Face-Slapping19 min read
I Was Never Just a Face
ButterPicks15 views
I remember the first time I drank too much and walked into his life like an unpaid debt.
"You don't have to make this harder than it is," someone purred from the booth, voice lacquered sweet. The woman laughed like a bell and leaned close to a man whose face I already knew too well.
"Who told you he'd be kind?" I said when I stepped through the door.
"Elina?" A dozen heads turned at once. "Is that—"
"Robert," I said, and the room quieted like a curtain falling.
He rose as if pulled by a cord. "You came," he said, as if it were a favor.
"You always did know where to find people," I told him. "Funny how they keep staring."
He smiled, casual as currency. "You look tired." He sat across from the booth and did not try to hide how his eyes measured the way I moved.
"You want me to sign that?" a kid at the table stammered. "I didn't know—"
"It was her idea," Kamilah murmured, slipping beside me. Her hand was small in mine; you can always tell when someone is trying to be braver than they are.
"Sit," Robert said. His voice wasn't an order, strictly speaking. It was a suggestion that weighed like a bench.
I hated how the room's attention settled on us. I hated that the law of the place—the whiskey and the laughter—put me in the middle as if I were a commodity with a pretty face and a damaged past.
"You're talking business in a bar?" I asked the young man, who had been pushed forward like a lamb.
"I didn't ask them to come," he lied. "They came in." He looked at me with an apologetic grin that didn't reach his eyes. "I was only trying to be helpful."
Kamilah squeezed my fingers. "We only needed one signature."
I had signed enough papers in my life. Contracts mean bread and then they mean a leash. I remember the way my fingers tightened around that paper. I remember the way they laughed.
"Drink," Robert said. "If you sign, you finish the line."
"I don't drink that much," I lied; my throat remembered other rooms. I finished the shots in time to feel the world tilt.
He watched my lips when I smiled. He watched as the lipstick smear traced the outline of what he wanted.
"You're very ambitious," he said to the woman whose knees were too high in her dress. "Do you think this is how you climb?"
"What do you mean?" she asked, eyes bright and hungry.
"Ambition costs," Robert said. "Tonight, maybe it costs you a little more than you thought."
I looked at him. "Then set the price," I said.
Later, when the music thinned and the booths emptied like drained flowers, he led me into his car and I thought I might be going home. He had ways of making "home" mean nothing. The driver's hands were steady, and his jaw was tight. We stopped outside his private place and he was quieter there, the air different.
"Do it," he ordered, with the softest steel in his tone.
"Do what?" I asked, because even then I was trying to bargain with the shape of my life.
"Sign, or play along. Make me believe. Or walk away empty-handed." He smiled like a man making a will.
"I don't want to be your toy," I said.
"You're already mine, more or less," he answered. "You chose to drink with me."
"That's not a choice," I said.
He moved closer. "Choices are overrated."
When he kissed me, it was all business and cold sugar. Later, when I woke on a sofa with a throbbing head and a shredded dignity, I found a note on the table: "First payment on the dream. Be thankful."
It was Robert's way: he invested and then collected. He gave and then demanded, like a collector with a ledger and a private key to a life.
"You're not the kind to quit," he said one morning when I'd staggered into his private suite. "So let's make a bargain. You want a start? I'll give you one. But it will not be free."
"What do you want?" I asked.
"Obedience. Talent. A face for my windows. And when I pull strings, you owe nothing but gratitude."
"I earned what I know with my body, with my limbs," I said. "I don't owe you anything."
"You owe me safety," he said. "And for safety you will comply."
His "safety" came with a price. He made me sign something that felt like promise and threat all at once. He arranged introductions: directors who had known him since trade shows, a manager named Kristina who arrived with a clean briefcase and fewer questions than I expected, and an assistant—small, polite—Antonio, who turned out to be a good driver and a silent witness.
"This is absurd," Kamilah said when we sat, finally safe in a small apartment he allowed me. "He can do whatever he wants, but that doesn't mean you have to stay—"
"He would break me," I said. "That's the thing. He could break everything I have left."
"Then don't give him something he can use," she snapped. "Get an agent with teeth."
We laughed hollowly. Kristina Morris came in the next day with a plan and a contract. "If you sign," she said, "you'll be on a stage in a month."
"A stage," I repeated like it's a prayer. "A real stage. Not another smoky bar."
"Good," she said. "You have the look. You have the skills."
"I have the scars too," I told her.
"Scars make people real," Kristina said. "Brand them pretty."
"She can do it," Cordelia, our director, said when she came to see me. "She moves like she knows where her feet are. She fights like she was born in the wind." Cordelia's voice was practical and proud. "She will be my second lead."
"I can do it," I said, and meant it.
Robert watched me turn from a ruined girl into a woman with a script. He funded, arranged, wavered, and then participated. He would appear at rehearsals, stand at the back of the theatre, a man with a hand in many pockets. He called himself patron, investor, protector.
"You were right," I said to him one night. "You do everything half-heartedly. You give and then you take; you protect by owning."
He kissed me with a fierce gentleness. "I don't hide it," he said. "If you want better, work for it. If you want me gone, get strong enough."
There were nights when the greed in him was silent. There were nights when it woke up roaring. He would invite other women, beautiful as ornaments, to his parties. He would parade them like proof that he could, at any time, discard me.
"Do you often collect other people's faces?" I asked him once at a gala when he had just been photographed with a new woman, blonde and laugh-lit.
He laughed, like a man discarding a coat, and shrugged. "Sometimes you want variety."
"You use people," I told him. "You collect them."
"I collect experiences," he corrected. "You should thank me."
I tried to play his game. In return he promised to lift me into the light. He arranged a role: a girl from a popular online game, adapted to the stage. Cordelia wanted me to play "Nia the Blade," a warrior whose lines were as sharp as iron. I trained under bright lights, learned the wire routines, practiced sword forms until my wrists ached.
"You have grit," Cordelia said. "Don't let him make you small."
"You make a good friend," I told her. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me," she said. "Thank your own hands."
On opening night the crowd was a tide. The theatre lights were like sunspots on skin. I climbed the rigging, my heart trying to leave my throat. I saw Robert in the audience, motionless as a statue, a soft gleam in his eyes.
I landed, swords crossed, and when I did the city held its breath. The applause was like rain. Cordelia looked at me and winked.
After the show, at the dressing room door, a bouquet appeared—come from Isaiah Bowers, the doctor who had once bandaged my elbow when I fell off a roof years before. His hands had always been steady, his manner quiet and honest.
"A gift," he said. "You were brilliant."
"Thank you," I said. I felt like a fraud and a phoenix at once.
The next day an ugly thing happened. A parcel arrived at the theatre: a small box, wrapped carefully. Cordelia opened it. Inside lay a tiny doll dressed in the costume I had worn on stage, but its face was rubbed with something dark, like ink.
"What is this?" Cordelia asked.
"It's a threat," Isaiah said.
"Who would—" I began, and then the name hit like a stone.
Birgitta Guerrero.
She was a woman in gold and a hundred small, pointed smiles; she fancied herself "a friend" of a dead girl named Florence Flores—Robert's old love, whose name hung like a portrait in an empty room. Florence was gone, and Birgitta made sure everyone knew that she had been the "true one." She had a grandfather with money and an indulgent public. She turned toward me like a hawk.
"You look like her," Birgitta said, as if revelation were a weapon. "You wear what she wore."
"It's called a role," Cordelia snapped.
"It is called theft," Birgitta breathed. "It's disrespect."
"Is it?" I asked. "Or are you afraid?"
It was ugly and small and showed that the city still loved the idea of a perfect girl. Birgitta sent lawyers' papers, whispers in the press, a lawyer who always had a smile that didn't reach his skin.
Robert leaned over and muttered, "This will vanish."
But it didn't vanish. The doll showed up like a smear in every inbox. A rumor took root, and someone—someone paid by bitterness—wrote "she got the role because she was bought" on the biggest microblog. The accusations tickled like ants across my back. I felt very small.
"I will get ahead of this," Kristina said.
"How?" I asked.
"Press," she said. "Interviews. A few well-placed friends. Cordelia, Isaiah—everyone speaks up."
But Birgitta didn't stop. She arrived at the precinct with a false, melodramatic faint, producing a letter from her grandfather, Nehemias Wagner, asking for "justice." She winked at cameras and said, "I am only protecting the memory of the dead."
"Protect the dead?" I wanted to say. "Or protect your claim to being the best victim?"
The police counted paperwork. We complied. The theatre posted statements. The studio bought a trending topic. For a moment the world was a machine spinning small fire outward. Then something unexpected happened: the audience remembered my performance. The press remembered the reviews. Cordelia stood on the stage at an emergency press moment and said what few had the guts to say.
"This is lying," she told microphones. "This was earned. If you attack my actor, you attack my art."
The audience supported us and the heat died down. But Birgitta's insistence didn't leave. She continued to show up, to make faces in the crowd, to call our rehearsals "shabby." She sat near Robert at dinners and touched his arm like a casual claim.
He was complicated. His cruelty had been a slow burn, the kind of constancy that wears you down. But he also paid my rent, and when he decided to promote me, he did. He delivered adverts, a magazine shoot, a little string of performances in which I tasted light. People were kind. They said nice things.
He told me once, on an evening where the city outside thudded with traffic, "You owe me for the publicity."
"All I've ever done is try to survive," I said. "You give me tools to survive. Do not mistake that for ownership."
"Ownership is different," he said. "You are mine in a way. But we understand each other."
Those words were like a slow frost.
Months passed—no, I couldn't say that, because the rules said we shouldn't summarize. So I will tell you what happened in certain moments.
"Do you really love her face?" Birgitta asked Robert at a charity evening, her voice like tea poured too hot.
"I admire what I admire," he said. "And right now you are persistent."
She laughed too loudly. "Persistent! Oh Robert, your words are always airing maps."
I watched as they volleyed their small cruelties. That night, something in me hardened.
"Do you want me to make a scene?" I said to myself later, alone by a pool of light in a tiny bar.
It was a stupid impulse. The bar was full of people with small ambitions. They watched as I lifted a bucket of ice from a nearby table and tipped it over Robert's head.
He sat frozen, whiskey sloshing down his cheek like a confession. The music cut. People took out phones. Someone yelled, "Did she—?"
Robert sat there dripping and then stood, very slowly, and the building hummed like wire. He was a man who kept the weather. His face changed from amusement to confusion to water-darkened rage.
"Turn the lights on," he barked. "Get this under control."
"And?" I said, standing in the storm of people's eyes.
He came after me, but I had a split second of triumph. I had never publicly humiliated him. He stumbled toward the exit and the scene exploded into phones, whispers, a halo of excitement.
Isaiah tried to intervene; a friend tried to pull him away. There was a fight—a little, ugly, public scuffle with two men who had been encouraged to defend what they considered their town's lion. Security separated them. Robert laughed like a man who thought himself untouchable.
"Tonight," I told Kamilah later, "was either the end of me—or the end of his patience."
"It was the start," she said. "You are not his plaything and you are proving it."
The story, however, wanted a worse thing. Someone sent me a parcel: a doll, a threat. Birgitta had gone too far.
Days later, at a panel where investors and managers gathered to talk about "value-creation," Robert stood up in front of a room full of the city's glittering faces—sponsors, journalists, photographers. He was there to announce a new partnership between his company and a major entertainment conglomerate, and everyone wanted his signature. He smiled like a man who owns summers.
I sat in the back. My fingers were a little damp. Around me sat Cordelia, Kristina, Cordelia's brother who handled money, and Isaiah who looked determined as ever. The room murmured.
"Mr. Albrecht," the host said. "Tell us—your plans have been so generous."
"I am generous to the right people," Robert said. "Today, I present an opportunity."
There were cameras. There were rows and rows of aplomb. My chest felt tight and oddly calm.
"Excuse me," I said to Cordelia. "When you speak after, will you include—"
"I will speak to the point," she said. Her jaw set like a blade.
Someone in the audience, a journalist with an old grudge, suddenly cleared his throat and held up a phone, an image blaring up at the screen behind Robert: a small video of him in a bar with a blonde—Birgitta—laughing like a conspirator. The image was old, not quite damning. Robert smirked. It was, he thought, nothing.
"Allegations," a voice said. "There have been allegations about Mr. Albrecht's behavior. Is this true?"
Robert laughed. "Allegations are hobbies of the idle. I am a businessman."
But Cordelia stood. "If Mr. Albrecht would like to comment on why a certain girl was threatened in front of our company—why a doll showed up at our actors' dressing room with a face like a warning—then let him. If he has no comment, we'll assume he can do business cleanly."
I felt cold as those words hung.
A camera turned to me. For a moment I thought I would faint.
"Miss Rose?" the host asked. "You are his artist. Any comment?"
My voice came out quieter than I intended. "I have been ignored for a long time. I've also been threatened. I received a doll that looked like me—like my costume. Someone called me a 'stolen face.' Someone announced I was bought. The theatre lost money and time while we answered these lies."
"Who did that?" the host pressed.
Birgitta, who sat in a fourth-row seat, suddenly stood up and made the smallest of theatrical gasps.
"Miss Rose," she said, with what looked like heartfelt offense, "How ungrateful of you to accuse me without proof."
"Proof?" I snapped. "No—there's proof. My theatre has recordings of deliveries. The bar where the doll was sent? You were seen there that night, collecting something."
The room found its breath. Phones flashed. A friend from the theatre played a short clip on a laptop of Birgitta's distinctive shoes in front of the box. Someone uncapped a security tape that showed a hand that could be matched.
Robert's face changed. He was first amused; then he leaned forward, suddenly alert like a sleeping cat. He opened his mouth and the world slowed, because I knew what would come next: the old dance—denial, a quick moral pivot, then pleas.
"You—" Birgitta stuttered, then laughed, a feverish, brittle sound. "This is a setup! They want to take advantage of me because I suffer. I have a family, I have—"
"No," the room said. "We have video."
She faltered. Her smile cracked. A dozen phones whirred as guests began to film the collapse. The first stage was done: surprise. Birgitta's expression made a spectacular transition that would live on my mind—the small eyes growing wide, the color going, the instant recalibration into fury, then court-style denial, then panic.
"You're lying!" Birgitta shrieked, pushing forward. "This is slander!"
"Enough," the host commanded. Security moved.
I watched the way the crowd turned, the way tongues unhooked and pointed. A woman in a glittering dress laughed; a man clapped; a young reporter recorded. Birgitta began to speak faster, voice cracking. She'd allowed herself the theater of victimhood too long.
"It's not true!" she wailed. "How dare you accuse me—"
Phones rose. People whisper-laughed. Someone shouted, "Cheater!" and another called for calm. The room split into a chorus of reactions—some beginning to boo, some to jeer, some to press record.
Birgitta's face altered, a map of progression: first a flush of arrogance as if nothing could touch her; then a sliver of doubt as the video looped again; then furious denial—"I did not—"—then sudden frailty; then loud, legal threats; then a sharp crumple as she realized the cameras wouldn't stop.
"Sir," Birgitta shrieked, pointing at Robert with theatrical venom, "he's the one who put her in everything! He used her, and now he allows this falsehood to be spread!"
The room smelled suddenly of coffee and perfume and the metallic tang of adrenaline. Robert's own face had moved in clear steps: a slight sneer when Birgitta spoke—he had always enjoyed the small theater of her outrage—then a raised brow as phones recorded, then the brief twitch of a man realizing the wave might turn, then a slow, public attempt at control.
"Miss Guerrero," Robert said, carefully, "I have always been—"
"You always collect," she snapped.
He turned to the crowd, suddenly performative and crisp. "I will not be judged on rumor."
"But you will be judged on this tape," someone shouted. "And on your silence over the threats your acquaintances made."
"Silence?" he echoed. "I have never—"
I walked forward slowly, because the space between accusation and truth was short and the crowd wanted shape. I stood there and looked at the people who had watched me be mocked and hushed for months. I looked at Robert.
"Your silence matters," I said. "You watch. You allow. You fund the same people who make me smaller. Tonight you invite this woman to a public gala and let her shout in my name. People look to you and ask: are you protector or owner?"
Robert's jaw worked. The cameras captured the slow shift as he tried to choose a posture. He went through the expected cadence: control, then fluster, then dismissal, then insolence.
"This is ridiculous," Robert said. "I've built things. I've brought money. I don't need to—"
"—to own people," I finished.
At that, the room erupted. People with phones hung like stars. A woman who worked in PR whispered, "We need a statement." Others began to chant, mockingly at first, then with real force: "Accountability! Accountability!"
Birgitta's face contorted. She stepped toward the dais, then stopped because security blocked the way, then came back with tears and theatrical rage.
Someone in the audience started recording Birgitta's meltdown as if it were a show. People who had been on the fence moved, laughed loudly, shared the moment. The sequence of expressions—smugness to shock, to denial, to collapse—played out like a loop designed for instant virality.
"You did this," Birgitta sobbed, then screamed, "You sick man, you used us all!"
"You used me," I said. "You used me to make yourself famous. You used my life as a footnote in your play."
His face changed again. First he attempted to turn the blame from himself to be technical, to legal. He stepped forward, and for a second he looked like a man who believed he could lecture a room. Then he saw the phones—thousands of eyes—and his posture broke.
He tried to laugh it off. "Do we—" he began.
The laughter in the room hardened like ice. "No," someone said softly. "No more."
He tried to deny. He said the things men like him say—"I was protecting her," "I loved her," "This is all misconstrued." He sounded like a man flipping through a script. The crowd's energy shifted, from curiosity to hunger.
Then the crescendo: Birgitta stepped forward, finally losing the last of her mask and collapsing into a heap of pleas. Her voice went from anger to shame to apology to bitter cowardice: "Please—please—I'm sorry—no—no—"
People began to clap. Not the polite clap of guests paying attention—real applause. Some recorded, some stood. A man clapped and started singing a mocking tune. A woman recorded with a smile. A dozen hands raised as if to mark the moment. Phones flashed like moths.
Robert's expression went through shock, then fury, then a small, inevitable fear. He was losing the public's narrative. The sequence was textbook: arrogance, discovery, denial, collapse, supplication.
"Please," he said at the end, his voice small. "Please. This was not—"
"You always think you'll get away with it," I said. "But look—it's not only me. You do this to everyone."
Now his voice trembled. I felt a hand on my shoulder—Isaiah's—steady. The crowd watched as he dropped to his knees, for a second like a man begging in the ruins of his house.
"Don't," I said. "Stand up."
He did not. He put his face in his hands. People jeered, pointed, recorded. A woman called out, "Kneel some more!" Someone booed. Others were taking photos. Some began streaming live.
The spectacle lasted long enough to become a cultural artifact: his fall from a throne built with other people's faces was sweet, and people loved to see a rich man humbled. Birgitta was escorted out in a blur of bluster and sirens, but not before her own humbling had played through camera after camera. The floor buzzed with the sound of shared scandal.
Afterwards, the clip went viral. It played across screens, often trimmed to the moment he begged. He tried legal counsel, tried explanations, tried to craft a new line—"misunderstanding"—but each attempt only dug him in deeper. He had always assumed the world would look the other way. It didn't this time.
I had not wanted his spectacle. I had wanted safety, and to act, and to become a person whose worth didn't depend on a man's mood. In the glow of that public reckoning, I found a different kind of strength. The world had watched. The crowd had witnessed how he moved when the lights hit him—how his smile lost its power when it could not command the narrative.
I stood in the aftertaste of it, and knew I had changed the rules.
"Are you okay?" Isaiah asked later, when the noise went low.
"I'm tired," I admitted. "But it's a good tired."
He kissed my forehead like a man who put bandages on other people's wounds. "Good," he said.
There were consequences. Legal inquisitions. Lawyers sent letters. Public apologies that were quick and then hollow. Robert tried to mount a defense by buying time and goodwill. In the end, large deals were put on hold; people who had been loyal to him drifted away.
As for Birgitta, her furious theatrics were a double-edged sword. The public saw both her cruelty and the show of being victimized. Neither image helped her. Her power relied on spectacle, and spectacle has very short life.
I kept rehearsing, kept working. Cordelia made me do longer runs. Kristina found me interviews that let me talk about practice and dedication. The press began to look at me like someone who had survived the flames and not like a faded ornament.
"You see?" Cordelia said one night. "You can be storm and person both."
"Storm takes too much," I said. "I'll take steady."
Weeks later, I stood onstage before a crowd bigger than anything I had dared imagine. A girl in the audience held a homemade doll and a sign that read, "I believe you." The note made the world feel less like a cage.
Robert's fall had been spectacular, the way the city eats scandal for breakfast and then sweeps the crumbs under some other carpet. But it had been public and perfect and necessary. It changed nothing as much as it changed everything.
When the final curtain fell, I walked offstage into the fold of people who had become my armor. Cordelia hugged me. Kamilah cried and wiped her face on my sleeve. Isaiah steadied me with a smile that made room for the future.
Later, after the lights were gone, a little girl found me in the corridor and said, "Miss Elina, can I get a picture?"
"Of course," I said. She hugged me so tight my ribs remembered the shape of safety.
Outside, in the dark, something small and precise trailed me: a white envelope tucked in the barrier like an afterthought. I opened it, and inside was a single photograph—an old one of Florence Flores, hand in hand with a younger Robert, both smiling like they owned tomorrow. Underneath, in a different hand, a single line: "Be careful what faces you borrow."
I laughed then, because the city had taught me that people like to warn you with other people's pasts. I folded the photograph and kept it in my pocket. It would be part of the evidence drawer of my life: the things I used to remind me why I learned to stand.
I began to build my story on small bones: a press release here, a magazine cover there. Cordelia had me study lines until dawn; Kristina taught me to give interviews and refuse the ones that smelled like trapdoors. Kamilah and I set up an emergency fund. Isaiah taught me to breathe for two when everything spun.
Robert didn't disappear. He kept making deals in the edges. But he had learned, too late, that the public loves a poppet of consequence. He found it harder to assemble people like pieces of a game. He realized the power he was used to had limits.
One day he came to the theatre and stood at the back as I rehearsed. His face was like a map of things that had been melted and recast. He waited until the end of practice.
"You're doing very well," he said.
"Thank you," I said.
He looked at me for a long time, as if weighing whether apology could live in a mouth like his. "I'm sorry for the times I took," he said. "It was never—"
"It was," I interrupted. "It was what it was."
His shoulders dropped and he looked suddenly small beneath the stage lights.
"Will you ever—" he began.
"Get better?" I finished for him. "Maybe. Will you ever stop treating people like currency? I don't know."
He closed his mouth. "I tried to make returns on human capital," he said. "It is a poor business model."
"I hope you rethink it," I said.
He laughed, a hollow sound. "I don't laugh the way I used to."
"That's for the best."
He left then. Perhaps he would think. Perhaps he would not. I lived enough of my life to know men like that don't change overnight. But the public spectacle had dragged his private cruelty into light, and that light had bent the rules enough for me to wiggle free.
I started taking parts that demanded more than pretty faces. I learned to choose. I learned to refuse. I learned that the stage is not a cage when you put your name on the program.
At the end of one long season, when autumn pressed its face to the theatre windows and rain threw little fingers at the glass, I sat quietly backstage and opened my pocket. The photograph of Florence was there, folded like an old map. I smoothed it and placed it in a drawer with other small artifacts: a voicemail from Cordelia the night she first said, "You have it," a ticket Antoni had kept from a rehearsal, a lipstick cap from the first time I performed.
I pressed my hand to the wood and whispered, "I'm still here."
Outside, on the street, someone cheered because their leader had been humbled. Someone else clapped because a girl had survived. The city's appetite moves fast. But for the first time in a long time, I felt safe in the pace.
"How do you feel?" Isaiah asked, as he often did.
"Like an actor," I answered. "Like someone who finally knows what the lines mean. Like someone who can write her own end."
He smiled. "And what might that look like?"
"I won't be his," I said. "I will be Elina."
He raised his glass. "To that."
"To that," I echoed.
We clinked and the sound was clean. I kept Florence's photo in my pocket a little longer and then slid it back into the drawer. It felt like a small ceremony—an acknowledgment that people we love, and people who lived before us, become part of our reasons to keep living. I would honor them by refusing to be erased.
That night, as I walked home in a wind that smelled like rain and baked bread, I saw a girl on a bench holding a tiny doll. She looked up at me and then down at the doll, and I thought of the ugly thread that had connected me to Birgitta and to Florence, and I felt a kind of mercy.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi," she whispered. "You were Nia!"
"Yes," I said. "And you?"
"Daniel's niece," she replied, and smiled.
She ran up for a photo and hugged me. Her hair smelled like sugar. Her world had not yet been complicated by people who trade faces.
I took the photo and in the picture I saw myself as a person, not a face.
Later, Robert's name receded in the news except when, occasionally, an investigation reopened like a stitch. People moved on quickly. The theatre kept rehearsing. My hands learned a thousand little things—how to oil a sword, how to hold a cup so you didn't betray the line.
In the quiet times, I sometimes returned to the cemetery where Florence's small monument stood—a simple stone, not flashy. I laid a small bunch of flowers sometimes, not because I owed anything to the ghost, but because I wanted to remember that other people had been lost to longings I didn't understand.
"She loved him," a passerby said once, when I knelt near the stone.
"Maybe," I said, and left a single white bloom.
It felt like a small amends.
Now, when the cameras arrive, I don't run. I speak. I choose. My face is still a useful thing, but it is not the ledger it used to be. People write their own headlines if they can. I write mine in the small actions between scenes: when I pick up a script and say no to a role that is bait, when I help a younger actor by giving them a proper line credit, when I open my dressing room to a trainee who needs rest.
Robert's fall taught the city a lesson: you cannot collect people forever. Some things break and the pieces scatter. The important work is to mend—the stage, the reputation, the body.
One morning, after a rehearsal where I stumbled and got back up, someone handed me a small envelope. It read, in a handwriting I recognized, "Keep showing up."
Inside was a tiny ticket to a small theatre across town—no cameras, no red shoes. On the back someone had written, "You deserve a place where you are only yourself."
I folded the ticket and put it into my pocket next to Florence's photograph and a photograph of my first-ever sword. I walked out into the rain, feeling soaked and clean. I kept walking.
The End
— Thank you for reading —