Sweet Romance14 min read
"I married a stranger who taught me how to keep the roses"
ButterPicks17 views
I still remember his first sentence to me.
"Love and marriage are two different things."
Three seconds later I decided I would marry him.
"Why tell me that on a first date?" I asked, and the tea shop was quiet enough that my voice felt overly loud.
Ely Wolff smiled the way only dangerous men can: calm, measured, like a person sure of the map while everyone else was fumbling with directions.
"Because," he said, "I want to marry you, Juliana. And I want you to know the terms."
I laughed, the laugh that sounds like a cough, until he reached across the low table and poured me tea as if he were watering a plant in a greenhouse. The light hit his fingers and the jade bracelet on his wrist flashed, a small constellation.
"You can sign a prenup," he offered.
"You sound like a lawyer and an optimist," I replied. "Which are not mutually exclusive."
"Good. Then you know how serious I am," he said. "We don't need fireworks. We need a home that doesn't burn."
"Fine." I sat back. "I expect honesty and a decent coffee machine."
He looked at me like I had handed him a blueprint. "Done."
We were married that month. The ceremony was small, the vows economical, and I told myself for reasons that had nothing to do with courage that this was sensible: an agreement, a partnership, a tidy arrangement.
After three years, sensible looked a lot like comfort. Ely was gentle in a way that cost nothing—he didn't parade affection, but he never humiliated me. He kept to his word: no scandal, no spectacle. He came home twice a week like clockwork. He didn't mind that I had half a marketing firm and two small galleries that hummed just enough to keep us fed. He gave me safety, and when the world felt loud, safety felt like a softer sound.
But the sound of the world changes. One afternoon I opened an email I had subscribed to, and there he was again—Ely Wolff—on the cover of a trade paper.
"Twelve times," I said, leaning across our small kitchen table, "you've been on twelve covers before."
He placed his cup down and said, almost apologetically, "Those were advertisements. I paid for them."
My mouth went dry. "So the twelve covers—" I started.
"This latest piece," he interrupted, "is different."
"Different how?" I asked.
He didn't answer directly. His fingers went to the ashtray and he rolled a cigarette like an old movie man. "I am not an honest broker in my family's businesses. Most of the paper you see is smoke."
"Smoke?" My voice rose.
There was a knock at the door and a group of men in dark uniforms came in as if they'd been telegraphed. They stuck seals over drawers and wallets, and the next thing I knew a plastic bag held my favorite mink coat. "What's going on?" I cried.
Ely leaned back and said softly, "I am bankrupt."
"You're bankrupt," I repeated like a spoon reading a word it did not know the meaning of.
"Yes." He stared at his hands. "I wanted to shield you because the truth would have hurt you. I thought I could play a larger game and keep us safe."
"Why didn't you tell me before we married? Why keep the game?" I demanded.
He looked at me, up close, and his eyes were the color of the river at dusk. "Because I wanted you to marry me for more than pity."
"Instead you married me with a plan that included me not knowing my own life."
"Juliana," he said, "I wanted something I never learned to ask for—someone to be with me willingly, not because of contracts."
We were still both in our pajamas when he said it; the argument left a strange residue in the kitchen, like steam that doesn't condense.
"Then let's divorce," I shouted once. He sat very still and named me fully, the way his father had always named his heirs: "Juliana Durham."
I blinked, surprised. "We're married."
"Yes. But I don't want to drag you down. My crash is going to make your life small."
"Your crash?" I spat. "What does that make me, a coat to pawn?"
He reached for me, then stopped and said, simply: "I want to give you back what you lost. I will transfer the house titles. I'll sign whatever you want."
"You think money makes this easier?" I asked. "You think buying silence or goodwill is the antidote for a husband who never told his wife?"
He walked to the window and said, quiet as prayer, "I don't want you to have to suffer because of me."
So I followed him to the family estate when his mother fell ill, because I thought that maybe in the maze of his past I could find the reason he hid his life. I learned then the old wounds that defined him.
His mother—Eve Lombardo—was a woman who had once been young, but at some point the world had decided she should be small and forgetful. She sat with beads in her hand and prayed, and she treated Ely like the air. In the room there was a young woman in plain cotton—Hinata Vitale—who was quietly tending to Eve. Hinata had the same jade bracelet his mother admired; she moved like a person who had known grief early.
"Who is she?" I asked.
"She used to be my mother's student," Ely answered. "She lived with her while I was away. She helps the house."
I watched them together—Ely's look softened when he said her name. "Then why didn't you tell me?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I didn't think it mattered."
And then he left the house to me: a bruised, beaten out home that had no foundation. The company he said he had invented was a shell. The news—when it came—hit like hail. UChat, a chat app that had bloomed into a new kind of fame, was revealed on a public square screen. Ely stood at a podium and told the city, with an even voice, that he owned thirty-eight percent and that he was transferring twenty percent to me.
"To my wife," he said into the microphone, "Juliana Durham."
The LED on the plaza flashed his face. People stopped. I pulled the curtains.
"You gave me twenty percent?" I whispered.
"Because you stood by me even when I fled." He was soft. "Because I am terrible at asking for help."
We took the bankruptcy together. We lived in my small apartment, and his fingers slid to the small of my back in ways that seemed new. He made soft-boiled eggs. He read to me from a book we both pretended to have never heard of before. At night he asked me, in low, crude sentences, to stay. I lied most nights and said yes because the alternative was unknown.
"Are we happy?" he asked one night while we held a single bowl of soup.
"What's happiness?" I asked.
"Two people with clean teeth and clean sheets," he said, half joking. "Sometimes warmth matters more than fireworks."
"That's the saddest philosophy I've ever heard," I answered, and he kissed my temple like someone apologizing for the entire species.
The trouble didn't end. Ely's father, Roman Delgado, and two men who had lived like the shadow-puppets of him—Magnus Chandler and Ramon Sullivan—had their eyes on anything that moved. They had taken advantage of Ely's initial good will: factories, stakes, and the pride of an established family. I learned the family history like a crude novel: Ely's mother had once been pushed aside by a younger stepwife, and from that family fracture the twins were born, bright and greedy.
"You are his wife now," Roman said the day he cornered Ely on the estate steps. "You can decide how much pity he receives."
"Don't speak to her that way," I said.
Roman smiled. "Little Juliana, come to the table. Let us discuss terms."
"Terms of what?" I asked.
"Your access," he said. "You are the key. You have his shares now. We want to negotiate."
"If you think I'm a door," I said, "you picked the wrong doorknob."
We argued in the old dining room while the family watched. It was the first time I felt my own spine in more than three years. Ely didn't stand when the conversation turned to slander and threats. He simply said, "We will not fold."
That would have been enough, except that Magnus and Ramon decided to prove their point with violence. The night they came, Roman Delgado sat on the porch with a whiskey glass like it might be a gavel.
"He's the one who took what is ours," Magnus snarled.
"Your father wasted everything!" Ramon hissed.
"You will not lay hands on my husband," I said.
"You are not family," Ramon shot back.
When the first cut happened—when a blade flashed and someone screamed—I grabbed my phone and called the police. But the scene that followed was the worst of what greed produces: a man with someone's blood on his hands lashing out, knives clacking. Magnus had lunged. Ramon had slammed a table. Roman Delgado had fallen into a slicing rage that he convinced himself was righteous.
We ended up in the back of an ambulance with Eve on my lap and Ely's sleeve stained.
Ely was quiet for days. "They tried to kill my mother," he said finally. "They tried to kill me."
I looked at him and heard a kind of calm gear grind into motion in my head.
"Then we will show them the world," I said.
A week later I gathered evidence. Rodrigo Clapp, Ely's assistant, and I dug through ledgers, messages, transfer slips. We found payments back and forth—factory selloffs that read like deliberate theft. We found surveillance footage showing meetings at fusion dinners where Roman and the twins had smiled and quietly stabbed Ely's company in the back.
The day of the public punishment, we chose the largest room in the city: the shareholder's forum at the trade center. The press would be there. Their lawyers would be there. The twins never suspected the one weapon I had learned to wield: the public eye.
"You're sure?" Ely asked. He looked like a man who had slept poorly for months.
"Yes," I said. "We will show them everything."
We arrived with presentation boards and a stack of documents. The room hummed like a hive. Cameras flashed. Roman Delgado walked in like a patriarch expecting the crown. The twins swaggered behind him.
"Today," I said into the microphone I never imagined myself using, "we discuss the ownership of UChat and the financial conduct of Mr. Roman Delgado, Mr. Magnus Chandler, and Mr. Ramon Sullivan."
"You're the wife," Magnus called from his seat. "What do you know?"
"Everything," I answered.
Then began the long reveal. Rodrigo projected emails. "Here is the sale notice," he said, voice steady. "Here are the fingerprints of transfer and the shell companies."
A lawyer for Roman rose to object. "This is slander," he said.
"Then let's have the truth," I answered. "Open the ledger."
Rodrigo clicked. The projector lit the wall with dates: transfers to offshore accounts, signed approvals, a string of contracts that matched the twins' signatures. The room went quiet.
"You used our factories to launder money," I said. "You signed them away at pennies. You set up a loan that siphoned cash to a company named 'Delgado Holdings' and then transferred the funds to a shell that, inconveniently, belongs to you."
Roman's face went a hard red. "You are making accusations," he snarled.
"What the ledger makes plain," I continued, "is that you, Mr. Delgado, and your sons conspired to strip assets from companies that were legally owned by Ely's family, then used them as collateral in an investment that ruined thousands. You routed money to exactly the accounts Magnus and Ramon control. You engineered Ely's public humiliation to place these assets at bargain rates."
A murmur ran through the crowd, like wind through dry paper. The twins began to speak at once, their voices thin.
"That's not true," Ramon stammered.
"Fabricated!" Magnus yelled. "You have no proof!"
"Proof?" I said. "Do you want the proof in your phones, gentlemen?" I held up a folder of photographs. "Photos of bank transfers, timestamps, emails, our conversations. We even have a recording where Mr. Delgado instructs his son to 'push Ely out with a public scandal' and mentions 'the factories' by name."
The lawyer tried again to stop me, but Rodrigo had already streamed the recording across the screen. Roman Delgado's voice filled the hall—crisp, cold, paternal.
"You see that?" a reporter shouted into his recorder. "We have audio."
Faces in the crowd shifted. Journalists leaned forward like flowers to the sun. The twins' confident posture collapsed. Roman's jaw trembled.
"You're lying," he said, but his voice was smaller.
"Hold on," Magnus said. "You can't—"
"I can," I said. "And I will. Because my life, the people who work in those factories, were stripped for your private gain."
"Is this your revenge?" Ramon asked, panic creeping. "Are you extorting us?"
"No," I said, and here I slowed my voice because the watching world deserved detail. "This is accountability."
I read aloud the list of transactions, the dates, the people involved. I named the consulting firms, the lawyers who got small fees, who washed papers in and out of shell accounts. I showed the file where Roman had authorized transfer of titles in stages, and then the twins' signatures on 'emergency sales'. I had everything.
When the final ledger flashed, the room went cold. Reporters started clicking, fingers tapping. One by one, investors looked like they wanted to crawl out of their suits. The chairman of another firm tapped Roman on the shoulder—past friends, now estranged.
Roman stood. "You have no right—" he started.
"You're right," I said. "I am a wife. But I am also someone who has seen the damage. I have seen nurses who lost pay because of your actions. I have seen elderly factory workers who can't afford medicine. And you were smiling when that happened."
Silence like a held breath stretched, then broke into noise. A dozen phones came up and recorded the audio. Someone from a public prosecutor's office was already standing, phone to ear, listening.
"You wanted a public punishment," I said. "Here it is."
Roman's face lost color. He looked at the panel, then at the two young men he had taught to be wolves. Their expressions twisted from indignation to panic.
"You're going to jail, maybe," a reporter muttered near me. "At the least, a court will have to answer."
Magnus put his head in his hands. "This is—this can't—"
Ramon started to shake as if with a fever. "Father—" he said, "we were following orders!"
"Orders?" I replied. "Orders to sink your own family."
The room became an amphitheater of judgment. People who had once smiled at Roman in charity dinners now whispered the word "fraud." The twins' friends, men who had fed them deals, now shambled aside. Phones were out. Live streams began. The humiliation was not a single moment but a cascading failure: sponsors withdrew calls, board members texted cancellations, a legal team that had once courted Roman now drafted letters of disassociation. The twins' investors started asking for audits right there.
Roman's face changed through a painful roll of emotions: bluster, denial, small anger, then a realization—like someone standing in a windstorm who can no longer cling to a weak umbrella. He tried to salvage dignity.
"This is a smear," he spat, voice brittle. "You—"
"Save it," I said. "You sold companies. You stole payrolls. You arranged shell transfers. You really think the people in that hall will forget when they see their names on those ledgers?"
I watched as his social orbit collapsed in front of him. The men who had once shaken his hand now averted their gaze. Someone behind him took a photo of Roman's face; it would be a headline.
"Please, please—" Roman began to cough, then to beg. "Juliana—" he said, and the sound was almost comic in its sincerity.
"Where were you when we needed medicine?" I asked. "Where were you when nurses were unpaid?"
He faltered. The men around him shifted closer, but the momentum had changed irreversibly. The twins began to sob—one of them covering his face while the other ranted at a lawyer. The camera caught it all and sent it like lightning to the world.
When the prosecutors arrived later that week, the list of charges felt clinical: misappropriation, fraudulent transfers, conspiracy. But the public spectacle had already leveled the field—no more private favors, no hush money. The twins' friends deleted photos. Roman was asked to step down by his own board. The humiliation was complete in the way the world consumes a man: live streams, daytime shows, op-eds that tore him apart paragraph by paragraph.
It lasted long enough for the city to record the fall. It lasted long enough for Ely to squeeze my hand and say, "You did this for me."
We left hand in hand. On the street someone called out and filmed us with a shaky palm phone; the reporter who had once asked how we met now asked about forgiveness.
"For what it's worth," I said to the camera, "we did not begin with love. We began with honesty. We began by deciding to be better people."
That humiliation was public and full; Roman Delgado's social empire crumpled, Magnus Chandler's and Ramon Sullivan's alliances dissolved into cold text messages and formal legal notices. For days the twins' reactions changed as the cameras rolled: first furious bluff, then denial, then terror, then pleading. They walked the stage of shame under the public's cold glare, flanked by lawyers who could offer a little time but not reputation. People who had stood and applauded them at dinners now averted their eyes. Friends posted statements. One of the twins was filmed begging at the courthouse steps while an old college acquaintance turned him away. Another was photographed alone at a restaurant, the chair across from him empty.
"It feels like justice," a woman in an apron told me as we left the courthouse. "Not the grand kind. But necessary."
Ely and I did not savor the moment. We knew humiliation is not a cure; it's a mirror. But the mirror had broken something rotten, and in the debris lay a kind of clearing.
After the trials and the settlements, life returned to small things. Ely made me solstice dinner boxes; he crafted little eggs that were the perfect, creamy center of a morning. We sat on my narrow couch and watched old films. He still had nights when guilt thundered and he leaned on me like someone who had found a harbor.
"Why didn't you tell me the truth," I asked one late night, as rain tinkled against our window, "before?"
"Because I thought my pride could protect you. I thought I could buy time until the tide passed."
"You bought storms," I said.
He smiled, embarrassed and honest. "Then let me learn to be honest the right way. Let me court you. Properly."
He knelt one night under a weak streetlamp, and in the middle of a cracked alley he offered what he called a "proposal of courtship." I laughed until I cried.
"Will you date me?" he asked, simple as a child and just as earnest.
"Yes," I said. "But first, make me laugh in public without ulterior motive."
He puffed his chest like a man who had never flinched from a dare. "Consider it done."
We dated poorly and well. We argued like neighbors and held hands in grocery aisles. He remembered little things: the way I liked my coffee, the exact place I hung my coat, the fact that I hated cold elevators. He learned to be small in the right moments and large in the needed ones.
Months later, the city's main square played the story of our fight: the LED screen that had once carried his name now flashed simple headlines about the convictions and fines. And for the first time in a long time, I felt seen not as someone’s bargain, but someone who had chosen to stay.
"Why roses everywhere?" I asked as he handed me a small, deep red rose one morning. He left them outside my door for weeks—fresh, not a velvet apology but a deliberate ritual.
"Because you said once that roses are a bit dramatic," he said. "And I wanted to be dramatic properly."
I laughed. "You finally learned the choreography."
He bowed, rather awkwardly, on the sidewalk. "Will you accept this theatrics of mine?"
"Yes," I said, and I meant it.
There will always be scars—Eve would need more care, there would be lawsuits to finish, and sometimes the city would whisper about the family who had fallen. But those were not the stories I wanted being broadcast in my living room. I wanted slow afternoons, ordinary dinners, and the right kind of honesty: the one that begins with small daily truths and grows into tenderness.
One evening, as the neon of the plaza blinked out and the moon rose low, Ely and I sat on the roof of my small apartment and ate a bowl of soup, watching the city breathe.
"You remember what you said the first day?" I asked, soft as thread.
"That love and marriage are different things?"
"Yes."
He nodded. "I still believe that part. But they are not enemies."
"Then what are they?"
"They are two hands," he said slowly. "Sometimes one holds the map and sometimes the other steers. They have to trust both."
I slid my hand into his. The moonlight made the jade on his wrist look like a small shore. We were neither young nor naïve. We were people who had bled and lost, and still found the courage to arrange roses on a cheap table.
"Would you sign a new contract?" I teased.
He stroked my knuckles. "No contracts. Just dinner and a promise to show up."
"I can live with that," I said.
Below, the LED at the plaza flashed an old headline—Ely's name, there and gone. I inhaled the cold night and tasted the salt of the river.
"Wait," he said suddenly. He took a small box from his pocket and opened it. Inside, not a ring, but a tiny mechanical watch with a worn strap. "I bought this when I was young and thought time could be bought. I failed. But I learned how to keep it wound."
He wound it and the second hand began to tick. The tick was small and literal, nothing like a speech. But to me, between the moon and the distant hum of the city, that little click sounded like a promise.
"Tick," he said, and the watch answered.
I leaned against him and whispered, "I can hear it."
"Good," he murmured. "Because I always wanted you to know, if nothing else, then time—our time—was something I could finally keep."
We listened to the second hand together until the city quieted and the roses on the balcony sighed.
The End
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