Revenge15 min read
"I Hit Send" — How I Broke and Fixed a Life
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"I hit send," I say, and my hands keep shaking.
"I knew you would," Kori says on the other end of the line, laughing too loud. "You always do."
"I don't feel like laughing," I whisper.
"Then don't. Just do it."
I press the final message, then close my phone. The screen goes black. The hotel room is quiet except for the air conditioner. I pull the blanket up to my chin and remember how it started — a keyboard, a tired voice, a promise to listen.
"Why did you leave your window open?" Isaac asked the first time he walked into my life in daylight.
"You walked in," I told him. "I just let you stay."
"I like that," he said. He put his hand on my shoulder like it was home.
I smile a little remembering. When it began, it was small things. A late-night call where he read me silly stories. A voice that said "sleep, baby" and kept me safe. A hand that fit mine. Names: Isaac Cole. Me: Katharina Baumann. We were pieces that felt like they matched.
"I want to meet you," he said over voice chat.
"Me too," I said. I was seventeen. He was twenty. He made room for me in a life that had very little room.
"You sure about the train time?" he asked, the first time I met him.
"I am," I said, and forgot to breathe.
He laughed. "You look smaller than your photos."
"You look bigger," I said.
He took my hand and didn’t let go that day.
We fit because we needed to fit. He was warmth and habit and rescue. I was small and careful and tired of being seen as nothing more than the quiet kid in a broken home. My mother, gone when I was small. A stepfather who kept a loud house and a cold hand. I learned to hide my bruises with jokes. I learned to ask for less. "I like you like this," he would tell me, and I believed him.
"Promise me," he said in that low voice one night. "Promise you'll be mine."
"I promise," I answered, because when he wanted me to promise, it sounded like a future.
At first, there were only small tests. A jealous message. A silent hour followed by a string of "I'm sorry." We learned the rules: he would show me everything; I would show him everything. He would let me read his messages; he would let me see his screen. And I liked that. "See?" he would say. "I have nothing to hide."
Then, the first silence came.
"Are you there?" I texted, and the dots stayed stubbornly gone.
"I fell asleep," he finally messaged.
"I waited," I typed. "You always fall asleep when I try to tell you I'm scared."
He sent a heart. "I'm here."
The second silence smelled different. A pattern formed: long nights at the cafe, sudden video calls he didn't answer, a ghosting that lasted days. He'd come back with excuses — game nights, family things — and the warm "baby" again, and I took it like medicine.
"You changed your profile," I said once. He shrugged like it was nothing.
"People change," he said. "It's fine."
"It doesn't feel fine to me."
"Then say so," he told me. "Tell me you need me."
"I do," I said, and the way he said "good" over the phone made me think I was saved.
But then, one winter night, he sent that line: "I have someone."
"Who?" I asked, my throat tight.
"Someone I like," he said. "Don't add me back."
He deleted me in one message. He used two sentences to end what we had.
"Why?" My hands were cold.
He didn't answer for three days. When he did, it was a photo — a smiling hand holding another hand, tied with a small, red thread. The girl had two ponytails in the picture.
"I didn't know," I told my friends.
"Of course you didn't," Kori said. "He was a coward."
Lacey was quiet. "He should answer, Katharina," she said. "He owes you that."
"He owes me everything," I said. "He owes me the night we promised things."
Weeks passed. I deleted his number. Then I added him. Then I deleted him again. I told myself not to care, then wrote him letters in a secret folder and didn't send them.
"Why would he come back?" my roommate Lacey asked when he did.
"Because he needs something," Kori said. "Or because he regrets."
When he walked back into my life, it felt like a mistake and a relief all at once. He claimed he wanted to be better. He said he had thought about me every day. He said he was tired of games and wanted me.
"Can you trust me?" he asked with a small, hesitant laugh.
"Show me," I said.
And for a while, he did. He bought me a cheap keychain, a silly astronaut figure. He called. He complained. He said he would fight for me.
"Change takes time," he told me in the hotel room where we slept together that first night after we got back.
"Then change," I said, and gave him more of myself than I had before.
We grew careless. We argued. He smoked, and I hated it. He promised he would stop near me. He lied about small things and I laughed them off as quirks. I shouldn't have.
"You lied to me this morning," I said the night at the barbecue when he slipped out to smoke.
"It was one," he said. "I gave you the pack. Why does it matter?"
"Because you didn't tell me the truth."
"You're making a scene," he said. "Stop."
I held my ground. We were tired, both of us. We fought under neon signs and then made up in the dark. He told me bedtime stories. He stroked my hair. We promised.
"I will marry you someday," he said softly once.
"Say it," I said.
"I will marry you someday," he repeated, with a smile.
I kept that promise like a fragile weapon.
Then he left again. Not with drama, not with a letter — just a message at midnight. "I have someone else," three words, no punctuation. He did not say sorry. He did not ask. He removed me like a stain.
I was nineteen. I felt like a child again.
I called until my phone was hot. No answer. I went to his social, where his posts were full of a new girl's smiles and pictures of a movie he had promised we would see together. He put our movie on the same shelf as his new girl's photos. She was there the date we had planned.
I sent him one message: "We are done." Then I left the message on read for three days.
He texted back: "I am sorry." I did not answer.
When he announced it publicly with a grid of photos — their hands, their laughs, a movie frame we once promised to share — the world I had built began to crumble.
"Why did he hurt you?" Kori asked, angry like a mother.
"Because he can," I said, because somewhere inside me I knew the answer. He could.
I met him twice after that. The second time, he came late, eyes empty, like a man trying on a borrowed coat.
"Are we the same?" he asked when he saw me.
"We were," I said.
He touched my arm like an apology. I didn't pull away. Maybe I shouldn't have let him touch me. Maybe I should have kept that space.
"Do you want to try again?" he asked in that small voice.
"No," I said, "not like this."
He looked like a child who had lost a toy.
"Tell me you love me," he begged.
"I loved you," I said. "I forgave you."
It might sound weak to you. It sounded like mercy to me.
Then the thing I didn't want happened: I got sick. The doctors said the tumor was there and growing fast. I told nobody at first. I wanted to keep my life the way it had been — small, private, lived in shared couch nights and cheap movies. I thought if I kept my mouth closed, the world would promise to be gentler.
"You need treatment," Lacey said when she found out.
"I don't want to be a burden," I told her. The truth was I didn't want pity.
She pressed my hand like a balm. "Let us be the burden," she said. "Let us take this."
Kori started making calls. She rallied. She planned. "You're not leaving like this," she snapped at anyone who suggested otherwise. "Not when you haven't told him the real story."
"I don't want him to know," I said.
"Then we'll tell him the wrong way," she said.
I let them plan. I wanted to decide nothing. The days that followed were a mix of hospital corridors and laughter that tasted like honesty. Isaac appeared and disappeared like weather. Sometimes he brought flowers; sometimes he missed planned calls. He promised. He said he would be there. And I believed him like someone clings to an umbrella in a storm and hopes the rain stops.
Before I left, I wrote a letter I never sent directly. I wrote one for him, and another for the room where people would gather later. I recorded messages and left them to be played at a time only Kori would know. I asked for a strange final kindness: a day — one day where truth would be loud enough to cut and clean.
"Why?" Kori asked when she read my note.
"Because he needs to see," I told her. "If I can't make him see the harm, then someone else should."
She nodded and smiled with that fierce thing she keeps like a secret weapon. "We'll do it," she said. "We will make him understand."
I planned the edges and the friends filled in the rest. They called Felix and Scott and a handful of others. They learned where Isaac's life would be public and vulnerable. There would be a wedding announcement. He was engaged to the new girl. I knew the place: a bright hall in a hotel two towns over, where the music plays and where people clap for promises.
"It will be perfect," Scott said when we met.
"Perfect?" I repeated.
"The exposure," he said simply. "When he thinks his life is moving forward, we will show him what he's done."
They asked me if I wanted to be there.
"No," I said. "I want them to carry me in a way that makes the scene true. Just...promise me one thing."
"What?"
"If I cannot walk into the room, if I'm gone, let the truth play. Let the screen show what he did. Let the world see him choose like that."
They took my hand and promised. Kori wiped my face with fingers that shook.
The night before the wedding they practiced. They finalized slides. They printed photos and saved chat logs. Lacey asked me to review the files once more.
"This is mean," she said softly.
"No," I told her. "It's necessary."
On the day, I was too weak to go. I wrote the last thing I meant to say and asked Kori to read it if I slept. "Katharina," it read, "I forgive you. May you be happy." It was meant for Isaac, oddly simple.
They carried me to a room at my apartment, placed flowers near my bed, and left with things to do like soldiers with a plan. I listened to the phone ring and watched the ceiling like a sky I couldn't touch.
"Do it for me," I whispered, though I don't know if anyone heard.
The marriage hall was full. There were white dresses and suits and relatives who clapped and took photos. Isaac stood at the altar, smiling and nervous, his hand in someone else's as if that had always been right. The new girl's face was a bright thing; she loved him hard and publicly. He looked like a king. He looked like a thief who would never lose until the day the law took his things.
Kori stood near the stage. "You ready?" she asked Felix, and his jaw tightened. "Let's light the screen."
Felix touched a button. The hall dimmed like a breath held. The big screen, where a slideshow meant to celebrate the couple would run, blinked and then did not show the floral collage they'd planned. Instead, it started with the old photo — me and him, taken years before — small hands, a silly keychain astride his jacket.
"Felix?" someone murmured, then the first message popped up. "I am your girlfriend. Please don't leave me."
An uncomfortable silence swept the room like a draft under a door. Phones were pulled out. People began to lean forward.
"What is this?" Isaac whispered, taking one step back.
"Did someone hack the files?" the new girl's father asked, his voice sharp.
The screen showed our screenshots. It showed lines of messages we had saved — the nights he was gone, the promises he made, the days he deleted me and then added me again. It showed the times he called the new girl "baby" the same way he called me "baby" in my sleep. It showed spoiling messages like receipts and bookings that said, "For her, because she likes this." It showed photos of him and the new girl on dates we had planned. It showed a split-screen of his chats with me on the left and with her on the right.
"Who did this?" Isaac shouted.
"Who are you?" someone else asked. Cameras flashed.
The slideshow paused like a held breath. Kori stepped to the microphone without hesitation. "My name is Kori Fischer," she said, low and steady. "We were close to someone he hurt."
My friends started to stand. People began to murmur. Felix handed another folder to a hospitality worker and whispered: "Play this now."
The next slide started to play. It was a recorded voice — my voice — reading a letter.
"Isaac," my voice said over the room, clear and soft, "I forgave you a long time ago. I loved you. I wrote what needed to be said. You should hear it now."
Isaac's smile faltered. "This is illegal," he said.
"Maybe," someone replied from the crowd. "Maybe it's the truth."
My recorded voice read the messages. It read the screenshots. It read the times he told me to trust him and then left. It read every small cruelty, every omission. The room went still. Distant relatives stopped at their canapés. A child's hand reached for a napkin and froze.
"Turn it off!" Isaac yelled and lunged for the control desk.
"Stop!" the bride cried, but the video kept rolling.
The screen showed a photo of him laughing with the new girl. The caption under it read: "Booked seats for movie we promised to see." The people around him looked at their phones, at faces, and then at him. A woman near the back gasped. Cameras clicked like shutters.
"How dare you?" Isaac shouted, voice rough, fingernails white on the edge of the podium. He walked up the aisle, his suit too tight, his face going from anger to confusion to a kind of helpless panic.
"This is defamation," he said. "You can't just —"
"Look at him," Kori said, her voice rising. "Look at what he chose to hide. Look at the pattern." She handed her phone to the maître d', who propped it up for all to see. There were more texts. There were photos. There were dates when he had told me he was "at a friend's" and photos of him, at those exact times, with someone else.
People began to whisper loudly. Some stood, some sat. Phones were lifted to film.
"You're wrong," Isaac said, his voice lower now. "This is not like — this is private."
"It's public now," someone in the crowd shot back. "Because you made it public when you chose to hurt people."
He backed up as if the aisle had become a stage for his shame. His new girl's hand gripped his sleeve. She looked at him the way someone looks at a stranger who has broken a promise.
"You're lying," he said, panic in his voice. "I didn't—"
"You did," Kori said, and her words were a drumbeat. "You typed it. You sent it. These are your words."
A woman near the front, his mother maybe, reached out, hand trembling. "Is this true?" she asked.
Isaac didn't answer. He stared at his hands like someone who has just noticed they belong to a stranger. The flip from arrogant to confused to shattered happened in a breath. People around him who had applauded the couple earlier now had different faces: curiosity, anger, betrayal.
"Mom, this is—" Isaac began.
"Don't," his mother said, and I could imagine the cold line in her voice like ice. She had come out to see her son tie his life to another, and now she watched as his life unraveled on a screen. Her eyes were wet. "Tell me it's not true."
He fell to his knees on the red carpet, suit wrinkling, knees scraping the floor. For a moment, he did not speak. Someone shouted for security. He covered his face with his hands and then, like a frightened child, he looked up.
"This isn't real," he said. His voice fractured. "Please, please." He crawled to the microphone, grabbing it like a lifeline. "I didn't mean— I was young. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Don't— please."
People took out their phones. The room filled with light and sound and the sound of people talking fast. Some filmed. Some whispered. The story moved out of the hall in the time it took someone to press "share." Comments popped up on screens. The truth was now in people's pockets.
"Get him out of here," the bride's father said.
"Wait!" Isaac begged, desperate. He turned to the crowd. "My friends—" He broke mid-sentence, as someone in the front row held up a picture: him, smiling, with his arm wrapped around me in a way that looked like ownership. The crowd shifted.
He started to cry. Real tears. Not the polished weep of a show. He knelt, his face streaked with makeup, and for the first time he looked small in a way his bravado had always hidden.
"Please," he said to anyone who would listen. "Please forgive me. Please. I'll— I'll change. I will change. I will do anything."
The hall did not move. Someone laughed — a short, shocked sound. Some guests turned away. A little girl clapped when the band played on, unaware of the adult storm. Phones kept recording.
He begged. He scratched at the carpet. He called me names that sounded like prayers. He begged the bride to stay. He begged his mother to look away. He begged us — my friends, the crowd — for mercy.
"It won't fix it," Kori said into the microphone, slow and sad. "He can beg all he wants. But begging won't give back the nights he left me waiting. It won't fix the messages he sent to someone else while he told me he loved me. It won't make him feel the ways he made me feel small."
He went from shock to denial to rage to collapse. "This isn't fair," he said, voice breaking. "I didn't— I didn't mean—"
"You did," said a voice from the back. "You meant exactly that."
Security escorted him out. Cameras followed. Outside the doors, he sank on the steps and wrapped his arms around his legs and looked like someone whose map had been burned.
The crowd murmured, more loud now. People held their phones up like witnesses. Some filmed the fall. Some shook their heads. A few clapped, small and angry.
Later, when the video of the incident topped feeds, people had opinions. Friends called me. "How are you?" they said, and I heard compassion and hunger. My phone chimed with messages from faces I hadn't seen in years. Isaac's name trended and his new girlfriend's name trended and so did the phrase "truth at a wedding."
Kori sent me a voice note early that night. "He cried," she said simply. "He was on the steps. He begged."
"Did you feel better?" I asked.
"I felt numb," she said. "I keep waiting for the thing that happens after revenge. It doesn't make pain disappear."
"It's okay," I said. "It mattered. It made him see."
He called me from outside the hospital a day later. "Please," he said. "Please answer."
I picked up, and for the first time in years, I heard his voice without the small, soft edges. He sounded like a man who had been stripped.
"Why did you do it?" he asked. The shame was raw, like the scrape of his words against metal.
"You told us who you were," I said. "We only let other people see it too."
He fell silent. I could hear the cars passing. "I made mistakes," he said finally.
"You made choices," I replied.
He sobbed like the boy he had been the first time I met him. "I love you," he said brokenly.
"I know," I told him.
"I'm sorry."
"You should be," I said.
We spoke for a long time. He begged and said he would fix it and I told him I forgave him because I had to — forgiving someone who was dying and forgiving someone who was living are not the same things; I forgave him so I could sleep.
A week later, I stopped sleeping.
I wanted the wedding scene to be the moment he recognized what his choices did. It was messy and sharp and public. It humiliated him and exposed him. That exposure did not make my liver stop aching or my nights less bright. But it made a line in the sand.
People who watched the video turned their judgments into messages. Some hated me for what I had done. "Cruel," a few said. Others thanked me for pulling back a veil. "Good," one wrote. "He deserved it." The internet is a crowd that never sleeps and loves a headline.
I died on a quiet morning in May. My room smelled like lemon cleaning liquid because Kori had insisted on washing the sheets every day. I held Lacey's hand and heard Kori laughing in the corridor like a sound I had known all my life. I thought of the idiot things Isaac had said when he was happy and the darker things he did when he was frightened. I thought of forgiveness and how it can be a wound and a salve.
Before my heartbeat faded, I made one last choice. I asked Kori to send one last message from me to him, with no exposure attached, no pain. "I forgive you," I told her to say. "I hope you are happy."
"Why?" Kori asked me with that hard gentleness again.
"Because I want him to carry something soft when I'm gone," I said. "And because I loved him once. I want his life to have a gentle corner."
Kori pressed the phone to her face and read the message aloud as if it were a spell. "Katharina, I forgive you. Be happy." She quoted me wrong, but it sounded true in the room anyway.
He received the message in the middle of an interview, a small bubble on his screen that blinked and then stayed in his pocket. He read it. Someone saw him reading it and thought he was smiling. He wasn't.
At my funeral, a video played — the one Kori had filmed from the wedding hall, the one where people had seen him on his knees. Felix stood and said a few words. "We did this because she's not here to speak," he said. "We did it because she asked us to tell the truth."
Someone in the back of the chapel, a woman with a child's face, shouted his name. I couldn't see him. I didn't want to. I had wanted the punishment because I could not stand silent watching him hurt others and walk free.
Later, when people asked what had been gained, I had no grand answer. He lost faces. He lost a home he had not yet built. He begged. He broke. He talked and cried and apologized. People put him on the internet and then on a list of gossip.
"Did he learn?" people asked Kori.
"I don't know," she said. "But he knows now. He cannot forget the day people watched him fall."
My last line, in the small note tucked into Kori's hand, said, "I forgive you. Live better. And mean it."
He posted once after that. "I was wrong," he wrote. "I'm sorry." He tried to make amends in small, human ways. He volunteered at a shelter. He wrote to people he'd hurt. He called his mother and told the truth about his mistakes. He tried to be quieter.
But the wound and the apology are different things. I had hoped the public shame would teach him to be careful. It taught him to be afraid.
When they talk about me, some say I acted cruelly. Others say I finally reclaimed a story. I say: I lived and I wrote the last page. I didn't want revenge for its own sake. I wanted a moment where the truth could not be ignored.
If you ask me now, from the place I'm telling you — from the private life I left behind — I will say this: people can break you, and you can break yourself, and you can also plan to break the thing that kept breaking you if you choose. But be careful. Violence begets noise, not always justice.
My last photo with him is on the slideshow at the back of the chapel. His hands are big. My laugh is small. Kori pressed play.
"Be happy," I wanted to say again. "Truly."
He watched the funeral video and called after, voice hollow, like someone missing a shore.
"Katharina," he whispered into the air, and I had no answer left.
I had already said what I needed to say.
I forgive you. Be happy.
The End
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