Face-Slapping17 min read
I Can't Lie — The Truth That Broke His Empire
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"I can't lie," I told the room full of microphones. "I have someone I like."
"Who is it?" the reporters shouted like a small wave.
"It's Evan," I said.
"Wait—Evan Williams?" one woman asked, her pen stabbing the air.
"Yes," I said.
They screamed the rest themselves. The headlines did the work for them. Overnight my name climbed to the top of every trending list. Someone clipped the moment, looped it, and added a chorus of speculations. I sat in my car outside the press center and watched the world decide the shape of my heart.
My life used to be tidy. I had a place on Colton Said's arm and in his five-year schedule. He paid for my cars, my house, my face on glossy covers. He was handsome in the cold way of men who grew up to inherit things—sharp suits, a bank of people who moved for him.
"You are my woman," he told a man in a crowded room the first time a paw touched my shoulder. He spoke like he owned the truth.
"I know," I answered him then, because I had only ever known one way to speak. I had a sickness of truth; people joked, and journalists loved it. I always answered. It made life dangerous in small ways and honest in large ways.
"I like that you are not deceitful," Colton said once, amused. "You're refreshingly straightforward. It's rare."
"I like that you are generous," I answered. "You give me everything I need."
"And what do you need?" he asked.
"Money, comfort, nothing public," I said.
"Then that's the agreement," he said, and he kept his part for a long time.
At parties I learned to stand where the light would flatter me. At parties I learned to watch him. He had other girls orbiting; still, for five years, he kept me. His assistant, Claude Rodriguez, once told me, whispered over my shoulders while we pretended to be opposite in different rooms, "He keeps you because you don't ask for things he can't give."
"But isn't that lonely?" a friend asked me once.
"Loneliness is a cost," I said. "Colton pays it."
I first met Colton because I spilled coffee on him in a corridor at the film school. It was painfully cinematic. He looked down at the stain, then at me.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Caroline Brooks," I said. I was nineteen. He was an accident I clung to. He offered a hand, then offered a life.
"You'll be fine," he told me on that first night. "You're honest. That's an asset."
When he introduced me at a crowded charity as "my woman" and pushed the hand of an older man away from my shoulder, my heart struck like a small cold wind.
"Did you mean that?" I asked later, when it was quiet between our bodies.
"Yes," he said, covering his mouth with humor. "So what if I did? It's a selfish kindness."
That moment was the first soft place my heart fell. I pretended not to notice the fall.
"You're always careful," he said to me once. "Careful to know the rules. Careful to play your part."
"I like being useful," I answered.
"That's why I keep you," he said.
The truth is, I hid nothing. I studied desserts because he once said I was interesting when I experimented with pastry. I painted small watercolors because he liked the way I concentrated. I learned to listen, to say the right small things. It made him come sometimes. When he came, he brought warmth and a hand that rested at the small of my back as if he owned the map of my body.
Then he stopped coming for a while.
"I am busy," I told the phone. "That's fine."
Three months of silence arrived. Money still came, as it always did. Claude told me, gentle as always, "He's tied up with business. He's okay."
"Okay is not the same as here." I said.
"He'll come back," Claude said.
When he returned, it was not the same. He had new stories. He had a ring of people who were less discreet than he was. Colton had been away to the south, he said, and in the south someone's hand fit too smoothly into his.
"We may be engaged soon," he said the night after he returned. He had a tired look and I felt something in me give.
"Is she—" I started.
"Young," he said. "Bright. Family to settle into the deal. It's smart."
"Ah," I said, because I could tell the truth even when it hurt me. "When will I meet her?"
"Maybe you'll like her," he said.
I said nothing. Outside, the rain slid in sheets down the windows and the city breathed in grays. I made dinner. He kissed my neck in the dark, a small attempt at mercy. "I don't want this to change things between us," he murmured.
"Don't lie," I said, no armor, no strategy.
"I won't," he said, and he slept, heavy and quick.
Then I met Ivanna Moeller.
"You are Caroline Brooks!" she sang when she took my hand in the sunlight of a small studio lot where I had just completed a scene. She had a rope of hair at the back, a smile like a new coin. "I love your films!"
"Thank you," I said. She clung to Colton's arm and waved at me as if she lived in an only-sunny world.
"Come have lunch with us," she said, delighted and honest like a child.
"No," I said. "I'm working."
Colton looked at me with a dark something in his eyes.
"You must come," he told me.
"No, I mustn't," I said.
"You are difficult," he said and laughed, which made me feel like a small animal caught in a human joke.
For a while, I pretended. I acted like the woman who could accept being the in-between. But the truth had always been that the things you want most are the things you reveal when you stop protecting yourself. I began to want more than trinkets and warm nights. I wanted a person who saw me in daylight.
Evan Williams was a director who made films like they were secret letters.
"You were honest in that last take," he told me once, after we shot a scene where my character couldn't stop crying. "It wasn't pretty. It was real."
"I always am," I said.
"That's rare," he said.
We became small conspirators. He taught me simple things—how to carry a silence, how not to be afraid to be ugly for the sake of truth in a scene. He picked me up at airports. He took me to the places that smelled like film stock and coffee.
"I like how you laugh," he told me one night when he brought me coffee on the set in a far-off country. "You know, you don't care what people think."
"I have a problem," I told him, which is another way of telling the truth. "I cannot tell lies."
He laughed and then he didn't. "That's not a problem with me," he said.
We fell in small steps. Not in one cinematic rush, but in the soft accrual of late-night talks and his hand brushing mine over a map of a shot. He was different from Colton. He did not own anything that mattered to him. He asked. He was clumsy about asking, which made my heart stagger in a kind of relief.
"I like you," he said one night, honest and only a little theatrical.
"Me too," I said.
That was the truth the press loved. At a festival, after an award ceremony that made my work feel wide and new, a reporter asked me in front of a stage the question people save for everyone.
"Do you have someone you like?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Who?" a chorus demanded.
"Evan," I said.
The noise after that was a kind of avalanche. Colton read the headlines an ocean away and, later, he came.
He found me in my kitchen. He had a smell of smoke and South. "Who is he?" he asked, and his voice was a carved instrument of need.
"Evan Williams," I said.
He pushed me against the wall as if he could make the world squeeze into the shape he desired.
"Is he the one?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"No," he said. "No, he is not. Caroline, don't be stupid."
I set a plate down and told him to leave.
"Are you serious?" he said, trying to laugh, the muscles in his jaw like small steel.
"Yes," I said. "I'm leaving."
He scoffed. "You think you can just walk away and be free of everything I built for you? You think you can walk away and they will all—"
"Don't pretend you own the world," I said. "You own parts of it, but not me."
He had rage like an invention. He answered not with words only but with plans. He began to go quieter, darker. He claimed business emergencies and late flights. He started to call less. He showed up sometimes and asked for the oddities that made him feel normal—my desserts, my small paintings. He started to look like a man who was assembling something.
"I want you," he told Claude one day on a line I could not bear to hear without breaking. "I want us to be back."
"You already have everything here," Claude said. "She's with someone else now."
"Then make them go away," Colton said.
Claude, who had been kind to me from the beginning, looked at Colton and did not answer. I found out later that Colton had arranged the accident.
He called it efficiency. He said, "He won't die." But what he planned was precise. A barrier on a mountain road. A crashed car designed to accept the brunt of a fall. A bad turn that couldn't be foretold. He had whispered to the men who would put the spikes in place, the wires that would send a vehicle into a ditch. He had promised himself a truth: remove the obstacle, reclaim the territory.
And yet, the day of the attempt, something in him wavered.
I think he saw himself in a paused frame—Evan, pale and still against a cracked windshield, a pendant clutched like a lifeline. Evan's car lay on its side, the air stink of rubber and fear.
He hesitated.
I know because he told me later, in a courtroom made of cameras and murmurs. He told me he had dialed a number and then he had hung up. He told me he had stood over the wreck, his fingers shaking, and listened to Evan's breaths. He had thought of what would break if he did this thing, and something in him—pride, perhaps, or a sliver of the man he thought himself to be—could not follow through on the final cruelty.
Evan lived because Colton turned away at the last second and called for help. Paramedics arrived, sirens cutting open the mountains. The news said "accident" and "heroic rescue" and "miracle." People said I had been lucky. I said the truth at the hospital, because there is no art in lying between patient and truth.
"Someone tried to make my Evan not come to the premiere," I told the police. "I think Colton is involved. He had the means."
"Do you have proof?" the officer asked.
"Not yet," I said. "I have only a name."
What I did have was the pendant—a paired green jade charm I had bought on a hill once, the kind of thing tourist shops sold with a smile. I had given him one; he kept it. The other disappeared after a journey. Later, when the wreck happened, the pendant hung from Evan's rearview. A piece of thin thread draped and gave me a small sharp thing to hold onto. It was not proof enough to drag a man of Colton's wealth into the light.
But the world had a way of keeping receipts.
Evan's recovery was slow. He came home with a scar like a light-pale wedge on his forehead and a memory that surfaced in patched episodes. He smiled at me like he had found a secret. He got well enough to return to work; he returned to me entirely. When Colton's engagement with Ivanna collapsed under its own contradictions—boardroom fury and humiliated family pride—Colton came undone.
He began to make mistakes.
Claude, who could no longer bear his loyalties, came to me with a battered envelope.
"Caroline," he said, hands shaking, "I can't do it anymore."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"I put him in contact with the men. I drove them. I loaded the GPS files. I helped make the obstacle list. I thought we would scare them. I thought he'd wake up. Then it went too far."
"Why come to me?" I asked.
"Because you can't lie," Claude said. "You tell the truth. People listen when you speak."
I took the envelope. Inside were messages, invoices, a list of dates and locations, an audio file. In the audio file Colton's voice was precise. He hummed and calculated. He spoke about the mountain curve at 22:13. He referenced a man who "knows how to put a line through a road." It was enough for a warrant.
"Do you want the law?" Claude asked.
"Yes," I said.
We took evidence to the police. They were slow at first; Colton had lawyers who were smooth and thick-skinned. He tried to call it a vendetta, a misinterpreted call. "He's unstable!" his spokesperson said. "He's angry at a breakup!" His PR team painted me as the scorned woman, volatile and dangerous. But the truth is not neutral. It begins to gather people.
"There's a public hearing this morning," the city prosecutor said. "We can call for a fast-track restraining investigation if the board and the public put pressure on them."
"What will happen?" I asked.
"You'll speak," she said.
The day of the hearing I stood on the courthouse steps and watched a crowd form like weather. Cameras took up their posts like small black birds. Photographers angled for the right frames. Reporters made room for their questions.
"Caroline!" someone shouted. "Do you have proof?"
"I have truth," I said.
"You say him?" a journalist prodded.
"Colton Said," I said. "He tried to make someone's life end so he could reclaim one."
There was a hush, which was the first breath of public judgment.
The hearing was meant to be formal: a closed session to begin an investigation. But the prosecutor, who had seen the audio and the messages, decided to bring Colton in front of the press. "This is no longer just a legal matter," she said. "This is a public safety issue."
The room where it happened was ridiculous in its intimacy: a municipal theater converted into a hearing room. Seats filled with people who wanted to see a scandal become a spectacle. Board members of Colton's company sat stiff as if they could move their faces into another shape. Ivanna Moeller sat to one side in a cream coat, her mouth pinched like a newly learned expression.
"Mr. Said," the prosecutor said over the microphone, "you are accused of conspiracy to endanger the life of Mr. Evan Williams. How do you plead?"
"I—" Colton started. He had the same ten-year-old face when he tried to charm a clerk. He opened his mouth and tried to be larger than the room.
"Do you deny involvement?" the prosecutor asked.
"No," he said.
A murmur ran through the crowd.
"Then why did you do it?" the prosecutor asked.
For the next hour the theater was filled with the kind of sound that shows when a man who thought himself invisible is made luminous.
"I couldn't bear seeing her with him," Colton said. "She was walking away. It was a panic. I didn't think—"
"You planned it," the prosecutor said. "You paid men to create an accident. You used company assets to coordinate. You made no attempt to stop it. You created a scenario that could have killed a man."
At first Colton's face was proud. He tried to smile. "I didn't intend to kill anyone," he said.
"Intention is irrelevant when action puts life at risk," the prosecutor answered. "But what you did shows a pattern. You used your power to enforce private desires."
"Private desires, yes," Colton said. His voice shrank. "I thought if he wasn't there—"
"—then you could have what you want." The prosecutor finished for him.
"You are asking for this man to be accountable in public," the prosecutor said to the room. "Do you want to speak?" she asked me.
I walked up. The floor creaked under high heels. A chorus of cameras framed me like some modern martyr.
"Speak the truth," Claude whispered.
I breathed. I said what I had always said in small rooms, and the microphones caught it. "I am Caroline Brooks. For five years I was with Colton Said. He gave me safety, and I took it. Then I fell in love with Evan Williams because he taught me things. I told him the truth at a press event. The next thing that happened was Mr. Williams's car nearly died on a mountain. I do not know why anyone thinks the right thing is to hurt other people for one's own comfort. He is a man; he has to answer."
The courtroom was a theater of faces. People leaned forward in that same involuntary hunger that watches fate meet reckoning.
Colton's expression changed in a way that felt surgical. Pride thinned, then a quick flush of anger came, then something like fear.
"This is manipulation!" he said. "She is a liar! She is trying to damage me!"
"Miss Brooks does not lie," the prosecutor said quietly. "She will answer for everything she says."
"Caroline," someone shouted from the gallery. It was Ivanna.
"Why did you do it?" Ivanna asked, and the hurt in her voice made the theater press against itself.
Colton's hands shook. "I loved you," he said. "I thought you had been promised something and I wanted to fix it."
Ivanna's face moved from confusion to betrayal to something almost fierce. "You played with people's lives as if they were chess pieces," she said. "Do you know what that means, Colton? Do you know what you almost made me into?"
"I'm sorry," Colton said, but it sounded small.
The prosecutor called witnesses—Claude first. He stood and told the story of messages, of cold calls to anonymous operatives, of a list of obstacles and a time and a place.
"And you did this because?" the prosecutor asked Claude.
"Because he ordered it," Claude said. "Because he was desperate."
They played the audio file. Colton's voice filled the theater, mechanical in its ordinary cadence, a man planning a small death with supply lines. I remember the way his eyes darted, like a trapped animal. The gallery of cameras clicked. Someone began to record on their phone. A woman near me sobbed. A man in a suit whispered curses.
Colton's face unstitched itself into horror when the playback included his last-minute call, the one he made and then did not complete. "Call them off," he had said, then hung up.
"You tried to balance your conscience with your desire," the prosecutor said to the room. "You did not call the police when you found the car."
"I didn't want—" Colton started.
"You didn't want what?" the prosecutor asked.
"You didn't want him dead," Ivanna said, and you could see how the room turned a little then, like a leaf.
"Yes," Colton said. "I didn't want him dead. I only wanted the obstacle removed."
There was a sound like a collective understanding—a gasp that was not a surprise but a recognition.
The hearing turned into a punishment the way a campaign turns into a storm. The board of directors of Colton's company—men and women who once nodded at his jokes—sat with faces that read like old money in discomfort. They had their own worries. Stocks slumped early rumors. The press smelled fear and fed on it. A chorus of shareholders demanded answers.
They called for an emergency meeting at the company's head office that same day. The board demanded Colton's resignation, citing "personal conduct incompatible with his duties." They read the audio transcripts and invoices aloud. They held up the pendant and asked how long it had been in his possession. They played Claude's testimony. They debated as if they had not always known power corrupted.
Colton stood at the podium to say he would not resign. He tried to frame it as a victimhood: "I'm being attacked. My personal life is private! I will fight!"
A dozen phones captured him. His words dissolved into a river of commentary online. The markets reacted like a heartbeat. The company’s stock fell. Investors—people with names I will never know—shouted that they would no longer be party to such risk.
Ivanna stood up during the shareholder's meeting. She walked to the microphone under a storm of flashbulbs.
"You used me," she said, quiet and cold. "You used my name to build an alliance, then you discarded me."
The room was full of people who had used others in different ways and yet found the same shame to be too hot to sit in. Someone filmed Ivanna's face and it trended. She had been Colton's public future; now she was the woman who stood and moved a room.
"You promised things to family and markets," she said, addressing the board and the cameras. "If that promise is bargaining with life, I withdraw."
"Do you want him fired?" a reporter asked afterward.
"I want him to be accountable," she answered.
The board took a vote in front of TV cameras and a small army of law clerks. They needed to show the world they were not complicit. The CEO they had chosen for his ruthlessness had become its liability.
Colton's reaction to the board's vote was a metamorphosis. At first he looked furious, as if he could still carve his way out. Then he grew pale. He tried to speak, but the sound came out like a small animal sobbing. He asked for privacy. He launched a deniable press action. He called lawyers. He appealed.
None of it mended the way the room's collective attention had shifted. Colton's friends—those who made a living on his favor—began to distance themselves like people stepping off a boat that was listing. Photos that used to show him smiling with senators were removed. An actor he had backed took down a repost praising him. The kind of people who move in the orbit of wealth are pragmatic; they fled what smelt like contagion.
Outside, the crowd wanted more than legal boundaries. They wanted to watch him fall in public.
They made their own court.
At a small press plaza after the board meeting, Colton walked out. Reporters called his name.
"Colton—" someone shouted.
"Did you try to kill Evan Williams?" another demanded.
He opened his mouth. He tried to put his hands up. "I—" he said, but the gallery were the jury and the verdict came fast.
"Shame on you!" a woman yelled, loud enough to carry.
"How could you?" shouted a man who had a daughter in the room.
Ivanna came forward again. She stood there with the jade pendant on a black cord. The cameras caught the light of the green stone, and the feed went global.
"This is mine," she said. "You took my trust and turned it into something dead."
Colton's face crumpled. "I didn't—" he started.
"You didn't want him dead," a reporter said. "You planned to harm. You didn't stop it. You called it off at the last second. Why?"
"Because I couldn't live with it," he said, and then his voice broke, "and because I loved her."
"Love is not a license to murder," Ivanna said. "Love is not a justification."
The crowd hummed. Cellphones recorded. Someone laughed—brittle and sharp. People filmed his apology like it was a performance for the cameras, and in a way it was. He tried to speak with dignity, but it had been spent. His voice fled.
He staggered, then sank onto a bench by the fountain. People circled him like vultures and doctors saw him like a patient. A woman near me said, "Good. Finally he will learn what it is to lose everything that made him glorious."
They chanted his name and then let it go viciously. Someone slapped him with the print-out of the transcript. Someone spat. A man with a channel on a social network read a long statement listing his companies and the ways they'd relished Colton's cleverness only until the world turned.
Colton's reaction went through the necessary acts of a public fall: denial, angry shouting, pleading, and then an utter collapse. He tried to curse people for being cruel to him when he was the architect of cruelty. He tried to explain himself as a man who had been hurt and bewildered, and in his explanation was the final bankruptcy—the refusal to accept the full measure of his actions.
Officials moved in to protect him as if he were fragile. That made people angrier.
"Do not touch me," he said. "Don't—"
They touched him anyway. The cameras kept rolling. Share prices sank again on the news of his resignation. He promised to step down. "I will resign," he said. "I will accept punishment."
The board removed his name at press time. Colton's empire dissolved in public view, not because one judge made the decision, but because everyone who knew him turned away. His reputation—so crafted by old favors and deniable memos—burned brighter to go out.
At the end of that long day, Colton sat hunched in an unlit corner of his city apartment. He had his old vices stacked like unopened letters. He had people who still spoke to him out of fear or loyalty, but not love. He had lost the private thing he had tried to buy with violence.
"I didn't want him dead," he told the empty room. "I only wanted it to stop. I wanted to make it stop and to take back what was mine."
"You did not get to own me," I thought. I spoke that truth in a small kitchen where our lives had once come together and torn apart.
Evan healed in the kind and stubborn way that people do when they have the right reasons to hold a future. He came to the public hearings and sat quietly. He never liked the shine of the cameras. He liked the plainness of people. He took my hand in the middle of ruined news and he held it like you hold a thing you'd never break on purpose.
"Do you regret telling the truth that day?" he asked me later, in a small café where he preferred to talk.
"No," I said. "I said it because I couldn't do anything else."
"It cost us," he said, fingers to the pendant that hung between us.
"It gained us too," I said.
The truth, once out, reshapes everything. Colton had to face consequences because the world needed that proof: powerful men are not above harm, and the lives they break will eventually find their own stories to tell.
The jade pendant that had been a prop of the mountain story hung around my neck now. Someone in a souvenir shop had sold me a superstition: that two pieces meant a bond that would not break. It did not mean that. It meant this: the thing that binds people can be lost, found, kept, or used as a talisman against despair.
"I never wanted to be a martyr," I told Evan as we walked away from yet another press line.
"I know," he said. "You wanted to be someone who could tell the truth."
The world changed in small ways after the hearing. Colton lost the chairmanship and much else. Ivanna disappeared from my feeds for a while; she eventually found a company that did not depend on what he thought he could buy. Claude testified fully and received a reduced sentence for cooperation. People in our circle rearranged themselves like pieces on a cracked table.
And me? I stood in liminal lights and said what needed to be said. I told the truth about who I loved and what I could not take. That truth did violent things to the life of a man who had never learned the cost of his appetite. It also made room for gentler things—Evan's hand, the steady work at his side, the small ordinary dinners we ate with people who could be trusted.
"Will you marry me?" Evan asked once, in a hotel room where the air smelled of rain.
"No," I said, and then I laughed. "I like being honest. I like being loved in daylight."
He smiled like he had found the only right answer. "Then be mine. Not because I'm yours by fate, but because we keep wanting to say yes."
"You will tell me when I say something wrong," I said.
"I will," he said.
"That is the promise then."
He brushed a hair from my face and pinned the pendant near my collarbone. "So it goes," he said.
I have learned that truth is a force. It can topple kings or pick at the corners of a life until that life looks different. The jade pendant warmed against my skin. Colton was forced to face himself in the light. The public watched his unmaking like a harsh opera.
In the end the thing I kept was not a trophy but a person who saw my ugliness and still stayed. The unique twist—the small green pendant in the wreck, the mountain curve, the boardroom that forced a man to resign—those will always be the way I know where truth can go.
And when the press finally stopped chasing our names, Evan and I had breakfast in a small kitchen that belonged to both of us. I poured coffee and thought of how strange honesty had been my curse and my freedom.
"This is the best part," he said, and I believed him.
The End
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