Face-Slapping13 min read
I found out he’d made a baby with his first love — and I smiled
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"I’m pregnant with your husband’s child," the message read.
"I told him he should leave you. He promised. Do you want to be fair? You’ve had five years and no baby. He wants a child. Let him have me."
I stared at the unknown number. I put the phone down and blocked it without typing a reply.
"This is the third time," I told myself out loud. "Third time in three months."
"Gavin," I asked him directly that night. "Are you having a baby with someone else?"
He smiled like he had done on our wedding day, that carefully practiced small smile—"I love you, Nina" in slow motion.
He did not answer.
The house smelled the way it always did when he had been working late and come home hungry: warm soy, takeout containers stacked in the sink. Our life looked normal from the sofa.
"You’re not being honest," I said.
"I'm being careful," he said. "Someone is trying to hurt me at work. You know how it is."
"You keep saying that."
He reached for my hand. "I am doing this for us, Nina. The work I do now—our future."
I had sat across from him at so many dinners where he explained, and I had clapped at his raised brow. I had tried to believe him.
My new assistant, Faith, came in smiling and holding a brown bag. She looked twenty-three, bright and neat. She set the bag on the table. She laughed as if she belonged and offered the roasted duck.
"Your wife likes duck," she said. "I warmed it. You told me."
I caught Faith’s belly with my eyes. She was flat. She was a girl straight out of a campus brochure. I smiled, put my phone on record hidden in the couch cushion, and stood up.
"Stay for dinner," I told her, though I planned to step out for watermelon.
"No, you go. I’ll stay and chat," she said, and the way she squeezed his arm made a small bell ring inside me.
I left. I walked to the corner store, bought fruit, and let the summer air press cool against my face. I thought of our seven years: the college nights, the quiet mornings, the tiny apartment we had made into a home. I thought about a brand I had spent years building—children’s and couple clothes that tested my hands and made me proud.
I came back and placed the recording-thing on the couch where I had set it earlier. I poured water over the melon, pretended to hum as I cut slices. I heard laughter through the kitchen door.
I walked toward the kitchen and opened its door while holding my phone closely. I was ready to listen. I wanted proof. I wanted to hear him explain away everything like he always had.
"He’s going to have my baby," Faith chirped, loud and proud. "He told me he wants children. He says you work too hard, Nina. He says you don’t want kids now. He says, ‘I want to be a father.’"
"I—" Gavin’s voice was soft, like someone caught between two choices.
"I won’t ruin your life," Faith said. "I just want what’s mine. He promised me a home."
I saved the file and felt my chest still. I went to the bathroom and took a breath.
Dinner was quiet. Gavin stared at his plate. He had been holding a small item in his pocket for a long time, and it had a weight to it.
"Let’s talk," I said.
He looked up. "About?"
"About us." I sat. "Are you leaving me?"
He set his fork down. "We should get a divorce."
"Because of who?"
The words spilled from him like a glass dropped on tile. "Because I’m tired of pretending. Because I love someone else, Nina. Because she’s pregnant."
I laughed because I had practiced every reaction in the shower and every one of them had been ridiculous. I had not practiced calm.
"Do you love her or are you just tired?" I asked.
"I love her," he said, and his face looked like a map I had stopped reading.
"Then go," I said. "Go now. Take the room. Take the chair. But not the house. And not the truth."
He started to talk about time, about pressure, about his dad asking, counting the years. He said, "If you had given me a child, I wouldn't have...," and his voice trailed off like an old radio.
"You can't blame this on me," I said. "We are not vending machines. A child is not a prize for a husband. You chose the rest."
He had the gall to look hurt.
"I want the house," he said. "I want custody—not custody, that was stupid to say—but I can't afford paying everything if we end up fighting in court."
"Good," I said. "Let me take this to the bank. Let me see the numbers."
I asked him to come with me to the bank. He hesitated, then agreed. He thought I would be weak. He thought he knew the doors.
We printed long bank statements. The account looked normal at first: rent, utilities, business dinner. But one card, tucked in the name "V. Atkins," showed transfers. Luxury items. A transfer the morning of our wedding for six thousand. He had hidden a card in someone else's name.
"I don't have to explain," he hissed.
"I will ask Pierce," I said.
"Pierce Roberts?" he named the lawyer with a worry that tasted like fear.
"Yes," I said. "Pierce is good. Pierce will make this clean."
Pierce Roberts came that afternoon, shoes polished, his binder precise. He did not waste words.
"Keep this private," he said. "If we can get him to sign voluntarily, do it. If he refuses, we go to court. The chest of bank files will be our sword."
So we began to plan. I felt strangely calm. When the world is flipped, things can become simple. I told my friends. Kennedy Petersen, Leanna Crawford, Bianca Belov—they closed ranks like a storm coming.
"Let me bring a lawyer," Hendrix said one night at the jazz bar, his voice low and sure.
Hendrix Farmer had a crooked smile that did not belong to the sort of man who plays by the rules. He worked before midnight as a host at the nightclub, and he had a habit of grinding coffee at two a.m. He called himself a man of many friendships; he called himself a friend.
"You're my friend?" I asked.
"More than that," he said. "Let me help."
"You don't have to," I told him. "But if you do, we'll split a bottle of something expensive."
He showed me his phone, then turned his head to the performer on stage. He had a way of giving permission to the room.
I remember waking in a hotel room I did not know, my head fogged and my phone warm under my palm. The video on my phone showed me clinging to someone’s shirt and slurring a million half-true lines, saying "I'll pay you," and "I’ll sponsor you," and ridiculous, mean things I didn’t dare claim in daylight.
"You embarrassed me," I told Hendrix when I called him the next morning.
"You were brave," he said. "You were honest when it mattered."
It was the evening of the registrar appointment that changed everything.
I walked into the Registrar Office with a printed divorce agreement. Gavin came, with a white envelope clenched like a fist. Beside him, a woman in a loose dress—Valeria Atkins—stood holding a hand on her belly.
"You two together?" she asked with a badge of innocence.
"Valeria," I said simply.
She smiled like a person who had rehearsed her lines. "So this is the woman he left."
"Yes," I said. "I suppose it is me."
The miracle of the moment happened out of something I had to keep in my palm. I stood and took the small card I had taken from Valeria’s bag earlier—her card, the one Gavin had used.
"This card is registered in your name," I said, holding it up.
"Give it back!"
"You don't get to keep other people's money just because it buys you dinners," I said.
Valeria moved like a cornered animal: shout, plead, clutch the belly. People in line stopped, curious. Phones were out. Music of low conversation rose and rose.
"And if you keep it," I said, "I will take the receipts, the transfers, the statements. I will show them to everyone."
Valeria's eyes went wide. Her voice cracked.
Before she could say more, a hand reached for her bag. I had the card between my fingers and I put it on the registration desk.
"That's our joint account," I said quietly and plainly. "I will ask for every cent. And I will make sure your baby has nothing but the right to be claimed—legally. I will not let my husband's betrayals be used to rob our home."
Someone recorded. Phones turned like small moons.
Valeria started screaming. The crowd began to shout: "Shame!" "Scandal!" People who had been expecting a quick appointment were now glued to the scene.
She snarled at me. "You can't do this! He loves me! He is the baby's father!"
"He was married to me when he promised he would come back," I said.
Someone laughed. Someone took a picture. Valeria tried to rush me, and with a movement that surprised me, I slapped her. It felt like a hard coin in my palm.
"I will not be the quiet one," I said. "You shall feel that I existed."
She called the security guard and called me names and I slapped again—once for every year I had been told to be small. The crowd cheered. The clerk at the desk asked them to calm down. The registrar stamped the paper in a loop because the office was now the stage for a dispute.
"In the end," the clerk said in a dry voice, "we have signed the papers."
He signed our divorce. We walked out like a page ripped from a book.
He watched me from the mouth of the building. He wanted to say something. He couldn't.
"Hendrix, I need you," I told him. "Do something big."
"Leave it to me," he said with a grin that was half promise, half dangerous.
Two weeks later, Gavin was called to the company's annual awards night. He had expected a promotion that night. He expected accolades, a filmed speech, a toast with his parents in the front row.
He did not expect me.
The gala was filled with chandeliers and thin glasses clinking. I had a dress that hid my face and revealed my neck; I had money in my verified account and I had the legal papers that said the house was mine. I had Pierce Roberts, two copies of bank statements, and the power of a world that loves a scandal.
"Hendrix?" I whispered as the lights dimmed. "Now."
"Now," he said, and stepped to the shadows.
A man from IT who owed Hendrix a favor popped up behind the stage with the company's giant projector. He slid a flash drive. He looked at me, smiled, and hit play.
"For Gavin Rocha," a voice said into the speakers.
The large screen at the back of the stage lit up. It started with an image that made silence ripple: a credit card statement in the name of Valeria Atkins. Under it, receipts. Under that, screenshots of messages: "I’m pregnant," "I want us to be a family," and his answers. The room went cold.
"Is this some mistake?" whispered someone near the front.
The CEO, a man who had used Gavin for years and commended him in memos, sat up straight. His smile froze. The lights brightened a little as if the room could not handle darkness and truth at once.
The first video played. It was of Faith, the assistant, laughing, and then a recording of Gavin promising "I will give you that home." Then a line of bank transfers. The audience leaned forward like a sea ready to break.
Gavin looked at me from the stage doorway, as if hoping I would help him. I had nothing to give.
"Turn it off!" he shouted. The lights flashed and someone in the crowd shouted, "Let it play!"
Voices rose. A woman near the back said, "I can't believe it." A man in a tie laughed, the sour sound of coins clinking into a jar. Someone recorded. Everyone recorded. Fingers flew.
I watched his face change. At the beginning of the video he had been proud, his jaw set; he was the man at the top. The video showed his messages with Valeria, his soft words, his planned holidays with her, the transfers to her card. He had not expected anyone to show the receipts. He had not expected his double life to be put on a stage where his peers watched.
Pride slipped into confusion.
He walked out onto the stage in a sudden urge to seize the microphone. "It's a misunderstanding—" he began.
"Shut up," someone from the crowd said.
Gavin lifted his hands like a man who wanted to smooth a table that had been knocked over. He tried to find words that had been practiced for a different audience. Whatever speech he had rehearsed that morning in the mirror dissolved into spittle.
The CEO looked at him over his glasses. "Is this true?" he asked, the question small but grinding.
Gavin inhaled. He tried to say, "I—" and stumbled into silence.
The video continued. Messages with his young assistant, receipts of gifts, and then a plain text message: "He said he'll leave her," typed out on screen, as if to underline the act.
I could see the walk of life break into him.
The crowd was no longer private employees. A director from another firm who had once praised Gavin's 'strategic mind' clapped slowly, the place where mockery and pleasure meet.
"Denial," Gavin said at first. "This is fake. Fake evidence. You can't do this."
"Are you sure it's fake?" someone asked.
"No—" His voice broke on the last word.
The change was quick. He went from control to disbelief, to denial, to pleading in a way I've never heard before. It came like a storm.
"You're ruining me!" he screamed. "This is my life!"
Someone in the front row stood up. "He lied to his wife?" she shouted. "To her face?"
People pressed their shoulders together. Someone whispered into the speaker, "He told me he's 'family-minded.'"
Then his face went pale. The color leached. He walked to the edge of the stage, hand pressed to his mouth. I watched him, my heart an empty glass, and I felt a small grief for a man I had once loved who had become someone else.
"Stop!" he begged, suddenly vulnerable in the wide room. "Please—Nina, please! Don't—"
His voice lowered into the kind of pleading I had only ever heard in a hospital hallway at three in the morning. It was a childish voice trying to patch a broken toy.
"Ask for privacy," he said. "Please—don't make a spectacle."
It was too late. Phones circled him like small moons. People recorded the fall of a man who had thought himself safe. He had his mask ripped off on stage. People started to chant in a childish way that made me pinch my fingers together.
"A public fall," someone said. They began to clap. A beat of laughter, then a thunder of claps, then a mutter of "Good," as if the world wanted to balance itself by showing equal amounts of shame.
He stumbled. He went to his knees by the microphone stand, clutching his suit like a child who had been startled by thunder.
"Please," he said again, louder now because there was no point in being quiet. "Please, I can explain! I can—"
"Plead all you like," I said into the microphone the staff had given me when the projector man handed it over. "He lied to me. He used our joint account to fund another home. He promised some woman he'd leave me while he still took my love as a shield."
The room hummed with the news. People watched his face color, go blank, then flood with the knowledge that he had been doing both things—loving a new life and stealing a quiet one.
He curled, then straightened, then tried to speak, then simply wept. Not the controlled tears of an actor, but the messy wetness of a man who had been caught with his hands in too many jars.
The crowd watched this metamorphosis: the rise, the fall, the plea. Phones were held high. Laughter met jeers. Some people patted each other like men who had been given a show for free.
Gavin’s final arc was more devastating than any speech: from arrogance to the tremors of his voice, from angry denial to outright fear. He crawled on his knees across the stage. The CEO called security; they took him away slowly, with the public say-so of a man who had been allowed to make a scene.
"Beg me not," I said softly. "Beg the woman you hurt, the one you used for a future when you hid the present."
He came around again on his knees, forehead almost touching the step, voice dropped to a whisper. "Please, Nina. I can't—" He tried to make contact, but people stepped back. A journalist in the second row shouted, "We have it all."
Gavin bawled in the doorway, and a few people near the back cried out, "How could you do this to your family?" His colleagues were stunned, then angry, then amused that the company had allowed this.
He begged for forgiveness. He begged not to be fired. He begged for his reputation to remain. He begged for money. He begged for pity. He offered to work without pay. He promised he would be different.
Dozens of phones surrounded him. A hundred lenses kept moving. He fell through all possible states of manhood in half an hour: arrogant, stunned, defiant, pleading, broken.
"You're done," the CEO said at last. "Company policy is clear. We cannot allow a leader to deceive shareholders like this."
He was escorted out to a crowd of murmurs, some applause, some jeers.
I watched him as he was taken away. His composure had drained like water from a hand. He had no audience left to hold him up. He had used his life as armor until the armor became his prison.
Afterward, the video of him kneeling went viral within hours. News anchors replayed the scene and rewound the moment where he clenched his fist and then dropped it like a man letting go of a wound. People debated ethics. People decided he was finished. People said he deserved it.
When the lights came up and the music resumed, I felt hollow and light. I had expected anger, but the satisfaction was a cold glass. The crowd dispersed, and someone walked up and offered me a card that read, "Nina Watkins — fashion designer." They tipped their hat like a knight who was now on my side.
Weeks later, the bank handed me clear statements. The house was solidly mine. The joint funds were moved into my control. Valeria wrote messages that begged and then threatened. She tried to sell the story. She took a few polite hits from the reporters and found she did not like the taste of rabid attention.
Gavin's fall was complete.
He tried to sue. He tried to claim privacy. But the public had already judged. The board sent out a terse statement. Clients rescinded offers. He sat in airport lounges with his head on his hand and watched his life become footage on a screen that played over and over.
Valeria drove herself into a quieter place. She later called and asked for money, demanding it under the name of the child. "You're cruel," I said when I refused. "You tricked a man into thinking everyone is happy."
When the child was born, people watched whether it would shame my victory. I did not go to the hospital. I did not want to see the outcome of a man’s weakness.
"You hurt a child," I said once, when Valeria begged for my mercy. "If you wanted to keep a life, you should have asked differently."
She tried to be brave, then she broke. On camera, she cried. The public recorded everything.
I sold the old house. I found a small, bright place on a quieter street. I took the membership card the restaurant manager had given me—the gold card with the small heart—and I put it in a drawer. It was a ridiculous gift I had earned through pretentious steaks and a man who had once wanted to buy his way into my life.
I kept that card to remind myself of one thing: small strange tokens can come from small strange friends.
"Are you okay?" Hendrix asked once over tea, after the noise had faded.
"I'm free," I answered.
"You look like someone who will sew stronger seams."
I smiled. "I will design a line called 'Second Skies.'"
"You'll sell out," he said.
"We'll see," I said.
We did not get married. We did not belong to each other. But he stayed, and for once I did not ask for anything but a decent friend.
"I will always have an eye on my bank," I told Pierce. "And on my own heart. It's mine."
"Good," he said. "Better to guard both."
The world moves on. People gossip about fallen men like seasons. I learned to laugh again. I learned to sleep without being checked.
My phone still buzzed sometimes with strange numbers. I ignored them.
Years later, I open that drawer and take out the gold card. The little heart on it is slightly rubbed. It is a small proof of an evening I once had. I have kept it because it reminds me of the night Gavin stood in the spotlight and asked for pity and for a bridge. It reminds me of the exact second I chose myself.
I put the card back and hear the faint fold of paper against wood, and something small inside me smiles, soft and steady.
The End
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