Revenge9 min read
Goodbye to a Green Hat (and Hello to My Own Life)
ButterPicks17 views
I am Elaina Sherman.
"I saw them," I told myself like an accusation. "I saw them together."
They were the two people who had built the map of my life—Atlas Green and I used to joke that maps led to treasure; Annabelle Chang and Carter Malik were part of my coastline, my safe harbor. Now that coastline had been cut by a jagged reef.
"I can't believe she would do this," I said out loud to the empty room, because speaking softened the ache a little.
"You have to decide," Atlas told me the night he sat on my living-room armrest and refused to leave. "Leave, stay, fight—it’s your choice."
"I choose to leave," I said. "I choose to leave and never come back."
Carter folded his hands, eyes rimmed red. "Elaina, we can fix this."
"Fix?" I laughed, a short, sharp sound. "Fix? Annabelle in our bed? Fix? You think 'fix' is a word big enough?"
He started to say something and swallowed.
Annabelle's eyes were wet. "I didn't mean—"
"Don't," I said. "I won't listen."
They both stood in my doorway like a replay of some nightmare I couldn't wake from. Atlas had told me to ask for nothing from them but the truth. I already had it—their guilty breaths, the smell of perfume that wasn't mine, the shapes of two bodies where there should have been one.
"Leave my flat," I said finally.
Carter's jaw worked. "Please," he whispered. "Please, Elaina."
"No," I said, and turned my back.
I walked into the street like I was made of glass and would break with a wrong step. People stared. "Are you okay?" a stranger asked. I only nodded and kept walking.
I found Mason Duffy waiting at the corner near the hot-pot place where my cheeks first puffy from crying had met the sting of chili. He looked smaller than I had imagined, until he opened his mouth and the sound was low and steady.
"You look terrible," he said.
"Thanks," I sniffed. "You brought water like a saint."
He gave me the bottle and said, "I heard. I'm sorry."
"Why?" I asked, because a stranger couldn't possibly be sorry in the right way.
"Because someone you trusted hurt you." He didn't explain. The silence between us was a fabric thin enough to tear.
Later, over spicy soup that made my nose run and my face burn, I looked at him and said, "Let's be together."
His hand trembled in mine as if the thought had been waiting. "Why?"
"Because she hurt me," I said, and the lie tasted like iron. "Because I want to show her what it feels like."
He looked at me—really looked—and he wasn't amused. "Figure out if you want me before you drag me into things," he said.
"I do want you," I lied, and his jaw set.
We both knew it was not love yet. It was a plan, a weapon shaped like warmth. That night Mason became my answer. He said yes, though he sounded like he was agreeing to a storm.
"You deleted the recording?" he asked once my voice softened.
"I did," I told him. "I pretended to, anyway."
"You tricked her."
"I set the rules," I said. "She called Mason after—she begged him and then I hung up."
Mason's laugh was thin. "You're cruel."
"Not cruel," I said. "Just tired of being kind to people who took me for granted."
"They will pay," Mason said quietly. "They will lose what they think they have."
We were a fitful team. He was not a blank tool; he had lines he wouldn't cross. He told me he had wanted me quietly for five years—notes, small gifts, a diary of my name scribbled between lines about the weather. For the first time, his face was not a stranger's. It was a ledger of small, steady attention.
I held on to that ledger like a talisman.
"Do you really like her?" someone asked Mason later, when gossip reached him through the city grapevine.
"I do," he admitted. "I liked her first. Maybe I still do."
That admission was a thin bridge. We crossed it together, unsure if it would hold.
The town watched. News moved like river water—fast, cold, and everywhere. The rumor mill steamed: Elaina stole Annabelle's man. Elaina is home because she couldn't live in the city. Elaina is ashamed. The accusations cut at me sharper than the truth.
"You don't have to prove anything," Mason told me as we walked under the locust trees one moonlit evening.
"I do," I answered. "I want to make them see."
So I planned a punishment. Not in the petty, viral video kind. It had to be a proper, theatrical unmasking—public, long, and humiliating enough that no one could forget.
Two days before Annabelle and Carter's quick wedding—arranged after the pregnancy and the town's gossip—my plan was ready. I had gathered witnesses. I had a recorded confession, but not the one they'd expect. I had friends who would stand and say what they had seen. I had Mason by my side, not a weapon but an ally.
The square was full the day I performed the truth. It felt like winter in the bones: everyone I knew from childhood to neighbors who liked to spectate had come. My mother stood at the edge with her hands clenched, her face a cross between anger and worry. Annabelle's mother hovered near the pavilion, flustered and proud. Carter was stiff in a suit that suddenly made him look very small.
"I was going to let this be simple," I told the crowd, my voice steady. "But simple isn't what I need. I need you to see."
Annabelle laughed a short, fake laugh. "What is this, a show?"
"It is," I said. "It's a show. And you are the main act."
I took out my phone. "Carter," I said, loud enough for everyone to hear, "do you remember when you promised to marry her before your parents? Do you remember what you told me?"
He opened his mouth, closed it. The stage felt like it had grown hot.
Annabelle snapped, "Elaina, stop being dramatic."
"Not yet," I said. "You will be dramatic in front of us all."
I played the audio I'd collected—the voice of Annabelle voice-cracked with laughter and apology, and Carter's, a man who sounded comfortable and careless. Their words echoed off the tiled square.
"She said it was one night," I repeated, and the recording answered, "It was a mistake."
"Do you hear how small the word sounds?" I asked the crowd. "Do you hear how casually they erased me from their lives?"
The reaction was immediate. A woman gasped. Children tilted their heads. A man who had been gossiping fell silent. Someone took out their phone.
"Carter!" a neighbor shouted. "Is this true?"
"I—" Carter tried to reach for my hand, to take control, but his fingers trembled and failed. His face flushed as if heat had risen from his chest. For a moment he looked proud, like a man who had been caught but still wanted the victory.
Annabelle's smile vanished. "It's not like that," she stammered, "we—we were drunk."
"You're drunk at love," I said. "You used that as cover."
She glared, mouth working, then tried to laugh away the moment. "Elaina, I loved you. You have to believe me."
"Love isn't betrayal," I said. "Would you like to explain to everyone what 'loving' the woman who shares your bed means?"
A hush fell. Annabelle's mother gasped, clutching her handkerchief, and a ripple of murmurs spread like wind. People began to point, whisper, and take pictures. Some saved the faces of the betrayers like trophies.
Carter's expression changed first: from feigned innocence to shock, then to denial. "No," he said, voice high, "this—this is not fair."
"You said it was a mistake," I said. "You're asking for forgiveness. You kneel. You beg. You do all that, when you never thought about my heart."
He looked as if he might cry. "Elaina, please."
Denial turned into outrage. Carter lunged at Mason, fingers clenching. Mason stepped back but didn't retaliate. "No," Mason said, voice low. "You started this. Don't make me a part of your defense."
Annabelle's eyes darted to the crowd, searching for an ally. Friends shifted away. The woman who had been loudest in defense of the old ways looked suddenly small. Children began to point. A man shouted for the police. An old lady spat and muttered that this was the worst kind of kitten play.
Then Annabelle's mask fell.
She tried to speak, then stopped. Her voice now was the one I had loved as a child—soft, pleading. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
"It doesn't work like that," I said. "You did mean."
Her face went pale. She began to cry, but not in a way that earned sympathy. It was raw, ragged, guilty crying. No one rushed to console her. People recorded. A neighbor I hadn't seen in years took a step forward and said, "You broke her. You broke what two people kept for twenty years."
Annabelle's denial crumbled. "It was one night," she said, then, quieter, "I didn't mean to hurt you."
"Hurt me?" I asked, and that single line—the simplicity of it—made her look ridiculous. "You slept in my bed. You looked at me and smiled and then slept with him."
She covered her face and shook, like someone who had fallen and couldn't get back up. The crowd watched the fall. The old woman who had once liked Annabelle's family now stood and spat a sour, "How could you?" The village gossip center had found a stimulus too delicious to ignore.
Carter's face changed next: smugness to shock, shock to angry bluster. "This is private," he blurted, trying to reframe the moment as private hurt.
"Private?" I repeated. "When you made me your promise in front of family? When you declared an engagement in front of everyone? When you were the public face of our life? Who did you expect to believe you then?"
He staggered, as if his words had been taken away. "People will—women will talk."
"They are already talking," I said. "They will remember."
A murmur that sounded like verdict moved across the square. People began to form small circles, trading opinions. Some offered me looks of praise: she stood up; she didn't tolerate betrayal. Others looked at me with suspicion: how could she steal a man? My mother watched with her jaw set; she had not expected this level of vindication.
Annabelle's mother rushed to her daughter's side and began to plead, loud and high. "You can't do this," she cried. "Don't you see you're destroying the girl's life?"
"I am showing what was done to her life," I said calmly.
By the time the sun sank and the crowd thinned, the aftermath was clear. Carter's reputation had dents that would not buff out. Annabelle had been exposed as the person who chose the wrong bed and wrong time and wrong friend. The photos and recordings spread like flour in the wind; the village had created a fossil out of their faces and frozen it for months.
They tried to fight back in private. They called us names. They asked for a chance, for mercy, for time. They offered tears and explanations. But the scene in the square had already changed the ledger. People who had been their fans turned away. The shopkeeper refused to serve Carter when he came the next day. Annabelle's classmates avoided her. A woman in the market told her, "When a person betrays her childhood friend, she has no right to expect kindness."
I wanted to watch them fall apart, and I wanted them to learn. So I watched as the proud became small, as denial crumbled into shame and then into humbling pleas. Carter went from "It's not fair," to "Please," to collapsing into a heap of apologies. Annabelle moved from furious to pleading to a broken quiet that did not win her back the trust she had burned.
They did not crawl on stage and beg theatrically. They crumbled in slow, human ways that made them smaller: Carter checked himself into therapy and then out; Annabelle moved away and married quickly to save face. But the town had already decided. The viewers turned their cameras away; the crowd's eyes were no longer on them but on me—older, sharper, and finally free.
Mason stood beside me through all of it.
"Elaina," he said afterwards in the hush of my kitchen when everyone had left, "are you okay?"
"No," I answered truthfully, "but I'm getting there."
"You did well," he said. "You didn't destroy them. You just made sure people saw the truth."
I turned to him, close enough to touch his shoulder. "Do you hate me for using you?"
He shrugged, then took my hand in his. "I wasn't used. I wanted to stand with you."
He kissed my forehead like a quiet promise. His lips were warm and real. I let myself hope, for the first time, that I might not be using him forever.
We had more fights later—about control, about honesty, about how much of the revenge we had the right to keep. But when Mason's hand reached for mine in the dark, I squeezed back.
"He told me once you were the only one," Mason said one night, voice small. "He wrote my friends your name every day for years."
"Who?" I asked.
"The one who never told you," he said, and then showed me his old journal. There was my name scrawled across pages in little notes about my weird laugh or the way I always burned the edges of pancakes.
My anger calmed into something quieter. Not forgiveness—different—but an acceptance of a trick that fate had played: the person I had used as revenge became the person who would teach me what love could be.
Years later, when people asked if I regretted the square, the recordings, the sting of it all, I would say, "No. I regret only that I waited so long to keep myself."
Mason and I moved through seasons. I moved back into the city as a different person. I drew comics about small heartbreaks and surprising kindness and somehow they found readers. Atlas came by once in a while, voice booming, always happy to see me earn my laughter back.
As for Annabelle and Carter, the village wrapped them into separate stories. Annabelle's marriage didn't fix the emptiness she'd planted. Carter kept trying to make the broken parts of himself whole in ways that didn't include me. It was enough. They were punished publicly in the square; privately they had to live with the quiet collapse of the images they'd built.
And me? I learned to plant my feet like a tree. I sat on the old locust tree by the river some nights and watched fireflies and let them remind me that light can be small and still brave.
I kept the recording, the little proof of betrayal. Not to hurt, but to teach myself that I would not forget the lesson. I burned the memory of Annabelle's soft, treacherous smile and replaced it with the warm, steady grin Mason gave me on mornings when coffee was stronger than my insomnia.
"Promise me one thing," Mason said once, when we were alone and the night smelled like jasmine.
"What?"
"Promise me you'll never let anyone make you small again."
"I promise," I said.
He brushed a stray hair from my face and kissed me. The kiss was not an end. It was a beginning like a quiet dawn.
If anyone ever asked what sealed the end of my old life, I would tell them it was not humiliation alone, nor revenge alone. It was standing in the square under the shutters of eyes and finally saying, "No more." It was choosing to walk away. It was sitting under the locust tree and listening to the sound of my own breath and not the gossip.
When the wind moved through the locust leaves, it sounded like a branch turning the pages of a book. I learned, slowly, to write the next chapter.
The End
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