Face-Slapping14 min read
I Came Back, and Everyone Misread the Story
ButterPicks13 views
I woke up to a thunder that I felt at the back of my skull.
"Ow—" I rubbed my head and flinched as the room spun for a second. Papers fluttered everywhere. A tall man above the stairs barked like thunder too.
"Do you hear me?" York Bennett was shouting, voice brittle as broken glass. "Dad is in surgery because of you! Three times they've sent us a critical notice. You keep acting like—what are you doing here?!"
"I—" I squinted through the white sheets of paper hitting my cheek. The sting on my face was real. The world settled into cold, clean focus.
Someone shoved a thick stack of files across my face. "You ruin the Bennett name!" York barked. "You signed with that agency behind our backs, you made endless scandals, and now—now my father is in the OR because of you!"
I blinked and looked down at the documents strewn on the floor. My hand moved before I fully felt it. I gathered the papers, one by one, and stacked them by the wall with a muted thunk.
"You..." York's voice went smaller. "You look—" He faltered.
I let him falter. I let the odd light in the room settle on me the way it wanted to. The woman they'd known as the slow, quiet, fumbling Bennett heiress had never stacked papers like that, with those small, precise motions. People shifted in the doorway and their eyes slid from me to York, curious now.
"I'm not stupid," I said softly, not because I wanted to be heard but because it made the words real. "I've been slow to speak. But I'm not stupid."
York's nostrils flared. "What are you implying?"
"This." I flipped open one file and skimmed it calmly. "From last September, the day I signed with Giao Summit Media, until yesterday. Every gossip, every meeting, every micro-scandal compiled into this neat set. Even the wine-spill at the party—only internal staff knew about that. Whoever wrote this had access to the inside."
York's face lost color. Around us, whispers changed direction and now tilted toward him.
"Who else could know?" York said, the sharpness back in his voice. "It's your little world; who else but you—"
"Is that your answer?" I asked, and drew the papers tighter under my palm. "If someone collected my dirt and left it on our tea table so the old man would see, who benefits?"
He couldn't say. The group grew restless. I let the question hang.
"I'm going to the hospital," I said, and I moved, which startled everyone.
"Don't even think about it," York snapped. "If you care for one scrap of decency, stay away until Dad gets better."
I smiled, small and cold. "Two hours, York. Tell the doctor to do whatever they must to keep him alive until I'm back. Oh—" I paused and looked at the old people clustered near the bed, at my grandfather's framed portrait on the wall. "By the way. Dad's already updated his will. Half goes to me should anything happen."
York's face turned the exact color of winter iron.
*
I didn't have the time or the comfort of being sentimental. The hospital records I hacked—well, hacked is a big word; in my head it was calculated, quiet, and precise—said he had a massive primary intracerebral hemorrhage from hypertension. The surgeons had cleared much of the clot, but intracranial pressure remained high. If the old man couldn't reabsorb blood quickly his life hung on a thread.
"There's a herb," I murmured to myself, scanning the charts on my phone while the air outside the hospital window tried to pretend spring had arrived. "If only I had the right stuff."
Then I saw a sign: "Jingming Pharmacy." The name felt like a promise.
I pushed open the door.
"Red peony, earthworm, Dragon's-vine, angelica..." I rattled off twenty-two names on instinct.
"You—" The clerk blinked at me, then blinked again when I asked for Qing Mulian. "That's a controlled species. We don't usually sell outside, but if it's urgent—let me check upstairs."
Upstairs they had a different kind of world. A private office opened and a man stepped out like a moon walking out of shade.
He was impossibly pale. His lashes were long enough to make a shadow line on his cheeks. He looked at me and said, "He's your father?"
"He's my grandfather," I corrected. "Please. I need ingredients. My grandfather's in surgery."
"And you are?" he asked.
"Jillian Bennett," I answered simply.
His expression flickered the way a shutter does. "You're the Bennett girl the papers keep laughing at."
"That would be me," I said.
There was a ripple of amusement from his younger companion—carried like a breeze. "Of course you'd be the one causing a fuss," Karim Conley said under his breath. "Family icons, right?"
"Shh." The pale man—Anders Hunt—stepped forward slowly. "How much Qing Mulian?"
"Two qian." I said. I nearly laughed at the smallness of the request in my account. "I'll manage."
Anders hesitated for a beat, watching me.
"You have blood on your face," he said finally. "What's that from?"
"A fall," I said, shrugging. "Nothing."
"You injured in the stairwell," he said. He said it like a fact discovered, not a question.
I watched his hand catch the plastic jars smoothly. "Thank you," I told him.
He said nothing—only turned the jars and carried them to the prep room himself. He came back with a packet of Qing Mulian and a slow, precise expression.
"Let me help you carry it," he said.
"Fine," I said.
We carried the herbs like people carrying heavy truths.
*
"Two hours," I told Dr. Zhou when I forced the staff to accept my credentials. The nurse frowned, then paused when she read the ID I flashed—the ID that was not quite mine and yet had a name she respected.
"You're not family," she said, suspicious.
"Please submit my credentials," I said quietly. "I am authorized to be in the OR."
She hesitated, then—
"You're sure?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "Please."
They moved with the kind of speed that happens when permits are written and signed and someone urgent takes hold of the string. In those minutes I learned two things: the gut of a family is a cruel thing when it turns, and the hospital has a hierarchy where nine out of ten people will listen to a white card and respect a name.
I pushed back my sleeves and stepped into the operating room. Once the mask was on, I could be anything. Doctors moved around me like planets around a sun, and for a sliver of time I felt like I had taken my true place in a world that had been staring at me sideways all my life.
"Who is she?" Dr. Zhou asked, under his breath.
"Someone who knows more than she lets on," Anders said.
"Please," I said, focusing on the monitor. "Lower the pressure slowly. Give mannitol IVs, and prepare that herbal adjuvant. It won't replace the surgery but it helps."
They listened.
We worked. When Arden Laurent came out of ICU twenty-four hours later, his breathing rough but steady, he looked at me like a lighthouse finally touching his eyes. He grunted, then smiled—an animal smile anything but weak—and waved a finger.
"You're trouble," he said.
I let him. He liked me being trouble.
*
Of course the world wouldn't leave that alone.
"Someone posted," a voice said into my phone as I sat in Arden's recovery room. "They've made a new column of dirt on you."
"Let it burn," I told the voice. I typed quickly and opened the marketing account named 'CircleGossip'. I found thirteen drafts—ready-made hit pieces. I selected five and clicked publish. Then I logged out like a woman who had done something small and brilliant.
"Why?" Clancy Ewing asked, shifting in a chair and looking every inch the nephew who thought he deserved more than a glance. "Why make it worse?"
"Because," I said, "they're not the kind to let things rest until they've turned a life into a story. I want them to play by the rules." My fingers stalled and then moved again. "And because I can."
The marketing guy—Goddard Vasseur—went mad when his line blew up. He called, begged, shouted. "Delete! Delete!" But he couldn't undo something that had already spread like a fever.
I slept for a little while and woke to find Arden out of ICU, the family circling back to polite survival. Then came the video.
I put a laptop on the bedside table and played it. The clip showed a small domestic scene from months ago. Katherine Makarov—York's wife—sat close to a desk as an older woman spoke quietly. Someone passed them a paper.
"They're planning, aren't they?" I said. "They were altering the calculus. They needed a scapegoat."
"Who would do that?" Clancy asked.
"Why ask me?" I said.
"Because you know," he murmured. "And because you're the kind of stubborn who would."
I smiled. "Watch."
I watched that footage and rewound and played it to death. The date stamped on the corner was September fourth—the day I had signed with Giao Summit Media. The footage showed Katherine quietly telling my grandfather the truth about his illness and then taking pictures of it, then stealing file copies.
"Why would she do that?" I asked, to no one and everyone.
"Money," York said. He sounded like a man with the last of his courage trying to justify his anger.
"Power." I corrected. "Saving face for his lineage. To manipulate her way to a share of what she wanted."
Katherine turned pale when I confronted her with the footage. "You can't possibly—" she began, but the truth didn't care for the fight.
"Who else would release these?" I asked.
York said nothing.
"Enough," Arden said. He coughed, then laughed the way old men do when something small delights them. "Enough theatre."
He took the video, put it on the table and asked, "Are they family to you, Jillian?"
"Family," I said slowly. "Is a funny word. It can mean restitution, loyalty, or a long rope to hang a reputation with."
"You choose," he said.
I chose.
"Call the houseguard," Ard en said. "Call whoever will sign a witness. Call lawyers."
"Should we call for a statement?" Clancy asked.
"No," I said. "Let us make a show of facts."
*
We made the show.
I gathered those who'd watched quietly from the wings: the staff at Giao Summit who had been paid to collect dirt, the marketing clique that thrived on gossip, and the hospital administrators. I sat Arden beside me. Anders stood close enough to be counted, and Clancy hovered like a prosecutor who had found his quarry.
I connected a laptop to a screen in the main lounge. Reporters had been invited under the auspices of a family clarification. Social feeds hummed. My chest felt steady. I had thought of so many endings, but the one I wanted was simple: public truth.
"Tonight," I said, standing in a room of people who expected drama, "we tell the truth. We show how truth is sold in portions and how reputations are purchased in installments."
A man called Goddard laughed loudly from the corner. "You're a celebrity now, Jillian. People buy gossip for a living. Why're you on this soapbox?"
"Watch," I said. "Just watch."
I played the first clip—Katherine with documents. The room held its breath.
Katherine's voice rose, straining for innocence. "I—"
"Shh." I held up a hand. "It's best to let the video do the talking."
We moved through the file after file. Emails. Payments. A string of numbers that led to the bank account York's chief financial officer could not explain away.
York stood stiff as a post until the sequence of texts—Katherine's voice, his own hidden comments—rolled across the screen. He reddened first with rage, then with an odd deflation, like a ship with a broken keel.
"You can't do this," York barked, when his anger found a voice.
"Why not?" I asked.
"You don't understand family honor!"
"Honor?" I laughed softly. "Is that the word? Or is that the word the dishonest place in the mouth to sweeten the poison?"
People in the lounge shifted. Some had phones already up to record. The air filled with low murmurs and the static noise of surveillance. A few of York's friends had come, and now they looked away. A man nearby took a picture. A woman filmed on her live stream. Someone started a hashtag.
York's face changed.
First, triumph: he assumed the room would close ranks. "This is nonsense," he said loudly. "They're lying. They're actors. You have no proof—"
I projected the bank logs. The conference screen blinked: timestamps, transfers, a trail of cash that had been moved to fund a smear campaign timed to the grandfather's surgery.
The murmurs became questions. "Who moved the money?" "Who took the files?"
York stepped forward, jaw tight. "It's not true! I would never—"
"Then explain," I said. "Explain the transfers. Explain the messages. Explain Katherine's accounting records. Explain why her name is on the delivery logs for the papers."
He stammered. He tried to ask for an attorney. He tried to say it was a hack. "You have to be kidding," he said.
I turned to the cameras and the people like a woman who had let herself be sharp enough. "If you're lying," I said, calm as glass, "stand up and say it. And if you tell the truth—if you step up—I'll let you explain."
He tried one last thing. York stabbed a finger toward me, all swagger and fury. "You're a show! You signed with that agency! You seduced the media into saving you! You're a puppet! This—this is theater!"
There was a long silence. Then the phone of a barista, then the click of a camera shutter, then the croak of laughter from someone who saw the world as a stage.
"Katherine," I said, quiet as a knife. "You want to speak? Or let your messages speak for you?"
She opened her mouth and then closed it. Her hands trembled. She looked at York, and the look belonged to someone who had thought herself untouchable and found the sky falling.
"You are accused," I said. "You will be judged. But tonight, we will let the public see what the truth looks like."
"You're going too far!" York said. The color of denial smeared his face. "You're destroying the family—"
"—and saving your father's life?" I said. "Yes. We'll see which matters more."
He laughed and then stopped. The laughter had lost its spark. He was a man who had become used to being heard and not listened to.
"Turn on the feed," I told Anders. "Let them watch."
We did. The feed spread. Comments exploded. People streamed the room. People outside gathered in the lobby. New voices accosted old ones. The world was watching.
York's expression shifted: smugness, disbelief, denial, then a shot of fear.
"You're lying," he panted finally. "This is a set-up! You framed us!"
A woman near the doorway began to record with slow, steady hands. "He's pleading," she whispered.
"Aden's signatures were forged," York insisted. "They tricked me into signing! You plant doctored evidence!"
I turned to the cameras and said, "Then sign something to refute the bank transfers. Sign here, with witnesses. Show us your receipts."
He couldn't.
"Please," he said suddenly, voice smaller and raw. "Please don't—"
He grabbed at Katherine's sleeve. "We can fix this! We can—"
No one moved to help him.
"You're asking them to fix what you broke," I said.
He told one last story—about pressure, threats, the fear of family collapse—and with every word his voice grew thinner. The audience recorded everything. Comments morphed into a chorus: "exposed", "shame", "I can't believe it".
He sank. He did not go quiet. He demanded denial—defiance—and when none came he began to choke. He looked like the man who had been all arrogance and now had to swallow it, one bite at a time.
"Please," he said again, to me this time, voice cracking. "Don't—this won't do."
A woman in the crowd raised her hand and took a long, deliberate video. "Say something," she whispered, sugar and salt in her voice.
York's face became a study of denial cracking: he mouthed the words "not true" and then cried, "Please! Please!"
First a small gasp, then a crowd of phones, then people stepping back, a few leaving in disgust. Someone recorded him kneeling.
He didn't even plan it. He dropped to his knees like a man finally bending to gravity. The suit pockets folded with a sound, and his kneecaps pressed into the plush carpet with an odd, human sound. His hands came up and the sleeves dug into his palms.
"Please!" he begged. "Please!"
People who had once stood with his smiling faces watched as the man who'd once ordered them around pleaded from the floor.
There were cameras, there were people who laughed and there were people who cried. The shift I wanted had happened: the echo of his arrogance had been silenced and the world had recorded the fall.
He crawled back on hands and knees, voice small as a child's, "Don't—"
No one answered.
A few people clapped—out of a kind of late approval—others recorded. Someone shouted, "Publishes this!" A single woman started a chant: "Justice. Justice."
York's shoulders shook; he tried to say something praying for mercy. The cameras recorded the entire collapse from the beginning of the feed to the end.
In the crowd someone took a selfie of us with York in the background on his knees. That image went viral in minutes.
He begged and he pleaded. He donned all the phases of a man unmoored: arrogance, fear, denial, collapse, humiliation. He had been the loudest in the room for years; that night he had nothing but ragged breaths and a dirge of apologies.
They filmed him. They laughed. They videotaped his begging hands.
He asked people for forgiveness. "Please," he said, voice thin. "I'll give you money. I'll resign my share. I'll—"
Someone shouted, "Get up, York. Crawl away."
He didn't even have the energy to stand. The crowd parted in a slow, cruel wave, and York's hands left warm smears on the carpet when he pushed himself forward.
When the cameras closed and the live streams ended his face was still puddled with tears. He tried to reach for me and Katherine but we did not move. Arden watched with curious amusement, like a storm that had passed him by.
"Let him go," Arden said finally. "A lesson is a kind of medicine too."
York scrambled to his feet and stumbled through the doors. People on either side of the doorway shook their heads and whispered. A woman posted the video before he had reached the parking lot.
Later that night, the headlines were not mercy but spectacle. York's public image was shredded. Sponsors canceled contracts. Friends turned away. The videos multiplied. Comments were merciless.
I would not be cruel forever. But the law of the family house had been broken. The show of punishment was public, ugly, and complete—an unblinking unmasking with witnesses.
That night many learned that betrayal hides under smiles and that paper stacks can topple lives. York's collapse had been recorded and willful in its lessons: smugness will be replaced by supplication when the truth hits.
*
In the weeks that followed, the fallout kept moving like a slow, hungry tide. Goddard Vasseur was exposed, shamed in a different way when I leaked the invoice trail connecting him to a woman named Galina Atkinson and her hired hands. Goddard's face dissolved in TV brightness; he pleaded for leniency. "It was just business," he told cameras. His agency dropped him. He stood in every news clip somewhere between rage and vacant despair.
Lucas Nunes—the doctor who had thought himself untouchable—found the weight of his greed pressing on him. I made sure hospital admins saw his procurement logs, the ghost contracts that fed his lifestyle. He was investigated and quietly moved into a different hospital on paper; in practice, the whispers followed him and a merit badge for mediocrity replaced his old titles.
"Katherine," I said one afternoon as she attempted to walk past me in the garden, "you knew the math. You counted on your husband's silence. You chose."
She burst into flames like a candle snuffed by wind. "I did it for him," she whispered. "We were losing everything. I had to secure—"
"You had to secure your future by making someone look like the villain?" I asked.
She could not answer.
"Katherine," Arden said from the sunchair, amused, "we are not children. Money cannot buy memory."
The world kept watching. My grandfather's recovery continued. I kept doing the small, surgical, precise things I had always done: collect information, arrange facts, level a room with a single sentence.
*
"Are you the one they call X?" a young programmer messaged me months after, when I was sitting at a computer late and a cold light painted my face. "Is the old TFB—The Future Base—back?"
I stared at the stars on my screen—an old project name that hummed something in me like static. In another life, some other me had built an entire small world inside a device. TFB had been a name that used to make people whisper. Now this world seemed like a half-remembered dream.
"Not tonight," I typed back. "But the old things have a habit of returning when you least expect them."
I closed the laptop and looked at the black, heavy card Anders had given me earlier—the black-gold card that meant access to things reserved for a small circle of people. I kept it in my pocket like a talisman.
Outside the hospital the city breathed, fluorescent and clueless. Inside, my grandfather slept. I approved orders, I booked herbs, I argued with administrators. I answered messages from Anders who would sometimes be blunt, sometimes distant, but always present in that way the strange people who matter are.
"You've changed," Anders said once, when we were on a rooftop looking at the city like two strangers who had found one another a few times too many.
"I always was," I said.
"Are you sure?"
"I know what I'm doing," I said.
"Good." He looked at me like a man who didn't trust words and preferred facts. "Then do the thing you're best at."
"Anders?" I asked, turning.
"Yes."
"Don't make my birthday a fuss."
"Is that a request or an order?"
"You pick the side you like," I said.
He smiled briefly and that was enough.
Sometimes I would think of the girl I had been in the other life—how she had died on a cliff the day I had been reborn into this body—and wonder if the patterns of loss and return had any sense. Sometimes I would think of the places that had vanished: a small base of people who had believed in the future and kept its access codes hidden. Where had they gone? Why did TFB's name vanish?
I logged onto a black page on my screen and typed the code name: /The Future Base/. The old interface blinked, then quietly, like a door acknowledging a knock, vanished.
I closed my eyes and listened to the hospital's slow breathing. Arden's chest rose and fell. Outside, someone laughed. The black-gold card weighed in my pocket like a secret.
Later, as I walked back to the bedside, Arden squeezed my hand and said, just loud enough for me to hear, "So, girl, who do you think I should watch out for? Who steals the sugar from his own jar?"
I laughed. "Watch the ones that smile the widest."
He grinned a thief’s grin. "Then I'm safe, because you are wicked enough to look after me."
"That's the plan," I said, and kept my eyes ahead. I had books to read, computers to pry open, and enemies to set in the light. There was more to do.
The End
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