Sweet Romance20 min read
I Accidentally Live-Streamed My Way into a Prince’s Life
ButterPicks17 views
"I can't believe this thing is the only thing I brought with me," I said to the quiet square of stone in my palm. "Kira, what did you expect? A castle and a crown?"
The jade pendant was smaller than a phone and uglier than I remembered old costume stores being. It had a little raised square button and an odd, rough pattern on the edge. It did not feel like a magic relic, but a broken gadget that refused to die. It also refused to tell me anything friendly.
"Please tell me you at least have a return ticket," I whispered to the jade.
The pendant blinked and spat three neat lines across its milky surface.
"Start a Heart-Beat Live. Find Eliot Guerrero's true love. Goal: 90% heart-rate and 8,888 hours of valid streaming. Complete the task to return."
"How charming," I said out loud. "How about a help button? How about a hint? How about—"
"Confirm?" the pendant asked.
"No!" I mouthed at the sky and then, with the practiced cowardice of someone who had no other options, I pressed the square button.
"Press once to begin. Close with another press."
I fiddled with my scavenged linen sleeves, forcing brightness into my face, and set the pendant up while a half-dozen curious locals watched me like I'd grown antlers.
"Hi, everyone," I said, because pretending was cheaper than crying. "I'm Kira Jordan. Welcome to my first stream. I'm in—um—an old city. I'm lost. And I have one goal: marry a prince."
Messages scrolled like a waterfall, mean, helpful, cruel, funny.
"You sure it's not a prank show?"
"She looks like a cosplayer!"
"Does she have WIFI in 1700s land?"
I laughed with them. "It's a long story, okay? I woke up here, this pendant told me to find Eliot Guerrero's true love, and if Eliot's heart-rate hits ninety percent and we log enough hours, I go home. So, help me, please."
"First tip," a comment said. "Check the human messengers. Old women know all the gossip."
"Good," I told the camera. "Gossip is my fuel."
I picked up a bowl of sold sunflower seeds from a warm-handed woman who introduced herself by touch and tone rather than name. The seeds clicked under my teeth, and the woman’s laugh sounded like a bell.
"Where is Eliot Guerrero?" I asked, not expecting to be lucky.
"Why do you want to go to a prince's house?" the woman asked.
"I want to—" I started, and then made the face people use when asking for charity. "A friend told me he's handsome. I thought—"
"You are brave to say so," she said. "If you want a position in a prince's house, you must prove you will be useful. Do you have papers?"
"No papers," I said. "Only debt."
The woman smiled like a professional. "Sign a bond. Live work to cover room and board. I will bring you in."
"Sell my life to live? Great," I muttered to the pendant. The chat exploded with crying-laugh emojis.
I signed. My scribble looked like the confession of someone I might have been in another life. The woman—Linda Young by the name I would later know her by—patted my shoulder and led me from the warm, noisy street into alleyways that smelled of frying oil and jasmine.
"Are you sure about this?" I whispered into the pendant, feeling like I had handed my wallet to a fox.
"Do it," the chat said. "This is content!"
Soon we were at a gate with soldiers and lacquered wood. Linda Young smiled to the gatekeeper like she had been offering soup to generations of lords.
"Welcome back, Mother," said a man in white robes, the kind of greeting that held an entire household's memory. He leaned a fan against his hip and watched me with lazy curiosity.
"I brought someone," Linda said. "A girl. She can sweep."
"Do you know the chamber doors?"
"I can learn," I blurted.
"Then bring her."
Linda marched me inside. The servants bowed. The palace of Eliot Guerrero—the Third Prince, son of a favored consort—was ordered like a quiet song. I tried to hold my expression neutral and failed.
"Put her in the servants' rooms," the man in white told a boy. "She is not to trouble the prince."
I could have celebrated. I could have breathed. Instead, I trailed after the woman who had sold the idea of me to a prince's house and realized she had sold me too, if in a kinder language. "Linda, I didn't mean—"
"Good pay, new shoes," Linda said. "We will see if your heart is for lo, or profit."
"That's vague," I told my feed.
"Vague sells," my chat replied.
The house had a routine. The man in black armor—Decker Howard—moved like a shadow and spoke like one. The prince, Eliot Guerrero, favored black and quiet in equal measure. When I first saw him, he was leaving a bathing room, hair damp, and his face was a landscape I'd never seen: cool cliffs with a river of something softer hiding beneath.
I should have looked away. I didn't. The rest of the day swam in mistakes.
"I didn't mean to—" I said.
"You were in his chamber?" Linda said, like she had already filed the whole event under "troublesome."
"It was a door," I told her. "It was a mistake. I walked in. He was bathing. I am good at walking into doors."
Eliot's eyebrow rose, a tiny notice. "Name?"
"Kira Jordan," I said, and the pendant buzzed—somebody had tuned in.
"Why are you in the prince's room?" he asked.
"I'm lost. I thought—"
He pointed past me. "Take her to the maid quarters. Keep her out of my sight."
"Yes, Prince," Linda said, with an energy before a storm. "She will stay."
"I will be holding you to that," Eliot said. Then he sat and did what royals do; he made nothing mean everything.
I survived on ginger broth and odd jobs, and the pendant gave me a small prize for my first viewers. The pop-up count climbed by hundreds that first afternoon. People loved a trainwreck that knew how to laugh.
"Someone told me to learn to sew," I told the chat. "Apparently making slippers proves affection."
"Of course," they said. "Sewing = heart."
Linda forced my fingers to an old warhorse of a wooden low stool and taught me how to thread. "If you want to be in a house, make something that holds the person to you," she said.
I stabbed the needle into a foolishly earnest cushion and remembered everything that had happened to me in the world I'd left behind. When I'd left my small apartment I'd kept a charm in my pocket: a promise to myself that I would always laugh. I found it again in the rhythm of sewing. The stitches were crooked, but they were mine.
"Tomorrow, take them to the prince," Linda said, eyeing the completed pillow like a finished scheme. "Give him something to hold."
It was a plan: small, loud, and—if I thought of it like a story—useful. I was a matchmaker by guilt and duty.
Then I learned the most modern lesson: if you live-stream everything, someone in the world will supply you with surprises.
I stood at the threshold of the prince’s inner hall with my small tray. I had worked until my fingers swore. The pillow was rough and bright; the color should have been embarrassing, but it felt like armor. Linda straightened my sleeves.
"Don't say too much," she told me. "Less is safer. But show the heart."
I bowed. Eliot glanced up from his scrolls. Decker lingered near the frame like a belt that did not allow loosening.
"You made that?" Eliot asked.
"Yes," I said. "I embroidered the slipper cushion myself."
"Why?"
"To show sincerity," I said. "To show I could take care of someone."
He looked at me the way a tide looks at a stone. "You are not a native."
"No," I said, honest as a child. "I am not."
He looked at the stitches. "Keep it here, in the footlocker."
"Thank you."
I left lighter than I'd expected.
"Do you think that worked?" I asked the pendant.
"Viewers favor sincerity," the chat said, and my viewer count spiked.
Weeks folded into routine. I learned the steps of sweeping and the names of the kitchen pots. I learned how Eliot's hands curved around wood and ink and that he liked his tea warm, not scalding. I kept my pendant charged with small snippets of honesty and transactions with the live audience—the more they engaged, the clearer the path felt. The pendant fed me tiny messages: "Eliot's heart-rate rises at laughter," "Eliot likes sweetness." Those were cryptic but edible.
Soon Linda and Journee Moore—my roommate, "Little Peach"—and I formed a ridiculous, tender little network.
"You do realize you are trying to fix a prince's life," Journee said one dusk while I practiced bread shapes in the courtyard. She had cheeks like moons and a face that did not understand secrets. "What if he doesn't want fixing?"
"Then he will deny me entry, and I will be well-practiced in denial," I said.
"Also, don't play matchmaker if you can't deliver brunch."
"Good point," I said, and we both laughed.
One evening, a strange, foreign-scented fruit arrived in the prince's hall—pale spikes and an overwhelming smell that unsettled the guards. The palace servants called it a marvel and a mistake. I recognized the fruit because, once upon a time, someone I loved had brought me the taste of far away things.
"Who knows how to open it?" Decker asked, snapping a towel.
"Open it like a stubborn book," I said, because I had, decades ago, opened stubborn things in other lives. I pried the spikes, and the room made a sound that could have been a hymn. Eliot watched, curious beyond his practice in other people's matters.
"Better keep it," Eliot said, and my heart gave the tiniest flicker. "It is rare."
"Can I have it?" I asked. "Just one piece. I will share with Journee."
Eliot blinked, the slightest motion. "Yes."
My chat went delirious. "She touched the prince's hand!" someone cried. "Open the fruit for us!"
It was a ridiculous, human moment: the prince and the accidental servant sharing the same strange thing, and my stream rose to a rank I hadn't known the pendant could teach me to reach. I was not the star of any song I remembered, but I was in Eliot's quiet orbit.
Then things broke, because stories always find a way to complicate themselves.
A set of thieves—thick with trouble and arrogance—still active in the streets, took exception to my sudden popularity and used it as a reason to ruin me. They cornered Journee and me on the way back to the servant entrance after a market run. When I tried to run, one of them tripped, and the whole scene unfolded like a bad picture: I collided with a tall young man in white, and the rest surrounded us. That man—Easton Cotton—moved like the hush of a closed street.
"Let her go," Easton said.
They laughed at him. Laughter translates poorly when you are setting a price on someone else's life.
"Catch them," the leader sneered. "They ruined our friend."
They lunged. Easton moved and the fight condensed into efficient, deliberate defeats. He tied up the troublemakers with ribbons of speed and left them flopping like fish. The city patrols arrived, and the thieves were marched away under dull cuffs.
I collapsed on my knees and discovered the bone-deep exhaustion of feet that had run hard.
"Are you hurt?" Easton asked.
"My ankle," I said miserably. "And my dignity."
He unwrapped a cloth and looked into my eyes with a softness that made my face suddenly too sensitive for my skin. "What's your name?"
"Kira Jordan."
"Stay at my house to heal for a few days," he said before I could refuse. "You cannot limp on a wounded ankle."
"Can't," I said. "I must—"
"—go back to the Prince?" he guessed.
"Yes," I said, surprised at how truthful the word felt.
"Then heal," Easton said. "And finish whatever mess you started."
He brought me to Easton Cotton's family compound—a place like a small country. His sister—Cadence Graham—was there, bright and calm like the surface of a lake. She greeted me like a proper guest, offered a dress, and listened with a cultivated interest I could have been suspicious of if I had not already been so very tired.
"Stay," Cadence told me kindly. "You look like you could use rest."
Days at Easton's house became an odd sojourn. I recorded bits of it for my viewers. They called it "the rescue arc" and decided I was more interesting being rescued than being a rescuer. Easton kept me in a spare room, and Cadence bound my ankle, and I learned that the prince and my new protectors had histories. Easton looked at Eliot with a kind of reserved respect that meant there were pages missing from my understanding.
I kept pushing on the original assignment. I asked Easton about Eliot's likes. He raised an eyebrow. "He dislikes noise and likes honesty. He's not much for crowds, but he remembers faces who are kind to others."
"Do you think he will ever marry?" I asked.
"He will if the right woman is persistent," Easton said. "Or if the right woman hurts him less than he fears."
"Which kind is that?"
He smiled the way someone tells you the weather. "You'll know it when you see it."
So I planned. I planned like a chicken with a ten-step algorithm. I made Cadence laugh. I embroidered small things and asked the palace cooks to make cakes sweet enough to tempt Eliot's secret tooth. I coaxed Journee and Linda into watchful alliances. I used the pendant to keep my audience involved: "Should I leave the slipper cushion or a cake?" and I obeyed the people's votes.
But fortunes in such houses change like lamps in a wind. The person who would refuse me entrance to the next chapters of my plan was not a thief or a guard. It was a nobleman named Adolfo D'Angelo—a man Eliot had once shown courtesy to, now a senator of influence who believed a prince's servants should never have opinions. He was handsome, perfumed, and habitually cruel in ways that cost others little and fed his ego greatly.
Adolfo had watched me bloom on stream like a weird, promising flower. He saw popularity as a threat to his comfortable ignorance.
"Who is this girl?" he had asked in an audience as if the question had been invented by gentility.
"A servant," Linda said. "With heart."
"A servant who makes eyes at a prince," Adolfo scoffed to the others. "Troubles begin with those who look up."
Then the real trouble started.
One morning, during a small gathering in the hall, a scroll was unfurled and the court went still.
"Listen," the herald said. "We have evidence of a servant's fraud—a forged letter trying to propose a union for the prince. There are witnesses who swear she bent the prince's ear, and she bribed a servant to plant bread crumbs as tokens."
The room turned to me. I remember the way the air felt: thin and dangerous.
"I did not," I said.
"You fabricate scandal," Adolfo said, and his voice was cushioned with velvet. "You trap princes and make them look foolish. For sport."
Eliot folded his hands and did nothing. People clustered like flies around gold.
"Where is your proof?" Linda hissed, and even Journee looked like she might throw up.
"Eliot," Adolfo said, and smiled a smile that had grown teeth.
Eliot moved like a glacier, and then, to everyone's mortification, he raised his voice in a way that felt barely human. "Bring everything. Let it all be shown."
I had no strategy for a properly public accusation. I had only the pendant, my stitches, and my internet-honed habit of making the audience into witnesses to everything. So I did what I always did: I spoke true.
"I did not forge any letter," I said to the hall. "I did not bribe. I made slippers and a cushion. I have the pendant. I—"
"It is evidence," Adolfo poured out like a wine cooled in someone else's cellar. "She has motives. She wants to be more than she is."
"Then you will show proof," I said, and the hall laughed, like pre-waters of a storm.
They did. But they gave me the type of proof that shakes the ground.
Adolfo had arranged a display—letters, witnesses, a servant who'd been paid to repeat a story that painted me a liar. He had the backing of a minor judge. It was all presented with the art of a man who had never had to face ugly consequences.
"She tried to be a ladder," he said, and his friends clapped between the syllables. The room was full of faces I'm sure would have been kinder in another world.
"Do you have anything to say?" Eliot asked. His voice stopped my breath because it was not angry. It was curious in a way that felt like steel.
"I made slippers," I answered, and then I did a thing the pendant had taught me: I turned to my viewers.
"Everyone watching," I said into the pendant's camera with my pulse in my ears, "tell them what you saw."
The pendant displayed a flood of messages: "She opened the durian," "She sewed the cushion," "She was tripped by the thief." Thousands of people. It was absurd. It was my only armor.
Adolfo had a friend who moved like a man used to being unquestioned. He stepped forward and laughed like a man who had decided his life must be more fun at others' expense. "We will not have our prince humiliated by strangers," he said.
And then the world shifted.
Eliot asked for witnesses. "Bring them," he said again, as if rummaging in pockets. "Bring every witness and every claim."
They did. The servant-turned-liar wriggled like a captured fly. Adolfo's smugness hardened.
I had thought the worst for three breaths—then the hall took another turn. Journee had a way about her teeth when she bit down on her courage. She stepped forward.
"She is truthful," Journee said to the room. "She sewed slippers. I saw the stitches. I ate the cake. I saw the durian piece. My hands can swear. I will swear."
More servants spoke. Linda said, "I signed a contract to bring Kira here. I treated her with my methods because I believed I could get her a place. Do not destroy a girl to feed your amusements."
Their words were small but they were true.
Adolfo looked smaller. He clenched his jaw. He began with denial.
"This is a web," he said. "They are paid."
The hall was a river of faces. Some turned their heads; others took out pho tos on small devices. The prince's eyes narrowed.
"Enough," Eliot said at last.
He called for the city council to review the accusations. He demanded the letters be read aloud and verified. He made the judge read every line under the authority of the court, right there, out loud, in the public hall, with crowds and the palace scribes and the city clerk and the foreign envoys.
Adolfo watched himself being dismantled as if someone was taking apart his favorite toy.
Eliot's voice went colder. "Adolfo D'Angelo, you present manufactured evidence to smear a servant for sport. You bought witnesses. You paid testimony from a servant who confesses he took coin."
Adolfo's face flickered. He tried to laugh. "I acted in the interest of the prince’s dignity," he said.
"Who paid this man?" Eliot demanded.
Adolfo turned like a man whose cloak had been stripped. "I—"
"He wants a seat on the palace committee," another official murmured.
Eliot read the list of coins and receipts. There were ledgers. There were witnesses who said Adolfo had given the servant money. The hall shifted. The court clerk began to read the public code.
"Falsifying testimony, bribery, and public slander," Elliot said, and his voice struck like a mallet. "Given the evidence and the insults offered to a woman in my household, I order a public recantation and penance."
Adolfo's face drained of color. He steadied himself like a man who had never been required to stand. He tried to rouse a denial.
"It is untrue!" he barked. "You are colluding—"
"Silence," Eliot said. "You will kneel."
It was a moment like a drumbeat. Adolfo, Adolfo D'Angelo, a man accustomed to being seen and obeyed, felt knees like ice. He fell to his knees on the polished floor. His robe creased, and the silk made shame visible. He lifted his hands, then lowered them. There was shock around the hall like a wind.
"Please!" he said, and his voice was a child’s.
"Recount your bribe," Eliot said. "On your knees, in front of the court, recite who you paid. Deny anything you will, but we will place your ledger where your hand cannot hide it."
Adolfo looked up and his mouth worked.
"Come clean," the clerk said. "Admit names."
The witnesses were in the hall; the servants' faces were steady and true. The crowd had begun to murmur—shock, gossip, the rush of theatre. Someone took out a small device and started recording. Others pulled out their own notes.
Adolfo's face contorted, then hardened.
"I deny—" he started.
"I do not accept denial," Eliot said. "You will not escape this by words alone."
Adolfo's denial shortened. He looked down and his hands trembled. He had moments of denial, bargaining, panic. He remembered the ledger's scratch and the coins hidden under his name. He felt the floor under his knees cold as stone and the eyes that once warmed his ego becoming a tribunal.
"Who paid you?" Eliot demanded.
Adolfo broke. "It was—" he said, and the sound of his confession fell like a great weight. He named names: minor officials, allies he had hoped to protect. People gasped. His voice went small. He tried to withdraw, to insist it had been a jest. "I—no—this was an act of mischief. It was—"
The court listened as he grew thin and then invisible. He fell from insolence to imploring. "Please," he said. "I didn't mean—"
There was no mercy shown as the court read out the options for punishment. Adolfo's colleagues watched with the same dull astonishment of men who had always taken for granted the kindness of the world. They had not planned for a day in which their petty cruelties would be punished in public.
Eliot's expression did not change as the clerk announced his sentence: public apology, payment of the bribed wages to the injured parties, and a week of public labor in the city market—an ancient punishment to humble a man who had thought status made him unaccountable.
Adolfo's color drained into an ashy gray. He flailed through the stages of reaction: disbelief, then furious denial, then wheedling, then collapse. He tried to deny again, to smear others with collaboration, but the court insisted on naming his wrongdoing and recording it.
He went from a man of smooth jokes to someone with ragged intent. He dropped to his knees again before the assembled hall.
"Please," he begged, voice breaking. "I beg you, do not—"
People recorded, handed coins, shaded their eyes, stared. Some clapped—subtly—like an audience that has just seen an abuser unmasked. Others took pictures. The city clerk walked him through the restitution list, item by item. He realized, in the leaking light of the hall, that the coins could be counted and the reputation that came with them could be measured in public shame.
"Will you confess publicly?" the clerk asked.
Adolfo looked at the faces—Eliot's flat attention; Linda's stillness; Journee's tiny clenched fist. He tried to smile and found that the smile would not hold.
"I—" Adolfo started. Then he broke. He finished the confession in fits, cried "I was wrong," then "I feared losing face," and "Forgive me" in horrible little bursts. He begged everyone, but the crowd had picked up momentum. They recorded the apology. They filmed his kneeling. They whispered. Some nodded as if a heavy weight had been righted.
Eliot watched silently. When it was over, the court declared the sentence: the public apology recorded and distributed through the palace channels, the restitution paid, and ad hoc market labor to be performed for a week in the city square. Everyone saw him bow and try to work like a man who had been reduced in status. He tried to steady his breath, but the room shook with whispers, pictures, and people who had found their voice.
Weeping and collapse came next—he went through denial, then to frantic sadness, then to bargaining—a litany of "Please" and "I didn't—" and "Don't make me." People took videos. Someone clapped softly when his legs shook.
It lasted far longer than anyone thought it would. I stood there with my pendant buzzing like a trapped insect and realized my world had changed.
Adolfo's humiliation went viral before the attendants could sweep the tapes aside. People who owed him favors made rigid faces that morning. Others sniffed and congratulated one another on having watched a man who thought he could buy truth be made to kneel and say "I was wrong" in front of a crowd.
When it ended, he was escorted out. The crowd leaned away.
You would think that would be the end of the damage. It was only the start.
After the day of public reckoning came the quiet that follows a thunderstorm. The palace felt different. Eliot's eyes had a new warmth when he caught mine, like a door slightly ajar. He began to give me small tasks—books to tidy, a tea cup to prepare—and asked questions in ways that made my hands remember their purpose.
"Do you watch them all?" he asked once, sitting like a rock as I cupped his tea.
"Sometimes," I said. "Mostly the ones who keep me company."
"Who are the ones who matter?" he asked.
"The ones who will tell the truth."
He considered the answer. "And do they?"
"Not always," I said. "But if you collect enough of them, you can coax a story out of the truth."
He smiled, small and complicated. "This is how you talk about loyalties?"
"Yes," I said. "And how I get home."
Days slipped like this: small actions, a growing attention from Eliot, the pendant buzzing with live comments, the world watching. I gained a room with a real window. I gave Cadence a small trinket I had embroidered in the quiet hours. Journee and I shared recipes from our old lives and laughed at the absurdity of pie crust.
Eventually, things reached the point I'd always thought the world would reach: an attempt at confession and a moment of near-transparency between the prince and me. I could feel it—like the first cold wind after a long summer.
We sat by the window overlooking the garden. I held the little jade pendant and whispered, "We are almost there." The pendant did not answer with numbers. Instead, it shone like a tiny moon.
"Why do you want me to find his love?" Eliot asked, as if he had been thinking about the goal all along. "If he sits in halls and reads, what does love mean to him?"
"Maybe," I said, because it seemed true, "love is a person who won't leave when the bell strikes midnight and his hands are tired."
He laughed like a small bell. "Then you are crafty. You are trying to fix my mistakes."
"Someone has to fix them," I said.
He looked at me for a long while. Then he tapped his fingers on his knee, a rhythm I learned to count. "Kira, why do you speak like you belong everywhere and nowhere?"
"Because I don't belong anywhere," I said. "Mostly because I am a bad tenant to time."
"Then stay a little longer," he said.
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to say, "I have to go home." The jade pendant lay cool against my palm. The screen in my device was full of faces, and I could feel the stream's pulse. In the corner of the room, Cadence hummed an empty song.
"One day," I said, "I will leave."
He nodded. "One day."
That night I went to my bed with a list of tasks to do to push his heart-rate higher—silly things like sharing a terrible joke in the hall and setting a cake on the table with a note from "a secret admirer." My chat loved the interactive bits. They loved helping to plan a life.
Weeks later, sitting in the courtyard with Journee, Linda, and Cadence, I pressed the pendant and watched the tiny counter tick up.
"You're doing it," Journee said. She squeezed my hand.
"Not yet," I said. "But there's a rhythm to it like a heartbeat. We have time."
We did. The pendant kept counting. The viewers kept watching. Eliot and I kept trading tiny truths. Easton brought me citrus from the far reaches of his storeroom and teased me by saying, "You will forget the world you came from here."
"I won't," I told him. "I will take it all like a souvenir."
One afternoon, months after my first stumble into the prince’s chamber, Eliot stopped me in the corridor.
"Kira," he said, "walk with me."
I did. We walked to the garden of the palace, where the jasmine and the trimming hedges had the heavenly job of playing background music.
"I will make you a promise," he said, slow but sure.
"What kind?" I asked.
"I will be honest," he said. "Not theatrical honesty, but honest in my actions. And I will let you be you—silly, blunt, obnoxious in the most human way."
"You mean you'll let me be a mess?"
He smiled. "Yes."
I laughed, and for the first time in months, I allowed my laughter to be for me and not an act for the viewers.
The pendant hummed softly; the counter climbed. My heart, which had been thumping against the ribs of a stranger's life, felt like it had found a rhythm in the steady beat of something that resembled home.
But the thing about live stories is they are never neat. The world kept watching, but now, people watched because they had seen justice done to a man who had thought himself above reproach. They watched because a prince had knelt to pay attention. They watched because a girl had sewn a pillow with clumsy stitches and refused to be erased.
And one night, when the pendulum of fate is merciful, Eliot took a breath and said, with the weight of something cross-examined and true, "Kira, the thing you asked for—love—is not a contest. But you have worked like one who knows the value of another's peace. For that, I am grateful."
"Are you—" I began.
He shook his head, his mouth softening. "No promises of fairytale endings. Just the truth of where I stand. I will not be cruel to your heart."
We both felt the sound—the pendant's small chime—and the little counter flicked up. The number was not ninety percent yet. It was not 8,888 hours. But the pendant showed something else: a slow line of people who had watched a messy life and decided to stand with it.
Days later, as the sun fell low over the palace, Eliot and I stood among the servants and friends when Adolfo’s sentence was finally complete in the market square. He worked under the eyes of the city; his shame became public craft. He knelt on the cobbles, and people recorded him, whispered, and some clapped.
"Please," he begged, and the crowd listened as he fell through the stages of denial into pleading. People watched him crumble like a man unmade. He begged as a child might beg for a parent's mercy; he tried to bargain, recall favors, buy back dignity. The witnesses watched, some stunned, some satisfied. People filmed the implosion. He could not manufacture a second life of power. He was reduced to someone who had to sweep for his wrongs under a sun that did not bow to him.
I streamed the scene because I had nothing to hide and because, somewhere in the hum, accountability seemed a small miracle worth sharing.
Later, Eliot put a hand on my shoulder. "You did well," he said.
"I had help," I answered.
"You have more than that," he said. "You have people who will not be bought."
The pendant kept humming. The counter kept climbing. I kept streaming. People were no longer just viewers; they were witnesses, friends, and sometimes the loudest chorus of critics a person like me could have. They loved to laugh at my mistakes and to celebrate my small triumphs. They paid attention.
One morning in the quiet after a long night, I pressed the pendant and whispered, "I want to go home."
The pendant's light pulsed gently back.
"Complete the task," it said. "Or accept a life you have made."
"I don't know if I can choose between the two yet," I said.
"Live," Eliot said from the hall. "Make a life one stitch at a time."
I looked at the jade that had started everything and at the people I had grown to rely on. The wound in my ankle had healed; my pillow had become a real thing in Eliot's footlocker. My stream counted hours, viewers, and a kind of affection I'd never learned to accept before.
I pressed the pendant down one last time for the morning and opened the stream.
"Today," I said into the camera, "we finish what we started."
"How?" someone asked.
"With a truth," I said. "And, if you're lucky, a durian."
The chat burst into emojis.
Eliot smirked. "You and your durian."
I looked at him, at Easton, at Cadence, at Journee, at Linda, and at the tiny war of a world we had stitched together.
"This place gave me a pendant," I said, "and, apparently, a pile of friends. I will finish the task. But when I do, I will put this pendant away in a drawer and remember what it taught me: to watch people, to hold them to their words, and to make room for ugly apologies and slow forgiveness."
We laughed like a small, private choir.
And as the jade lit up with another line of viewers and the pendant kept its slow and patient counting, I pressed record and said, "If you want the rest of the story, stay. If not, I understand. But remember the durian."
The pendant chimed. The screen filled with tiny faces and words. The world kept watching, but that day, I watched back.
The End
— Thank you for reading —