Revenge15 min read
I Chose Not to See
ButterPicks15 views
They call the app CaptureHouse. I called it trouble.
"I don't want to do this anymore," I said the first time I deleted it.
"You mean forever?" Drew Pierce asked, pouring a can of soda into a paper cup like nothing heavy was happening. He sat across from me in a sparse room that smelled faintly of oil and canned coffee.
"I mean for a while," I corrected. "I need to be a mother. I need to watch him grow."
Drew smiled, but it was the smile of someone who had learned to hide how much he could read in your face. "You know they won't let you walk away. Once they mark you, they keep you. They need you."
"I won't go back," I said. "Not after what happened."
Drew leaned closer. "If you won't, then we won't force you. But understand this—CaptureHouse will call you when it thinks people need you."
"Then I'll ignore it."
"You sure?" He set the can down. "You sure you can do that?"
"Yes." My voice was small and certain.
He looked at me as if he wanted to argue, then nodded like someone who had lost that argument a long time ago. "Fine. We'll wait for the signal that everything's safe. I will send you home."
"Thank you." I put my hand on my belly. I felt that small round secret there, busy and warm. I wanted to keep it safe.
That day Drew gave me a tour of the place he called home: three low factory buildings, an administrative office, and a cluster of cottages behind the plant. "These houses are for the hunters," he said as we walked. "When they suspect danger, they come here to lay low. Anyone can take a key. Everyone sleeps where they want—except Reed."
"Reed?" I scanned the line of doors. "Who is he?"
"He is... different." Drew's voice dropped. "He never takes off his mask. He lives in the single house by the corner. Nobody goes inside his room."
We came to the cottage that stood apart. A narrow porch, a rusted sink outside and a line with a few plain shirts hanging. A man I had only heard about—Reed Chavez—was on that porch, sleeves rolled, a simple mask covering his face. He scrubbed a shirt with a stiff brush. The water from the sink ran black with soap.
"Why does he stay masked when he's home?" I asked.
"Reed doesn't do small talk," Drew said softly. "He keeps to himself. He hates people getting too close."
I watched him wash until the rhythm settled into something like a secret hymn. The shirt, once bright, grew faint and clean under his hands. He rinsed, then shoved the shirts into the old washing machine under the eaves, dropped a blue bead of detergent inside, and walked away. As he left, Drew leaned toward me and whispered, "He will hand-wash them again after the machine cycle. It's how he forgives his hands."
I laughed, surprised by the strange tenderness in the statement. "Is he... lonely?"
"Maybe," Drew said. "Or maybe he just believes in doing things right."
I remembered then a pair of hands that were no longer warm to my memory. Abel Espinoza had been broad and steady. The last time I had hung clothes, the lift had stuck. I had stood on my toes, reaching up and failing, when Abel had come up behind me.
"Let me," he'd said, and scooped me into his arms as if the world had gone soft. "You make me want to keep time," he had whispered, and held me close until I was dizzy with the safety of his strong chest.
He had been alive the last time I felt that life, and all those small, perfect moments—his laugh in sunlight, his thumb brushing a stray curl—kept surfacing while I watched Reed on the porch. Reed scrubbed slower than before. He scrubbed like someone repairing something he had broken.
When Drew led me back inside, he handed me something warm: a paper cup of tea and a bandage for my hand. "You seem tired," he said. "You should rest. CaptureHouse will contact other hunters. They'll sort the scene."
I had promised myself that I wouldn't do this again. I would not answer every frantic ping. I would not tear the day apart like a moth to a lamp. I would be with my baby. I would be safe.
"I won't go," I told Drew again.
"You might not be able to stop yourself," he warned. "When you see blood, you might—"
"I won't," I insisted.
We sat and talked, and when he thought I had calmed, he said, "If something is dangerous near you, we'll come."
"Good." I breathed out and listened to the hum of machines around us. "Please."
"Okay," he said, and left. His voice in the empty room was like a promise and a threat at once.
The screen on my phone buzzed through the day. I saw it and would not open it. I left the app alone on my home screen and pretended not to hear it hum. It kept pulsing like a heartbeat, impatient. I told myself, again and again: I'm done. I want to be ordinary.
By noon, we were all ready to go home. CaptureHouse sent a notice that the area was secured. "You can go back," it said to my profile.
"You're sure?" Drew asked at the boat. "They will contact you if anything else comes up."
"I'm sure," I lied to myself and to him. "I want to be at home."
We drove off. I sat on the passenger seat and pressed my belly with both hands like someone protecting an obvious treasure. The wind was light and the city felt stupidly bright after that place of shadows. I wanted to hold my husband flashbacks like porcelain in my mind, not to let them shatter.
At home, the house smelled like dish soap and dust. My mother-in-law—Joanna Hughes—was waiting with a tension that made her voice sharp when she saw me. "Angela!" she cried into the phone before it even rang. "He's gone! Someone took the baby!"
I froze. "What?"
She sobbed like a person toppled by wind. "I was pushing him at the gate and—someone snatched him! I ran after them—"
I stood there with the car keys still in my hand and the app sitting in the corner of my mind like a guilty animal. My phone rang with Joanna's voice in a way that peeled my insides out. Her breathing broke like thin glass.
"I called the police," she screamed. "Someone ran with him on a scooter! Oh God, Angela—"
"I am coming," I said. I didn't know if I was promising to an enemy or to myself. In the hall my dog, Battle, limped up and bumped my knee, whimpering. I grabbed him by instinct and leaned down.
"Call CaptureHouse," Joanna shouted. "Call them!"
The app on my phone pulsed. My fingers hovered. I thought back to the quiet room and Drew's face and the promise we'd made.
"No." I whispered the choice like a prayer and a lie. "No, I won't."
"Angela!" Joanna's voice broke as if she could hear the rejection. "What do you mean 'no'?"
"I said I won't," I said, and that was that. I flung the door open and ran into the sunlight with Battle behind me. I drove like a person whose skin had been peeled; everything burned. Cars blurred. I remember the taste of the wind like iron.
I reached the bridge as they told me in the app's updates. The little packet of messages I had ignored painted the route: a man named Alejandro Ray had grabbed a baby, sped along the riverside, panicked, and then—then threw the baby into the water. Each update arrived like a cliff sliding closer.
I saw a scooter. I saw the blanket sail. For a moment, we were slow as syrup, the world stretched and held me suspended over an empty place. I saw Battle jump out of the car and fall; I saw him reach the water, bark, and then—he caught the blanket. He brought the baby ashore like a small, soaked miracle.
"Hold him, hold him!" I screamed at the river like a lunatic. The baby's tiny face opened and then—once my hands touched him, I saw the blood. Bright, impossible. The back of his skull was a ruin.
I will never forget the weight of the blanket soaked with red. I will never forget that when I opened my hands, the boy was too small to be bone and blood and stillness, and yet he was all of that. My breath quit my chest like a blown candle. I had chosen not to see the app. I had chosen comfort. The choice had turned on me and cut.
Someone shouted that the police were on the way. Someone told me to lie down. I held my baby in both arms as if arms could be armor.
At the riverbank there were faces—neighbors, strangers, an old man who had been sweeping, a woman whose eyes were wide and full of accusation. A crowd gathered, and sirens wound near like a sound from a ruined future.
Alejandro Ray was caught within the hour. They found him shaking on a broken railing, clothes sticking to his skin. He was filthy and sullen, and there was a smear of red on his sleeve. He didn't look like a monster—he looked like someone who had been surprised into his own body.
"Why did you do it?" a woman yelled when they dragged him in handcuffs to the square near the police van.
He spat something that sounded like denial. "I didn't mean—" His voice was small and cracking. "It was an accident. I panicked."
"It wasn't an accident!" someone screamed back. "You threw a child into the river!"
"I—" His eyes darted to me. He saw me holding the blanket like a sacrament and then looked away as if the look would burn him. "I was told to; I was promised money."
"By whom?" the officer demanded, but Alejandro shook his head.
The crowd's anger gathered like a storm. Phones came out. People began to film. Someone called out the words that would carry far beyond that square: "He killed him!"
The police took him to the station. There, under the sodium orange lights of the holding room, he began to unravel. He had been a petty thief before, someone who had done other small cruel acts for small sums. But on that day he had become the instrument of cruelty that no one forgives easily.
We did not wait for a court. The square filled the next day with people who had heard and wanted more than legal phrasing. They wanted their eyes to witness something final. The city government promised an official hearing, and the local news vans set up like vultures. Alejandro was going to be shown to the public.
They brought him out at noon on the courthouse steps. The sky was stacked blue and indifferent. The crowd pressed forward until the square was a sea of faces—astonished faces, wet faces, faces of people who had children or knew someone who had lost a child. The police had him in cuffs, but they left his jacket open and his shirt half undone to show his chest heaving. The reporter's microphone hovered like a hungry thing.
"You're a murderer!" someone shouted.
Alejandro's lips twisted. "No—" He began to lie and then the sentence died. The cameras outside of the mics caught the first real cracks. He had a way of looking stunned, like someone who had watched himself do something in a dream and then woke to find the room full of blood.
"Did you plan this?" an old woman asked, and in the crowd there was a ripple of faces that hardened into something like a demand.
He flinched when he saw Battle and me in the front row, my face a map of sleepless nights. "I needed money," he said finally, in a voice that had become thin and used. "I was paid. I didn't— I didn't realize—"
"Who paid you?" demanded a voice that was not his to answer.
Alejandro began to speak of names he didn't say. He kept his eyes on the ground as if names might jump up and bite him. The crowd got louder, not because they didn't believe him, but because they wanted the truth to be dragged into daylight.
Then a man pushed through. He wore a business jacket and an exhausted look. People gasped. He stepped onto the steps like an accusation in a human body.
"You're lying," the man said to Alejandro. "You planned it." The camera turned and focused: he was one of the men who ran an illegal ring that sold small children on the black markets. People had called him affluent and ruthless. He had a name—Court Zhao—and then the word spread: he was a client of some traffickers.
Court had been caught before in gossip, but not in law. On the courthouse steps he stood trembling with rage. "We bought packages," he admitted in a voice that sounded like glass breaking. "We know people. We paid for infants—"
A chorus of gasps and cries rose. Phones recorded. For a moment the world stopped pretending this was about a single broken man. The crowd's focus split, and then sharpened. Alejandro's face crumpled as his own cheap reasons were dwarfed by the web that tumbled down.
"No!" he wailed. "I only did it because they told me—" He pointed weakly at Court Zhao. "He gave me money."
Court's face, once smug, turned from composure to hunger to panic. A reporter shoved a microphone into his face. "Is this true? Did you pay him?"
Court did not deny it. He tried to bluff. He tried to say the man had been coerced, that it was not him—but each of his denials cracked into something worse. People in the crowd began to name things they had suspected but never proved: small ads, odd charity fronts, nights when certain neighborhoods smelled of diesel and fear.
"What did you do with the others?" a woman demanded. "Where are the babies you sold?"
Court's lawyer tried to drag him away. A group of onlookers pressed in until the police pushed them back. Court's eyes traveled to the cameras with the terrified calculation of someone who knew he could not pay for what was coming.
For the first few minutes, Court was defiant. "You can't pin everything on me!" he hissed. "I'm a businessman—"
"You're a trafficker," someone cut in. "You're a coward." A man took a photo and posted it live. Court's face lost its smoothness; it became a mask of fear and anger. He tried to speak to the crowd, but the words twisted.
They dragged him up the stairs and pushed him to the very edge of the platform. The crowd began to chant, not with one voice, but with many broken ones. "Truth! Truth! Truth!" They wanted the whole network exposed. They wanted the city to stop pretending such things did not exist under its lights.
The mayor arrived, sweating in a suit that did not fit the cruelty of the moment, and promised an investigation. The press recorded everything. The people of the city were witnesses. They filmed Court's face blanching in real-time as his reputation dissolved into the sludge he had made.
Court's transformation was something to behold. He had been skilled at smiling; on the steps he tried to smile, then his mouth faltered. The public was not satisfied with a press release. They wanted him to feel the disgust he had manufactured. They wanted a reckoning where the face of ordinary cruelty would be made ugly.
"Do you want to confess?" a middle-aged woman asked, her voice shaking. "Say the names. Save the ones still out there."
Court's lips trembled and a sob choked him. He had treated the lives of infants as ledger entries. Now he was counted. His denial turned into pleading. "No—please. I can fix it. Give me time—"
"Fix it how?" a young father shot back. "By buying more children? By selling them to strangers?"
Court's composure finally crumbled. He began to speak the names like a spilled bag of stones. He named people—other men who had bought and sold. He named street addresses, phone numbers. The crowd's roar shifted to stunned murmurs and then steam. Each name was proof. Each proof was a nail. He saw his world collapse, and his reaction shifted from denial to shock to frantic insistence that he hadn't meant harm. People around him took out phones to record his confession.
Alejandro watched this with eyes like a struck dog. His own sentence had curled into something smaller than he had expected. He cried, he sobbed, and then he went still. The crowd took his shaking body into a kind of scornful silence between gossips. They turned their fury in complex ways—toward Court, at those who had kept money instead of reporting horror, at the system that let them think they could buy human beings in the shadows.
It was ugly and it was necessary. They marched Court up the steps to the microphones, and for a long hour he answered every question and named every accomplice he could no longer hide from. Each name spit oil into the fire. People began to call out addresses and phone numbers. Several men were pulled from cars and dragged, half-naked and furious, into the square. The press had more than they expected. The city's police had to move on rumors that morning; by evening they had a working list to act on.
Alejandro's ordeal was of a different tone. He was young. He had done evil for money, but he had also been used. In front of thousands he went from defiant to pleading.
"Please," he said, looking directly at me then. "Help me—I was paid. I didn't know—"
I looked at him. I wanted to tell him to be silent, to say nothing that might let him off. Instead I felt the avalanche of my guilt—my choice, my refusal to open the app—that had allowed a chain of events to play out. He had become the visible end of a rope that had been held by many hands.
"You threw him," someone shouted. "You killed that child's future."
"I didn't mean to!" Alejandro cried. "They told me to throw him into the river so they'd say it was an accident. They paid me."
"Who paid you?" a chorus demanded.
He named names. People shouted them back. The crowd's mood changed from anger to something like triumphant hunger. The men named were not all arrested that day, but the shame had been spread. The cameras caught court hearings and police raids. Men with clean hands were forced into the mud of accusations. For some of the small-time buyers, the crowd itself was the punishment—their faces plastered on newsfeeds, their children's schools called, their mothers confronted at markets.
Alejandro's punishment did not stop at the courthouse. The city made him stand in the market square the next week, once the press had circled. The mayor insisted on a public apology and a community hearing. People wanted to see him break and want to see the network that fed him collapse.
They made him do something old and humiliating: he was asked to stand before the grieving parents, before the people whose children had been taken and sold, and speak. He had to recount his actions and the names he had worked with. He had to answer questions about where children had been taken. His voice trembled from beginning to collapse and then to something like raw honesty as he flung himself into confession.
At one point a woman shoved forward holding a small carved toy that had once belonged to another missing child. "You will see what you stole," she said. "You will know us." Alejandro's face crumpled into a knot of tears and denial and then submission. The crowd was not just about vengeance; it demanded that his lies be taken away and replaced with truth. He broke down, naming addresses and networks like a boy naming names in school to save himself. The police took notes and dragged men out. The crowd's hunger for public justice had become a tool. The names he gave led to small raids, to rescue rooms where infants sat crying and confused.
But no punishment could bring back the baby I held in my arms on the riverbank. The public humiliation and the exposure of a trafficking ring were righteous; they were necessary. They made a map of the guilt and began to tear the network apart. Court Zhao's fall was spectacular—he was photographed being taken to a detention center, his business contacts evaporating in the glare of the cameras. Men who had thought themselves untouchable found their names broadcast and their families shamed.
Outside the courtroom, on the cold tiles of the square, people turned their cameras on those they had suspected for years. Social media ripped them apart in minutes. A few men who had been judged by their peers were stripped of their honors, their companies suffered, the schools their children attended were crowded with angry parents demanding answers. For some, the punishment was not prison but isolation: the people who had fed their greed turned away, their friends unfollowed them in public feeds, their spouses left. They were ruined in ways older than law.
Alejandro's face aged a decade during the week of exposure. He begged for mercy. "I was paid," he said. "They told me it would be a staged accident." He named more addresses. Men were taken from cars and offices. The press rode each arrest like a triumph. The people in the square cheered at each new name delivered into custody. Some shouted for more. Some sobbed for the children who could not be recovered. The city—in pieces—watched itself flay away its neglect.
In the end, the punishment was many-layered. Alejandro was arrested, charged, and put through courts. But his public humiliation—the stair-step fall from anonymity to a man sweating and naming names on a courthouse step—lasted longer in the town's memory than the trial. Court Zhao's business connections were ruined. Men with money found their faces on posters at bus stops. Public scorn is a slow and corrosive punishment. For some it was the sharpest blade.
I watched all of it from the front row and still felt nothing that filled the hole in my chest. The city had its justice. The network was being dismantled. But the small body I had tried to warm in my hands remained small and cold. I could not go back and open the app when it pleaded. I could not take back the choice to close my eyes.
That night, I sat on the riverbank where the water had taken the life it had wanted. Battle lay by my feet, limp and quiet. Around us, people lit candles and set them afloat. The flickering lights moved like tiny testimonies.
Drew found me and crouched beside me. "You did what you could when it mattered," he said. But his voice was a thread.
"No," I said. "I didn't. I chose not to see."
He took my hand and held it like someone who was not allowed to break. "You can still help," he said. "You can help the kids found, find homes. You can help the investigations."
"I failed my child," I whispered. "I failed the small, simple life I wanted to give him."
Across the square, the cameras closed in on Court Zhao's car being driven away by police. The city continued to turn. People argued about how to fix the system. Some wanted laws. Some wanted harder punishments. But none of that stitched my raw lungs.
The public punishment had been messy and loud and satisfying in a way that made the city ache less. It laid bare names and deals and the way greed had chosen to traffic in infants. It made men lose their business cards and their friends. It made Alejandro, Court Zhao, and many others feel the shame of being seen.
"Do you remember," Drew asked later, "what Reed said when he washed those shirts?"
"He said he'd hand-wash them after the machine cycle." I tried to make my lips curve.
"He believed in fixing by hand," Drew said. "Maybe we can pick up the pieces by hand too."
I looked at the little sugared candle floating on the river and then at my smudged reflection. I could not undo the decision I had made. But I began, clumsily and badly, to help where my feet could reach. I helped identify men the crowd accused. I volunteered at rescue centers. I learned how to hold other people's frightened infants without thinking of my own loss.
"No one will forgive me," I said to the woman who ran the shelter. "I can't forgive myself."
"You don't have to now," she said, rubbing the baby's back as it cried, peaceful in her arms. "You just have to keep doing things that matter."
That night, the city slept with a wound that had been exposed and cleaned, bleeding and crusting, and a public punishment that rocked a hidden trade into the light. The men who had fed on silence found themselves naked on steps, their names on cold air. Alejandro had been pilloried and accused and finally made to confess. Court Zhao had been exposed and removed from his heights. The crowd's watching eyes punished them with ruin, with the slow scrape of social exile.
I went home and kept the app. I could not bring myself to delete it again. It sat on my screen like a scar. Each time it pulsed, I felt the choice I had made and remember the warm press of Abel's hands.
"I won't do everything by myself," Drew promised over the phone one evening. "You don't have to."
"Maybe next time I'll answer," I said, and it was an admission and an oath both. The city had burned a few of its dark places into the open, but in my heart the greatest dark remained: I had chosen not to see, and a child had been taken.
Sometimes I still watch Reed on his porch when I go by the CaptureHouse. He still scrubs those shirts by hand, masked and steady. I watch his hands and think of Abel's hands and my own. We all do the small repairs the world needs, one by one, and sometimes those repairs are not enough.
But the city had learned to look. The crowd's memory would not let some men sleep in comfort. The public punishment had been a show of the people's anger and power. It had been loud and ugly and necessary. The names had burned. The ring had been cut. For a moment, the river seemed to hold its breath.
I kept the app because I could no longer trust my comfortable blindness. The phone pulsed sometimes and I answered. Not always. But I answered more often. I let the city be the place that watched, and I tried to be one of the hands that reached.
The End
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