Face-Slapping17 min read
I Pretended to Forget — And Let Them Watch Me Make Them Pay
ButterPicks16 views
I woke up to white light and no memory later than a childhood that stopped at ten. The hospital room smelled like disinfectant and boiled rice. My body felt foreign but safe enough. A woman sat in the plastic chair beside me like she had been waiting there forever.
"Anna," she said when the nurse told her my name, and she took my hand like the word tied her to me. "Anna, forgive me, I've been so busy. I'm your mother."
"Are you my mother?" I asked. I knew the syllables but not the weight of everything that came after them.
She closed her eyes as if the sound hurt her. "Yes. I'm Marie."
She said the sort of things mothers say when guilt sits heavy on them. "We lost you once," she whispered. "I'll never lose you again."
Her voice shook. She hugged me as if that one hug could stitch years together. I let her. My face didn't betray anything. My memory was a child's map that stopped at a small house, a lunch tin, a river, and the feel of being hungry. After ten the map was blank.
Soon after we went home, someone came in like a breeze that smelled of perfume and money.
"Big sister, I heard you forgot things," she said. Her voice was bright as candy. She wore a dress that shone and shoes that clicked like a clock. It was Fernanda. She had the small imperial air of someone used to being followed around.
I smiled and stretched a hand. "You're Fernanda, right? I'm Anna. You must be my sister."
Fernanda slapped my hand away so fast my palm stung. "Don't be weird," she said. "I'm busy."
"Fernanda—" my mother started, then stopped. She caught me by the elbow and helped me up.
"I just touched her, Mom. She wasn't steady." Fernanda said it like I had done her a crime.
"She's just left the hospital," my mother said. "Be careful."
"Whatever," Fernanda sniffed and walked away with her chin up like she had pushed a soldier aside and the soldier deserved it.
At dinner my father sat in a leather chair, the light catching the gold frames on his face. He was Per. His voice was concise and professional. He was a man paid to judge value and cut anything that did not produce profit.
"Anna," he said once, because introductions were to be filed. "Welcome to the family."
Fernanda came down the stairs like a small queen. "Daddy!" she sang, and he softened like a machine made to soften for her.
"She is beautiful," Per said, and his eyes went to Fernanda the way a lighthouse eye finds shore.
I tried to be the good sister because it was the role they assigned to me. "If she likes something, I'll share, right?" I told Fernanda.
"And?" she asked, amused.
"I'll buy it for her when I can."
Her face twisted with something like disdain. "You? Buy things? You don't know a thing."
"That's okay," I said. "I'm learning to be better."
They told me I was to go to school with Fernanda. They said it like they were arranging chores. "Take care of Fernanda," my mother told me, and my father's nod made the sentence into an order.
"You just came back, Anna," my mother added. "Don't try to take anything."
I learned quickly that the life I had been placed into was full of rules that were stacked to keep me low. I did what I was told. I smiled when they smiled. I curled my fingers around the tasks they handed me. It hurt less when you let them think you were harmless.
"You're in the wrong book, Anna," a voice said one day in class.
I looked up and found a tall boy who looked at me like he was seeing a stray animal he might feed. He was Hayes Seidel, with a smile that wasn't a weapon and eyes that asked gentle questions.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I was just—"
He laughed softly. "No worries. I can help."
"Thank you," I said and ran off to finish the errand for Fernanda. She tossed my snack to classmates like a queen having made a show of charity.
Hayes kept watching me. He noticed the way I kept my head down, how I learned like a person building a shelter. He read the room in ways others didn't. When he heard my laugh, he leaned in. When he saw my quiet, he reached a hand.
"Anna, don't let them do that to you," he said once, in a stairwell that smelled of damp paper. "If you need anything, tell me."
I felt the warmth of someone who extended comfort without expecting anything. "You are kind," I said.
He smiled like a sunbeam. "I won't let you be treated like a doormat."
He turned his back to the hall and said, quietly, "I like you."
A small hope crept in. I was still forming myself from the ashes of what I had lost. I had no compass but small people who showed me how to survive. Hayes became my shelter. He bought small packages of snacks and lend me his old school notes. I pretended I was grateful, and I was, but I also watched him with an eye that was not innocent. He was a tool I could use too—if I needed to.
Fernanda's friends were cruel with a quick smile. Jaden Fletcher liked to be loud. One day she ripped my workbook and laughed.
"What's the point? She reads like a child," Jaden said.
"They say she had a crash," another voice said, and the room erupted in murmurs. The students circled me like birds circling a dead thing, tasting pity and cruelty.
"You look like a charity case," Jaden said. "Do you know how strange that is? Nineteen and reading a third-grade book like it's a hobby."
I kept my face blank. That was the acting part. I had perfected it since the orphanage. Appear fragile and they step in; appear calm and they relax. I wanted them to underestimate me.
I had a list. It was invisible. It lived in the smallest lines of my mouth when I processed the names: Per, Marie, Fernanda, Hayes, Felix. Each name was a knot to untie.
Felix Liang was the man Fernanda loved. He was charming in a way that made people lower their guard. He knew how to tilt words like cups and pour the right phrase into any ear. For while, he noticed me but not the way Hayes did. He noticed me the way someone notices scenery—pleasant but not precious.
"Anna," Felix said once, at a coffee stall where I had been left to buy drinks. "You seem far away. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," I said. "Thank you for the offer."
"You're always welcome," he said, and his voice slid past me.
Fernanda used her friends to push. She fed them small rumors, artfully made to make my life smaller. Jaden and others followed. "She's a foundling," they said. "She has no roots. She can't take our places."
They invented stories. They told the class a false thing—that I had stolen; that I was a spy for a poor family; that I was a distraction. People bought it because the story fit the picture they wanted.
I started to move like a chess player whose pieces are people. My plan was long and slow. I was patient in a way that scared most. I let them see everything I wanted them to see: the quiet, small, forgiving girl who would never fight. Inside, I kept the map of what I would do.
"Why do you let them?" Hayes once asked quietly.
"I have to," I said. "It's the best way."
He frowned. "You don't have to suffer for their comfort."
"Suffering is a language," I told him. "You learn to speak it to survive. But you can also write its grammar."
He didn't answer that night. He only stayed and hummed until I dozed and left.
I began with small moves. I whispered a lie here and there into the right ears. I fed Jaden a paper that looked like a teenage confession and let her spread it. I let a secret smear through the school and watch the way the stories grew.
"Why are you helping me?" Katelynn asked once when I approached her.
"Because you're useful," I answered, quiet and clear. "And because we owe people a test."
Katelynn Ziegler was a girl who wanted breath in the big house that was not hers. She wanted a path to a better life. I gave her hints. I told her things to whisper to Fernanda and to the right friend who would take the bait.
When Fernanda's eighteenth birthday arrived, everyone expected a normal display. Per had planned to show the family album, and he had almost convinced the world that his daughter was a perfect product. He handed me an innocent job: to help the tech person with the slideshow.
"Anna," he said, "just press next."
"Of course," I said.
The slideshow began with the usual pictures—Fernanda as a toddler, Fernanda in dresses, Fernanda with her crown. People cooed. Fernanda sat like a queen, radiant, expecting gratitude.
"And now," I said, "we have a gift."
I clicked, and the screen didn't show the baby pictures they expected. It showed a medical scan. It showed a name that was not Fernanda's and a photograph that made faces around me freeze. Then I played another image—an intimate photo, then another—things that belonged to Katelynn and a man who stared back from the print like a lover from his own memory.
"What's this?" Per barked. The room blurred into a storm. Fernanda was pale; she didn't know where to look. Mothers fainted. Someone called for a doctor. I stayed calm and let them suffer through the confusion their cruelty had created.
It was the first public crack. The first time a mask slid and revealed something sloppy, human, ugly. People started to talk.
"You wanted them to see," Hayes whispered in my ear later, when the parents and staff were clearing the hall.
"Yes," I said. "They had to feel it."
That night, my mother came to my bedside at the hospital again—this time in a private room prepared for her. Her hand trembled.
"Anna," she said, "that was bold. Are you sure—"
"I'm sure," I said. "They have to see."
She looked at me with a hesitation like a precipice. Then she took my hand. "We have to make them regret."
We worked in quiet ways—details, bribes, subtle notes that would feed anger into the right minds. Katelynn was given a small push: photographs, hints, a false proof that would terrify a rich man. Jaden and the others were primed. Hayes kept his watchful distance and still left small gifts. Felix drifted, unaware of the net tightening.
Then things sped up. Fernanda's lovers were revealed one by one. Her convenience friends turned away once the scent of scandal touched them. Per's face turned from control to fury. He wanted order, and my order was disorder.
I was careful. I never touched the rawest spot directly. I didn't need to. People are sharp, and they cut themselves on their own sharp edges.
They made mistakes. Per had a paper trail that would not survive scrutiny. Katelynn's fake evidence crumbled under pressure but not without doing its work. The slideshow had shown more than embryos of gossip; it showed access—how easy it was for a poor girl to become a pawn. The family fractured.
"You lied to us," Fernanda screamed at me one night. She had been expelled from most social circles. She clawed at my sleeve like a drunk stealing warmth. "You made my life a joke!"
"I gave you your life back," I said. "But you threw it away with your hands."
"You're a monster," she spat.
"Maybe," I said. "But you deserve clarity more than comfort."
People watched her fall. That fall was not the end. The end was coming when I stood in front of Per in a company meeting with shareholders, his trusted men, and reporters. I had convinced him to put trust in a plan. He had always been hungry for control and believed his authority would protect him. He believed his company could survive any scandal.
I prepared a file and sat quiet until the light hit his face and he thought he could taste victory over me—over the girl he had found and half-loved. Then I began.
"Per," I said, cool as the bottom of a bowl, "do you remember the night you changed everything? Do you remember the woman whose name you could not say?"
He spluttered. "Anna—this is not the place—"
"It is the place," I said. "The place you think is safe for secrets."
"You're making a scene." His voice was dry. Shareholders looked up. Reporters shifted.
"I have proof," I said. I clicked my thumb on the remote and the screen lit. Photos, documents, and audio files streamed in sequence—the same kinds of things I had used at Fernanda's party, multiplied over nights of careful digging. I had lawyers waiting. I had investigators who knew how to extract secrets from men who thought themselves untouchable.
"What—" Per's color fled.
"These are the records of illegal transfers, of contacts with people who were paid to disappear, of communications that show intent." I spoke slowly so every syllable landed.
A man across the table rose, his voice a late thunder. "Is this a joke? Anna, how—"
"Not a joke," I said. "A truth-telling."
Phones buzzed. Reporters leaned forward. Someone recorded. Shareholders' murmurs mushroomed into a roar that drowned the air conditioning. Per's visage crumpled into the face of a man who had realized a dam had burst.
"You lied to us," someone shouted. "He lied. He lied to the company."
"Call the security," Per ordered. His voice sounded like the clatter of a fallen gavel.
"Per," I said quietly, as if speaking to a child, "tell them how you put away a baby. Tell them why you faked the records. Tell them why you wanted a child who would never challenge you."
His hands shook. "You don't know—"
"I know," I said. "Because I saw the file. Because Marie and I found the ledger you thought you destroyed. Because you thought rich men never left fingerprints."
The room filled with the ugly gust of truth. Shareholders who had been complacent suddenly resembled wolves that smelled blood. "This company has liabilities," one said.
"Are you denying the evidence?" a journalist asked. "Are you going to call this fabrication?"
Per's mouth moved like a fish on a dock. He tried to claim innocence. He blustered. He denied. His denials were thin. The more he denied, the more the men around him shifted from loyal to puzzled.
"Per, stop," my mother said, and her voice was a brittle thing. "This is not—"
"It is," I said. "All of it."
The public unfolded as if the wall of a reservoir had finally broken. Phones glowed, cameras rolled, and a dozen people filmed the man who had been untouchable, now small and human and pleading.
"You're making a fool of yourself," Per said, then he laughed—a ragged, wet sound.
"Show me mercy," he said to the board. "Please—"
There was a silence and then a sound like the wind when winter breaks. One by one, the people who had called themselves his allies took their distance. Contracts that had been signed in ink were rescinded with a flick of an email. Lawyers circled and quoted articles and laws. I watched the man who had told me to be small find the room had emptied.
"You're under investigation," someone said. The words were surgical.
Per stood and covered his face with one hand. "Anna," he said, "how could you betray me like this?"
"By telling the truth," I said.
The next scene is one I have been asked to describe many times. It lasted long enough to burn itself into the minds of every person there. It began with his public unraveling: reporters shouting questions, employees filing complaints, lawyers delivering subpoenas. It was not just the legal unspooling. It was the spectacle—the slow reveal of a father who had made monstrous choices while maintaining a smile for public cameras.
Per's face shifted through a sequence: pride, confusion, denial, anger, then raw fear. At first he sought to belittle the whole thing, to call it manipulation, but transcripts were cast across the room like nets. People witnessed him squirm. They saw his hands tremble when he tried to reach for authority. He was asked to explain a string of payments. He was asked to explain a file labeled "Project Rebirth" that mapped the fates of children he controlled.
"You're a monster," Fernanda shouted from the back. She had been dragged by the tide of ruin along with him. Her voice cracked like a whip.
"How could you?" Katelynn asked, her own face pale. She had been used and humiliated, and she now looked at him like she had been sold a dream on terms of debt she didn't understand.
The board convened an emergency meeting. The police were notified. Cameras were outside. It was loud and public in the most effective way. Lawyers read out charges in a clipped tone.
Per had to explain himself in front of photographers and in front of people whose signatures had put stock prices up and down. He tried every tactic. He lied, he evaded, he begged. He made promises of reform. He promised to resign. He promised to undergo treatment for "stress." He promised anything that might buy him time.
When it became clear the truth could not be spun, the shareholders voted. The motion was swift. He was removed from power. He walked away from the building like a man who had been declared enemy of the house that once shouted his name.
Outside, hundreds of people watched. Cameras zoomed in on his face, which had lost its mask. He stood like an actor who had missed his cue and had been left on stage while the audience left for the exit. People outside shouted: "Shame!" "Justice!" "Liar!" They filmed with phones, they cried, they cheered. The social feeds lit up like an explosion.
Fernanda was in the same storm, but her punishment was more brutal in the way gossip treats prettiness when it cracks. Her friends had left. Her suitors vanished. The school turned their eyes away. When the forum threads started, they sounded like hounds.
She came at me once, in public, at a charity event where she expected fans. "You ruined me," she said, and she tried to stab me with words. Her voice went high and thin; she began to cry. "You stole everything."
"Do you want them back?" I asked.
She halted, stunned. "Yes."
"Then tell them the truth," I said. "Tell them you lied."
Her bravado melted and was replaced by a look I will never forget: the look of a person who realizes the world has no more use for them.
"What are you going to do?" she pleaded. "Please, Anna."
I stepped closer, close enough to be heard. "Show them you can own your mistakes," I said. "Or do nothing and watch them walk away. It is your choice."
Years of small cruelties came down on her like a rain without shelter. She tried to beg, to maneuver, to bargain. People who had once kissed her hand now turned their faces away. Her father's friends denounced her. In a small video that was captured on a phone, she knelt once in the lobby of a building and asked forgiveness to no one in particular. People filmed. The clip went viral. She became a spectacle: the princess who had been dethroned and then made to walk among those she had scorned.
Fernanda's public collapse met a different kind of punishment than Per's. Per lost his power; his public persona was shredded and vetted. But Fernanda lost her image, her money's soft glow, her circle. People called it poetic justice. They watched as she changed from a person who had everyone on call to a person who called no one.
The long punishment wasn't immediate. It took months. It took lawyers, background checks, leaked documents and the steady thinning of fortresses. Per resigned and was accused publicly of many things. The board had him escorted out. He was hospitalized for a "stress collapse" after he argued—loud and bitter—on camera.
The company took a hit, but not fatal; people like me know how to keep what matters while burning what must be burned. I moved the company focus, I called in favors. I leaned on Hayes when I needed a steady hand. He stood there like he always did—faithful. He had loved me truly once, and when the truth of my plans came out he felt betrayed.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked, his voice breaking in the quiet of my office after an emergency press conference. "I would have stood with you."
"You would have stopped me," I said. "I knew you would."
He swallowed. "I still want to stand with you."
"I have gone where I had to go," I said. "You helped me survive. That is enough."
He reached for me and then stopped. "I'm sorry."
"You don't have to be," I said. "But you must understand—this wasn't just about revenge."
"What was it about then?" he asked.
"It was about justice dressed up as a lesson," I said. "We will never get back what we lost. But they will feel the cost of making others small."
He looked at me the way someone looks at a lighthouse when the fog lifts. He was so tender it almost broke the plan. I let him be tender. I let him believe he had been kind enough to match my cruelty. He had not. He was kinder.
The public punishments continued. Per's fall was legal and social. He was pursued by investigators, and the court of public opinion took him apart on live feeds. People who had once laughed with him now avoided his gaze. His face, once carved with power, became a cautionary tale about how cruelty never keeps its throne.
Fernanda's punishment was more intimate and unrelenting. She had to watch her peers—those she had stepped on—live better. She tried to beg favor and got none. She tried to get into wealthy circles and was denied. The girls who had been her friends sought only to dissociate themselves from the scent of scandal.
She changed. I did not expect apology to come quickly. She wrote a letter once and asked me to read it.
"You know what it says?" she asked.
"What does it say?" I asked.
"It says I was wrong," she whispered. "And I'm sorry."
"Is it real?" I asked.
"I don't know."
"Then keep it," I said. "Let it be a seed. Maybe in two years it will sprout."
She left without promise. She had to find her own way down. Public punishment had been cruel, but it had been necessary.
In the months after the fall, the family dissolved in public and private ways. Per was declared incapacitated after a stroke that critics said might have been stress-induced. He was a shadow in a hospital room; cameras kept away and legal battles circled like vultures.
My mother sat in the empty house and did something I did not expect: she became steady. She read through files and helped me plan the future. We rebuilt things in quieter rooms, away from the cameras, reshaping the company into something that could not be run on secrecy.
"Why did you do all of this?" she asked me once in the kitchen, where we burned incense like survivors marking ground.
"Because nothing else would make them listen," I said.
She held my hand. "You are like him," she said—a dangerous compliment. "You are like him in your will."
"I'm like him in one way," I said. "I am his child, and his child must answer for what he did."
The public punishments were over only in the sense that they had stopped every day being a fresh wound. They had become a scar—large, visible, painful. People who had done wrong paid, some in jail, some in exile, some with their reputations ruined beyond repair. The playground of my world had been cleaned of certain pests.
But revenge left new puzzles. A ruin can be pretty; a ruin is still a ruin.
Hayes stayed. He helped me sign documents, he sat through meetings, he bore the quiet of someone who loved a person who loved the wrong things. Felix Liang saw his lover leave him, then watched as the world that had made him into a useful man collapsed. He begged me once.
"Save me," Felix said, in a voice that had finally learned to be honest. "I didn't know."
"You knew enough," I said.
"You can help me—"
"I can do nothing for you," I said.
"For what you did to me?" he asked, the old bitterness returning like a bruise.
"For what you did to others, yes," I said.
He left the next week. He apologized to no one. He tried to call Fernanda, but even the phone calls were like empty coins.
"Do you regret it?" Hayes asked once in the quiet of my study, months later.
"Regret?" I repeated. "I have none about the plan. I regret only the cost. There are bodies of small pains I had to step on to get here. My hands are not clean."
"We all have debts," Hayes said.
"Some of us pay them with tears," I said. "Others pay them with time."
He took my hand and would not let go. "Then I will spend my time with you," he said. It was the kind of vow too small to hold a world, but it was true.
I let him. He wanted to be the man who stood with me not as a weapon but as a witness. That sufficed.
My life after the purge was quieter in some ways and sterner in others. I ran the company, I kept my power, and I repaid those who had helped me in ways that preserved dignity. I never let the cameras catch me smiling in a way that suggested triumph. My smile was private, something I offered only in the soft dawns when Hayes brewed coffee and the house smelled like toast.
Sometimes, at night, I lay awake and thought of the orphanage and of the river where I had learned to count the days by duck calls. I thought of the girl I had been and the woman I'd become. I had taken revenge, but I had not taken peace.
In one of those small hours I found a photograph tucked into an old box—a picture of a child who might have been me and a woman who could have been Marie. The eyes were the same. The mouth, a similar set of decisions. I touched the paper and felt the sting of a lifetime of plans.
"Anna," Hayes said one morning, leaning in the doorway. "Will you teach me how to read these files? I want to understand the machinery, not because I love power, but because I love you."
"Then you will learn," I said. "But know this: once you learn how the machine moves, you'll see how easily it can hurt people. Promise me you won't let that curiosity turn into appetite."
He laughed, then said, "I promise."
We both knew promises can fray. We both also knew the things people say when they have rebuilt themselves.
The punishments had been public; the changes were quieter. Per Medina would spend many days in offices that no longer required his signature. Fernanda Baird would spend many days learning to be ordinary. Katelynn Ziegler would sleep in rooms less gilded and more honest. Jaden Fletcher would find a job that had less glamour and more reflection. The world had rearranged itself. I had placed pawns and queens; I had lost some pieces and saved others.
When I walked through the halls now, my steps were measured. People whispered, but they did not mock me anymore. They respected me with a wary mixture of fear and admiration. That was justice in a modern world: effective, public, and irreversible.
One evening, Hayes gave me a small paper envelope. "Open it," he said.
Inside was a card with a single line in a child's handwriting: "I counted the stars and you are the brightest."
I looked at him. "You keep childish things."
He shrugged. "They keep me human."
"Good," I said. "Keep them."
We stood in the kitchen with the light soft on the counter and, for once, I did not think of plans or trapdoors. I thought of the small comforts I had carved for myself. They were simple: a cup of good coffee, a friend who stayed, and mornings where the sun came in clean.
Sometimes, after a long day, people ask me if it was worth it. "Worth what?" I ask.
"Worth making them pay."
I smile then, not because I love the memory of violence, but because I know the cost. "It was necessary," I say. "And it was precise."
Hayes squeezes my hand. "And now?"
"Now we live," I reply. "Now we run the company responsibly. Now we make sure the little ones are taken care of."
He nods. "And the past?"
"The past is a room with a locked door," I say. "We can visit. We can learn. We do not live there."
He looks at me like someone reading a map. "Do you ever forgive them?"
"I forgive them the way a doctor forgives a disease," I say. "I treat the symptoms. I prevent the spread."
He laughs, because he knows I mean it.
Years later, people still talked about the day that Per Medina lost his crown and his daughter was stripped of that crown. They still talk about a woman who walked out of an orphanage and returned to perform the most exacting of retributions. They told the story as a cautionary tale. The truth is messy and small and human.
At night, when the lights dim, Hayes and I sit in the garden, and he hums a tune. I listen and think of the river water I spat once into mud when I was a child. I used to think survival was a bare thing—eat or die. Now I know survival can be a bright, angry instrument. It can be used to free people.
That is how it must be.
The End
— Thank you for reading —