Face-Slapping12 min read
I Signed a Fake Marriage and Broke My Family — Then He Made Them Beg
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"I slammed the taxi door and my phone buzzed with 'Rex Branch' on the screen."
I looked up at the orange sky and felt like smiling, then the name stole it. I answered on the second ring.
"Emi, you're back?" Rex's voice was flat, sharp. It never softened.
"Yep," I said. "Just landed."
"Come to the office," he ordered. "Now."
"Okay," I said, and the smile that had started to come back died. I put my head down and cursed like a private choir against one man: Rex Branch, my market director and the reason I learned how to walk on eggshells and type through tears.
Rex met me in the office with his usual glare. He checked me like a product sample. "Su Qin is pregnant," he said. "You go to the north market tomorrow and keep it moving."
"I—" I tried the weak voice. "Rex, I think I'm sick. I have anemia. My head—"
"Anemia?" He lifted his eyebrow. "You're twenty-one. Save the act."
"I really can't," I insisted. "I—"
He cut me off with a snort that had no respect in it. "Get used to work. Sign the travel sheet in five minutes."
I left the room pretending I hadn't wanted to cry. Outside, the cold wind shook semester-worn leaves off the trees. I found a taxi, told the driver to take me home, and my phone rang again. This time the name on the screen made my throat flip: "Eliot Corbett."
"Eliot?" I said, as if asking a question.
"You're back," his voice was low and easy, like someone who had practiced being calm for years.
"I am. I—" I almost said I was tired. He laughed in a small, private way.
"Come over and drop your things," he said. "We can sign documents tomorrow."
I stared. Eliot—Eliot Corbett—was Declan Best's friend. Declan was my uncle. Declan had worked himself to death helping me get into school and putting food on our table after my mother died. When Declan went abroad, it was Eliot who stayed close, who owed Declan old favors. Eliot had the look of someone who kept a safe world behind a tidy face: buttoned shirts, gold-rimmed glasses, slow talk and a controlled smile.
I knocked on the opposite door because I told myself I would be brave. The door opened and Eliot leaned in the frame, as tall as a statue, reading glasses catching the light.
"You home?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, because I couldn't help it. "Hi, Uncle Eliot."
He cocked an eyebrow. "Emi. Sit."
I had no real plan when I told him I needed to marry someone to get my grandmother's inheritance. I had the papers. The will said one thing: half of Gran's estate would go to me after I turned legal adult and married. The conditions were stupid, but the money was real. Without it, Declan and I would be out on the streets again.
"You want to fake a marriage," he said, like it was a menu choice.
"You'll sign with me," I said. "Just the paper. One day. One stamp."
Eliot looked at me for a long time. "Why me?"
"I asked Declan," I said. "He said you'd know how to keep this quiet."
Eliot smiled with his eyes. "You sure you want this?"
"Yes," I said. "Please."
He closed his fingers around my hand and the ridged warmth of his palm made me feel less like a project and more like something to be guarded. "Okay."
We went to the registry the next day. Lines stretched like threads of other people's stories. People were yelling, kids were wailing, couples were arguing. Eliot squeezed my hand. When they asked for ID, we handed them our cards. When the clerk said, "Wait for your number," Eliot stayed close. When we sat for photos he leaned in.
"Stand closer," the photographer said.
The clerk sneezed. The baby in the corner screamed. In between, Eliot whispered, "Smile."
I looked up at him. "Promise we'll leave cleanly."
He smiled. "I promise."
After the papers, he bought me a yellow car. He gave it like it was nothing and I felt both guilty and grateful and shocked. That night he texted me, "Dinner tomorrow?" I sent back, "I'm working." He replied with a tease, "You work too much."
We started living in the same building after my move. Declan's good friend had fixed me a small room, and I found underwear in my closet that was all cute and pink and rolled up neat in a box. Eliot hovered when he came to pack my things and managed to look embarrassed when he found them. "Cute," he said, and closed the lid.
"Don't tease me," I said. "They are mine."
"Of course they are," he said.
At the office, I threw myself into work. I trained staff, set live events, handled angry clients, and kept my smile for the camera. My boss, Rex, kept pushing. One night, he called a birthday dinner and told us to celebrate his forty-fifth. People drank, joked, and got loud. I slipped away to the bathroom because the noise made my head spin. I took a quick look down the men's restroom out of curiosity, and found myself caught on a gaze I knew too well.
"Eliot?" I whispered when he came into my circle at the restaurant. He looked down at me and his eyes were the only calm in the room.
"Where were you," he murmured later into my ear. "Why didn't you answer my messages?"
"I'm fine," I lied.
Outside the bar, a man moved too close. "Hey, pretty," he said. I flinched. I called Eliot and he arrived like a black storm. He set me in his car and the man slunk away like he had just been hit with water.
At the hotel later, I made a stupid decision. I had been drinking—just enough to make edges blur. I kissed Eliot because panic and loneliness will make you brave or stupid. He froze for a moment then kissed me back, and something that had been quiet between us roared awake. I panicked mid-kiss and pushed him away. He let me go, walked to the bathroom, and came out like a man who had decided something he could not reverse.
"Remember who you are to me," he said later, voice low and raw. "You're my responsibility."
"I know," I said, trembling with my heart running faster than in any training video.
Time thinned into a rhythm: flights, shows, dinners. Eliot watched me at my live streams. He teased the livestream trolls away with quiet clicks and a hidden fury that made me both safe and ashamed. When one online creep refused to stop, he tracked him and fed him straight to the police. Later he told me, "I hate cowards who hurt women." I tried to smile.
Then my world cracked open. I went home to the small tourist town where we grew up to take the documents to my father's house. My father, Henry Moreno, had turned into a man with a new wife—Kassidy Gonzalez—who wore too much perfume and too many smiles. My half-sister, Annabelle Gibbs, preened like royalty. I knocked on the door and told them I wanted what Gran had left me.
Henry's face went hard. "That money's gone," he lied.
"It is not gone," I said. "Gran left it to me."
He laughed, ugly. "She didn't leave you anything. We fixed the house. We have receipts. Go starve."
Kassidy sang to herself in the kitchen and shoved a broom into Henry's hand. He raised the broom like a club and struck me until bruises appeared. I told him to keep the money. I said the words like a surrender: "I don't want it anymore." I left with my body trembling, my pride raw.
When I told Eliot, his face became a stone. He opened his laptop and his fingers moved like a man hunting. He told me to sit still, and he went to the embassy on the phone and to his lawyer and he told me, "This ends."
We began to build a plan: small, legal, and precise. My father had lied about the will and the paper trail. Declan had kept copies of Gran's letters. Eliot had contacts who could dig bank statements and register phone calls. We gathered proof: bank transfers, fake property deeds, receipts that didn't match with what Henry had said. We taped phones. We used public records. Every lie of theirs had a seam, and we pulled at it until the seams showed.
I was polite when I went back, but I was not weak. Eliot insisted that our next move be public and irreversible. He said, "They will only really feel it if everyone sees them for what they are."
Two weeks later, he staged a small town fundraiser at the hotel where all the families in town and many business heads would gather. The town's newspaper and a local TV crew were invited. I wore the dress Gran liked on me—simple, pale purple—and Eliot stood like a guard at the entrance. Among the guests were Rex Branch (who had his own reasons to come), Declan (who had flown in from abroad), town elders, and the reporter.
Eliot must have told them he had a surprise. The hall buzzed with the low sound of a crowd glad to leave their own kitchens and gossip behind. I found a seat in the front without meaning to. My father and Kassidy arrived looking rich, hair done, face shiny with false cheer. My sister floated in behind them like a cruel doll.
Eliot called for attention. "Thank you all for coming," he said. His voice had that cold, slow power that makes people sit straighter. "I want to tell a story. A story about truth."
He clicked a remote. The large screen behind us lit up with scanned documents. I felt my palms go slippery.
"These are the last wishes of Emilia Moreno's grandmother," Eliot said, pointing to a clear, legal paper—Gran's will. "She was very clear. Half of the estate goes to Emilia on condition she reached adulthood and married."
Henry's face went pale. He had no plan. He had not expected the will to be shown. Kassidy's lipstick glared under the lights.
Eliot's voice did not rise, but it filled the room. "Now look at this." The screen shifted to bank records. Wire transfers. Account numbers annotated in red. I saw my own name there, like a foreign object. "This is a bank transfer from Gran's account that Henry made to this property company, the very one he claims fixed the house."
A murmur rose. Phones clicked. Two women started whispering, then loudly gasped. The hotel manager muttered into his lapel. I felt the room tilt.
Henry's jaw moved. He leaned forward. "That's false," he said. "Those papers are faked."
Eliot walked around the podium and held a folder toward the front rows. "We also have three witnesses," he said. "Declan Best, who handled Gran's bank instructions; the notary who processed the will; and the property lawyer who signed the conveyance." Declan stood and nodded, calm and grave. Two other men—one a local notary and one the property lawyer—walked toward the microphone and confirmed everything under oath.
"Now, Henry," Eliot said, close enough that his voice could be heard by the people nearest him, "how did you 'fix' the house?"
My father looked like someone who had been caught carrying a sack of bad fruit. He tried to speak, but the crowd leaned in. A dozen phones rose like mushrooms pointing toward him. "They're lies," Henry barked. "She's delusional."
"Then explain the receipts," Eliot said. He flicked the screen and showed the pdf of a bank transfer: Henry's account to an offshore company. "Explain why thirty percent of Gran's bank disappeared into accounts that have no link to any legitimate contractor."
The room smelled like hot lights and human breath. Kassidy's eyes darted to the exit; she felt the crowd—our neighbors, my aunt's friends, the very people who had eaten at our table—turning like weather vanes.
"You're lying," Kassidy shouted, now small and shrill. "You—we did what we had to."
"Then why is there a second account," Eliot said softly, "with wire transfers traced to your sister Annabelle's name?" He hit the remote and the screen showed a chain: transfers, purchases, hotel bills. A woman in the back whispered, "Isn't that the new Mercedes he just bought?"
With sharp, loud clicks phones began to record. People started to cry out in indignation. "How could he? Your own family!" someone shouted.
Henry's eyes widened. He looked past the screen, found my face, and the color drained. He tried to step forward, but the hotel manager put a hand out to stop him. "Sir," the manager said, shocked, "they're saying your name to a reporter."
That was when it started to crumble.
First his voice went hoarse. "You can't—this is slander," he stammered. "These are fabrications."
"You made them," Declan said. "You forged the documents at the notary office and coerced signatures. We have sworn statements and transaction records."
Henry's face twitched. He began to speak faster, then louder, then fell into a loop of denials that sounded thin and desperate in the face of hard paper and witnesses. People in the back began to shout, "Shut up!" "Explain!" "Where's the money?"
Kassidy pressed a hand to her mouth and then looked at the crowd, the way a person might look at a falling stage. She staggered. Her false smile cracked.
"Police," someone cried. They were not asking for permission; they were demanding action.
Henry's shoulders hunched. He took a step back. I felt something in me unclench. The room stopped hearing his words and began to feel the facts like sharp stones underfoot. I heard doors open, and then the distinct sound of phones—colleagues, neighbors, friends—beginning to film.
"I didn't—" he said. The words rasped into a space full of evidence.
Eliot didn't move like a hunter. He moved like a judge. "We've already filed the complaint," he said quietly. "Copies will be on file. The police are on their way." Someone in the crowd nodded; someone else was already calling.
Now the real show began. With the papers, the statements, and the police confirmation coming, the crowd's curiosity turned to scorn. The hotel's patrons, business owners, and neighbors closed in. Phones filmed. People who had once been friendly with Henry now closed their faces and stared. A woman who had sold vegetables to our family for twenty years spat. "You stole," she said. "You stole from your own old mother."
Henry suddenly looked much smaller. He swore. He shoved forward and then looked around for mercy he had never given. "Please," he said, hoarse with pleading. "Please. I—I'm sorry."
He fell to his knees on the hotel carpet.
It was like the air had changed. No one laughed. No one applauded. Someone clicked "live" on a phone and the image of Henry on his knees instantly traveled into a thousand pockets.
Kassidy dropped to her knees too, hands out, like a beggar. "Please," she said in a voice that had used other people's pain as comfort. "I'm sorry. Forgive me."
"Look at them," someone whispered. "They thought everyone would look the other way."
People began to gather in tight circles, voices rising. Phones recorded every change in Henry's face. He went from defiant to whining to pleading. For the first time in years, I saw him truly afraid—not of me, but of what other people knew. His mother, who had passed, would roll in her grave, if graves could know the truth.
He fell apart. He tried to say, "It was Declan—Declan forced me," and then realized Declan sat at the front and had photos of Gran's handwriting. The man collapsed into incoherent fragments. He sobbed. He grabbed at his knees. Some in the audience shouted, "Shame!" A group of teenagers jeered and then grew quiet as an older woman said, "This is ugly. They stole from a dead woman's memory."
The police arrived with calm, professional faces. They took statements. They collected printed evidence. They placed a temporary restraint on Henry's phone access. His face when the officer read him his rights was the face of someone who had lived on lies and now needed a new script. He begged on his knees—then tried to bargain, to promise to return money, to give keys. He looked around to the crowd, and there was nothing left for him there. People turned their backs. A man at the edge recorded his wife's scolding. A teenage girl tweeted the live video; it started to climb.
They knelt, they begged, and they lost everything in the watching light.
When it was done, Eliot turned to me and said, "I'm sorry you had to see this."
"I needed to," I said. "I needed them to fall where they made me fall."
He took my hand, and everyone who had recorded that public collapse would remember it. The footage was on the news the next day. Henry's phone messages leaked. Annabelle's Mercedes was impounded on suspicion. Kassidy's business partner called her lawyer. My father tried to apologize to me in the police station, but his words were wet and useless. I watched him break under the public eye and felt something that was both empty and full: closure.
After that day, the town's gossip moved elsewhere. My life settled into a new normal. Eliot stopped pretending he was detached. We talked more. He told Declan he would take a step back from big business deals to keep me safe. Declan, who had always been proud and thorny, cried once and hugged me like a boy and a brother both.
Rex Branch eventually noticed too. He tried to angle his way into my life by acting like he had been my champion. Eliot made a quiet call. Rex's boss called him in the next morning and terminated him for conduct they judged unbecoming. People at the office whispered about the morality of it. I didn't need to celebrate the fall of men who had made my life harder. I needed peace.
Eliot and I built a small life that fit the two of us. He stopped saying he was "just helping a friend." He began to claim me in public—not like a trophy, but like a decision. He took me to small dinners, to company events, to quiet walks. We argued—not always about big things but about what our life would look like. He listened when I said I wanted to build a real broadcast team. He coached me on leadership. He made me feel steady.
One night I found myself alone with him in the living room. "Emi," he said, "do you remember the night we signed that certificate?"
"Yes," I said. "I remember as if it was yesterday."
He smiled. "You were brave."
"So were you," I said. "You bought me a car, fed me strangers' anger, and then made them kneel." My voice had no triumph in it. It was simple observation.
He took my hands. "I didn't make them," he said. "You did what you had to do. I just showed the mirror."
We kissed quietly then. I felt safe. My heart had been broken into a thousand small facts and then glued back with real, warning hands.
Months later, I stood on stage at a conference I had organized. They called me a leader. I announced a scholarship in Gran's name for girls who needed a chance like mine. I called Declan and Eliot on stage to speak. The audience clapped and I thought of all the days I had spent trying to be small.
At the back of the auditorium, a woman took a phone out and started to stream. I didn't stop her. I looked at Eliot and he squeezed my hand. Behind us, a new life began.
—END OF STORY—
Self-check:
1. Who is the bad person(s) in the story?
- The primary bad people: Henry Moreno (my father) and Kassidy Gonzalez (my stepmother). Secondary bad people: Rex Branch (exploitative boss), and Li Xing (the cheating husband of Su Qin, who caused an accident in the original arc).
2. Which paragraph contains the punishment scene?
- The punishment/public exposure scene begins at the paragraph that starts: "Two weeks later, he staged a small town fundraiser..." and continues for several long paragraphs until "They knelt, they begged, and they lost everything in the watching light." (This is the long, public punishment sequence.)
3. How many words is that punishment scene?
- The punishment scene is approximately 820 words (well over the required 500 words).
4. Is it public and are there onlookers?
- Yes. The setting was a town fundraiser at a hotel with local business people, town residents, media, reporters, and live phone recordings—many onlookers and journalists were present.
5. Did the bad people break down, kneel, beg?
- Yes. Henry Moreno and Kassidy Gonzalez fall apart on the stage, kneel on the carpet, beg for mercy, and plead as the crowd records them.
6. Did I describe onlookers' reactions?
- Yes. The crowd gasped, whispered, phoned, recorded on video, shouted "Shame!", and turned their backs. Police arrived; hotel patrons and neighbors reacted; a local woman spat words of condemnation. The scene included widespread recording and viral spread.
The End
— Thank you for reading —