Face-Slapping17 min read
I Fell, I Woke, I Made Them Pay
ButterPicks14 views
"Get up."
I dropped the script and the room went quiet.
"Are you okay?" Monica asked. Her voice shook more than mine did.
"No," I said. "I'm not okay."
I still remember the smell of the studio that night—cold air, dust, cheap coffee. I remember Chandler's laugh, the way his eyes had sharpened when they landed on me. I remember the kiss that wasn't a kiss and the price he put on my silence.
"You shouldn't have worn that dress," he had told me once, as if he owned the meaning of my skin. "You shouldn't have smiled like that."
"Why are you doing this?" I had asked.
"Because you left me," he said. "Because you broke me first."
Now, months later, in a hospital hallway that sounded like a drum, I told Monica the same truth again.
"I didn't betray him," I said. "I never did."
"You already told him that," she whispered.
"I told him nothing," I said. "I did everything for them, and he let them use me. He let them throw my life into the street."
Monica looked at me like she wanted to protest, but the newsprint on my phone made her hands freeze. "They ran everything," she said. "They ran the post, the leak. They chose you."
"They chose me like they chose a story," I said. "They never chose who I was."
"Come on," Monica said. "You have to go on set. You need this role."
I thought about my mother in that hospital bed, of the hand I used to tuck under her cheek. I thought about the debt letters that arrived like threats every morning. I thought about the men who wanted to own the moment of my shame and sell it for clicks.
"I don't have a choice," I said.
The first time I saw Chandler after that, he wore his new look—clean lines, a smile practiced for the camera. He was sharper than I remembered, colder in a way that could be trimmed like glass.
"Nice to see you're still here," he said to me in the testing room, and the other directors snorted laughter like they didn't hear.
"Thank you for the chance," I replied. "I won't waste it."
He raised an eyebrow. "If you want the part, you'll do what I ask."
"I will act," I said. "That's what actors do."
"Do you?" he asked, stepping closer slowly, as if to prove a point. "Can you pretend to be whoever I need you to be?"
There are lines you never imagine having to cross. There are faces you never imagine turning away from you.
"Tonight," he said later, in the dark of his expensive hotel room, "if you want the lead, you give me what I want."
"You're mistaken," I told him.
"Then leave," he said. "Don't come back and ruin what little you have left."
I wanted to walk out. I wanted to spit in his face and run back to the hospital. Instead, I stayed, because what choice did I have in a world where money bought futures and people?
He didn't give me time to plead. He took what he wanted and called it a scene. He smiled like a man who didn't know the difference between cruelty and business.
"You're good," he said afterwards. "Very useful."
"I didn't come here to be used," I told him. "I came to act."
"You act well," he said. "You sell for the camera."
He left a check on the bedside table. It read five million.
I picked it up and felt the shame spread like oil across my hands.
"You can buy me," I said to the empty room. "You can buy my silence. You can buy my life."
Two days later, photos leaked across the net. Screens lit up, and my name became a wind everyone wanted to ride. Evil people smiled at their teeth. My phone became a battlefield. I vomited blood once and kept it inside because I needed my voice later.
The hospital called with news I wanted to believe was a lie.
"Ms. Feng, your mother... she has been found."
I ran. I held her hand like a girl clutching at a last promise.
"Wake up," I begged. "Wake up. Please."
They told me she drowned. They said she couldn't bear the shame. The news ticked at my feet: "Actress involved in scandal; mother commits suicide."
"Why?" I asked the ceiling. "Why did you make me beg and then let this happen?"
Monica folded the funeral notice into coins and shoved them into her pocket. "People will think you did this by design," she said, her words a flat knife. "They will not leave you alone."
I thought of Chandler's face, of Crystal Emerson's bright smile, of Blake Williamson's calm. I thought of who'd had time to plant traps and who had motive to make me fall.
A month later, on a roof I had once stood on by accident and by desire, I took a step.
I expected the fall to be a release.
I expected death.
When the ground hit, my world went bright white.
"You're gone," I thought. "At last, I am free."
Then I woke up in heat and the smell of soap and a different kind of body.
I could feel the foreign weight of someone else's arm, the unfamiliar loop of scars, the echo of a name that wasn't mine.
"Am I dead?" I said into the dark.
No one answered like a familiar voice would. A white ceiling watched me from up close. "Who are you?"
"Where is Cataleya?" I asked, and the voice that returned was mine, but not mine. The language of another life came with it: a string of files, a child who had no one, a faded degree in fashion, a name that had been erased.
I learned that a woman named Elise had been declared dead after rescuers found her body on the shore. Elise, they told me, was supposed to have drowned saving a child. The papers had her name. The hospital listed a different identity. I found Elise's records, her small claims, her empty contacts. I didn't know her. I had suddenly been given her life.
"You should be thankful," Monica said when I called her with shaking hands. "You woke up. You survived."
"Survived what?" I asked.
"Everything," she said. "You're alive. You were missing and then you were found."
I told myself that being given life again wasn't a victory. It was an invitation. I took it.
"What's your name?" Foster Bloom asked when he came by the care facility two weeks later. His face was steady like a rock. "You should choose something."
"I am Cataleya Feng," I said, because the name had once been mine, even if my face had changed. "But I don't live that life anymore."
Foster put his hand over mine. "Names are less important than what you do."
I started again with a new name in their mouths: Seraph Hart. Monica liked it because it sounded new and clean. She styled me, got me an agent, taught me to use the old photographs as a mask. We went slowly. We learned a new address. We avoided the gossip columns that had once fed on me.
"You're not going back to that life," she said, as if she could iron the mistakes out of my past. "Not unless you want to."
I nodded.
I wanted revenge. I wanted face-slaps and public reckoning. But the world we lived in didn't hand out justice on demand. It required strategy.
"You don't need to ruin him," Foster said once as he sat in my small apartment and listened. "You need to show the truth."
"The truth will get buried," Monica said. "People will pick whatever version is easier to believe."
"And they will always prefer drama," I said. "They will choose a story that fits their need to feel superior."
"Then we'll give them the right story," Foster said. "Slowly. Carefully."
For months we built a quiet counterblast. Monica whispered to old friends. Foster used his calm voice in circles of doctors and hidden donors. I learned to film again, to make small, sharp choices for camera. I walked sets where I was nobody, where no one expected me to be more than a new face.
Chandler was everywhere or nowhere. He built his 'brand' by embodying the kind of charisma that eats people for breakfast. He hit the grand openings with Crystal Emerson on his arm. He put Blake's money to work and hedged his way around any scandal that might touch him. I had been convinced he had wanted to break me, but once I heard the full arc, things sharpened.
"It wasn't just him," Monica said. "Crystal and Blake wanted to move into the energy project your family had. They made money by seeing you as an obstacle and by using you as the weapon to distract everyone."
"Who else?" I asked.
"A partner named Zhang," she said. "Eric Roux arranged the transfer. They were worried the renewable project your father worked on would come back to life."
The story fell into place like steps down from an old house. My father's work, the energy patents, the money owed—someone had planned it all. Blake's family had influence in the market. They had motive. Crystal had motive. And Chandler had—what? A broken heart and a taste for power.
"If we can expose the chain," Foster said, "we can take down the people who made a business of ruining lives."
I started to watch. I watched Blake and Crystal from a distance. I watched technology shift, and I watched investments that seemed too neat. Blake moved like someone who had never had to survive without money. He smiled like he knew he could buy the ending of a life. Crystal worked the same room as someone who loved the light on her. Both of them had reasons to want my family gone.
I didn't want revenge to be the only thing I had. But I wanted the faces of those who hurt me to be an answer to the silence my mother died in.
"You look like her," Chandler said once when he stood over me in a rehearsal. "You move like her."
"I move like I practiced," I said.
"Do you always have to be so careful?" he asked. "It's annoying."
"You could be less cruel," I said.
He laughed. "Cruelty and truth are friends."
That weekend, Crystal's brother—Blake—had to go to a meeting. I learned, through a source Foster had quietly nurtured inside Blake's group, that there would be a transfer of funds. Late at night. A shell company. Eric Roux had a hand in it.
"We need proof," Foster said.
"Then give me the proof," I said.
The night we got it, Blake's driver took a back road to avoid cameras and a protest. Crystal was on his phone, talking business. Blake's car slowed, then stopped. A small device slid under the hood and transmitted addresses. Chandler's team—Chandler had come awake in a way I had never expected—intercepted it and posted the transfer details. The stock took a hit so fast Blake's people couldn't move.
Blake's empire started to bleed.
I watched the news on a monitor in Monica's office. "They got him," she said quietly. "His stock is crashing."
"Good," I said.
The world is not a fair place. It doesn't always balance the books. But public balance can be created like light through a prism—if you know how to turn the lens.
They tried to blame Crystal and Blake for the leaks, and they tried to pin the scandal on third parties, but once a pattern was made—a pattern that showed how Blake's company benefited from the collapse of my family's project—people began to look.
I didn't feel better the first time Blake's name was called on live television. I felt hollow. I had imagined the revenge would roar. It was more like tapping at glass.
Chandler watched the whole thing like a man watching his own creation. He didn't gloat. He didn't even smile much. He paced. His jaw clenched. The man who had left me on a roof to fall seemed smaller that week, like someone trying to be as big as his rumors.
One night I followed him. Not to hurt him. Not to ask. To see.
"I thought you were dead," he said when I confronted him in the small service alley outside his building.
"So did I," I said. "I thought I had left, but I woke up."
"Elise—" he said, trying her name.
"It doesn't matter," I said. "You did this. You made my life into an object. You stripped me."
"Do you know how sorry I am?" he asked. "Do you know what I did?"
"You told me I was cheap," I said. "You said my father jumped and left us. You used me. You made five million into my shame."
"I was a coward," he said. "I was stupid."
"Cowardice doesn't cost the same as a life," I said.
He stood there, hands tucked into his coat like a man who couldn't decide whether to freeze or burn. "I would take it back if I could."
"Can you even imagine taking it back?" I asked. "Do you think a sorry on a roof covers a mother's dead hands?"
He put his head down. I saw in his face the pain that had never once stopped me from hating him. "I couldn't save your mother," he said. "I couldn't even protect you."
"You could have stopped it," I said. "You could have refused to play with people who use lives as bullets. You didn't."
"Then make me pay," he said suddenly. "Make me pay. Tell me what to do."
"I don't want you to pay because I want you to suffer," I said. "I want you to be different."
"That's impossible," he said.
"Startsmall," I said. "Start by owning what you did."
He looked like he'd been punched. "What? On live, in public?"
"Yes. On live. You can do that," I said. "Confess the campaign. Confess your role. Let them see your hands."
"You want me to confess on camera?" he asked. "You'll ruin me."
"Maybe," I said. "But if you hide, then the people who were wronged will never see the truth, and you'll keep building castles on the bones of others."
He was silent, then. The street smelled like rain. My pulse was a drum.
"If I do it," he said slowly, "do you forgive me?"
"Forgiveness isn't a thing you give to get absolution," I said. "Forgiveness is for you alone. If you confess and you are humble, you might find a path. But don't confuse confession with erasing your wrong."
He laughed without humor. "That's fair."
We arranged it. He would go public on a talk show that had a history of truth-bombs. He would say what he did. He would name Crystal, Blake, and the network that spread the photos. He would give them the evidence we had, which Chandler himself helped collect by doing his own tracking.
The night before the show, Crystal called my manager.
"Don't let him," she hissed. "You can't let him ruin us."
"Why would you think we would help you?" Monica asked slowly.
Crystal's voice broke. "He's going to burn us."
"Then be ready to be burned," Monica said. "You started a fire."
The show aired and the city watched like a hungry crowd. Chandler spoke with a voice that tried to be honest and cracked under pressure.
"I am responsible," he said. "I allowed a culture that made this possible. I let men with money buy outcomes. I used a young woman—Cataleya Feng—and I drove her to a place I can never fix."
We watched together in Monica's office. Foster held my hand and let the confession play out. When Chandler named Crystal and Blake, the room went cold. The host pushed for documents. Chandler gave them up. The chain had numbers and emails and bank transfers. It had all the ugly carelessness of people who thought they were beyond view.
"They paid people to leak," Chandler said finally. "They wanted the project dead. I let them use me."
The public reaction was a storm. Crystal's PR crumpled like wet paper. Blake's firm plunged into emergency mode. They were forced to talk, to respond. The media circled and circled, but now they had a direction to bite.
Days later, the first of them fell.
Crystal's sponsor dropped her. Blake's accounts froze. Zhang was questioned. The market punished the family he had built. A man who had thought his life was a river became a sandbar in a storm.
I felt nothing immediate. I had thought revenge would be delicious and sharp. It tasted flat. But then small things happened that felt like stitches. People who had turned away from me came knocking. Not to apologize, but to take back what they'd said and to slyly like my new posts. I didn't meet them.
Chandler came to my set. He stood at the edge and watched me perform like a man watching a trial. He refused to sit with the rest. He wouldn't speak to me in public.
And then things changed for Crystal. She was stripped of roles. She called lawyers. She cried in public. She blamed everything on a mistake, on a misinterpretation.
Blake tried to run. He couldn't. People wanted blood. He had used a child's life as a bargaining chip and then tried to walk away.
I saw him, once, in a boardroom after everything collapsed. His arrogance was gone. He looked faded, like someone who had lost his color. Someone pushed him toward the exit, and he stumbled. Slap after slap, the world watching.
"They're already paying," Chandler said quietly to me once, standing in a park near a fountain that smelled of iron. "But you deserve better than this."
"What am I supposed to do?" I asked. "Start over?"
"Yes," he said. "Start. But don't let me drag you into my mess."
"Maybe I don't want to be saved by you," I said.
"Then don't be," he said. "Be saved by yourself."
The months after were a slow burn. My name, Seraph Hart, rose in a small arc. People liked me because I wasn't a story. I learned how to say 'no' the right way. I learned to refuse offers that felt wrong. I learned to trust people who had nothing to gain.
We pressed charges against the people who hurt me. Blake and Crystal faced civil suits. Their world fell apart. The money that had been funneled to ruin my family was traced. A judge asked awkward questions. The press shouted. The market crumbled.
It should have felt satisfying when a judge ordered a freeze on Blake Williamson's assets. It did not. The man who had caused so much pain did not go to prison right away. He did, however, lose his grip on the world he had built. People who had once smiled at his parties stopped returning his calls. He disappeared from photos.
One winter, Chandler found me at the small grave where my mother lay. I had decorated it once with a cake she had taught me to make. I kept a white lily next to the stone. He knelt there too, awkward as a man without a script.
"All these months," he said. "I thought if I apologized enough maybe it would do something."
"It won't bring her back," I said, looking at my hands.
"No," he said. "But it will mark that I tried."
"Trying doesn't erase," I said. "It only starts."
He looked at me, and something in his face cracked so much that I thought he might fall apart. He leaned forward and touched the gravestone like a child looking for warmth.
"Would you ever let me make it up?" he whispered.
"Make it up?" I said. "You can try."
He looked stunned, like someone hearing a language he had forgotten belonged to him.
"I will work," he said. "I will stop making choices that hurt people."
"How will I know?" I asked.
"You won't," he said. "But I'll keep working."
After, the media called. They wanted a headline. They wanted reconciliation or drama. I gave them restraint instead.
"Will you ever love me again?" Chandler asked finally, late one night at a closed set.
"I don't know," I said.
He had no right to demand the answer. He had broken me and the people around me. He had cost me my mother. He had hurt me in a way that money couldn't buy back.
"I won't be your thing," I told him.
He nodded slowly. "I wouldn't ask."
Time did something I wouldn't have chosen but needed. It hardened me into something sensible. It forced Chandler to unlearn reflexive cruelty. It forced Blake and Crystal to rebuild from nothing. It made the papers spin.
Some small joys returned to me. I learned to make a cake that tasted like forgiveness without forgetting the flavor of loss. Foster came to my shows. Monica cried sometimes and then showed up at premieres. Chandler watched and didn't applaud at first. He learned to be present without making everything about him.
One summer night, I was at a charity screening. Chandler stood at the edge of the room. I watched him, anonymous in the crowd. When the film ended, he walked over and took my hand.
"I saw you tonight," he said. "You were brilliant."
"Thanks," I said.
"This time your art isn't a trap," he said. "It is you."
I let him say the words and not expect anything from them. I had stopped needing him to fix me. I had started building a life that didn't revolve around being loved by the man who had cost me my mother.
Months later, a small court hearing named Blake and Crystal as conspirators in the scheme that ruined my old life. They had to pay, not out of remorse but because a balanced ledger had to be drawn.
"Justice does not always feel like justice," Foster told me as we walked out of the courtroom into a cold sun.
"It's easier when it's final," I said.
"You deserve to write your own ending," he said.
"He is part of my story," I said. "That won't disappear."
"That's okay," he said. "Stories can have ugly chapters."
The ultimate face-slap came when Crystal's publicist released a statement that, line by line, mirrored the evidence we had already given. People watched her stumble like a presiding queen tripped by her own shoes. She was not broken so much as shrunk, and in the shrinkage I felt a cold satisfaction.
I never lost the memory of the roof. I never stopped hearing the phone calls. I carried the ache with me like a badge I didn't want.
"Will you ever let him in?" Monica asked me once over tea.
"Let him in?" I repeated. "In my life?"
"To be part of your family," she said.
"I would never let anyone replace my mother," I said. "But I could let someone be part of my life without being everything."
Chandler learned to stay quiet in a way I had never thought possible. He learned to be visible only when asked. He learned to do real work: he helped produce a small documentary about women in our industry, donating funding and time and his own public face to a piece that didn't need him to be a martyr. He hired survivors as consultants. He gave money to battered shelters. He spoke at panels about consent and power.
People called it a PR move. Some even said he was buying his absolution. I let them say whatever it helped them sleep.
One winter, I stood on a stage and accepted an award. People cheered. The award was for a role in which I had channeled grief and power and something hard-earned. I looked out into the crowd and saw Foster smiling. I saw Monica crying wet little tears and then wiping them away before anyone noticed. I saw Chandler at the back, almost invisible, his hands folded like a man who hadn't learned how to applause properly. He was smaller in that way. He had learned to be smaller in front of my light, and maybe that was a kind of growth.
After the speech, he found me. We stood outside under a sky full of city haze.
"You look good," he said, as if beauty were a currency between us that had nothing to do with blood or debt.
"So do you," I said. "You look like you slept."
"I didn't," he said. "But I was trying to be better."
"Good," I said. "Keep trying."
"Will you try with me?" he asked.
"Try? No," I said. "I will not try for you. I will live my life."
"I don't expect you to be the woman you were before," he said. "I know I can't take that back."
"You can be better," I said. "And you can let me be happy without you."
He nodded. "That's fair."
We left it like that. He started to do better. I started to build a life that had room for work and quiet and for a few people who did not hold my past like a club.
One evening, in the shadow of the old stone theater where we first met, I placed a white lily on the steps. A streetlight caught the petals and made the flower glow like a promise.
"I am not her caretaker," I told Chandler when he found me there. "I will not be your angel."
"I don't want you to be," he said. "I want you to be Cataleya."
"I am Cataleya," I said. "But I won't be someone you own."
"Then stay with me as you are," he said.
"I will," I said. "But I will never be owned."
We stood face to face under the streetlamp. He reached out and took my hand, this time without asking, and for the first time in years I did not feel a trap. The city breathed around us, indifferent, cruel, beautiful.
I let him kiss me then—not because I had forgiven him, but because I had chosen myself.
The last thing I left at that stone was an old recipe book with my mother's handwriting and a note inside that read: "Live. Bake. Love the way you want."
"Will you keep baking?" Chandler asked, like it mattered to the story as a whole.
"I will," I said. "And I will teach you how to make a cake that doesn't hide sorrow."
He smiled. "Then I have a lot to learn."
"Start by listening," I said.
"Okay," he said. "I will listen."
We did not fix the past. We did not pretend the past never happened. We stood in the wreckage of it and learned how to build smaller things: a decent apology, a quiet late night, a shared recipe, a cake without lies.
When the cameras came, I didn't pull my sleeve down or hide. I looked at them and then at Chandler. He looked back and didn't lean in. He held himself still like a man who had found a new script.
"You know," I said to him once on a rooftop where the wind made our hair wild, "I thought falling would end everything."
"It didn't," he said.
"It didn't," I repeated. "But it made me see what matters."
"What's that?" he asked.
"Who I am when I don't let anyone else write me into a story," I said.
He nodded like he understood, and for once, his understanding was enough.
I walked down the roof steps and left the city breathing behind me. I took a cake my mother had taught me to make. I placed it on the grave and I said the words out loud.
"I will live," I told the small stone and the empty air. "I will live."
Behind me, footsteps came slow and steady.
"Are you coming?" Chandler asked.
"No," I said, "I am not coming for you. I'm coming for myself. But you can walk beside me if you ever learn to listen."
He took one step. I took another. We did not belong to each other. We were two people with threads to mend. I no longer wanted to be someone else's fix. I wanted to be my own.
And so I went on—baking, acting, living—carrying a wound that had become a map.
Sometimes, at night, I still hear the phone. Sometimes, I still think of the roof and the white dress. Sometimes I hate him. Sometimes I forgive him for reasons that have nothing to do with him.
But I am alive. I have my work. I have proof. I have the faces of those who were punished in public and the quiet knowledge that some things—like a mother's voice in a cooking note—are small churches I can return to when the world gets loud.
"Do you ever regret coming back?" Chandler asked me once, in a small voice that fit the hum of a refrigerator.
"I regret a lot of things," I said. "But I don't regret waking up."
He put his hand on mine. I let him.
We both understood the rules. He could try to be better. I could try to be whole. The rest began with small acts: a courtroom decision, a public name on a list, the smell of a white lily by the stone, a recipe book in my hands.
I had been made into a headline. I had been made to fall. I had been made into something else.
I stood up again and decided this time I would write the next lines myself.
The End
— Thank you for reading —