Rebirth14 min read
I Said Yes to the Wrong Ring — Then I Said No
ButterPicks10 views
I was given one do-over: the day he confessed.
"Felix, I like you," he said, voice both shy and honest. "Eden, will you—?"
I let the cigarette smoke hang between my fingers like a curtain and smiled.
"Okay," I said. "Let's try."
That small "okay" was the only capital I had left: my face, a passport into other people's promises, my willingness to risk. I had loved only one man in the life before—Rex—and he never loved me the way I needed. He married me like he checked a box. This second chance opened like a tide. I decided not to drown the same way twice.
1
"Do you really want to be an actor?" I asked Felix one afternoon in the campus courtyard, lazy sun and the smell of hot coffee around us.
He blinked, bright and earnest. "Acting is what I breathe, Eden. I want to tell stories. I want you to see me try."
He reached over and smoothed a crease in my sleeve with the kind of touch that said, I'm staying. He made the ordinary feel important.
"What's your name again?" I teased, because nostalgia is cruel and sometimes memory is a door you can close and open at will.
"Felix Bray," he said. "First-year, performance major. Someday you'll see me on screen."
"I'll be in the front row," I promised.
Felix was like warm light—persistent, loyal, small enough to pick up and keep. He stayed. He waited outside my dorm in the mornings with milk tea. He learned my favorite director's name on the second day. He cheered for my tiny wins the way a parent might applaud.
Rex was different. Rex Almeida was tall, impersonal in a black coat, pages of a business deal always smelling faintly of jet fuel. He had been my high school star, the kind of person you put on a pedestal to measure yourself against and then grow tired. In the life I had already lived, Rex and I married. I gave him everything and he gave me a tidy life—until I found a metal box in a drawer full of receipts and the truth bled out in a stack of plane tickets to Los Angeles.
2
"You're serious about Felix?" Rex asked once when, for reasons I still can't explain, I let him into a meal with my parents.
"Yes," I answered, calm as water. "He's good for me."
Rex's face did not crack, but his eyes went very cold. "He's only a boy."
"He's my boy," I said.
He laughed that nervous, small laugh of a man who believed he could buy time. "Eden, I'm leaving for a few weeks. Can you go to the airport? Say goodbye."
"Why?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Business. Just a short trip." He placed a slim box into my hands, a neat surprise. "For the new year."
I opened it later and saw a necklace, expensive, glittering. I kept it in its box and then moved it into the closet. It felt like he had bought me instructions on how to behave.
"Come with me," he had begged under fireworks, "Be with me. I can give you everything."
"I don't want everything," I said. "I want someone who wants me."
That night at the clock tower, surrounded by the city's roar and countdown lights, he leaned toward me and whispered, "Go with me. Come back to me."
But the tide had changed. "No," I said. "I won't follow someone who follows other people."
He stood there, face drained to gray, as the last bell sounded. I walked away.
3
Months later the world turned and Felix's first film—my documentary—won me an unexpected invitation to a young filmmakers' festival. Felix had been the subject, honest and raw, and his interviews were a gift to the camera.
At the festival hall, I saw Rex. He stood across the room with a slim woman on his arm—Estella Walker, pale and gentle, the girl Rex had loved since childhood, who had gone abroad for treatment. Seeing them together felt like echoless thunder, a memory of doors left open.
"Long time," he said.
"Too long," I answered.
Felix squeezed my hand. "You did that," he said with simple pride. "You made something real."
Rex watched us as if we were a crime scene. "You're dating him?" he asked, directing the question at me like he had ownership over my answer.
"Yes," Felix said, steady. "We're together."
Rex inhaled a breath that tasted like something closing. "Good for you."
4
Then the first rumor hit.
"Felix Bray exposed in scandal!" one headline screamed. "Screenshots of messages—hotel, payments, lies."
My hands went weak. The feed exploded. Photos, screencaps, accusations stacked like knives. My stomach dropped into the floorboards. Felix, who had been a gentle constellation, folded inward.
"I didn't do it," Felix said, desperate, "I never met her."
"I know," I whispered. "I know."
We fought back—lawyers, denials, the agency spinning facts—but the internet was a forest fire and rumors were wind. He went home, hollowed by the noise. I wanted to pull the world over him and let silence be his medicine. He clung to me.
"Someone set me up," he said. "I'm sorry, Eden. I can't lose you."
"You won't," I told him. "I trust you."
This wasn't the first time ghosts had turned up for him. In the life before, he had been slandered, and then the abuse had pushed him to the edge. He had jumped once. The memory of that night made my lungs ache.
"Promise me one thing," he asked quietly. "Promise you'll keep me here."
"I promise," I said, though promises do not stop storms.
5
I had to find the arsonist. The agency dug and found a thin trail: a payment, anonymous and neat, moved to a PR firm that specialized in “reputation management.”
"It smells like a setup," Felix's agent told me. "Who hates him enough? Who benefits?"
I sat in my car and did something stupid: I drove to Rex's office.
"Rex," I said when the assistant smiled and led me into a dim reception, "Did you have anything to do with Felix's headlines?"
His cigarette tip glowed in the dark. He flicked it into an ashtray like a man used to disposing of small things.
"Eden, what are you doing here?" he asked, a practiced calm.
"Don't play dumb," I said. "There's a trail of money."
He leaned back. "Why would I—"
"Because you're jealous," I snapped. "Because you don't want anyone else seeing me."
He flinched and then smiled the smile of a man who hid knives with wraps of charm. "You're reading novels, Eden."
I left, hands trembling. I could not prove anything. But I had a feeling—a slow, cold certainty that matched the night it used to take to cross oceans in his jet.
6
The proof came because someone underestimated me.
Felix's agent had a contact in the PR node who hated the firm that handled the smear. That contact gave me an email—nicely written, corporate, with attachments. There it was: a signed brief, small print, payment lumps from Rex's company that had been funneled through shell accounts. Best of all, there were messages: "Make him toxic. He must fall," a line followed by a date and a sum.
I had the document in my hand when I walked into Rex's office for the last time.
"What's that?" he asked, not looking up.
"Proof," I said. "You made Felix's ruin."
He studied me like you'd study a puzzle. "You have no idea what you're doing," he said.
"I have the invoices, the bank trail, the emails," I said. "And I have everything you said when you kneel in front of me like you own me."
He laughed, sudden and sharp. "Do you understand what this will do?"
"I understand exactly," I said.
7
Then I did something none of us expected. I called a press conference.
"You can't," Felix said. "It will ruin you."
"It already has," I replied. "I can wait for legal processes that take years, or I can let the light in."
We arranged a small hall the festival was using the next day. The room filled with people—journalists, filmmakers, festival staff, students. Felix sat pressed to my side like we were two halves of a single steady heart. His hands were cold.
"You're sure?" he asked.
"I am," I said.
The lights hung above us, bright and surgical. I felt the metal box of plane tickets like a lump in my chest—the memory of that drawer and the ticket stack from the life where I had loved and lost. I remembered the ocean, cold and indifferent.
"Start," Felix whispered.
I stood.
"Good afternoon," I said. "Thank you for coming."
There were flashes, cameras like beetles in the dark. Reporters rustled paper.
"I have documents," I said. "I have proof that certain attacks on a young artist were not organic. They were paid campaigns."
A woman in the front row raised her hand. "Who?" the question cut like a blade.
I lifted the folder. "Rex Almeida."
The room inhaled.
Rex stood on the far side of the room, surprised into uprightness. He had come to the festival thinking he was beyond being seen. He was wrong.
8
"How can you accuse me?" he said, stepping forward in a suit that looked expensive enough to be armor.
"Because I have the trail," I said. "Because your company paid a PR firm to target Felix Bray. Because I have the emails that say, 'Make him toxic.'"
"That's forged," Rex said immediately, breath fast. His voice moved from cold to sharp to angry like a weather change. "This is slander. Who are you to—"
"I'm the woman you married and tried to own," I said. "And I'm the woman who won't let you take another life."
A murmur moved through the room. Someone gasped. Cellphones rose. A cameraman leaned in.
Rex's eyes flicked to Felix, to me, to the edge where the festival volunteers stood like indifferent judges. His confidence crumpled, infinitesimal seconds at a time.
"No proof," he blurted. "This is—fabricated."
"Then admit it in front of everyone," I said. "Admit you paid for the smear. Or we show the receipts, the bank transfers to shell accounts, the emails with your signature."
"You would play him," he said, voice shaking now. "You would set a man on me."
"Do you know what you did?" I asked. "You nearly took Felix's life last time. You don't get to be the only person who decides who lives and who dies."
He laughed then, disbelieving, a small sound like a puppet's creak. "You don't understand business. You don't know what it costs."
"Tell it to Felix," I said. "He cost you nothing but a truth."
9
What followed was a slow unspooling that would not be forgotten.
"Here," I said, and the festival techs put the email on the projector. There was the corporate thread, signatures, a familiar date. Someone had used a corporate account to move money. The transfers had been structured through three shell companies. The bank statements matched.
"Oh my God," a woman whispered. "Is that—"
Rex's face went white. He tried to reach the table. "Stop," he said. "Stop it."
But the cameras kept rolling. A volunteer read the bank transfers aloud. The room's hum changed into a chorus of appalled voices.
"Rex," I said, and my voice did something I did not expect—it was steady, low, and a blade. "Why did you do it?"
He opened his mouth, then closed it. He tasted defeat.
A director from the festival stood up. "If that is true," he said, "we have to distance ourselves. We can't be associated with someone who funds character assassination."
"You're ruining an honest man," Rex spat. "You're smearing me."
"You're the one who paid for lies," said Felix's agent, voice hard as glass. "You thought removal would be effortless."
Someone in the back shouted, "Why would you do this?"
"Maybe because he thought he could buy everything," another answered.
10
Rex's reaction changed in steps—he wore pride, then confusion, then denial, then a brittle anger, then panic.
"This is fabricated!" he screamed. "This is a setup!"
Felix stood up. His voice was small but clear. "You paid for lies about me," he said. "You thought splitting me from Eden would be safer for you. You wanted her back."
Rex's face contorted. "I didn't want—"
"Yes you did," I interrupted. "You wanted me to be alone. You wanted certainty. You wanted control."
The room split into reactions like waves. Some gasped, some whispered, some pulled out their phones. A man I had never met stood up and walked to the front, placing a folded newspaper on the podium.
"People are recording," he said. "This is public."
Cameras zoomed in on Rex. He had no ally in sight; Estella had gone pale and slipped out of the room. People who had once admired him looked at him as if he had committed a private theft.
Rex looked around, and for the first time I saw fear. "You can't—" he tried.
"Tell them." I pointed a finger. "Confess."
"Pity," sighed someone in the back, a quiet cruelty. "Where's the pity you once had, Rex?"
He staggered, a man losing balance on a narrow plank.
11
He tried to bargain. "This will ruin careers," he said, voice smaller. "You don't know what you're asking."
"I know exactly what I'm asking," I said. "Public admission. Public shame. Consequences."
He went through the motions. First, he denied everything. He had the practiced looks of a man who had always managed to arrange truths to fit his life. Then he laughed thinly. Then he lashed out, calling names, accusing me of being unhinged. Then he said, "Forgive me, Eden," almost as if testing a note.
The room had become a theater. Cameras clicked. People recorded his implosion.
"What did you expect?" someone said. "That you'd pay a few thousand and silence a life? Lives aren't collateral."
Rex's face shifted. He realized that the bank transfers, evidence of his involvement, the emails bearing his company's watermark—they were all things you couldn't simply deny in front of a thousand witness phones.
He went from aggrieved to frantic. "This is slander!" he shouted. "This is—
"—you paid people to create lies," Felix finished, voice trembling but sure. "You thought if I was gone, Eden would come back."
12
The crowd reaction was precise and cold.
A woman at the back began to clap slowly, ironically. Others followed—soft at first, then louder, a call-and-response of disdain. "Shame," someone whispered. "Shame," a chorus answered.
Rex's eyes widened. He looked like a king who had suddenly realized the kingdom had left him.
"You're a coward," a student said plainly. "You bought attacks because you were afraid." The word "coward" echoed.
Rex's composure crumpled. He pressed both hands to his face, fingers splayed, and his shoulders shook—not with sobs at first, but with a brittle, hot anger that tasted of impotence.
"Please," he said, and his voice had shrunk to a child's pitch. "Please don't—"
People took out their phones and filmed. A journalist moved in and asked the question that would go viral: "Why did you fund the smear on Felix Bray?"
"I'm—" He faltered. The pause stretched like a fault line.
Someone near the podium read a paragraph from the emails. "Make him toxic. Make him disappear," they read loudly. The room felt like glass breaking.
Rex finally fell apart.
He went through the predictable stages—anger, denial, bargaining, then collapse. He paced, fists clenched, then sank onto a chair as if struck. He began to apologize, then to plead. "Eden, I—" he started, voice ragged. "I love you."
The press recorded every syllable.
"I thought I could keep you," he said. "I thought—"
"You thought you could buy people," Felix said. His face was ashen, but his voice did not tremble. "You almost killed me."
Rex's eyes met mine for one long moment. There was no grandeur left. "I'm sorry," he whispered. It was not the apology of a repentant man; it was the apology of a small animal caught.
13
Outside, the murmurs became a storm.
"How could he?" people said. "Why would a man like that stoop so low?"
A woman in a designer coat looked at him like she had been betrayed by an abstract principle. A student recorded the entire scene and streamed it. Within an hour, the hashtags had changed. #RexAlmeida trended beside #FelixBray and #Expose.
The festival committee convened and quietly escorted Rex from the stage area. He left like a defeated general, shoulders folding in on themselves. People took pictures. A group of young filmmakers applauded Felix and me as if the applause might stitch the world back together.
14
Rex paid a greater price than I could orchestrate in court. He lost reputation in a week where he had thought himself untouchable. Contracts were reconsidered. Investors excused themselves politely. Articles that had once praised his business acumen now asked, with surgical calm, whether a man who manipulated truth had any moral right to the platforms he controlled.
But the punishment I wanted was not only professional. It was, primarily, to unmask him in front of his peers, to show him what it felt like when people turned their heads and whispered. Men like him buy silence; they never learn how to face the public mirror.
He crumpled in public and then in private. At the door of his office, after cameras had stopped, a former colleague spat his contempt so that he could hear it. It was a small thing, but it echoed.
15
What he had not planned for was the looks of the people closest to him.
Estella refused to be his shield. She left him, quietly, and her absence was a louder accusation than anything spoken. Friends dropped calls. Sponsors pulled adverts. A board meeting considered his immediate resignation.
At the town hall hearing, where a journalist had cornered him for a live interview, he tried to justify it.
"I was desperate," he said. "She was slipping away."
"Desperation does not absolve theft," someone said.
He cried then in a way that had nothing of kingship left. Cameras captured his face split in grief and shame. "I was wrong," he repeated.
16
Felix recovered slowly.
"Do you hate me?" he asked months later, when the storm had settled into lines and trials. We sat on a bench near the river, wind combing the water.
"No," I said. "I don't hate you. I love you."
He laughed in a wet, relieved way. "You didn't have to humiliate him like that."
"You think you knew him better," I said. "You thought he would change on his own. I didn't have time for that."
He squeezed my hand. "You saved me," he said simply. "You didn't let him take me."
"Not just that." I looked up at the clock tower that had been the stage for New Year's confusion and for my refusal. "I saved myself."
17
Weeks later, the legal fallout began. Lawyers waved papers. Rex tried to argue that the files were forged and that he was framed. "Rex was a man who believed he could direct outcomes," his attorney said on television, "and that is a dangerous weakness. But the evidence is difficult for him to explain."
Felix testified once, calm and precise. He told the room about the emails, about the fake screenshots, about the nights he had considered leaving this life behind. He spoke slowly. The room listened.
Rex watched from the back. When the judge asked for a final statement, he rose and read a scripted apology into a microphone. "I cannot undo my action," he said. "I am sorry."
But the public watched the video where he had once tried to charm his way into my heart. They watched the man who had told me to come with him to London and then looked at another woman's hand. They watched him go from a confident prince to a small, apologetic figure before a thousand blinking lenses.
It was public, and it was complete.
18
After the storm, life settled into a new rhythm.
"I used to think marriage was safety," I told Felix one evening as we lay on the couch while rain tapped the windows, "but I was only ever someone's habit."
He kissed the nail of my thumb. "I used to think I had to prove myself," he said, "but I learned to trust from watching you."
We built small anchor points. He starred in another film. I made another documentary. My film took a prize in a small festival and he clapped as if my applause meant oxygen.
Sometimes, on nights when the sea felt far and time was a cheap coin, I opened the drawer where, in the other life, a metal box had lived. There was no box now, only a memory of cold ticket edges and the sound of waves. I kept a small memento instead: a folded program from the festival where I had exposed Rex, edges worn by fingers and time.
We invited Estella to one of our wrap parties. She arrived with a quiet smile and a bag of fruit. "You were brave," she said to me. "You were kinder than he deserved."
"Maybe," I said. "But I had to be kinder to myself."
19
Sometimes, in the quiet, I remember the other life: the ambulance wail, the black sea, the feeling of being held too lightly. I remember the metal box of plane tickets and the way Rex's promises had glittered like cheap jewelry. I remember Felix, the warm light, the way his hands fit around mine like an exclamation.
"I accepted Felix's confession," I told a friend once. "I wanted something true."
"You found truth," she said.
"I found it and made it public," I corrected.
20
Nothing is perfectly erased. Rex had to answer for what he'd done. The company board voted him out. His name still circulated, sometimes in pity, sometimes in scorn. He wrote an apology letter to the press and to Felix; it was printed in small columns, drowned by the day’s headlines. He gave interviews where he said, "I was wrong," as if humility could be purchased.
He tried, for a while, to rebuild a life without the platform. It was awkward for him. He learned what it meant to be watched without admiration. That lesson cost him more than money.
But the most intimate punishment was the one the crowd had given him at the festival: the way people turned their faces, the slow, exact unmasking of his privilege. Public shame is not justice, but it is sometimes the most humane tool left to a community that needs to mark a line.
21
Once, months later, I bumped into him in a quiet gallery. He had lost some weight and his eyes were older.
"Eden," he said softly. "I want to say—"
"You already did," I replied. "You said it in front of everyone."
He looked like a man looking for a map in empty hands. "I thought I could buy you back. I was wrong."
"Maybe you were always capable of being wrong," I said. "So are we all."
He looked like he might cry. "Are you angry?"
"I used to be," I confessed. "But anger is heavy."
He exhaled. "I'm sorry."
"I know."
As I walked away, I felt a thin, precise closure. The clock tower's bell echoed in the distance, a small sound that belonged to a single city. I folded the memory of the metal ticket box into a corner of my mind and put it away like a lesson learned.
"Do you regret it?" Felix asked me later, when we held hands and watched late trains.
"No," I said. "I would rather be honest and hurt than be someone's second choice on a ledger."
He smiled and kissed my knuckles.
22
There are nights I think of the first confession—the one Felix made, pure and stuttering—and the last confession Rex made, raw and dismantled under the lights. One gave me a reason to begin again; the other taught me the price of being someone's possession.
Outside the studio window, the clock tower stood like an honest man. Its hands moved, indifferent and real. I keep a small program from the festival in my drawer. Sometimes, when I need to remember how I protected my life, I open it and feel the paper edges like a familiar pulse.
The sea is cold in the early hours, someone once told me. The truth is colder still, and sometimes that is the only thing worth hearing.
The End
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