Face-Slapping14 min read
He waited on the red carpet while the vase lay on the floor
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"I told you I'd be there," Adam Hashimoto said into my phone, urgency fraying the edges of his voice.
"I see your location," I replied. "It's out of the way. I'll be there soon."
"I left a message," he said. "It's urgent."
I turned the wheel and the summer sun hit the hood of a black car with a hard, sharp glare. I saw Adam leaning through his own window at a distance, waving at me like a boy. Clementine Conrad sat beside him, gentle and grave, forehead bowed as if she had always belonged to the light.
"You're early," he said when I stopped and climbed out.
"I'm always early when it's important," I answered, and for a moment the two of them looked at each other.
"May I use your car?" Adam asked, the ask like a confession.
I handed him the keys. "I have a meeting."
"Thank you," he said. He sounded like he meant it. Then he and Clementine climbed into my car and the engine growled off with an energy that made my chest go flat and thin.
I watched red recede into the distance and did not know what the right thing to feel was.
I called him later. He cursed, and I heard his breath hitch against the phone as if there were too many sounds in his chest.
"I forgot," he said. "I'm calling Song—I'll fix it. Give me the Qianlong vase back."
"You used it as collateral," I said. "I gave you the vase because you asked."
"You'll get it back," Adam promised. "I swear."
I closed my eyes, pressed the phone to my cheek, and then the call cut. My hand trembled a little. I thought about how, when he was eighteen, he had dug me out of rubble in an earthquake; I thought about how I had never quite stopped thinking that kept him close to me. I thought, too, about the way he had told me recently that he loved someone else.
"Why do I always feel second?" I asked no one.
A motorcycle hummed, tore past, and then the biker, Beckett Campbell, pulled up, helmet on, and he looked at me as if he'd seen me before. He smiled with an easy amusement and asked, "Need a lift?"
"This is my ex's car," I said. "He ditched me. He deserves it."
"Hop on," he said. "I'll take you where you need."
I took the helmet he handed me and climbed on. The wind opened all the small wounds in me and for once I let it.
"You're Collins?" he asked, when we stopped at the auction house, where I had to prepare a bid.
"Yes."
"You have an interesting life," Beckett said, and his voice had the lazy cadence that makes strangers dangerous.
At the auction I watched the minutes reel by and then the day fell into evening. Adam and Clementine's kiss on the big screen at a concert had become a carnival of commentary online. Fans who once cheered had turned into watchful juries, pointing out my link to Adam and condemning Clementine as the "homewrecker." Screenshots of Adam swiping a card for Clementine circulated like private proofs that love costs money and why shouldn't it?
My father called, formal and leveled: "Come home. The Hashimotos are here. We'll talk."
So I went.
At Adam's house they rebuked him like an elder scolded a child: kneel, apologize, and break the promise. Adam complied, and people shouted, and AdAm's own parents left like thunder about to pass through. His father struck him with a wooden rod in fury. Adam only breathed and bled and promised the wrong thing.
"He says he likes her," I told myself quietly. "He says he likes her."
Then I stepped forward and spoke for reason. "We are not... lovers," I said evenly, "Adam and I... it's not what people assume. If you feel honor is damaged, make me honorary family. Take me in as a goddaughter."
My hand stopped the swinging rod. The rod stilled in midair and the room's noise turned into a bitter soundtrack. Adam looked at me and mouthed a thank you—your sacrifice means nothing, but thank you.
"Except for the vase?" I said, and he grinned. "You can keep one thing."
He stood up later, bruised, and left the house into a self-imposed exile. He thought he could chase Clementine back.
Samir Bass's voice was a radio through my phone. "We only accept you as sister-in-law, Collins. We'll always support you."
"Thanks," I said. "I like your loyalty."
I tried to be generous. I tried to be the woman who gives everything and demands nothing. I tried to be the person who would fix his life while he fixed someone else.
When Clementine's name hit the search results on my phone as the origin of a viral smear—an IP traced to a dorm room—I thought scraping and meanness had reached a new level.
"You're sure it's her?" I typed to Adam.
"She isn't like that," he said simply. "She wouldn't do that."
"Then let her prove it." I felt suddenly like a prosecutor. "Send me her camera files. Send me the raw footage."
He hesitated. "She's crying," he said. "She doesn't want the money."
"She won't keep it if she doesn't accept it," I answered. "She won't take it unless she can face the consequences."
Two days later one hundred twenty thousand changed hands from my account to a hospital in Clementine's name. Adam had transferred the money. I tried to pull it back and the transaction had already cleared.
"You're giving her my money?" I asked.
"Her mother needs it for surgery," Adam said. "Please, Collins."
"No," I wanted to say. "No more favors. Not after everything."
But I didn't say it. I sent the funds and watched the numbers reduce like a wound being stitched and refused to be grateful.
A week later I found Clementine in the lobby of S University. I didn't step out of my car. I rolled the window down and said, "Accept the money. Be a dutiful daughter. Stop making drama."
She looked at me with tear-bright eyes. "I didn't—"
"You don't have to explain," I said. "But don't cause a wreck."
She cried and accepted the cash. She promised to stay away from Adam. She left like a ghost.
And then a video very cleverly edited made me the villain. My words were cropped, her vulnerability magnified, and suddenly I was the arrogant heiress looking down on a struggling girl. The hate slithered across the comment boxes like a living thing.
"You're cold," Adam wrote. "You're cruel."
"Am I?" I asked the ceiling. "Or am I tired of being used?"
I got a call later that night: "She tried to jump."
"Who?" I asked.
"Clementine," Adam answered. "Her mother—heart attack. She called. She panicked. I went. She threatened things. I couldn't watch."
It should have been compassion. Instead it was like a knife turned.
I went to hospital. I found Beckett there, leaning on his motorcycle as if no problem could riddle him. He said nothing we didn't already know. He kept quiet and tended to me like a friend tends a wound. We were quiet companions while the world was loud.
Then the internet found the rest of the story.
Beckett hacked a page—no, not really hack, but with Samir's help they tracked IP logs, and the origin for the smear campaign led back to Clementine's dorm. Her roommates had no idea. But there was more.
Beckett: "Why would she do that?"
Samir: "Ask her."
I sent Clementine a message. She did not answer. It was probably cowardice—she was always too gentle to be cruel.
I collected the pieces. She had borrowed money—dangerous money—from a man named Rohan Albert. I had never met him. He was a loan shark who smelled of late-night corners and brassy pleasures. Clementine owed him money and had joined in a web of lies to cover her debts.
When the loan shark's picture came across my screen, it seemed unreal: an ordinary smiling man with too many expensive rings. I felt suddenly like the world had tilted and only base motives existed.
I decided to make a strategy. I wanted nothing more than to make sure she couldn't hurt anyone else.
"You're going to expose her," Adam told me the night before my planned move. "This is too far."
"I didn't ask her to die," I said. "I want her to answer for her choices."
He looked at me as if he had always known I had a temper like an engine: roaring, raw, capable of destruction. He asked, "Will you forgive her if she apologizes?"
"I don't know," I said.
We prepared a public unmasking.
"Do you want witnesses?" Samir asked.
"Yes," I said. "I want them to speak. Let them judge."
We booked a small hall at S University where she had once studied. We invited reporters. We invited students. We arranged for the precise playback of the original video, the raw footage, the IP logs, and the transfer receipts. We practiced the lines I would say until my voice was steady.
On the day, the hall smelled like hot coffee and new paper. Clementine arrived with her mother, head bowed, but in her eyes I saw a different animal: defiance edged in fear.
"Why are you doing this?" Adam asked too softly as we entered.
"Because she used people," I said. "Because lying should have weight."
The lights dimmed. I stepped onto the stage and clicked the laptop. Voices around me rose and fell—students, camera shutters, the small murmur of people wanting scandal.
"Play the clip," I said.
The raw, unedited footage showed a concert screen, a young Adam covering Clementine with a jacket, a brief kiss misread by the world and turned into a weapon.
"Her server log," I said, and the technician clicked. An IP address blinked on the screen.
"That IP traces to Clementine's dorm," Samir called out.
"No," Clementine's voice cracked. "That's not—"
"Play the social posts," I instructed.
We showed the edited clip that turned my words into cruelty. We showed the messages arranged to look like I had bullied her. We showed transfer receipts: donations to Clementine's mother's hospital, and then… a series of messages from Clementine arranging to mislead an opportunistic creditor.
"She near-ruined a girl's future to gain favor," I said. "She filmed manipulated versions and even colluded to have her flagged as a 'victim' once public opinion turned sideways. She accepted loan money, then used it to fund edits and to bribe an accomplice into creating a spectacle."
A hush fell. I watched faces, the way eyebrows rose, the way phones tilted to film.
Clementine's mouth moved, first denial: "I didn't—"
Then arrogance: "You don't understand—"
Then panic: "You don't know what it's like!" She slammed a hand on the podium. Her voice changed again: "It was for my mother! How dare you!"
"Where is Rohan Albert?" I asked.
"He—" she stammered. "He... I didn't plan the attack."
"Here," a security guard said, and we all turned.
A man was led in, cuffed. Rohan Albert's face was flushed, but there was a predatory calm. He'd been picked up after a sting. He glared at the crowd as if they were intruders in his kingdom.
"Clementine," he said in a voice that sounded like oil, "you promised you'd keep quiet."
"Rohan, please," she whispered.
I stood, and for the first time felt no pity.
"Why did you do it?" I asked her, simply.
She looked at the floor. "I needed money," she muttered. "I thought... I thought if I played victim, he'd help. If I were in the right light—"
"You put a person at risk," I said. "You had a violent man chasing you, and you used his cruelty like a cloak."
Clementine's face lost composure. "You don't understand how it is," she said. "I had no choice."
"Everyone has a choice," Samir called from the side. "You chose to make other people's lives a stage."
The crowd began to hiss. Phones lifted like iron birds.
"She arranged for a man to grab me in a parking garage," I said, "because she thought it would prove my moral bankruptcy. She paid him, or at least she connived with him enough that he believed she would pay." My hands steadied. "Would you like to respond to that, Clementine?"
Her eyes glistened. Her face flashed a thousand emotions—fear, fury, shame, then an instant of animal desperation. She lunged for a voice.
"It was to save my mother!" she cried. "If I didn't—"
"You asked him to harm me," I cut in. "You manipulated a man into attacking me."
"It wasn't supposed to go this far," she said, voice brittle.
"You're asking for mercy now," I told her. "You're asking us to look the other way."
"No," she whispered. "Please."
A student in the front row rose and pointed a finger. "You ruined people!" he shouted. "My roommate almost failed her course because you flooded the feed. She was canceled for something she didn't do."
Another voice: "You were my friend. You smiled at me and then sold me out."
The room swelled with someone else's memories stacking upon her lies, and Clementine's brave face finally cracked. She sank to her knees on the stage, hands clamped to the microphone, and the hall sang with the sound of her breaking.
"Don't film this," she begged, hands shaking. A hundred cameras ignored her.
Then the worst part: confrontation. A mother in the back whispered, "My daughter nearly dropped out because of you," and the woman stared at Clementine with a slow, cold rage that cut deeper than any judge's gavel.
Clementine's defenses fell apart like rotten wood. She begged, she denied, she tried to point at others, then at Adam, as if to say he had driven her to it. Her eyes snagged on Adam: "You made me feel abandoned—"
Adam's expression folded into something I had never seen—hurt, yes, but also a frank understanding. He said, "You made choices, Clem. You cannot undo them by hurting others."
Her face moved through the stages: arrogance, surprise, denial, then the tremor of panic. She tried to explain again—this time in sobs. "I didn't know how else—"
"Clem," Samir said softly, but the room wasn't soft.
Outside the hall the university administration had gathered. They listened, they photographed, they nodded. A small crowd formed at the doors. A journalist stepped forward, microphone extended, and asked, "Are you sorry?"
Clementine looked up at the floodlight and the lens and faltered. "Yes," she said finally, raw, "I am sorry."
It wasn't enough. Not to the people who had been manipulated. Not to me. Not even to Adam who had loved her for reasons I could not fathom.
"You're under investigation for fraud and for soliciting violence," the university minister said, and the security officers closed the circle. Clementine tried to beg. "Please, please—"
But the crowd had a new appetite not for retribution but for truth. People turned their phones into witnesses. "I want to see her apologize to everyone," a student demanded.
She stood, weak-legged, and faced the crowd. Her words tumbled out, untidy and inadequate.
"I'm sorry," she said again. "I shouldn't have—"
"You should have thought before you used others," a mother said, and the crowd murmured approval.
Her voice shrank into smaller noises. Students recorded, old friends said they've been duped, reporters asked for a statement. She sought Adam's eyes. He looked away.
The punishment was public, ugly, and precise: no cage, no jail yet. Instead an unmasking that would not let her go back into the world untouched. The university opened an inquiry. Social accounts were suspended. News cycles turned and turned. Clementine's name, which had once been a quiet corner of a dorm, became a headline of ruin.
That was the first punishment.
We did not stop with exposure. When the parking garage attack came to light, the police interviewed Rohan Albert under the evidence we had gathered. He had been coaxed into a scheme that had helped him terrorize debtors. He was arrested on assault and extortion charges, listed publicly, and escorted in handcuffs through the precinct. His arrest was not a spectacle executed for revenge; it was a lawful ending to his little cruelty.
The three punishments were different.
Clementine's was public damnation, a slow tightening of social consequence, and the crowd's judgment.
Rohan Albert's was the cold, efficient hand of law—hands behind his back, a transport van, a cell.
The accomplice who touched me in the parking garage—Ansel Roberts—was taken into custody, humiliated by a shining badge and a stern detective who read him his rights. He cowered like a small animal.
The law did not do all my work, but the public's verdict was immediate. I watched as people I had never met approached me in hallways to say they were sorry for believing narratives without facts. I watched as some of Adam's friends muttered and left. I watched as the screen of my phone lit up with messages from strangers: "We were wrong about you."
Yet watching justice unfold removed none of the ache. It left a hollow where trust used to be.
"Why did you do this?" Adam asked me later, in a corridor lined with funeral-white light.
"Because I can't be walked over," I said. "Because you owe me for a past I never asked to be part of."
He looked like he might cry. "I never meant to hurt you."
"Maybe you did mean it," I answered. "Maybe you wanted the comfort of trying on love without the risk of losing anything."
"You have a habit of thinking the worst," he said.
"I have a habit of being precise," I corrected, and we did not make a scene. We went on with the world.
After the public humiliation, Clementine was expelled from S University—administrative decision announced with crisp, legal language that stripped titles and privileges. The press waited outside her dorm to record the moment. She tried to leave with her head down, but cameras swallowed the scene. People walked by, some hurling curses, some offering silent looks. She was escorted away by two officers as her mother stared from the doorway, ashamed and defeated.
Rohan Albert got a separate court appearance weeks later. His bail was denied. When he was led into the courtroom, reporters craned, and his smugness had vanished into a plastered worry. He tried to bargain, tried the old tricks, but lawmen presented receipts and emails and phone records. He was held. That was the law's punishment.
Ansel, the small-time thug, was paraded through a police interview; his record was public and his father cut him off. He left with a red-faced shame and neighbors who pretended not to know him.
The punishments mattered because they were public. They were the kind of small judicial theater that teaches a city what is and is not permitted. People watched. They learned.
And I? I learned how hollow victory can be.
Weeks after the hall incident, Adam came to me and said simply, "I love you. I always did."
"Why then?" I asked.
"Because when I was a boy you saved me, and I thought I owed you everything," he said. "But I only kept you because you were always there. I was afraid of losing you. I thought—"
"That you loved me?" I asked.
"Yes."
I stared at him. The history between us held old bones and old reasons and the smell of smoke after a fire. I had given him shelter, money, patience. I had re-sent his vase and tolerated things no one else would.
"Do you regret Clementine?" I asked.
He closed his eyes and then shook his head. "No."
"Then how am I supposed to feel?" I demanded.
"You should decide," he said. "You should choose what's best for you."
I did choose.
I moved on to someone who didn't ask me to pay for his mistakes with my dignity. Beckett stayed a friend; Samir became a brother; Rohan Albert was in jail; Ansel Roberts vanished into a smaller life.
But there was Beckett—Beckett who had carried me to hospitals and made me tea, Beckett who had leaned on his bike and said, "Save your anger for the things that deserve it."
There was a night at my birthday party when Adam did not show. The lights on the screen played a montage of my life and stopped at a frame of us from years ago, and I felt like I had been promised a line in a script that never came. My throat tightened. I left the party and Beckett came with me. He helped me out of the dark by being the sort of man who stays.
When Adam sent me messages—"Please, Collins"—I ignored them sometimes. When he asked to marry me in desperation—"Say you'll marry me so I can stop this"—I had already decided I would not be his safety net again.
"You'll marry me?" he asked once, voice thin and a little fierce.
"No," I said.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because you love what you imagine," I said. "Because you asked the woman you love to do what was unthinkable."
He looked stricken.
"You can try to change," I said, softer.
"I will," he promised.
Soon after the trial, Clementine's sentencing came down. The university's inquiry had turned into criminal charges: fraud, solicitation, conspiracy. She received a sentence that reflected her crimes—community service, fines, a ban from campus activities, and later—after an appeal and further evidence—some custodial time for her role in procuring violence through coercion.
The public punishment scene that day outside the courthouse was long. She stood on the steps, smaller now, and a crowd pressed in to watch. People shouted at her. Someone threw a rose that missed her and hit the concrete. She begged the cameras to stop; they did not.
She then tried to speak again, to apologize, to explain, to place everything on a plateau of sorrow. "I didn't know how else to act," she said. "I was alone."
"No longer alone," someone in the crowd said, iron in his voice. "Now everyone's watching."
"Please," she said. "Please."
"You made choices," Adam said once, quietly, to me. "Now she must face them."
I watched her flinch under the spotlight and felt the last of the tired heat drain out of me.
Time moved. Adam and I drifted apart. Beckett left for another city, and our texts became sporadic, warm but thin. Samir married, and I kept working.
Months later a package arrived: the blue Qianlong "turning-heart" vase, encased in delicate silk, returned to me by someone who had chosen a different kind of courage. Adam had sent it back. Inside a note: "For what you did for me, and what you will yet do for yourself."
I placed the vase on the shelf in my office and looked at it often. It was beautiful and small and fragile, like apologies and like some of the promises we carry. The red carpet of that wedding would always be the red carpet I once stood on and did not step toward him. The vase was a reminder that some things can be returned, but trust is not a thing that fits back into a box.
I walked out of the office one evening and paused, touching the smooth porcelain with my fingertips.
Beckett called. "You okay?"
"I'm fine," I said.
"Good," he said. "Don't let anyone cheapen you."
"I won't," I answered.
Behind the desk the vase shimmered in the lamplight.
I left and, for the first time, didn’t look back. The Qianlong turn-heart vase sat still on its shelf, turning no hearts now but reflecting what had been broken and what had been mended.
The End
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