
We laughed at our own clumsy stories sometimes. We were both messes who had become tidy by choosing each other. If I had to go back to my supermarket cry, to the pawnshop's glare, to a foreman's downfall, I'd do it all for the life that grew out of those scars and brave, awkward kindnesses.
"Do you ever regret leaving?" Ethan asked once, years after, as we sat on the stoop of a house we bought with our own money.
"Only the nights I thought I'd lose you," I said.
He kissed my forehead. "Then we are even."
We learned to build and to forgive. We learned to make terrible food taste like salvation. We learned how to hum each other's names when the day was hard.
And when people asked how I, once spoiled and cruel with talent, could have learned to love an honest man, I told them it was because he taught me the rarest thing: he treated me like I already belonged.
The End
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