Face-Slapping12 min read
Hello, Ex—I'm Looking for Your Father
ButterPicks13 views
I did not expect to be standing in front of Lawson Reid seven years after we broke up and ask for his father’s number.
Lawson looked the same and completely different. He still had that half-smile that used to make me lose my balance, but he also had the calm of someone who had learned to keep people at the correct distance. He slid a business card toward me like it was nothing.
“Robinson & Blake, Partner—Lawson Reid,” he said with easy arrogance. “Reacquainting ourselves?”
My throat tightened. The card read Marcel Robinson, Chairman. My brain did what brains do when punched: rewound, paused, then burst open.
“Give me your father’s number,” I said. My voice surprised me by not shaking.
Lawson raised an eyebrow. “What for? You’re not—”
“Just give it to me,” I cut him off. I didn’t want him to see the raw, messy reason I’d been hunting for that name. I didn’t want to explain the night I found out my husband was sleeping with someone called Margaux Burnett, a name that felt like a small, greasy stone in my shoe.
He tapped his card against the table and pushed it closer. “Robinson. Now you can tell me why you want to speak to Marcel. Or we could pretend we don’t know each other, like we did for seven years.”
I took the card because I had to. Because I’d heard things I couldn’t unhear. Because the woman in the next-door house hadn’t been my friend; she had been his lover. Because the man who promised me forever had been buying someone else presents.
“How did you even become a lawyer?” I muttered, more to myself than to him.
He leaned back and laughed once, soft and tired. “People change. I took the right stairs.”
I hated that he still sounded amused. “Fine. Just—give me the number.”
He did. I walked out clutching laminated plastic like it was a talisman.
That night the bottle helped. Or maybe it didn’t. I told Lawson everything between hiccups and sobs over a plate of something greasy and an awkward silence that felt like a shield.
“You heard them?” Lawson asked when I could finally breathe.
“Yes,” I said. “Every word.”
He pushed his chair in. “Do you have proof? I mean, beyond the sound in your head?”
“I do,” I said. “I heard the whole thing. I could tell their voices. And later I checked his phone. I found transfers, receipts—money leaving our account for things I wasn’t involved in. I don't have receipts for what they did in the bedroom, but I have evidence of intent, money, patterns.”
He made a face, the kind that still carried old tenderness and a new, professional sharpness. “We’ll handle it. First, go to the doctor—full sexual health screening. Then we build a clean file. No drama, no public leaks until we want them public.”
I blinked. “Why are you helping me?”
He shrugged, as if the seven years had folded and everyone could just pick up the map and carry on. “Because some people still have lines that shouldn’t be crossed. Because your voice sounded like a woman who’s been run over.”
“Because you still care?” I asked, catching my breath.
“Because I’m not an asshole,” he said, and then, softer, “Because I remember.”
I remembered him too. The boy who gave me nicknames I pretended I hated and notes I kept tucked in sockets. The man who had watched my graduation and said, “We’ll make a life together.” Those memories were like orchids in a high window—beautiful, hard to reach, and impossible to touch without pricking myself.
The next morning I woke up on Jazlyn Moore’s couch. Jazlyn was the friend who showed up to bail me out of stupid situations and made them look glamorous. She handed me two baozi like that would solve everything.
“Why are you sleeping at Jazlyn’s?” Lawson asked when he arrived with coffee. He had a look that said he regretted sleeping on the couch in law school and now insisted he could do moral rapprochement.
“She insisted,” I said. “Because she knows I would throw myself into the traffic of grief.”
She winked at me like we were in a movie. “Also, your marital bed smells of betrayal. Ew.”
Lawson’s face went into a lawyerly frown. “Okay. Medical first.”
He walked me through the hospital steps like he’d done this for a stranger and a friend at once. Then he said one sentence that made my skin warm and brittle: “We will need evidence of intent, payment, and corroboration of their relationship.”
“Sounds like a court summons,” I said.
“It sounds like practical work,” Lawson answered. “Also, you should know he’s my client’s family. His name is Marcel Robinson. He’s a board-level kind of man. That complicates things. But not for me.”
We worked like that: awkward, professional, the way exes who had history and no future might work—except sometimes his hand brushed mine and the memory of a kiss in a crowded hallway made my knees go damp.
“Tell me how he took your money,” Lawson demanded at one point, like a prosecutor cross-examining a defendant he secretly liked. I told him every transfer. He listened and then said, “Record everything. Save receipts. Don’t let him know we’re building.”
I did, and then I was back home with a box of salted crackers and a plan. I texted Abel Booth, my husband, to say we should celebrate my birthday—because I wanted one last face-to-face. I wanted to see, up close, what I had been living with.
“Birthday?” he crooned when he came in. He had that practiced look—soft eyes, a hand full of flowers—and then a bottle of red wine. He treated me like glass that needed buffing.
“Just a small dinner,” I said. I had purchased two candles, a cheap cake, and a cheap sense of vengeance.
He ate, drank, and then—like a selfish magician—sprinkled the wine with two tabs of something that made him slump within an hour. That was when I took his phone and found transfers and receipts and whispers of other lands.
“Who is Margaux Burnett?” I asked, voice steady enough to surprise myself.
He blinked and tried to charm. “Why would I—Margaux? She’s just an investor. A friend.”
He wasn’t. The bank said she’d been more than a friend; messages and gifts flew like pigeons between them.
“You deserve to know,” I said to my own reflection in the phone screen as much as to Abel. I had secretly placed a tiny recorder in his briefcase days earlier. The truth came out in a bad mix of bravado and embarrassment when the device caught them on a call.
“Is this—are you recording me?” Abel stammered when I played a clip back to him.
“I am,” I said. “And I’m also asking you to leave.”
He gave me a look like I’d thrown water at a painting. “What? Is this—are you serious?”
“Yes. Pack a bag. Leave. Or I go to the one name I have left: Marcel Robinson. Your head will spin.”
He laughed nervously at the idea. But I’d already sent Marcel a message: “My wife is hosting a birthday. I invited someone you might know. Come.”
The door opened like the moment before an opera aria—tense, full of breath. Abel had called Margaux. Margaux arrived in heels and perfumed menace, and she slid into our living room as if she owned the couch.
I gave them cake and a script. “Surprise, it’s a birthday,” I sang like a broken music box. Then I stepped outside and waited.
What followed was something I had rehearsed in the small theater of my mind but never lived until that second.
Abel and Margaux laughed and reached for each other across the table. I opened the door. They went quiet, but not quick enough. I had placed the recorder in Abel’s briefcase earlier. They forgot to hide.
Then I walked in with a cheap cake and a loud phone call. “Happy birthday,” I said and hit play on a clip I’d saved: Abel’s voice, juicy and shameless, whispering to Margaux things he never said to me. Margaux’s laughter filled the room like an ugly anthem.
“Margaux?” Abel stammered. “What are you—?”
She shrugged like a woman used to slipping out of beds. “He wanted a present,” she said. “I gave him one.”
I pulled the tablecloth. Cameras—or rather, phones—appeared in the hands of neighbors Abel had once bullied into smiles. Jazlyn had texted everyone she could find: “Come see the show.” People filed in: colleagues, the grumpy mailman, our neighbor who taught Pilates, the woman from the café downstairs. The living room filled with the ordinary public.
“Abel,” I said, and my voice rang like a bell. “You have two choices. Leave quietly or let these people see you as you are.”
He scrambled to his feet, panic making him human. “Don’t do this,” he begged, dropping to his knees like a man who learned humility was a currency in short supply.
“Did you sleep with her?” Jazlyn called out, leaning against the doorframe with an expression of glee I tried not to envy.
“Yes,” he said. “Okay, yes. We were together.”
Margaux put a hand to her face, and the act of being wounded was so practiced it made me nauseous. “He forced himself on me,” she auditioned. “I’m such a victim.”
Abel and Margaux had weaponized melodrama before. But the room watched. Faces turned ugly like fruit bruised. Phones filmed. Someone laughed; someone gasped.
Then the real punishment started—not the private wailing or the legal thread—but the public unmaking.
A week later, Abel’s name was spreading through the office like a bad stain. Someone used the video. Someone else forwarded messages. The company whispered about morality clauses and personal behavior. He had no alibi left; his colleagues looked at him like a page from yesterday’s paper: disposable, used.
We had planned to make the humiliation practical and sharp. Lawson had helped file a complaint that put him on brief detention for 15 days—an administrative fold designed to punish without dragging them into long court cases. It was petty and perfect for the audience we wanted.
On the day they said the punishment would be public, I walked into the municipal hall with Jazlyn and Lawson and a crowd. Abel stood with Margaux beside him, and he looked small—no longer the man who picked out my furniture and wrote love notes like legal briefs. He looked like someone who’d had everything and misused it.
“Play the tape,” I told Lawson before the room. He did.
The tape was worse than the memory. Margaux’s voice—trained to manipulate—spun a story that would have worked on a softer day. But this was not a soft day. People leaned forward. Heads turned. An elderly neighbor muttered, “Shameless.” Someone else snapped photos. The city clerk, who disliked gossip but loved procedure, read the terms of the administrative action aloud like a judge reciting law.
“This is an administrative detention due to flagged conduct,” the clerk announced. “It is a fifteen-day hold.” He looked at Abel. He looked at Margaux. “You will be recorded. You will be processed. You will be public.”
Abel’s face darkened through a million shades. At first, arrogance. Then denial. Then a look of calculated fear as the room emptied into a field of witnesses. Margaux scoffed—at least at first. She smiled the smile you wear when you think you’ve bought immunity.
“You can’t make this stick,” Margaux spat, not to me, but to the clerk. “We will fight this.”
A man in the back let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-growl. He recorded everything. A teenager took a step forward, phone up. The office clerk clicked his pen, the sound precise and lethal.
“You thought you could manipulate a family, a marriage, and a public life with favors and gifts,” I said, the words coming out steady, practiced like testimony. “You thought no one would see the transfers, the flights, the hotel receipts.”
Margaux’s smile thinned into alarm. Her shoulders moved like a frightened animal’s. “This is not over,” she hissed. Her eyes darted to Abel, seeking the man who had been her shield.
Abel’s posture crumpled. He had believed his charm could pay all debts. He had been wrong.
The public punishment lasted beyond the fifteen days. People texted me that they’d seen Abel on the news, described him with words that would have once made me cry—now they made me breathe. People I barely knew sent messages: “You okay?” “You did right.” Strangers whispered, and colleagues shook their heads. The gossip column called it a “domestic unfolding.” The office where Abel worked sent a terse memo about “conduct unbecoming.”
The punishment that mattered wasn’t merely institutional. It was moral and communal. Margaux found herself at the center of a storm she’d thought she could ride out. At a luncheon for influential families, one that Margaux had thought would cement her influence, the room turned to her like a chorus.
“You were at the Booth residence last week,” someone said casually across the table. “Did you know that?”
The woman’s face, which had perfected wounded expression, collapsed into shock. People turned away. A video from the living room made the rounds. One by one, the room’s allegiances shifted like cards in a hand. Margaux’s calls went unanswered. Her business contacts found reasons not to be available. A well-known designer’s assistant texted her—“We can no longer associate.”
She stormed the city council building, trying to demand a retraction, but people recorded her tantrum. The footage showed a woman who had spent years crafting access suddenly losing it, the spectacle of being stripped of social capital in the open like a garment dragged off a stage.
The walk of shame was not cinematic in a neat way. It wasn’t a kneeling, viral clip. It was a thousand small slights: replaced invitations, cold shoulders, the sudden absence of messages. She called her daughter, begging. The daughter did not pick up. At a school function, another mother crossed the street.
When Margaux finally approached Marcel Robinson—my original quarry somehow tied to all this—he looked at her with a hurt that felt like old coffee: used and bitter. He would not take her back into the circle of his trust. She begged and pleaded, and he did what old power does: he turned the key and locked the door.
“You wanted to be close to my family for convenience,” he told her in the lobby of a building that smelled of polished stone. “You wanted me to be sick, you wanted what he could offer. You chose his position for profit, not his heart. You will have nothing from us.”
She doubled over. It was ugly, and it was public.
I watched the way the world closed around her like a mouth closing on a bone. The satisfaction I felt was strange and wide. It was nothing like triumph; it was a bitter release, the sound of a drum beat that marked the end of an abusive rhythm.
“I’m glad that everyone saw,” Jazlyn said as we walked out of the courthouse steps. “You made them watch.”
I remembered the voice of the clerk, the pen click, the phone camera flashes. I remembered Abel’s look sliding from defiant to hollow. I remembered Margaux pressing her palms to her face, feeling the world retract.
After the storm, things rearranged themselves. My divorce from Abel went through quietly because the court wanted to avoid drama after the public records. Abel was let go from his job; his colleagues called him tawdry in private and then pretended not to notice him on the street. Margaux tried legal threats but found herself unrepresented—no lawyer wanted the smell of scandal.
Lawson and I reconnected in small, shuffling ways—coffee, a book left in a taxi, a hand on my back as I read something badly written out loud. He apologized in small, slow sentences for the years he had been absent; for what that absence cost me.
“You left,” I said once, when the taste of our old conversations rose like old bread. “You chose to disappear.”
“I thought you were choosing a life I couldn’t give,” he answered. “I didn’t realize how stubborn you were. I didn’t realize I would be more stubborn to love you later.”
Three moments—three small, feather-light instances—made my heart lurch in the months after the cleanup.
The first: Lawson, in a busy café, handing me his coat without thinking because my shoulders were cold. The gesture was so unremarkable and so fiercely personal that I had to look away.
The second: Lawson, who hardly ever smiled at anyone, laughing at something silly I said in the grocery store and then blushing as if he had told a private joke with the world.
The third: Lawson, at my door in the middle of a thunderstorm, standing there with an umbrella and a thermos of soup because the power had gone out in my building. “I thought you might be cold,” he said. “Sort of a dumb hero move, but—”
I let him in.
We rebuilt in small things. He noticed when I needed a glass of water. I found myself telling him things I had saved for my own skeletons and then locking the drawer as if to punish the past.
One year later, there was a small ceremony in a park where the grass smelled faintly of the city and the sun was polite. Lawson stood before me with a ring that looked like a poor imitation of a childhood-fairy-gold but carried all the weight of a promise. He had been careful and clumsy and honest, and I had learned to want honesty over perfection.
“We have a lot of time,” he said, and I heard the steadiness of the man who’d been a lawyer and a friend and a ghost in my memory.
“Then let’s make it matter,” I told him.
We married on a field that smelled of cut grass and cheap champagne. My dress shone softly in the sun. It was not the fantasy I had once pictured—there were no huge chandeliers or impossible gowns. There was a circle of people who had stayed: Jazlyn, Lawson’s quiet smile, my few stubborn relatives, and my father—Marcel Robinson—who came not because he had to, but because he wanted to see me made safe.
I kept one small thing from the ordeal: a broken scented candle I had smashed on the living room floor the day I threw the tablecloth up. The shards glittered like little accusations. People told me to throw it away, to let it go. Instead, I kept it in a box under my bed.
On the night before we left for our honeymoon, Lawson found the box.
“What’s this?” he asked, picking up a shard. It smelled like night and cheap roses, a scent that carried every crooked moment we had survived.
“A reminder,” I said. “That small cruelties can be shattered.”
He smiled and turned the shard over in his hand, careful like a man handling something fragile. “We won’t break like that,” he said. “We’ll carry the pieces and we’ll know what they used to be.”
I nodded and leaned into his shoulder.
Outside, the city hummed. Inside, the shard glinted—like memory, like anger, like a small unused weapon. I slid it back into the box and locked the lid.
Our life after that was not a clean fairy tale. There were awkward phone calls from Abel that I never answered, the occasional mention of Margaux in the backgrounds of social circles, and the slow, grinding work of being human and forgiving. But there were also quiet breakfasts, Lawson’s terrible attempts at making omelets, and the way he would pick the phone to tell me something funny at noon.
One afternoon, years later, I traveled back to the building where that first confrontation had been watched by many. I stood on the steps and thought of the tape, the clerk, and the phones that had recorded the collapse of a small immoral house. I reached into my bag, found the little box with the candle shard, and set it at the foot of the building’s frozen fountain.
A child noticed it. He picked it up and pretended it was treasure. He wanted to keep it. I smiled and let him hold it for a moment.
“Why did you leave it here?” he asked, voice honest and simple.
“Because some things are best remembered,” I replied. “So we can know how to be better.”
He nodded solemnly, like a small judge. “Okay.”
I walked away with Lawson’s hand in mine. The halted fountain glimmered, and in its puddles the shard caught the sun and twinned with the sky.
We walked on.
The End
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