Face-Slapping17 min read
I Woke Up in the Wrong Story — and Didn't Die Quietly
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I remember the pain first—the kind that stole the breath from me and left the world narrow as a candle flame. I remember hands, linen, and an impossible white overhead. I remember someone saying, "Hold on, push," and then someone else, clinical and cold, saying, "Prepare the defibrillator."
"I can't—" I tried to speak. My voice came out as a thin rope of air.
"You must," said a man at my ear. His voice was a soft river. He bent and poured warm water into my mouth as if life were simply something to be given like that.
"Who—" I wanted to ask. The baby's cry cut me off. For a second, the room stepped away and I fell into an emptiness that felt like the end.
I woke in someone else's book.
"Lucia." He said my name—my husband, that face I had loved since childhood. Giovanni Collier bent over me, the whites of his eyes pink with lack of sleep. "Lucia, you're awake."
"Giovanni." My throat was dry and my tongue raw. "I—I'm alive."
His hand was gentle. "You are. Sleep now."
I let him tuck the blanket closer, watched the way his fingers smoothed the patched coverlet. The living man beside me was the same boy who had stolen my inked sketches of willow trees and tucked them under my pillow at twelve; he was also, according to the book I remembered, the man who would one day become a scion and forget me.
"You remember nothing?" I asked too quickly when he sat back and looked at me like I might break.
His laugh was a little bitter. "I remember enough for now. Worry less, rest more."
I had been inside that book once before—its pages written, its ending known: I die before he ascends, the heroine takes my place in his life, and the world applauds the swap. But I had come awake inside my own body after childbirth, tattered and raw and very, very alive. I had remembered the plot and my role as a disposable pawn. I had also remembered everything I had learned in sixteen years of waking as a reader of the book: what would happen, who would betray, who would profit.
"Please." I gripped his sleeve. "Tell me everything that will come."
He stared at me, and for the first time his face was a map of worry. "Lucia, why would you ask that?"
"Because I don't want to die," I said simply. "Because the end they wrote for me is not the end I accept."
He swallowed, and in the silence the child on the pallet brightened and wept again.
We had grown up together—sold cheaply into one household by a grieving father, raised in the same crooked cottage by a grandfather who taught Giovanni the characters and taught me how to mend cloth. We had wed when our lives were thin as a reed. The book had promised me one collapsing scene after another: a beating, a rumor, a man from the capital lifting me from the mire in a deal that cost my dignity. In the old pages, when Giovanni recovered, he recovered without me; he found a royal match, and I was only a rumor. I did not want that.
"Don't let me be the woman the book would steal," I whispered that night when I thought he was asleep.
He turned and kissed my forehead. "I won't lose you."
I laughed softly, the sound pebbly. "You are a man who promises when it is convenient, Giovanni."
"If it is convenient," he said, "I will make it so."
He left for town the next morning with a small satchel and a promise on his lips. I watched him go and felt the old dread return—because the book did not always obey kindness. The book had a stubborn rhythm and characters who moved like clockwork.
Days passed in small, sharp beats. The baby grew a little stronger. I learned to carry water, to fold the thin cotton sheets without waking the child. Giovanni worked in the market and copied briefs for other scholars. People in town whispered—women fold their lips around my name like a scandal. "She never cries," they said. "She is strange."
"Are you avoiding me?" I asked Giovanni one evening as he tied a knot in a rope.
He looked up, surprised. "Avoiding you? Lucia, why would I—"
"You were distant at dusk. You looked past me."
He blinked, then his face smoothed. "You worry too much."
He was a man becoming two men: the gentle boy I had loved and the future pillar of a court I had read about. Small acts began to feel like tests. He would tuck a flower into the cracked earthenware every time he returned, but sometimes he would not meet my hand. Sometimes his laugh was absent where it had been full before. I kept remembering the page that said: he forgets. I kept telling myself I could stop that page from turning.
Then the town-messenger came, wind in his hair and worry on his face. "Giovanni has been hurt in the market. Come quickly."
I ran and my legs moved like a machine. In the sickroom the attendants blurred like ghosts. Giovanni lay with a white headwrap, dark stains creeping along the bandages. When he opened his eyes they were clear and unfocused in that nightmare way.
"This is the part I remember," I said later when he slept. "A man from the capital will see you and take me into his house to keep you alive—"
He twitched. "Who would do that?"
"Someone with charm and terrible morals," I said. "Someone called Baltasar Sandberg in the book."
"You must not do anything foolish," Giovanni whispered, as if the mere mentioning of it could be a threat.
I did it anyway.
A carriage pulled up the week after Giovanni's illness. It was the neat kind of luck that ruins the mind: a young nobleman from the capital, florid and pleasant, who spoke softly and with a patience that smelled of new silk. He offered help for the cost of a name. "I can save him," Baltasar said, and I, breathless and terror-struck by the memory of empty fields where my grave might be, accepted.
"I will go to the city," I told Giovanni, my voice a thread. "I'll stay close enough. I will return."
"You must not leave our home," he said weakly. "You are the center of my life."
"Then, wait for me," I said.
He watched me with eyes that already seemed to belong to a man carrying the weight of a future that might not include me. He held my hand and said, "Do not make promises to me that you will not keep."
I left with Baltasar like a dog carried in a velvet basket—protected in a way that felt like imprisonment. In his house I learned quickly how the rich make breathing an art. Baltasar entertained easily. He had a patience with my fragility that the book had told me was false. He gave dinners and whispered a phrase that hardly any man ever said to a poor woman: "Tell me what you need, Lucia."
"I need to protect my husband," I said plainly. "I need Giovanni to wake and return."
"Then save him," he replied, and sent for physicians whose remedies cost gold.
Giovanni recovered, but he returned hollow. He looked at me with an odd distance, like a man who had misplaced a book and now worried about what would be lost. The town thought I was that other woman; they nodded and whispered when I walked the street. "She has been seen at Baltasar's," they said. "She left him for the city lights."
I was furious, but also wiser. The book's script had been written with a cruel neatness: a woman in need, a rich patron, a scandal, a death. I refused that neatness. The first thing I learned living inside someone else's predicted pages was to survive as if survival were a small revolution.
When the fire came to our cottage, I did the only thing that still felt like me. I ran into the smoke to find the ancestral plaque my grandfather had kept. A flame licked my skin. I could have died there, but a stranger in a calm, cruelly handsome face—Baltasar—thrust me over his shoulder and carried me out.
"Lucia!" Giovanni's voice broke into my chest like glass. He had been at the edge of town when the arson started; people said it was the drunken revenge of a petty man with a grudge. "Why would you go back in?"
"Because a box of bones is still a box of bones," I said. "I would rather have the boxes of bones than empty hands."
"Then do not do it again," he told me. His eyes were wild. He had never been the kind of man to break, but something within him was cracking.
In the turmoil, a new man came forward, the one the book had marked: Cael Coppola, a learned man who carried a look like rain—calm and cold. He peered into Giavanni's illness and found no permanent wound. But he also found something else: Giovanni's distance was not only a mood. It was a choice.
"You were seen with Baltasar," I said the night we returned to our patched home.
Giovanni's silence was a verdict. He answered quietly, "I had to know the price of a life. I had to know I could be taken care of."
"By him?" I asked.
"By anyone," he said. "By the world."
That night the book I remembered and the man beside me dissolved into one another. I realized how much of a life is made of choices, not prophecies. I would not be carried away by the book's tidy cruelty: I would learn how to move.
I took lessons. I learned to bind my voice low and even, to walk with a man's gait when I needed the world to see me as a different thing. Cael Coppola—who taught anatomies and the method to steady a throat—cut a small loop of silk and taught me the trick of the throat binding. "Sound comes from what is given room," he said dryly. "Make the sound be what you want it to be."
"I want to not be killed," I answered.
"Then practice," he said.
Months passed under a hard sun. I learned ledger sums to keep our affairs straight. Andre Romero, an older man with a teacher's patience, welcomed me to a small academy as a helper at first. I taught arithmetic to girls who had never touched a slate. They called me "Mr. Shu" because I pronounced the characters close to a man's tone and because my hand had always been steady. My daughter, Emi Brooks, who had been the soft center of my life since the harshest nights, slept in the corner and grew round-cheeked.
"Who taught you the numbers?" a girl named Tessa asked once.
"An old man who never laughed," I said. The children giggled and followed me to the courtyard like moths.
The book's plot tried to tug me back. Rumors came: that Giovanni had risen in his exams, that he might become a man of office. That a marriage between him and the princess—Claire Santos—was being considered as alliance and convenience. That in the capital, stations shifted like plates in an earthquake. I wrote to Giovanni and to Baltasar and to others. Their letters arrived with different tones: euphoria from Baltasar, dryness from Giovanni, a polite distance from the princess when she wrote.
"Join me at the academy," I suggested once to Giovanni in a short line. "Teach the boys sometimes."
He answered, "I must go to the city."
"Then you'll be gone," I said flatly. "Do not be surprised if I learn to live without you."
His answer surprised me because it was stark and honest. "Then live."
Time made me hunker into work. I became steady. The academy grew; I named it for my grandfather's willow. Girls came in rough skirts and went out with clear hands and steady minds. News came like wintering birds: Cael Coppola was accused of a crime in the capital; a woman of the court had been ruined. We rallied paper and ink and wrote to those who might listen. In the night, my hands would shake with the memory of the old book's cruel end—how a brave woman was traded and faded away.
Then came the murder.
I remember the carriage because the sun was fierce and my legs felt leaden. Two men dragged me into a coach, and a cold veil dropped over my mouth. "Not the teacher," I thought. "Not the girl who gives sums and steady bread." I bit my tongue until blood came and thought, "I will not be quiet."
They argued, low and greedy. "That's the one. Keep her alive until—"
"Keep her alive? Are you mad? We can't take any risks."
"She's the one. The big man's order."
I tasted metal and thought of Emi. I thought of the nights when Giovanni's hand had smoothed my hair. I thought of the times when I had lied to survive. Then a lamp of thought lit: if men believed I had been bought by Baltasar, they would think my death not a crime but a business. If I could make them think the wrong thing, I might live.
When the carriage halted, when they pried my head up to show me a rough field, I chose a risk. I spoke the single line I had practiced for years in other voices, closed my eyes like a set piece, and let the story take me.
"Lucia McCoy," I said, in my own voice and with as much force as I had left. "I am a woman of the town. Hear this: my money and my body have been sold. Take it and leave me."
It was a lie, but the men believed lies because lies were currency. They took my story and left me for dead because the "truth" was more convenient.
And then Aldo Chen—the stoic man who had guarded our academy—did something no page had told me he would do. He flung himself at the blade that was meant for me. The steel went through his chest in a way that made a sound like a lesson falling.
"Go!" he gasped, blood hot on my cheek like an offered brand. "Run."
I ran. I woke hours later with a hand over my mouth in a quiet place—Baltasar's estate at its far edge, an empty cottage he had used for funerals. They buried me as he arranged. A fake death. A false funeral. The town said my body had vanished and that I had been murdered in a jealous quarrel. "She had lovers," the gossip said.
They all thought me dead. They showed up at the grave with faces of righteous sadness. Giovanni wept and promised that the truth would be hunted down. And I stayed hidden, living as a man in the academy's outer guest room, my hair bound, my tongue trained to a lower pitch. I watched them bury a lie and walked among the living.
"Why?" Baltasar asked one morning when I confessed the plan. He had been kind and cruel in the way of friends who keep their hands too close to a game. "Why would you make them think you are gone instead of confronting them?"
"Because the book had a tidy knife," I said. "Because I can either be cut by the knife or take it away."
"You burned your own name," he said, and for a moment his voice was very small.
"Better a burned name than a hollow grave," I answered.
My life became a double craft—teach and hide. I taught as "Mr. Shu." Emi grew among the scholars, with Aldo Chen a fierce sentinel at her side. Cael Coppola taught anatomy in quiet rooms and taught me how to steady a scalpel. Andre Romero became my older father in a world where fathers were rare. I learned to write the petitions that could uproot lies; I learned to read the hidden accounts. The book's plot tried to puff wind at my heels: the capital was a furnace of ambition, the princess, Claire Santos, a woman with an appetite for reform and a gaze that made men shift. Over and over the same pattern sought to reassert itself: my death, Giovanni's marriage to a politically useful bride, the heroine of the book—Claire—replacing me.
But history, I learned, could be argued with.
A scandal broke wide when a low officer named Clark Kuznetsov attempted to pin the killing on Giovanni. Clark was a man used to breathing other people's fear; he had been part of an old faction. "You cannot hide blood," he said in the square, forcing the story to a head. The town's mood was a cutting wind, and I watched from the edge as the play moved to the capital.
"Who told you to slander him?" Claire demanded from the high bench when the hearing opened. She was already the sort of woman who walked like rebar and smiled like sun on steel. She had come to the trial because the politics of my life and the politics of the realm had begun to braid. Too many men had stake in the version of me that was fragile and dead.
Clark, whose face had that rinsed look of a man who has spent his life buying consent with small favors, squinted. "It was... advice." His voice cracked when the magistrate pressed. "They paid me. They said—"
"Who paid you?" Claire pressed.
A murmur went through the courthouse like a gust of grain. Clark's composure dissolved piece by piece. "It wasn't meant to be like this," he barked. "They told me to make evidence; to take things from graves and plant them; to accuse—"
"Who told you?" the magistrate demanded again.
I stood then, my skirts swapped for a man's plain coat, my throat wrapped and my voice steady as a child's hand. "I speak as the woman called Lucia McCoy," I said, and the room gasped because people had wept at my coffin and made me into a ghost in their mouths. "Ask him what he knows. Ask him who sent him."
Clark's head snapped up. "She is dead," he spat. "She is dead and gone."
"Then what were you doing with a bracelet from her trunk?" Claire said. "Why did your hand and another man’s tell different tales?"
"That bracelet—" Clark stammered, and the room filled with a sound like a river breaking into ice. He began to babble. "It was a—order. I was paid to say things. I was given lead to place in a coffin. I—"
"Who ordered it?" the magistrate said.
Clark's face, once haughty, turned many shades. He turned his eyes on Clark Kuznetsov—no, that was him. He swallowed. "A noble... a courtier with a name that belongs to the inner ring."
"Name," said Claire, and when a lady asks for names in a court, the air becomes wet with fear.
"It was—" Clark finally choked, and for a long second no one believed him. "It was an order from a man in the palace who runs errands for the Prince."
The shout rose like a wave. "Benito?" someone said.
"No," Clark said. "A smaller man, a clerk. He was to pass the money along."
"Protect him," said the magistrate and then he said nothing. The entire place waited on a breath.
"Who is responsible?" Claire demanded.
Clark's chest heaved. His eyes had only fear in them now, then pain, then a sick pleasure as if he expected to be the only one to fall. "I was paid coins to plant the bracelet. I was told to say Lucia took a lover. They said if I did—if I did—then it would please them, and I would be safe. They gave me the silver and told me to build the story."
"Who?" Claire said. "Who rose their hand against her?"
Clark's shoulders folded. "A man named—" He leaned forward. "Clark Kuznetsov."
The courtroom went very, very quiet. Clark himself lifted his eyes as if awake from a nightmare. "Lies," he said, but his voice was paper-thin.
"You set this in motion," Claire said. "You made them doubt a widow, a mother."
Clark's face rippled from shock to a ragged grin and then to a cacophony of defenses. "I was afraid! I was told I would lose everything if I didn't. They threaten families. They threaten land. It is not that I did not try—"
"Your voice is thin," Claire said. "We will hear from more." She nodded, and the magistrate ordered a public reckoning.
What followed was a punishment the book's pages had never detailed, because the book liked tidy things and not the messy unspooling of truth.
They dragged Clark to the main square at dawn where the market emptied and the town's eyes were sharp as knives. The magistrate read the charges: "perjury, collusion, malicious burial-meddling, and attempted assassination by counsel." People crowded like stacked plates. Giovanni stood a little off, his hands pale on his cloak. He had come because he could not bear a bloodless story to reach no one. Baltasar stood beside Claire like a red pillar, and I—Lucia McCoy—stood with Emi at my side, small hand in mine.
"Confess," the magistrate said.
Clark's confidence had long washed away. He laughed at first, a short brittle sound. "You cannot punish me for telling stories," he tried. "I was a messenger."
"Did you take money from a man in the palace?" Claire asked, and Clark's eyes flicked to a low man in a robe at the edge of the crowd. The man paled, but his face was set.
Clark was forced to name names; each name fell like stone and rang in the air.
"First he smiled like the governor's puppet," he said. "Then he gave the coin to a clerk—Clark Kuznetsov—I gave it to him. He told us to plant evidence. He said, 'This will make him... comfortable.'"
"Makes whom comfortable?" the magistrate asked.
He pointed and the clerk was snatched from the crowd with a violence that smelled like panic. "He is the one!"
The clerk's protests were thin as paper. "I was paid," he said, "I took orders. The court has its maw."
The crowd's reaction was a thousand hands unfastening. Men spat in the air. Women clapped in a rhythm like a wooden hammer; some cried. The clerk's face crumpled from smugness to terror to shame. He appealed, then he tried to place blame on someone else, then on a dead man, but the magistrate's patience was as thin as wire.
Claire stepped forward like a blade. "You will stand and explain how you dared to play with a woman's life," she said.
"Your honor," the magistrate said, "this is more than a private matter. Because of this, a woman's life was taken as quick as a bargain, and a family's name was stained."
Clark's voice broke into different notes: rage, pleading, self-preservation. "It was survival," he said. "They gave me the coin to save my mother's house. I was told they'd protect me."
"Who?" the magistrate demanded.
Clark faltered, then—pressured by the rising tide—he broke. He named the clerk, the middleman, the official. An arch of silence followed. The town's people moved as if they had been given a signal to lean in.
The magistrate's sentence was public, a spectacle and a cleansing: Clark would be stripped of his rank, his land confiscated, and he would be publicly shamed by walking through the market with a placard proclaiming his sins. He would be fined to a degree that would bankrupt him and his family. More than that, he would be forced to confess in each hamlet that would take him and apologize to the woman he had helped to slander.
Clark's posture changed as they read it. His jaw tightened, then slackened, then he reached for something like dignity and found only empty air.
"Please," he begged. "The coin—"
"Coin," Claire said coldly, "bought your tongue for a while. It will not buy your future."
The clerk was taken the same way to face the same punishment. People who had looked on with avarice now watched with a kind of savage interest. Children clapped. Old women spit as if the world had been scrubbed.
Clark's breakdown was slow and stage-like. At first he denied, then he pleaded, then he screamed for mercy as his placard was fastened to his chest: 'Perjurer'. The crowd—who had once listened to him—turned their faces away or spat. A teenage apprentice who had once learned from him threw down a bucket at his feet. "You taught me nothing but selfishness!" the boy cried. A woman in a dark kerchief spat at his shoes. "You took bread from the mouths of honest men," she said. People snapped pictures with their minds—memorized his fall as a caution.
Clark's final humiliation was not the market walk nor the confiscation but when Giovanni, who had stood silent like a long coiled rope, stepped forward and took a coin from his own purse and laid it on Clark's head.
"This is what we do with coin," Giovanni said softly. "We bury it in the earth and grow something honest. You will till the fields you have scarred."
The look on Clark's face when Giovanni did that—shock, then a bitter understanding—was the end of the scene. He had expected a final knife, not a hand that made him look small and absurd as a frightened child.
The crowd, who had come for justice, gave them something else: the taste of being right. They murmured and then applauded, not for cruelty but for survival. Clark left bound to the law and to public memory, his status gone. He had been a man who used other people's stories as tools; now his story was his punishment.
After the trial, the atmosphere shifted. The capital could no longer pretend the ugly had no name. The magistrate sent further orders to the palace; men were examined who had trade with the Prince's circle. In the quiet after thunder, Giovanni found me.
"You should not have come," he said, but his voice did not carry anger. "You should have stayed hidden."
"I am tired of being hidden," I said.
He looked at me, like someone trying to remember the shape of the river that had changed its bed. "You did well today," he said at last.
"I did not stand for you," I said. "I stood for myself."
He studied my face for a long, searching beat and then, near the mouth of the academy's willow, he took my hand.
"Can we try to be the people we want to be?" he asked.
"Try," I said.
Years followed like pages. Claire rose in ways I had not thought possible; she ran for reform and pushed the law like someone moving heavy furniture. She used the trial's shadow to prod men into admitting crimes. The court's structure shifted, sometimes with grace and sometimes with the violence of change. Patricio Muller, the old Emperor, found his pulse weakening. The Prince—Benito Cummings—fell into disgrace as schemes withered. The country's rumor mill changed; women began to ask openly for slates and teachers. We planted a small school dedicated to the memory of those who had burned and the teacher who had died to save one life. Aldo Chen, who had given himself, was honored in a quiet stone that Emi would touch before she went into lessons.
Cael Coppola's name remained like weather in the capital: he had been called a traitor and a blessing. He paid for his courage with exile, then with martyrdom, then with a name that wavered between honor and ruin. I pushed petitions to preserve women's learning. Andre Romero set up a network of teachers. The academy grew into a place where girls learned sums and fire-making and how to hold their voices steady.
"Do you ever think of the book?" Giovanni asked once as we sat under the willow the first autumn after the trial.
"Every day," I said. "But not the same way."
"Do you forgive it?" he asked.
"What can one forgive a thing that is only paper?" I answered. "I forgive the people who believed it and the men who took its lines for law. But the book—" I smiled at him with a small, deep truth. "The book is just a map. We kept the road we wanted."
He laughed, short and relieved. "Then let's build a world that refuses its ending."
We did not have a perfect ending. Giovanni never loved me in the way that another self in another life had loved a different woman. Claire never stopped wanting power. Baltasar remained a man who would barter loyalties. Cael died with his hands steady on a table. Aldo's stone took the damp and held it. But I learned the thing the book had tried to deny: a life is not only a scripted plot. It is a series of choices, each small and stubborn. I chose to stay. I chose to live out of the book's pages.
When the final order came to bind my voice no longer—when the Emperor made a decree that women who wished to learn might have the right—I did not feel victorious in the way girls imagine queens to be. It felt like washing a stain from a child's dress and realizing the child had been clean the whole time. I stood at the school door with Emi, who had grown into a bright, fierce girl who could do long division with her eyes half-closed.
"Will you ever tell her the whole story?" Giovanni asked, watching Emi skip.
"I will tell her the part about the willow, and the rest I will leave as lessons." I looked at him, and there was a softness in his mouth that had only rarely visited.
"Promise?" he said.
"I promise," I said. I took his hand. It was a small and honest promise, not the sort that bends the world, but the sort that kept us alive in mornings. In a life sewn from choices, perhaps promises like that were the truest stitches.
The End
— Thank you for reading —