Face-Slapping10 min read
I ruined my own wedding — and I loved the replay
ButterPicks12 views
"I can't believe it's playing," I said, calm as glass, watching the big screen in the ballroom light up like a traitor.
"Turn it off! Turn it off now!" someone screamed from the crowd. Phones rose like black flowers, cameras clicking. The music that had been set for my entrance was drowned by the crude soundtrack on the projection.
I stood in my white gown, custom-made, hair pinned with the sort of patience only a woman who'd been betrayed knows how to summon. My smile didn't tremble. "Play it again," I told the operator with a voice soft enough to make him think I was asking a favor.
"What?" he whispered, hands shaking.
"Play it again." I smiled the way a verdict smiles.
Mark Mendoza lunged forward. "Grace," he begged, voice wet with whatever lies he believed. "Grace, listen—it's not what it looks like. I was drunk. It was—"
"It was all you," I cut him off and let the room hear the blade edge in my tone. "You don't get to describe what you do to me as 'a mistake' and expect me to sign off on it."
"Grace, please—" Jaelyn Chavez wrapped her hands around her face, the cheap mascara streaking under the chandelier light. "I swear I—"
"You swear more than anyone I've ever known," I said. The screen replayed a piece of film that had cost me sleepless nights to acquire. It showed the pair of them in my bridal suite on my sheets—my wedding day bed, the lilies my mother had insisted upon, the pillowcases I had chosen. The room around them was a shameful blur of shared breath and whispered promises I had never heard.
"Turn it off!" Mark spat, but the door to the projection room stayed closed. I had locked it this morning. "Let us out!" he added, frantic, and the sound of his own voice seemed to wake the next act.
"Explain," I said to Jaelyn, and when she reached for excuses, I slapped her across the face.
"You are disgusting," I told her. "You planned this."
"I didn't—Grace, I can explain!" Jaelyn's mouth moved like a fish out of water. "It was him. He said he loved me. He said—"
"Stop," I said. "Save your shapeless apologies. Everyone can hear you now."
"You can't do this," Mark cried. "You're ruining me."
"I already have," I said. "And I'm only getting started."
The crowd closed in like tide. Reporters in the back clicked louder than before. Someone in a pillar of cameras shouted, "Who recorded that? Who released it?"
"Me," I said. "I recorded them."
There was a ripple of astonishment. "You?" whispered a woman near the dessert table.
"Yes. I recorded them," I repeated, letting the phrase sink. "And I arranged the playback. I also arranged the door."
"Why? Why would you—" Mark's voice broke.
"Because," I said, feeling a cold bright joy settle under my ribs, "I was given back two days."
"Grace—" my mother's voice broke, and I felt a warm hand touch the crook of my elbow. "My girl—"
"They deserve to be seen," I told her. "And seen they shall be."
"Explain," Logan Sutton said quietly at my side, not touching, not needing to. His presence was like armor: steady, composed, a man whose hands had been trained to steady others. "Why play it in full view?"
"Because I am tired of the private tragedies," I said. "Because whatever they whispered behind closed doors should have consequences in the light."
Logan's jaw tightened, and I could see him thinking thirty moves ahead, police and protocol and the particular tenderness he had for me. "You planned this all?" he asked.
"Everything," I answered. "I bought the ticket for the projectionist three days ago. I bought the men's drinks, too."
"You dared?" he breathed, but there was a smile in it—sharp, dangerous, human.
The moment the screen finished its loop, I let it sit. Mark's face became a child's behind his shoulders. Jaelyn was a portrait of hysterical grief. The whispers rose to a roar.
"Turn them out," I commanded, and the men at the entrance moved like trained dogs, ushering the guilty into the open. They tried to bury the scene in protests. The audience took over.
"Disgusting!" a bridesmaid screamed. "How could they?"
"Look at her face!" another woman cried, reaching for a camera as if to keep custody of the moment.
"Shame," someone hissed. "Shame."
"Are they married? Do they have children? Think of the children!" an older man shouted, moral outrage sharpening like a blade. People stepped forward, drawn to the spectacle, to the fall of a man who'd treated another life as legerdemain.
Mark's bravado dissolved. "You're ruining me," he said again, but there was no rage now—only an animal's flailing.
"You're ruined," I said softly, and that line struck him harder than any slap.
He tried to regain his posture, to spin a story of a drunken lapse. "We weren't serious," he stammered. "It meant nothing."
"And yet," I said, "you made a private life of mine public in the most intimate way." I held up a folded packet of documents. "Do you want to sign a confession on the spot?"
"What? No—no, that's—"
"Do it!" I shouted, and the room shuddered at the force. "Sign it, or watch your reputation dissolve in front of everyone."
He fumbled with the papers like a man handcuffed to his own guilt. The camera phones were merciless now. The reporters prowled in front. The security guards had their phones raised, streaming, and someone near the cake table was already live.
"Call the press," I told Logan. "Call Ellis at the precinct. Make sure what happens next is recorded." He nodded and moved.
Mark's face swollen, he signed. His pen trembled like someone writing his own eulogy. Jaelyn sank to her knees between the overturned flower pots, the crowd parting briefly as if the earth had opened.
"What have you done to us?" she sobbed at me.
"I returned you what you gave me," I said. "A taste of shame."
"You can't—"
"I can. I did." My voice was a blade. "And now you're going to beg."
She did beg. She crawled toward the dais on her knees, eyes wet, mascara wasted. Mark lurched in a motion I remember from my old life—the look of a man who thought all roads led back to him. Logan's hand found my waist and squeezed.
"Get them out of here," I instructed, and the security men obliged. The cameras rolled as Mark and Jaelyn were dragged out—two people so used to privilege that the soil under their shoes felt like an intruder.
Outside, they found themselves pinned under a sky that had witnesses. I had arranged a second act. Before the hotel's ornate stair, I had asked for the company PR staff and a handful of civic volunteers to assemble. I had leaked a statement to the press before the pair could call their publicist: "Investigation under way — proprietary theft, breach of trust and evidence of collusion in multiple corporate deceptions." The headline had been pre-made; the story, ready.
When Mark saw the microphones, his face crumpled. Reporters threw questions like stones. Mark attempted denials at first—"It's a misunderstanding"—but then the recorder's light saw him change. He staggered through a sequence: smugness, panic, denial, bargaining.
"Please—" he said, voice hoarse. "I can fix it. I'll apologize. I'll donate—"
"Apologize on video," a cameraman demanded, and Mark faced the lights, the sound of shoppers, the buzz of the city's rumor mill. He tried to reconstruct the man he had been pre-broadcast: confident, charming. The camera stripped him down to human in thirty seconds. He apologized, his lips betraying no sincerity. The gathered crowd—passersby who had come to see a famous wedding and stayed for a human ruin—showed their verdicts.
"Shame him," someone shouted.
"Tell him to face the victims," another voice cried.
Jaelyn, still trembling, was dragged into the circle. Neighbors leaned out of windows, drivers honked. Unscripted comments rose like surf.
"This is what you get," an older woman hissed, clapping like a judge. "You used people. You used lives."
Mark's protestation became pleading, then bargaining, then pleading again. He tried to call in favors. People around him recorded everything. The toast of his supposed future fell into a gutter of exposure.
Logan had arranged volunteers to step forward for testimony: people who had been hurt by the partner companies, staff who had been lied to, even one former employee whose rap sheet had been anonymously sealed by Jaelyn's old favors. Their statements were short, sharp daggers. When a young technician recounted how Mark's suppliers had used substandard materials that had nearly bankrupted small vendors, Mark's color left his face.
Jaelyn's transformation during those minutes was the cruelest arc. She went from self-assured predator to a woman hollowed out. At first she raged—"It's not true! It wasn't me!"—but when an old picture of her, a ledger, and a sworn witness were produced, she staggered.
"You're kidding me," she cried. "I didn't—"
"You did," I said. "You tried to ruin lives. You threatened a girl's future to keep your secret. You coerced people into silence. You don't get to keep your privileges." My voice found the ears of everyone around.
"Please," Jaelyn begged, crawling again, palms scraped. "I'll—I'll do anything."
"Anything," echoed a dozen phones.
"Get up," I ordered. "Face them."
She obeyed like a puppet on frayed string. The crowd hissed and called her names. People took selfies with her ruin. An old neighbor shoved a microphone into her face. "Do you regret it?" they demanded.
"Yes," she cried. "Yes, I regret it." The plea was mechanical—constructed out of instinct to save face. The crowd judged it for what it was.
The punishment wasn't a private wallop. It was a public stripping. Friends texted each other the live link. Executives who had turned away from me for Mark's connections now shared the feed with hurried fingers. Shares multiplied. Schools buzzed. The city's moral tide turned.
At the end of it, the police arrived—Ellis Sanchez at the lead; I had asked him to be present if Mark tried to escalate. He had arranged for the formal investigation to start right at the steps. Mark sagged, real fear now replacing the calculated bravado. Jaelyn followed behind him like a shadow so thin it could be blown away by news.
As they were led to the armored vehicle, I watched Mark attempt a last hurrah. He raised his head, eyes wet, and yelled, "Grace! You can't take my life away!"
"You're right," I said softly to the cameras that still panned us. "I'm not taking your life. I'm taking your easy afternoons, your excuses, your entitlement. You'll learn to make your own way now, like the rest of us. Maybe then you'll understand what people look like when they're not tools."
He slammed his head against the patronage I'd destroyed and, for the first time, I saw his soul unadorned: raw, shivering. The crowd's reaction had shifted. Where they had once cheered my triumph, sorrow and a toothache of satisfaction mingled. People were clapping because justice had some teeth tonight.
Logan squeezed my hand. "You were merciless," he said.
"I set a trap for those who thought they were untouchable," I replied. "And I let the light in."
He looked at me like someone who's been reading a long, complicated map of my life. "Good," he said. "You deserve mercy. Just not for them."
After the arrests, the fallout ricocheted. Stock prices ticked favorably for us; the board called me into the conference room. "You did us a favor," my father said and pressed my hand. The next morning the papers had long headlines, and Mark Mendoza's name was attached to corporate malfeasance. Jaelyn Chavez's crimes—harassment, bribery, coercion—couldn't be repaired by a press release.
"I thought you wanted only revenge," Logan said another night, when we stood on my terrace and watched the city like a sleeping animal. "You're not done."
"I never wanted revenge just for pain," I said. "I wanted a circle closed—a ledger balanced. I wanted people to know what they had done."
"And you started here," he said, glancing at the projection box in my study—the small black device I had bought with the first week's life. It sat on its shelf like a small relic.
"Yes," I whispered. "I started here."
"Then," Logan said, drawing me close, "let me finish the rest."
He pressed his forehead to mine, and in the quiet that followed, I felt the night's heat cool into a steady ember.
"I have to tell you everything," I said. "About the last life."
"Tell me later," he murmured, "or tonight." He smiled like a man who'd mapped a path and found a companion willing to walk it.
"I'll tell you," I promised. "After coffee."
"Good," he said, and added softly, "I like your coffee."
We laughed, because if you have plotted your revenge and found a heart that stands with you while the crowd watches, laughter is the only sane response.
Days passed, and the boardroom battles resumed. I retracted contracts with the people Mark had favored. I appointed Bruno Popov—the man I'd suspected of leaking—onto a controlled project with strict supervision. I told Bruno, "Either you change, or you begin somewhere that doesn't touch my family." He smiled a false smile and nodded. "I'll do that," he said.
"Make sure you do," I told him. "Or you'll find that certain lessons take longer to learn than you'd prefer."
Months later, on a bright day with the honeysuckle in bloom, a hearing was set for Jaelyn and Mark. I sat in the front row. Cameras angled like curious owls. "Why do you want more?" someone asked me once. "Isn't this enough?"
"No," I said. "They owe more than public shame. They owe a reckoning."
So I prepared the next stage—less theater, more exposure. Board meetings, whispered investigations, testimony collected; little thieves were cornered and made honest in the light. When the day of the formal public hearing arrived, it wasn't just about them the way the wedding had been; it was factory-clean fact. There were witness lists and sworn statements. Jaelyn's smirk had been washed away by depositions that showed a cold, calculating pattern.
When the judge read the verdicts, a hush fell. "Guilty," the bench said. "Sentences will be issued accordingly." The papers printed the story across a thousand headlines. Mark's business alliances fell apart. Jaelyn's community status evaporated. The punishments varied—fines, restitution, mandated community work, and mandatory counseling no longer voluntary.
"You did that," Logan said later, voice low. "You took everything from their plates."
"I took what was owed," I said. "And in return, I gave myself—us—back what they'd stolen."
He kissed the corner of my mouth and said, "Then we move forward. We build."
"Yes," I said. "We build."
"Together?" he asked, and the way he asked was an invitation I didn't intend to refuse.
"Together," I said.
The projector still sat on my shelf, the little black box that had become a tool and a talisman. Sometimes at night I'd wind it and watch its tiny spool turn, because when the world looks at itself, it remembers.
"Do you regret?" Logan asked once, when we stood again at the window, the city's lights a constellation we could name.
"No," I said, thinking of the white gown, the recording room, the locked door, the cameras that had turned predators into public men. "Not a single regret."
He smiled, and in that smile I saw the life I wanted: quiet mornings and sharp defenses. He tucked a silk handkerchief into my pocket—the same soft thing he'd used to wipe blood from someone else's face in older years—an odd little relic of tenderness.
That was the last thing I touched before I slept. The next morning I woke to the scent of my father's porridge and the knowledge that the man who'd been my undoing had his clean name shredded into pieces.
I wound the projector once more and let the spool turn.
The End
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