Face-Slapping14 min read
I Came Back from the Bathtub — Debt, Lies, and a Phoenix Stone
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"I opened my eyes to damp air and the cold bite of tile."
"The bathtub looked like a shallow grave."
"I remember the knife."
"The blood looked like it wanted to keep me under."
I had no right to wake up. I shouldn't have woken. But I did. I climbed out of the tub, every muscle complaining, and found my wrists already scarred and knitting themselves back to ordinary skin.
"Who is this?" a ringing phone demanded on the table. "Answer me, you—"
"Anna?" I croaked when I finally reached the phone. The voice on the other end did not soften when she heard me.
"Elena Alvarez, don't play games. Where have you been? Do you know how many calls I left?" Anna Aguilar's tone was sharp, and I felt nothing but a clear, steady calm.
"I'm listening," I said.
"Listen to this then." There was the clack of keys. "The board has decided. Your contract is terminated. Public statement today. All endorsements—cancelled. You will be liable for breach. One hundred million."
"A hundred million?" I said it out loud like tasting a coin. It was absurd and heavy and suddenly very real.
"One hundred million, Elena. You can start finding ways to pay. Don't expect any favors."
"I understand." I hung up.
I should have panicked. I should have curled up and let the old body finish its work. Instead I walked to the window and watched the city breathe. The social feed woke with a thousand teeth.
"Is this the real Elena? Entitled monster."
"Remove her. She pushed a child into the river."
"She deserves everything coming."
I read the hate like weather—stormy, unfriendly, expected. I was not the woman who had been famous before. I was a stranger in someone else's life, with debts, blood, and a sealed past. I had memories that were not entirely mine and a hunger for rice and quiet food that felt oddly new.
"My first move," I told myself, "is to make a plan."
A week later I waited under a tree outside the gated community where the very rich paid for calm. I closed my eyes and let my senses listen. That’s when I felt the car swerve.
"The car is going to hit the tree!" somebody screamed.
"It fell right into the tree," an onlooker shouted. A flurry of people ran. I walked to the crumpled vehicle like I had been called.
"Are you hurt?" someone asked.
"Don't worry about me," the man on the ground said. He had been a passenger, blood on his head, clutching his chest like it could break. He looked up when I knelt.
"Who are you?" he spat. He was Rohan Dean, though at first I didn't know his name. He had that look executives wear: taut, practiced. For all that, his eyes softened into suspicion when they saw me.
"If I told you I'm here to save you, would you believe me?" I asked.
"You expect me to believe an angel?" He tried to snarl but the scrape in his voice ended it.
"Try believing me," I said. I laid my unpapered palm on his head. He startled. He relaxed. A weight lifted from his shoulders like someone had cut ties in the dark.
"One week," I said when I stood. "One week. If you are alive in one week, come find me."
He watched me go, hand to his bandaged head, dumbfounded by an ordinary thing we call mercy.
When Rohan Dean's company made headlines a few days later—rumors of him being signed by an actress almost everyone hated—the internet blew up. People taunted him.
"He signed Elena? You kidding me?"
"Is his PR team asleep?"
Inside Rohan's office, he was quieter than his reputation. He limped in a wheelchair the day he came to my small rented apartment.
"I remember you," he said straightforwardly. "You put your hand on me that day."
"You were about to die."
"And now?"
"And now," I said, "you have a choice. I'll sign to your company on two conditions: I pick my scripts and you let me work without interference."
"I will give you full control," Rohan said. He looked at me with a tired gratitude that got under my skin.
"One more thing," I added. "Help me with the black spots on your name. I can clear things. Or make them worse."
"Deal," he said.
We signed a contract with minimal fanfare. It was supposed to fix two problems at once: my one-hundred-million debt, and whatever strange luck had been clutching at Rohan for years. After I walked out of his meeting, his accidents stopped for a full week. His secretary cried in private and said she slept for the first time in years.
Weeks passed like a train schedule. My social feed flared and softened, flared and softened. I kept my head down, practiced for auditions, cooked for myself. I let the world think I was a reckless woman who loved the spotlight. I used it to bait what needed baiting.
"People believe what they want," I told my new agent, Estefania Wolff, on our first dinner together.
"You're not trying to be liked," she said. "You're trying to be predictable."
"I'm trying to survive."
"You will have to be more public. There will be questions."
"Ask them," I said.
The truth about my death, if you call it that, was messy. I had been murdered, then returned to find someone had consumed my reputation. There were recordings and videos and a small, rotating cast of liars: a child actor, a greedy agent, and a famous actress whose smile hid a hunger.
"Estella Schmid?" I said once, when a note of memory suggested a child.
"Yes," Estefania said. "She was at the shoot. She told people you pushed her. She said it to the network. She intimidated crew. She did what she needed."
"So she lied."
"Children lie for less than adults. It's easier."
"Then why did it feel like planning?"
Estefania looked at me. "Money and attention. And someone that asked a lot of favors."
I followed a thread of whispers and open files to a woman's office—the office of Valentina Sherman, an actress adored for decades, a face carved into magazine covers. The world called her saint and queen; privately, she was a patron of certain charities and the owner of a smiling, secret hunger.
"She wore the charity like armor," Estefania said when I told her what I suspected. "No one doubts the saintly mask."
"She's the last person I expected to hate," I said.
"People wear authority like armor. Saints bleed, too."
We kept working the angles. Rohan paid my signing fee to clear the contract that would have torn me apart. I allowed public appearances that were calculated storms. I talked in fragments and let others complete the story with their assumptions. People are lazy and loud and they will always accept a tidy shape.
"That's how it starts," Rohan said in the car once. "A whisper, then a rope."
"Then we cut the rope."
"How?"
"With evidence."
We found an odd lead in a wallet: a direct transfer, made the night before Lin—Anna—was killed. Anna Aguilar, my old agent who had been mean and petty and alive in history books, ended up dead in a small apartment that smelled like bleach and old secrets. Her phone had messages about money and an attachment: a note that read, "Make it look like an accident. We can't lose the charity."
We took it to the police: Detective Hugh Dominguez and his small but stubborn team—Todd Abdullah and Hernando Blair—who handled crime instead of pretension. They were competent, blunt, and heir to a very human patience.
"You want us to believe an actress killed a manager?" Hugh asked when I placed the evidence on his desk.
"I want you to believe the evidence," I said.
"Evidence is a stubborn thing," he said. "We will dig."
"Do that," I told him, because my patience with whispers had become honest work. And I wanted the moment when the mask fell.
The police found what I had suspected. Valentina Sherman's welfare foundation—the same one whose gala hosted that phoenix-stone the world had stared at in admiration—had led a life better than its statements. The welfare center's books were messy where the camera could not watch. I followed a paper trail that smelled like varnish and old silk.
"She was afraid of being ordinary," Estefania told me one night, fingers wrapped around tea. "A lot of people are afraid."
"She used people," I said. "She used faith and charity and a child."
The push that had started me in the river—Estella Schmid’s buzzed testimony—was backed by small lies and a voice that needed to be bought. The child had been coached. The child had been given money to stay quiet. The real theft had been the truth.
One cold morning, Detective Hugh called. "We have access to a hard drive. Your friend found it under the mattress."
"It changes everything," I said.
They screened the footage in a secured room. "Watch," Hugh said.
The footage was a simple arc of evil: footage of Valentina entering a dressing room, kneeling by a stunned woman, then a hand on a child's head—no, not a child's head, the manager’s. The manager’s words seem to die in the air while someone filmed the truth and saved it between pixels. The child's face was in the corner, coached to look scared, to look like it had been shoved. The hand was gentle at first, caring, then desperate, then utterly cold.
"She didn't push," I said quietly. "She stopped a crime. She stopped someone else from being broken."
"Who?" Todd asked.
"Valentina."
"The actress?" Hermando's voice rose.
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
They moved slowly. The legal system is a lumbering thing that likes documents and signatures, but it moves when the public sees, and it moves faster when the public can point a camera.
We arranged it: a press conference at the charity's annual auction. The phoenix-stone—"the fengwen-dan"—was the object of everyone's attention tonight. It was the stone that had sold itself into myths and money. It felt like an altar. Valentina would be there. The room would be full of cameras.
"Tonight we expose her," I told Estefania. "And we do it public."
"Are you prepared for the fallout?" she asked.
"I've been ready since the bathtub."
When the auction hall's chandeliers poured light over velvet, I walked in and sat near the back. Anna's old enemies whispered close. Rohan sat to my left. Detective Hugh to my right. The crowd smelled like perfume and money.
"They're bringing out the phoenix-stone," Rohan said.
"Gods," someone in the front whispered. "Two hundred million and counting."
"They'll pay anything," a woman sniffed, "for a longer life."
On the stage, the host spoke in that oily, polished manner of men who never knuckle under. "We will now unveil a final item, a donation of legend—"
The screen behind him blinked. Then our evidence became a bright, implacable thing.
"Stop it!" Valentina's voice ringed like a bell. She was on stage, every eyebrow and hair in place. Her mouth said, "What is that?" Her eyes, though, turned brittle.
The host blinked at the video. It was our clip: Anna's apartment, the hand on the head, the child's coached expression. There was silence like someone holding the breath of the building.
"It is footage recently discovered and vetted by the authorities," Hugh said into the microphone. "We advise you to stay where you are, Ms. Sherman."
"You're lying!" she said. Her voice hit a new pitch, bright with feigned panic. "This is defamatory! This is—"
"You put your hand on her," the video played again. It repeated like a hammer. Her face shifted from denial to a thin frost of anger.
"You're making a mistake," she blurted, voice cracking.
"Ms. Sherman," I said, because the stage was hers and the audience now part of the scene. "Watch the screen."
The lights were unforgiving. Her practiced composure was cracking. Women in the first row leaned forward like it was a play. Men unsheathed phones.
"Your audience is watching," Rohan said softly in my ear. "They're recording."
"Why did you do it?" I heard a voice behind me ask. A reporter perhaps. Or someone I had only ever known as a rumor.
Valentina's smile, the one that had been printed on magazines and charity broadsheets, became a mask too tight.
"I didn't—" her first word fell into a swell. "You have no right—"
"Show the bank transfers," I demanded.
The video switched to a screen of numbers—phone recordings, a ledger entry, and names. The audience murmured, then roared.
"Whose voice was that?" she hissed, the last of her dignity snapping.
"It was the mother of Estella," Hugh said quietly. "And it's on record."
"No!" She lunged toward the stage like a spider, hands cutting the space between her and the projection. Security moved with rehearsed speed. The crowd closed in with phones raised high.
"You're under investigation, Ms. Sherman," Hugh said again, clearer now. "You will stay."
She staggered as if struck. For a moment she was a woman on the edge of a cliff, eyes wide as if at a horizon of all her wrongs. Then the transition began. Arrogance melted into pure, visible fear.
"You're lying!" she sobbed. "You're lying! You don't know what you're talking about!"
People were whispering, clicking. The air tasted metallic. She went from collared bird to hunted creature in forty seconds.
"Get me a lawyer," she pleaded, voice raw.
"There will be time for lawyers," Hugh said. "This is not for the cameras only. This is for the truth."
"You're a monster," she said at last, turning to me. Those words were feeble things. The audience heard the humiliation like the last piece of a puzzle.
"You're a murderer," a man in the audience shouted. "You destroyed a career for your vanity."
I stepped forward when security allowed it. The lights turned like spotlights on a theater piece. Valentina fell into an elemental human moment: she realized she could not buy her way out. The room was a bowl of witnesses.
"You killed Anna," I said quietly, directly, so Rohan and Hugh and the microphones heard. "And you used a child."
"No!" she screamed in denial. "I—no—how does a woman of my standing—"
The room filled with the sound of someone taking a step back. Her voice grew thin. A camera panned in for a close-up. The shutter-click chorus grew. Hashtags began to form.
"She always had a way," whispered someone near me. "She knew what to take."
She turned, eyes wet now, the practiced façade gone. For a long, terrible moment she saw the cameras as hungry mouths.
"Please," the actress said. "Please save me. Think of my children. Think of my work."
"Begging won't rewrite the facts," Rohan said, his voice steady. He had a kindness that refused excuses.
She realized people were not listening to the rational world anymore. She realized her charity checks and portraits and glossy interviews made no shield against a recorded truth.
She fell to her knees. "Please," she croaked. The cameras blinked in unison. A man took video on his phone and his wife clutched her pearls. A teenager in a black hoodie livestreamed it with a voice full of this is insane.
"Get up," security hissed, hands reaching. But the crowd closed like a sea. People took photos. Some clapped. Some jeered. Someone began to record the whole thing with a grin. The clapping grew and grew until it was applause for the spectacle she had become.
"No one help her," a voice near me said with a hollow cruelty. "She did this."
"Why are you filming this?" she begged a cameraman. "Why do you film me while I beg?"
"Because you filmed others," he said.
She looked around and saw not friends but the weight of an industry she had used. She pressed her hands to the floor as if she could push herself out of the world.
"Don't touch me!" she wailed.
She crawled to the edge of the stage, hands scrabbling, and then the awkward, ritual moment: she begged.
"Please, please—" Her voice became a thread. Her eyes searched mine as if for a final pardon.
"Beg all you want." I leaned forward, letting the words ring. "Beg in your shoes and on stage. Beg with cameras rolling. Beg as an example."
Her face twisted, smell of perfume and sweat airborne. She involuntarily reached for the first row—"Please—" she whispered, voice gone. The woman whose clap had once been timely and warm was now crying on the floor with a hundred phones recording.
"Do it," someone shouted.
"Say you're sorry," the host demanded, losing his professional mask as a human hunger took hold.
She bowed her head slowly like a ship that had run ashore.
"I am sorry," she said. Her voice was threadbare. "I'm sorry."
"Say it louder," someone urged.
"I am so sorry," she repeated, and each word landed like a stone. A hundred open mouths recorded. A thousand fingers uploaded.
She got up, legs shaking, and tried to find her manager in the crowd. There was no manager to catch her. She went from confident to undone in the time it takes for a spotlight to sweep.
"No one applauds her as a heroine," a man said. "She used people."
A camera showed her knees and the dust. A clip of the scene hit the feed in minutes, then an hour, then the world. The public spectacle stretched out like a wound. She knelt again, this time to implore the men in suits not to let her die broken.
"You're taking my life," she cried to the crowd. "How can you do this?"
"You took lives," a woman in front said.
Somewhere in the back a slow clap began. Others joined.
"Her reign is over," someone else said, and it was not a question.
When officers led her away, Valentina's face had collapsed into a childlike incomprehension. People recorded every sob. Reporters shouted questions. Some part of the world wanted justice served in a court; another part wanted a show. Both got what they asked for: a public fall so complete it would be replayed for days.
Afterwards, the news cycles carved the spectacle into thousands of headlines. People debated whether the punishment had been too cruel. They missed the point: the cruelty was not mine. The cruelty belonged to the system that let her build towers with other people's bones.
"That was necessary," Rohan said quietly as we watched the footage on a small phone. "People needed to see."
"Did they need to see her beg?" I asked.
"They needed to see the truth," he answered.
"Truth is a heavy thing," I said.
"Then let it be heavy."
The case moved to court with decisiveness that surprised even me. Evidence stacked like blocks. The child testified, under pressure and with adult hands guiding her back to an earlier performance. The charity accounting was revealed to be a theatre of paper. Bank transfers, private messages, the ledger under Anna's mattress—it all fit like a picture.
Valentina's lawyers tried to flip the narrative. "She is a great woman who made mistakes," they argued. "She has a lifetime of goodwill." But goodwill does not pay for bones.
The judge listened. The people watched. The camera crews waited outside the courthouse with light and a thousand opinions.
"Why did you do it?" I asked when Valentina sat in the defendants' dock and her eyes crossed mine.
"Because I wanted to be bright," she said with a blankness. "Because in the end I thought nothing would stop me."
"Did you ever think of Anna?" I asked.
She shut her eyes. "No. I thought of the show."
When the sentence came, it felt like the end of a long, slow shift. She would never work again. She would have to face the years with the weight of what she had made. People cheered outside the courthouse like a small child at a puppet show. Some cried. Some recorded.
"It will not fix everything," Detective Hugh said later. "But it changes a few things."
"It changes enough for now," I said.
The phoenix-stone—two years after the auction—sat in my small apartment on a shelf that caught the afternoon light. Rohan had donated it back to the charity, but the officials, shamed, had gotten rid of it. I had refused it at first, and then taken it because nothing less would contain a reminder.
"Keep it," Estefania said. "A talisman or a rock. We all need something to say we survived."
"Maybe," I said. I opened my palm and let the warm light of the stone spill like a secret.
"Have you paid the debt?" Rohan asked me one rainy afternoon.
"I no longer owe the men who bought my silence," I said. "But one hundred million—" I shrugged. "That debt was never only money. It was a debt to myself."
"How so?" he asked.
"Because I was dead before I knew who I was, and I'd promised I'd ask the world to look back and see what they had made."
"Do you still want to act?"
"I want to live my life, Rohan. Acting helps me live."
"You'll have scripts," he said.
"I will choose."
We sat with the stone between us like two people who had shared a cave during a storm.
"I still feel the bathtub sometimes," I admitted.
"Some things never leave you."
"Then we make a shelf for them," I said.
We spoke less after that. Life returned to its strange white noise: auditions, scripts, nights alive with the kind of small dramas that never make the headlines. Estella went to therapy. Anna got a voice in the world she had not had. Rohan's luck held. Detective Hugh and his team—Todd, Hernando, and a bright technician who had been at a hundred nights of evidence collation—kept working.
"Are you happy?" Estefania asked me in a garden where the city felt like a far-off sound.
"Happiness is not a state," I said. "Happiness is a table you clear the plates from and find there's room."
She laughed. "That's not what people write."
"People write what they can sell," I said.
One night before I slept I looked up. There were three small birds in the tree outside my window. One was black, different from the rest. I thought about the charity, the auction, the phoenix stone that promised long life and the price of that promise.
"I keep the phoenix-stone in the drawer," I said aloud to no one.
"The drawer with the old teacup?"
"Yes."
"Why keep it there?"
"Because it's a reminder that pretty things sometimes hide rotten things."
"Then don't forget to wipe the drawer," Estefania said, grinning.
"Never," I promised.
We walked on in the world, careful and a little bruised, and sometimes the bathtub returned in my dreams—a dark bowl full of cold water—and I would wake and laugh softly and be grateful to be awake and to have a chance to choose. I kept my phone close and the stone closer and told myself, every morning, that truth was a stubborn, unglamorous work.
"I will keep telling stories," I said one morning into the mirror.
"And I will be listening," the mirror seemed to reply.
The End
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