Face-Slapping12 min read
I Found Him on Live — Then I Became the Director
ButterPicks15 views
They call me lucky by habit. "Aylin, you married well," people said for years. "Your father built it, you keep the name, Finch runs it." I used to smile. Now my smile had a hole.
"It can't be him," I told the screen at midnight. "No way."
He was on her bed. The streamer called herself SweetHeart Babe — silly, bright, fake laughter. She played with a silk sleep set and laughed when her viewers flooded the chat with heart emojis. I poured tea and sat, stupidly, to watch her show as a dare to myself: to keep awake, to keep company with the glow of other people's lives.
Then a shoulder slid into frame.
"Who is that?" I whispered.
There was a small heart-shaped birthmark on his left shoulder. My mouth went dry. My throat filled with all the small sounds I'd heard for years: the way Finch hummed when he shaved, the words he always used when he tucked my hair behind my ear. I put on my glasses. The camera didn't show his face, only the shoulder. Only the birthmark.
"That's—" I said. "Finch?"
My phone rang. I didn't think. I called him.
The live broadcast echoed my phone's ringtone. She grinned to the webcam and waved at the sound, "Oh, my boyfriend gave up? Hi, cutie, look, you almost ruined my cute show!"
He fumbled with the phone, voice low, then the line went dead. A message popped up: "With a client. Sleep early, babe." He wrote "babe" like he did in bed beside me, as if our history could be typed away.
I pulled the blanket over my head and wept. Then I called Giselle.
"Divorce him," my lawyer friend snapped at me hours later. "Aylin, if he transferred assets, get a freeze now."
"Divorce," I echoed. The word felt like a weak coat. The truth was heavier: Finch had been the steady anchor through my worst days. When my father died and the world blurred, when I miscarried last autumn and the quiet swallowed mornings — Finch was there. He held me and said, "We will have another chance," and for five years I believed him more than I believed myself.
"But—" I said. "He was always so good."
"Do it," Giselle said. "Evidence. We need evidence."
I hired Abel Torres, a private detective, like someone hires a locksmith to pry open a locked drawer. Abel was efficient and quiet. Two days later, Abel's email came: photographs, timestamps, hospital footage. I opened them with the calm of a person reading someone else's letters.
"She used to be an ICU nurse at Greenridge," Abel wrote. "She and Finch were at your father's bedside the week your father died. There are frames of them together the day your father went into the hospital. They kissed at the bedside."
I sat very still. "They were there when my father died?"
"Yes," Abel answered in the next message. "Timestamp: the day of the stroke."
The old grief that lived like a small creature in my chest woke and doubled in size. After that, nothing small mattered.
"You need to decide," Giselle said over coffee. "Will you press charges? Or—"
"I want something else," I told her. "I want everything back. And I want them to pay for my father's last breaths."
"Be careful, Aylin."
"I will be careful," I lied.
Two nights later I sat on the sofa and ate nothing. I watched Finch come in, smell of whiskey and corporate perfume, small at the edge of the kitchen like a man who doesn't belong. He kissed my forehead.
"Sorry, I slept at the hotel," he said. "Client night got out of hand."
"Okay," I said. "You smell like smoke."
He frowned. "You okay? You're very pale."
"I'm fine. Tell me, honey, did anything happen at the hotel?"
His eyes slipped away in a way I had once called tenderness. "No. I swear." He plucked an invisible lint from my sleeve and grinned. "You worried too much."
When he left the room I slid my hand into his jacket pocket. A single strand of long, chestnut hair clung to the fabric. My hands shook as if the truth were a hot coal.
"You're going to be careful," I said to myself. "This is a job."
I wasn't naive. Finch wasn't a one-night fool. The hair was a clue, the live screenshot a match. But the real sin he committed — the one that could not be undone by tears — was under the surface, in the quiet pages of the company's ledgers. My father's company, which used to be in my name, had been moved. The bank records that should have borne my signature were beneath Finch's.
"How?" I whispered. "When I was in mourning, when I was on medication."
I remembered the stack of documents he coaxed me to sign: "For the bank, darling. For security. Blank forms are easier; we will fill them later." I was blunted by grief and drugs. He had been gentle, holding my hand as I scrawled my name with trembling fingers.
"Snake," I said aloud. "A very polite snake."
I called Abel and asked him to dig deeper. He came back with more than I expected: surveillance from Greenridge Hospital, a photo of Finch and Daphne Zhu at my father's bedside the day he collapsed — their arms around each other, laughter frozen in pixels. Another file showed transfers. My family's holdings were not mine anymore.
"You're sure?" I asked Abel.
"Every cent we tracked went into Finch's accounts," Abel said. "And there's more. Daphne has messages that match Finch's number."
I felt the room tilt. For a while I did nothing. Then I told Giselle: "Make a divorce draft. But not yet. Let me play."
She warned me. "Aylin, playing with fire is not the same as revenge. It's messy."
"Good," I said. "I like messy. Mess is honest."
I faked a pregnancy. I forged a medical report with the help of a sympathetic lab manager Abel had found. I sat with the fake test result in my hands and thought of the blinking blue lines like a life sentence and a way to draw the snake out.
That evening Finch came home bubbling with joy. "Finally," he said. "Our child. We'll have our bloodline. I'm so glad."
He kissed the hollow of my neck and cried with a man who still believed in his own fairy tale.
"Don't you feel happy?" he asked, wiping his eyes.
"I feel... cautious," I said.
"For our baby," he said. "I'll do anything."
He meant it. He meant the company, too.
I started to set traps. A virus program, secretly installed in Finch's phone while he showered, forwarded his messages to me. I posed as a wealthy admirer on the streamer platform and sank thirty thousand into gifts for Daphne. "Boss M," I wrote from my fake account, "I'll marry you. I'll give you the world."
Daphne was young, twenty-two, viral and hungry for money. Her replies were cash register simple and cruel when she spoke of me: "That woman? What a joke."
I fed the charade. I used a second phone, a borrowed line, and the pay-for-display identity of "Boss M." I invited Daphne out. I hired Maddox Bridges — Finch's cousin at the company, bored and greedy — to play the rich man who would fall in love and propose in public. Maddox wanted status and a chance to prove he belonged. He bent easily to my plan.
At the restaurant, Maddox rose, knelt with a ring I had taken from my safe, and called Daphne "sweetheart." Cameras caught everything. Finch watched a photo later and didn't suspect a thing.
"She's mine now," Finch told me later, pride like smoke. "She'll take half and leave. Then nothing to worry about."
"Do you love her?" I asked softly.
He only shrugged. "Love is not the issue. Control is. I will control the company. I will control the assets."
He was always slick with words that made fundamental things disappear.
While keeping Finch content with the illusion of my pregnancy and the possibility of heirs, I ordered a discreet audit. Jack Newton, who owed me a favor once upon a time, pulled ledgers and sent them to my desk in neat PDFs. The numbers were a betrayal in columns: fund transfers, shell companies, false invoices. Finch had been draining the company slowly, carefully, like he had drained my trust.
I had evidence finally. I took the audit to the police and to Giselle. "Freeze his accounts," I instructed. "Everything. We present these to the board and the prosecutors."
I also used my "Boss M" persona to get closer to Daphne. I offered comfort, flattery, money. She confessed to me, through the false intimacy, the details of the deals: a USB drive she held containing files on company transfers, photos of Dad's hospital moments. She said Finch had paid her to keep that day quiet.
"Why didn't you tell anyone?" I asked, voice patient.
"Because I wanted him to marry me," she said. "Because he said he'd leave his wife for me."
"Did he?" I asked.
"He promised," Daphne answered. "He promised more than he delivered."
All the while, Finch led me in private, back into bed as a man who pretended to be repentant. He came to me with soup. He brushed my hair. "It was a mistake," he said. "I love you, Aylin."
"Do you?" I asked. "Do you love the money, Finch?"
He flinched and lied. "Both."
The day everything shifted came when Daphne, finally pressed, set up a meeting and threatened to expose Finch unless she was paid off. Finch was furious, drunk, and scared. Abel recorded their argument. I watched it from a hidden camera I had placed in her apartment a week earlier.
"Give me what I asked!" she screamed into the phone, words raw.
"I gave you three hundred thousand!" he hissed. "That's all you get."
"You will give me more," she said, defiant. "You took my silence for granted."
He arrived at her door flustered. Neighbors heard. Someone filmed on their phone. The confrontation turned violent. Words became hands. In the scuffle a knife flashed — the neighbors' footage looped again and again on the news — and Daphne fell. Finch stood over her, stunned. The sirens swallowed his voice.
I watched it all through a screen and felt my lips dry, my breath go thin. I had wanted them punished, but not like this. Not blood.
Police swarmed. Finch was taken in handcuffs. His eyes met mine once through a camera. They were not the same eyes that had pleaded at the foot of my bed. He shouted my name in the custody van; the cameras caught it. "Aylin!" he yelled. "Aylin, don't—"
I stood up and walked to the window. Outside, a swarm of reporters gathered. Finch's arrest was a spectacle. The social feeds spun into a frenzy; the company building posted a statement, shareholders called meetings. My world, built of cool rooms and polite praise, had become a stage.
At the pre-trial hearing, the courtroom was packed. The judge's bench looked like a stage, and the public overflowed into the corridors. Cameras were banned inside, but they gathered in the lobby and livestreamed the crowd's reaction. I sat in the third row, hands folded in my lap, heart like a trapped bird.
Finch's lawyer approached me before the doors opened. "Aylin," he said, eyes flat. "Whatever you are planning, think twice. He is not a murderer by character."
"He is a thief," I answered. "He is everything he pretended not to be."
"Don't judge a man on rumors," the lawyer said.
"Then judge him on his bank statements," I replied.
When the defendant was called, Finch's face was gray. Daphne's family sat behind me, their grief an open wound. The prosecutor read the case: unlawful disposition of company assets, embezzlement, and, crucially, the violent result of the fight. Finch's hands trembled as he mouthed denials. He claimed accident. He claimed he had no intention. He claimed, with a voice that once coaxed me to sign papers, "She wasn't supposed to die."
"Your Honor," the prosecutor said, voice steady, "the evidence shows planned transfers, threats, payment for silence, and the defendant's aggressive intent that night."
I listened to the list: emails, transfers, audio recordings, eyewitness accounts. Abel and Jack testified on the chain of custody. The board members gave statements about sudden changes. The press ate every detail.
Outside, on the court steps, a crowd of reporters gathered. A camera zoomed in on Finch, led out in cuffs when the judge ordered remand. He screamed at me, but it was swallowed by the buzzing microphones. Someone shoved a microphone inches from his face.
"Why?" a reporter cried. "Why did you do it? How could you?"
"I—" Finch choked. "I loved my family. I loved my child!"
"You lied," I told him, voice a knife. "You loved yourself."
Those words made him pallor and shake. He tried to lunge, tried to say I tricked him, but the cameras turned his rage into spectacle. His supporters were sparse; shareholders posted cold statements about trust and loss. The world that once bowed to his suit now spat while flashing phones at his humiliation.
The sentencing day was worse. The courtroom was saturated with press, with the victim's family, with shareholders and employees who wanted faces held accountable. The gallery overflowed. When the judge pronounced the verdict — guilty on embezzlement and on the aggravated charges related to the fight — Finch's face collapsed.
"Life," the judge said, voice low. "Life without parole."
"You are a murderer," Daphne's brother screamed when the gavel hit. "You took her life and our future."
Finch crumpled into himself. He reached for the glass barrier between him and the public, as if the barrier could stop the weight of the news. "Aylin," he mouthed. "Aylin, please—"
I leaned forward. "You took my father's safety. You took my name. You took everything," I said calmly. The cameras picked it up. His knees gave like an old tree. He screamed, then he pleaded. "Forgive me. Please. For the child—"
I had recorded him begging in the visiting room later, the thin man who had thought he could buy his way out. The public watched his fall on every channel. The shareholders called emergency meetings. The company froze accounts, and the emergency board reasserted control.
At the public shareholders' meeting that followed, I stepped onto the stage. The room was filled with voices, with cameras, with the heavy hush of people who had been betrayed. Someone had the gall to applaud my being there.
"Ms. Fitzgerald?" the interim chairwoman asked, surprised.
"I am here," I said. "My father built something with his hands. It was meant to be trusted. It is not a toy for the grasping or the dishonest."
There were murmurs. People took notes. Finch's name echoed around the room with the hollow ring of a bell.
"You," I said, turning to the corporate counsel who had once smiled at Finch's neat lies, "have failed to protect what matters. You let one man become an empire in his head. We will restore the company's integrity. We will repay what we can to the families harmed. And we will not forget how easily trust is weaponized."
"How?" someone asked.
"By audits, by oversight, by a board that answers to the people who built the company — not to those who think a suit is enough."
That night, headlines read: Finch Khalil — From Boardroom to Prison. Online forums dissected his every lie. Friends who once toasted him turned their profiles private. The man who had once been unassailable now had a life sentence tattooed in public record.
But the punishment didn't rest in prison walls. The greater punishment for Finch was the slow collapse of the life he had built on theft. His name became a warning. The suppliers he had used to launder funds walked away. The small people he had used — including Maddox, who had begged me for help before he stumbled and fell into debt — suffered different fates. Maddox had run from loan sharks and later fell down a stairwell while trying to escape a collector; he survived but not unscarred, his face blunted and his future contracted. He called me once from a hospital bed and said, "I never wanted this, Aylin." I gave him no reply.
I visited Finch in prison once. He pressed his hands flat to the glass and spoke into the receiver while I sat steady on the other's side.
"Aylin," he said. "I know I did wrong. I know I'm guilty. But the child—"
"There is no child," I said and slid an envelope across the table between us. He stared. Inside was the real pregnancy test result, negative. His face crumpled and a low animal sound left him — grief, rage, disbelief.
"You lied," he said, with the fury of a man who had finally understood his own emptiness.
"I lied to expose you," I said. "You built your world out of my sorrow. You built houses on my name and thought you could live forever on that ground. You can't."
He raged, moaned, begged. The visiting room filled with the private fury of a man who had been stripped. He could not undo the transfers, the threats, the day he placed his hands where they did. He could not recall the precise moment he traded love for ledger lines.
Outside the prison, a small crowd waited, some wept, some shouted. The stock price stabilized after a harsh quarter of turmoil. People told me I had been cold; others called me a savior. I did not accept either label. I had been a daughter and a fool and then — when given no other option — an equalizer.
The last scene I remember before the quiet that came after grief was a small green stone in my palm. It was one of the jade pieces my father had bought before I was born. He had placed them in a safe deposit box and whispered legends I didn't understand. They had been my secret when the rest of my life was taken.
I opened the bank box and held the stones up to the sun. "These are yours now," I told the little pebbles. "You were never his to touch."
They were small and warm in my hands. The sun cut through the glass and painted them alive.
On the drive home I decided how to rebuild. I would take the company back, brick by careful brick. I would restore the accounts to their rightful place. I would find the people my father trusted and call them in. I would hire honest auditors; I would make policy changes that could not be circumvented by a charming liar.
"Are you going to be okay?" Giselle asked when I sat with her later, a cup of cold tea between us.
"I don't know," I said. "But I'm done letting other people write the ending to my story."
"Then what now?" she asked, leaning forward.
"Now," I answered, and smiled, "I plant a new garden."
I kept one small secret to myself: the way I had orchestrated pieces of pain and truth was not clean. Some of it had been ugly; some of it had been necessary. The world is not a black box of right and wrong. It is a messy table of bills, receipts, love, and vengeance. I had poured all of that onto the table and then sat back to watch the collapse.
The last photograph of Finch in my phone is of his shoulder, the heart-shaped birthmark like a coin. He will spend his life thinking of what he lost. I will spend mine arranging what I have left.
I put the jade stones into a small box and locked it away in a new safe — not because they were valuable, but because they were proof that my father's hands had once held something honest.
That night, alone in the dark kitchen, I opened the box just to look. The stones glittered like two green promises.
"One for each of us," I whispered to them. "One for me. One for him."
Then I turned the lock and walked away.
The End
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