Revenge23 min read
If There Is Another Life, I Don't Want to Meet You
ButterPicks14 views
I never thought a single name could become a weapon.
"You look terrible," Ensley said, leaning against the office doorway. Her voice was softer than the lights in the dressing room, but it cut me the same.
"I slept," I answered. The word was small. My throat made it smaller.
"Sleep doesn't hide a bruise," she said. "What happened last night?"
I touched the place on my temple that had swollen into a cold moon. "Nothing important."
Ensley sighed and stepped forward. "Listen. The feed is clearing up. The photos from the premiere—"
"Don't," I interrupted. My fingers tightened around the cuff of the blouse. I could feel the mesh of a million camera lenses in the air when I thought of those images. "Don't tell me."
She put the phone on the table, the screen still blue with news alerts. "They want footage to be taken down. They want damage control. But there are conditions."
"Conditions," I echoed. The word tasted like steel.
"You need someone to stand with you. Everyone says the man who can do that is Leo Wolf. He hasn't been answering press, but—"
"He won't," I said. I pictured Leo, framed in a wall of power and authority, unbothered the way people who never worry about money always are. I pictured the man who, months ago, had torn breaths out of my chest with cold sentences. "He will not."
Ensley looked at me for a long time. "Then do you want me to call him anyway?"
I wanted to say no. I wanted to crumble. But there was Myrtle Chaney in a hospital bed, tubes and strangers and a small, trembling wrist that had held mine since I was a child. "Call him," I said. "Please."
The call happened the way a storm happens—sudden, impossible, and without warning. When Leo finally stepped into the room at two in the morning, he walked like every room belonged to him. Scent of expensive whiskey. Smell of cigarettes. He blinked at us as if we were an interruption.
"You're awake," he said without surprise. His voice held the distance of all the skyscrapers that looked down on the city.
"I need help," I said.
He looked at Ensley with that slow, unreadable assessment. "Why should I help her?"
"Because—" Ensley started, then stopped. She, for once, had no script.
He looked at me then, and the ease he sometimes wore like armor cracked for a breath. "You," he said. "What did you call yourself this morning?"
"I called myself... Ines," I replied, the name sticking like an old scar.
"Why would you call yourself that?"
My mouth forgot how to make sound for a second. "Because my passport says so," I said. "Because my life says so. Because that's the face they're publishing."
He straightened, the glass of his drink making a soft glassy chink. "Fine. Then call the press and say—what will you say to stop the photos?"
"I don't know." My fingers looked like thin branches. "That I'm ashamed? That I have no dignity left? That—"
"You don't have to say anything," he interrupted. "Stand with me, wear my name for two hours on their headlines, they'll pull the story. I owe a favor."
I felt a heat flush my neck, half-hope and half-embarrassment. "Stand with you?"
He shrugged. "Appear beside me at tomorrow's press event. Be the woman who is seen with Leo Wolf."
My heart did a small, painful hop. "You want me to lie with you?"
He turned his back to the city lights as if the skyline might answer. "Appearances are currency. I will spend mine."
"Why?" The question came out raw. "Why me?"
Because when he was kind to me once, all at the beginning, I had believed every small tenderness. But kindness and tenderness were not the same in the hands of the powerful. He had used them like a lever.
"Because I like you," he said simply. "Because I like the way you don't pretend onstage."
My chest twisted. I was a bargain, then, a thing that could be borrowed to buy silence. A stray lung closed down in my ribs.
"Fine," I said. "I'll do it."
The next morning I walked the red carpet with a smile I had practiced for months. The cameras cared nothing for the small wars I fought; they wanted spectacle, and I gave them my face. When I saw Leo standing under the lights, his jaw hard and composed, I wanted to run away. Instead I stood deeper within the light.
"Glad you're here," he murmured as cameras flashed, his voice near my ear.
"Don't be foolish," I said. "You could take a hundred women and no one would notice."
He looked at me like I had said something faintly amusing. "You are wrong." He didn't expand. He had never been one for explanations I wanted.
The applause was a soft tide. I signed autographs with a hand that didn't always know its own pressure. People called me "Ines" until half the room forgot that I had once been anything else.
Then the seam of my dress ripped.
It wasn't dramatic at first. One small thread, then a tearing breath, and the cameras caught the motion in freeze frames that would not be erased. Someone shouted. Someone else laughed. The hot, bright light became a spotlight of judgment.
"She staged it," hissed a voice in the crowd. "She staged it for attention."
"She must be desperate," someone else sneered.
I felt the world tilt. Ensley rushed to fetch a shawl. My hands became two small islands. In the footage, someone lifted a sleeve and the cameras found a bruise, a red scab at the edge of my shoulder that spoke of more than a playful misstep.
"You wanted this taken down?" Leo's voice was a low rumble behind me.
I nodded because words felt useless. "Yes."
He frowned as if the motion required thought. Then he smiled like a man who could always rearrange the weather. "We'll make it look like an accident."
"Will that work?"
"It will," he said. "But you need to cooperate."
I thought of Myrtle Chaney's hands—thin, lined, the way she used to smooth the hair at my temple when I slept—hands that now were tethered to a hospital gown. I had mortgages on silence; I had debts that lived in people's mouths. I had no coin but the one the world accepted: my image.
"I'll cooperate," I said.
He took my hand, quick and controlling, not gentle. It felt like a contract.
But the help he gave did more than shield me that week. It pulled me into a current I could not breathe in. He asked small favors; then he asked larger ones. Each time the price was less of him and more of myself.
"Say you're Mrs. Wolf for the press piece," Ensley whispered one night when I was too tired to move.
"I won't," I replied.
"You will. And you'll go to that charity gala with him. And when someone says 'Is that your wife?' you will say yes and bow."
It felt like an acceptance of suffocation. I nodded.
We moved through the city like animals on leash. Leo anchored me in places I had no business being, and his influence pulled open doors. People who once would have refused to speak with me now offered warmed seats and smiles that cost nothing and everything.
"You're doing well," a director told me. "People like the new confidence."
It was a strange new armor, and it didn't reach my bones.
One evening, after a dinner where Leo had introduced me to the right kind of people with the wrong kind of looks, a woman crossed the room and greeted him like a sunbeam. Her face was all practiced brightness—Bianca Costa—and it slashed me one more time.
"Leo," she cooed, looping her arm through his as if the world owed her the privilege.
He smiled. He bowed. He moved as if she were oxygen. In the dim of my emotions something broke.
"You like her," I said later as we stepped into the car.
He did not look at me. "I like what she can do," he said.
The words were a stone. They dropped between us and sank. "So what am I?" I asked.
He opened the driver door without pause. "You are necessary."
The word sounded like an accusation I could not answer. "Necessary," I repeated softly. "For whom?"
"For me," he said. "In this moment."
It didn't feel like a truth worth treasuring. It felt like a wound that would never mend. But I had learned to numb. I had learned to nod.
When the scandal came—when someone had pulled at a seam and found what they wanted—the firestorm crashed down like winter. Someone leaked a set of photographs: a torn dress, an arm braced across the torso, a bruise that read like evidence.
"She staged it," they said. "She wanted publicity."
The director called. "They say if we don't control this, they'll pull your contract."
"Who?" I asked.
"Advertisers. Investors. People who don't want risk."
"How much?" I whispered.
"You owe us a huge penalty if they drop you," Ensley said on the phone. "Bills, payments. Your grandmother's hospital bills."
"How much?" I asked again.
"All of it," she said. "If they terminate, you can't pay Myrtle's surgery."
My hands grew cold. The hospital bed was a physical thing, a ledger. I thought of Myrtle Chaney on oxygen, murmuring my name in a voice like a moth wing. I thought of the three months left in our savings and the small life that could all turn to ash.
"Call Leo," Ensley said.
I hated that I was reduced to that command. I hated the way my world had shrunk to the circumference of one man's answer. But there was no other road.
When he arrived, he was not the man on the red carpet. His face was careful, like a man in a quiet throne room. "They want you to make a statement with me," he said. "Stand beside me. Tell them we're together. That the story is false."
"With you," I repeated. "Again."
"You will do it for Myrtle," he said, and something in his voice nudged the needle of my loyalty. "And I'll make sure the fees are covered."
I wanted to ask why he didn't simply send someone else. I swallowed.
"They want proof of our relationship," he added. "They want a short video, a statement. Nothing complicated."
It was never nothing complicated.
On the day of the press event, I wore the dress he chose. It was soft and seductive in a way I had learned to be, and for a heartbeat—one thin line of starlight—I felt like a woman who might be allowed to survive.
"Say whatever," he whispered. "Keep it simple."
I rehearsed the words in my head like a prayer.
When the cameras rolled, I said, "I'm Ines Deng. I'm with Leo Wolf. Those photos are a misunderstanding."
The sentence hung there like a card with a lie tucked inside.
He looked at me, then at the cameras. "She is," he said.
A good sentence. A protective one.
The feed went out and the world softened.
An hour later, the text messages started coming in. A thread of photos. A folded slip of an invoice. A blackmail note. The cameras had only paused while someone further plotted.
"They want you to be quiet," a publicist said. "They say no one will pay if you don't cooperate. They say the only way to pull it down is for you to publicly apologize for stealing your sister's name and stepping into a world you did not inherit."
Steal—name—inherit. Her voice was sharp and sugarless. "They want you to announce you're pretending to be someone else."
This was the first time the word "sister" was used aloud.
"No," I said. "No. I will not—"
"Either you do that or they leak worse," the publicist said.
"Who?" I asked. It was like asking the city who had thrown the first brick.
"Someone with leverage," she said. "Someone who can arrange to post doctored video. Someone in the background."
I thought of Journey Acevedo's laugh—Journey, who had been my sister in name and nothing else; Journey who had been given the life I was supposed to have. She had always looked like a photograph taken for the correct angle. She smiled with practiced sweetness. She had the kind of face that could be used like a coin. She had slipped into the life I was pawned into and smiled as if it was her due.
"She didn't do this," I said to myself. "She wouldn't—"
"She did," Ensley said.
"You don't know—" I began.
"No," she said. "I do. I checked. The messages. The account. This looks like a campaign against you, and the one who benefits is Journey."
The room turned cold and sharp. The photo of Journey embracing Leo floated in my mind like a bright storm. Her fingers curled in a way I couldn't mimic.
"He wants her," I said, whispering the part of the truth I could not say otherwise. "He likes her better."
"Leo said he would help," Ensley said. "You owe him."
"I owe him nothing," I said sharply. "He gave me nothing but a ladder."
She blinked as if the idea of me refusing some deal offended her. "Ines, you have two choices. Lose everything, including Myrtle's surgery, or stand in front of the cameras and say something that saves twenty million dollars worth of deals for three companies. And the terms? They want you to say you'll give the upcoming lead role to Bianca Costa."
"Bianca," I breathed. Her name felt like a concrete shoe in a pool.
"Say yes," the publicist said. "And they'll pull the search. And they will make sure Journey's name is defended."
Say yes. Trade dignity for life.
I thought of Myrtle on the bed, her fingers like pale brass. I thought of a hospital bill like a shackle. I imagined leaving her to die because I wanted the world to think better of me.
"Fine," I said, and something inside me shuttered. "Fine."
The bargain was explicit. The camera didn't see me when I couldn't allow it to.
Two days later, on set, they cast me as the woman the story said I was: malicious, bitter, spiteful. I had to act a part that almost matched the role they had already carved on my skin. Bianca Costa watched with something like pleasure. Leo watched with a face I didn't know anymore.
"You can do it," he said once, when the cameras were off. His hand hovered in the air between us, as if measuring the distance.
"What do you want from me?" I asked.
"Cooperation," he said. "You want Myrtle taken care of, right?"
"Yes," I said.
"Then do this as if it's a job," he said. "You can act. You can earn."
So I acted. I learned the voice and the tilt. I made the right faces. The world ate them. They love their villains well-made.
Later, the director yelled "Cut!" and someone clapped. We were all actors in different tragedies.
On the way home that night, the car smelled of cheap lemon and cigarette smoke. I sat with hands folded like a prisoner. My eyes stung.
"You're not the first to be used," Ensley said into the dark. "And you won't be the last."
"It's not just using," I said. "It's killing."
She didn't answer. There are no words for what happens when someone trades their soul for money and the world applauds.
I knew the script. I knew the part I had to play. But the part of me that refused to die in small increments lodged harder into my bones. I began to keep journals again—small things: the way Myrtle liked her tea, a joke the doctor Mason—the man who had treated me when I left for the hospital—had told me about his ridiculous love of cello music. They were small, human things I tried to hold onto.
"How are you the star of your own downslide?" I asked Mason one day when he came by the hospital to check up on Myrtle. He had a careful kindness about him, a quiet that made the machines hum softer.
He smiled with the patience of a man who had seen pain and stayed. "Because you keep living despite it," he said. "You keep moving."
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe I deserved a future.
The second blow arrived like a cold note. The video that would have saved everything—that protected me—was pulled from the feed. Replacements arrived like winter: anonymous posts, accusations. I could not stop them. Behind each one there was a methodical hand.
It became painfully clear: my life would be used until it had no currency left.
"I'm going to the hospital," I told Ensley that night. "If they ask me to do something wrong, I won't."
"You mean...?"
"I'm going to speak to Leo. If he won't help, I will find another way. I will find funds."
"You don't have other funds," she said. "You don't—"
"I will ask him to help my grandmother in person," I said. "If he refuses, I'll beg on my knees."
"Will you?" she asked, the pity in her voice nearly as sharp as hatred.
I stood outside the private hospital wing where Myrtle lay and watched the lights. Inside, they were a sterile universe of medicine and prayers. I thought about the days as a child, how she protected me, how she wrapped me in riddles and told me to sing the little songs she taught me to sleep.
When I found Leo that night at the club where he kept other people's secrets—for him, the city was a portfolio—I did something I had never done before: I demanded openly.
"Help," I said. "My grandmother needs a transplant. The doctors said the only match is in the private system. They said your influence could move the file up."
Leo looked at me with a smile that did not reach his eyes. "You dramatize everything, Ines."
"This isn't drama," I said. "This is life."
He took a slow sip from his drink as if deciding whether to swallow me. "I can help," he said at last. "But it will cost."
"What?" The question burned out of me.
He unfolded a small paper box and pressed it against my palm. Inside was a check for fifty thousand—a sum that was nothing to a man like him but life to the people who kept my grandmother alive.
"Five hundred thousand," he said. "That should cover the surgery, the aftercare, the hospital fees."
My mouth opened then closed around some small noise.
"That's..." Ensley had told me the amount a week ago: five hundred thousand to prevent contract penalties, to hold the line for evaluations. Five hundred thousand to buy a chance.
"What do you want?" I asked.
He leaned forward and the light made clean lines of his face. "A favor," he said. "Just one."
The favor he wanted pressed against the edge of my life and peeled it back. "Tomorrow morning, you're going to the press conference and you'll publicly confess: that you lied, that you used your sister's name to get into the business, that you accepted roles meant for someone else. You'll read the statement and you will apologize."
The words were like a blade. "You want me to destroy myself," I whispered.
"You want me to save my grandmother," he said smoothly.
"Is that what you call transactional?" I asked. "Is that how you define obligation?"
He shrugged as someone might who has practiced cruelty until it becomes muscle. "Call it what you like. But either way you're getting a solution."
"I will not play your games," I said. My voice trembled, but I wanted it to be loud.
"You can't afford not to," he said.
I went to the press and read the script. I read it in a voice that felt like a stranger's breath. "I confess," I said, and the world took a fishing line and pulled me through.
But the worst came afterwards.
That night, I came home to two hits on my phone. One: a video sent to the hospital where my grandmother slept. Two: a message that said, "If you don't cooperate, you will hurt your elderly."
Myrtle's heart rate bled through the monitors. I swallowed bile. I had been a willing partner. I had been a bargaining chip. But bargaining had limits.
I went to her hospital room with the check in my pocket. I sat at her bed and held her hand. "I'm coming back," I told her, because I had nothing else to promise.
In the morning the phone rang.
"They want you to go to the studio," Ensley said. "They want you to wear the dress. And they want you to accept the role of the villain, the woman who stole her sister's name."
I repeated the words, like testing if the world had misaligned. "Will she make it through the surgery?"
"Yes," Ensley said. "But only with the transfer."
"Go," sighed a nurse somewhere behind the curtain. "She is strong."
So I stood on set and did what they wanted: I pretended to be someone I was not. I simulated venality until the people around me couldn't tell difference between the lie and the soul. I performed perfidy until I was as hollow as the applause.
An hour after the shoot, I had a blackout. I drove home like someone with water in their shoes. I remember calling Mason in panic. "My stomach hurts," I told him. "It's unbearable."
He made arrangements. "Get to the ER," he said. "Now."
They took me in and gave tests that smelled like sterile metal and waiting rooms. The doctor on duty looked at me with sympathetic paper eyes.
"You've been vomiting," he said. "There's blood in your vomit."
"I can't—" I murmured.
The tests came back with numbers that felt like verdicts. "Gastric perforation," the doctor read, then looked at me in a way that was direct and terrible. "We'll need an emergency procedure."
The world minimized. I watched as people moved with speed like a breeze in a hurricane. Mason took my hand before they put me under. "I'll be here," he said.
I made the mistake of closing my eyes with him beside me, a human touch that made me imagine things like being saved. I woke up to a whisper I never wanted to hear.
"You have gastric cancer," Mason said when he could speak to me straight. "Advanced. Late stage."
"No," I said in the small way someone says a child's name. I pinched his sleeve. "No."
He was calm in the way people are who have gazed at cliff faces and still know the steps. "We'll manage pain. We'll try to keep you comfortable."
"Comfort," I repeated. It shuddered like a broken bell.
I went home from the hospital with paper prescriptions and a deeper red than I'd worn for months. The flow of the public life receded into a tide of diffused light. The small things—Myrtle's fingers, Mason's quiet voice—became islands.
I stopped acting. The industry that had once swallowed me now simply let me be, as if I were a page that had been read and tucked away. The contracts terminated not with a slap but with the polite removal of chairs.
They told me life was reducing to a ledger: bills, medicines, grief. I had no way to pay for more than a small handful of days. In the silence of my small rented place I found an old check in the drawer—Leo's hand had pressed the financial paper at one point—and I thought of counting out the last of what I had.
"You could leave," Mason said to me once, when snow had rimmed the city in quiet. "You could go somewhere else. Far away."
"I can't run from myself," I said.
He put his hands on my shoulders and somehow made them human. "Then let's make time count."
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe a life could be kept together with tender hands and small truths. But there are debts that require more than small hands. There were contracts signed in the dark. There were people who wanted the story and who would take it down to the last cheap layer of flesh until I had nothing left.
The night my grandmother died, someone called me at the hospital and told me she had woken and called my name. My chest broke in a way I did not expect.
"Grandma," I said over the phone, my voice small with new weather. "Are you awake?"
"Heart," she whispered. "I am tired. Forgive me."
"I will be there in a moment," I said. The lie was sweet enough to keep her in a body for the length of a sentence.
I didn't make it.
When I reached the hospital, the light behind the curtains was a thin knife and the world had been reduced to the reality of white sheets and the smell of antiseptic. Someone said she went peacefully. Someone else said the news about me had been a lot. Someone else muttered "It was a shock." There is always a excusatory language people use.
I left the hospital like someone who had been ceded a space in a room too small to hold her grief. I wandered into the night and found the city as clean and indifferent as always. I thought of the small matters that had been made into tragedies.
The phone rang in the dark. It was Leo.
"You owe me one," he said.
"I owe you everything," I said. "And nothing."
"How," he asked quietly, "did your grandmother die?"
"Because she couldn't survive the shock," I said. "Because someone used my despair and turned it into a spectacle."
"She died because of me," he said.
I thought of the arrogance of that face, the way he had used the city as if it were his own living room.
"You did not kill her," I whispered.
He laughed, a sudden, painful sound. "Then what will you do, Ines? How will you punish me?"
"I won't," I said. "You can't be punished."
"Then you won't speak," he said. "You will be quiet."
"I will be quiet," I answered. I had no breath left to continue.
After that call, I walked to the roof of the building that held the company where he had once signed cheques and given orders. The wind that night was sharp, taking fingers with it. The city looked like a map of small gleaming islands.
I thought about the ledger of things: debts and friendships, favors and permissions. I thought about a life that had been carved up in the name of convenience. I remembered the small things again—Myrtle's fingers and the smell of nursing man's hands—and felt them like a fire.
I called Leo once more.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"Below you," I said. "Do you see me?"
He was incredulous with a kind of distance I didn't understand. "Come down," he said. "Let's make it right."
"Make it right," I said in a voice that had been tempered by pain. "You can't."
"Please," he said.
There was a pause.
"Tell me how to fix this," he said. "Tell me how to undo what I didn't know I did."
"I wanted to be loved," I said. "I wanted to be seen for myself."
"You will be seen," he said.
I let out a breath like smoke. Then I let go of the parapet.
The world contracted into a long, scaled slide of air. People below saw a shape fall. There was a sound like a dropped jar somewhere. My body hit stone whose hardness had nothing to do with the reasons I had chosen this. The white of snow took the color of my life.
In the days after, there came the noise: the police, the flowers, the hush that had the shape of a funeral. Mason found his own voice turned iron. Ensley could no longer look at me without her hand trembling. Leo wandered into the room where the memorial was, undone in a way that made even the lights dim.
I had expected nothing after my death. But the world did not stop. It moved with the politics of grief. It found sins that had been hidden and shoved them into the light.
Later—much later, I would learn how much later—there was a banquet. Francisco Barrett arrived, flushed and smiling, believing himself secure in an office full of the right people. Journey Acevedo sat by his side like some perfect conjured heir.
The stage was set. Glass chandeliers shook with soft light. The place was fragrant with success. People moved like birds around the prize.
Near the end of dinner there was a moment of theatrical blackness. A screen came alive.
The footage that played showed long-ago conversations in a room that had the stained look of secrets. Men spoke in that low, exchangeable language of conspirators.
"Will this recipe do the job?" a younger voice asked.
"So long as she takes it," another voice replied. "The dosage will cause complications in a pregnant woman. It will be enough to take her off the line."
Money changed hands. Hands pressed pills into other hands. The camera panned and the person who accepted the money was a face in an older suit: Francisco Barrett's. The voice overlapped, younger and shrewder—Journey Acevedo's—laughing as if the world belonged to her.
"Turn it off!" Francisco sputtered. "Turn that off!"
"But it's true," someone else said. "You signed. You agreed."
"You can't show this," Journey said, white-knuckled. "You can't—"
By the time the screen stopped, the air had become a cage. There were whispers like feathers falling.
"You set her up," someone shouted.
"You killed her," someone else said.
The sound of shoes on the marble was a noise in my head then. Leo stood at the microphone, ripped out of the straitjacket of his own numbness. He walked to the center like a man who had waited too long to strike.
"I didn't know," he said at first, his voice very small in the enormous hall. "I didn't know because I never asked the right questions."
There were people who booed. There were people who applauded. But the sound that gripped the room was the easy geometry of truth: it drew up like a net over those who had hidden themselves well.
Francisco's face went through a sequence of transformations—face flesh working with the muscles of surprise, then denial, then a flush that was anger without logic. "You are slandering me," he said.
"You're a liar," a woman to his right cried, pointing.
Journey's face was a pale bloom. For the first time she looked small. "You're insane!" she screamed at Leo. "You can't preach at my father."
"You can't keep taking what isn't yours," Leo said. He was not the man I had known—the gallery of cold gestures and fine collars. He had an edge now that could not be smoothed.
"This is a vendetta," Francisco said, voice trembling. "You have no evidence."
The police moved then—arrived with a quietness that was mechanical and inevitable. "Mr. Barrett," an officer said, "we need you to come with us for questioning."
The guests rose in a wave. People took out their phones. The cameras found faces. There were hands filming, talking, shouting.
"You're making a scene," Journey shrieked. She had the hysterical white of those who have been found out and yet hope for salvation in the crowd.
"No," Leo said. "I want everyone to hear."
He turned on the voice clip he had kept. It was a small file of a conversation—an earlier meeting in which decisions were made. It was the voice of a man who claimed it was a business matter, the voice of a daughter who thought profit was a mother's due. The crowd heard everything.
Francisco's breath hitched. He walked toward the exit like a puppeted thing and was stopped by uniformed hands. The man who had enchanted contracts and led boards of men felt the weight of cuff links tightening.
He looked at Leo as if the world had been turned to glass. "You can't—" he began.
They took him past the marble columns. People watched the former patriarch walk in a new direction: out of the room and toward a police car. Journalists shouted questions. Phones filmed.
Journey fell to her knees. "Please!" she cried. "It's a mistake! We were just—"
"It was deliberate," a voice said from across the room. "You took a life."
People gathered in small clotted groups. They could not believe what they had seen and yet their disbelief was a kind of surrender. Some applauded in ugly, judging fashion. Some cried.
"You killed a woman who loved someone and paid you nothing," Mason said when he found Leo afterwards at the empty podium. He had come with a small group to the hall after the grief had ruptured into action.
"I didn't know," Leo said. "I didn't know until she was gone."
Mason's face hardened with a grief that had nothing to do with protocol. "Ignorance is not innocence," he said. "You can still do the right thing."
The arrest was public. The shame was public. The guilt unspooled in the long days that followed with a kind of cruel justice.
Journey's punishment was social before it was legal. Her name—once a perfumed thing in salons—became an epithet. Paparazzi camped outside the small apartment she had once claimed with easy entitlement. People in the street pointed. Her friends turned away, phones held like small verdicts. The company that had insured her image withdrew representation. Invitations stopped.
At her first public fall, I watched it on a screen that had once been a thing I used to sign contracts with. There was a woman who had once walked like a Queen now reduced to a small animal outside a door. Cameras took pictures of her face as she was pushed through the glare of the town.
She did not go quietly.
"You're lying!" she screamed at a camera. "You all want to destroy me!"
The crowd recorded her with hungry fascination. Some people laughed and pointed. Others made voices that sounded close to sympathy. But the machine had moved. She had miscalculated the cost of the risk she had taken.
When she tried to run, a nearby shop owner recognized her and barred the doorway. The choke-hold of exposure tightened. Shegrabbed at the hands of anyone she thought might still belong to her, but hands that had once held her high withdrew.
On the day she was publicly humiliated, the whole hall remembered a smaller scene: the footage of a woman in a hospital bed, the recorded voice of a conversation about a drug administered, and the face of the man who paid for it. People gasped. Some cried. Some shouted for capitals. Journalists fed the frenzy. A legal team worked in hours to make the charges stick. By the time the police had finished their paperwork, Journey had been stripped of board positions, public status, and the carefully crafted sympathy of the elite had dissipated into contempt.
She tried to bargain. She offered money; she offered promises. "I can use my contacts," she said to a reporter in a teary room. "I can call people—"
"No," someone replied. "The truth doesn't need speed." They closed the door.
She begged. She wanted her father to be freed. She offered to testify if only they would let him go. It was a public spectacle of a woman transformed into a child of entreaties.
At the sentencing hearing weeks later, Francisco Barrett's voice had gone thin. The judge's language was formal and unmoved. The courtroom was full. Leo sat in the back with Mason behind him. Ensley sat with her hands clenched, knuckles gone white.
Francisco's face during the verdict was a study. He went from arrogance to denial to outrage. He turned red and then grey. For a long time he seemed to try to find speech, then lost it, then found it again in a thin, frightened mutter. He asked for leniency. He cried. He claimed he had been naive. He blamed others.
The prosecutor said, simply, "You sold poison."
Journey tried to scream at him across the room. "Father! You lied to me!"
They both fell silent when the judge spoke. "The court sentences Francisco Barrett to life imprisonment for conspiracy and manslaughter. The charges are grave. Evidence will be presented and the verdict is just."
When the hammer fell, someone in the gallery clapped their hands once. People in the front wept. Nebulous relief spread like a slow light.
Journey's sentence came later—less formal but just as punishing. She was shamed in the press and abandoned. People who had once wanted pictures with her now refused even the smallest conversation. Her social accounts filled with venom. She applied for help and was refused. Even the woman who had once smoothed dresses for her now gave a cool professional nod and turned away.
At the public unmasking, the transformation on their faces was dramatic. Francisco went from the smug man who had believed himself beyond reach to someone who now clutched the railings in court like a child. Journey cycled through bravado, then anger, then the quiet collapse of someone who no longer had a place to fall.
The crowd that watched them fall was loud. Some applauded. Some wept. Someone shouted that the justice was delayed but finally arrived. A string of cameras recorded every muffled sound. Phones recorded everything; by the time the doors closed, the city had digested and expended the story.
Leo walked out after the case with tired shoulders. He found a small bouquet of white roses waiting, half-wilted from a day of weeping. He held them. He placed one on my small grave as if asking forgiveness from a place that did not speak.
He stood there with his hands full of white roses and finally, in the long hush of a cemetery that had been too small for our lives, he whispered, "I am sorry."
People watched from the road. Some shook their heads. Some crossed themselves. Leo did not raise his voice. He only knelt beside the stone that bore my name and the tiny, stubborn little bracelet with the letter "YI" engraved on its inside—a keepsake he had once found in an old box of things in an attic no one else had thought to open.
He lifted the bracelet and held it until his fingers went limp. The rain began then and fell in a thin, bitter way, like someone crying with a small and private mercy.
The punishment had been public, painful, and varied: a father jailed, a sister ostracized, a mistress unmasked as a small accessory to a ruin. The watchers in the hall had cheered one part and whispered at another as the counts unrolled like a ledger.
When the storms of shame and press moved on, Leo did not return to his old life. He gave up some chairs at boards; he donated money to the hospitals Myrtle had been at; he made small and private gestures at repair. He refused public interviews. Sometimes, late at night, he would sit alone in the house we had shared in rumor and say my name until it felt like a call.
I would say now, if I could, that punishment is not a measure of justice nor the balm of sorrow. It can be cold and surgical, and it can be public and loud. It can offer the shape of accountability, but it cannot knit bones and return a breath that was spent.
If there is a last line to this story, it is one of small, stubborn things: the bracelet that was left in his pocket, the white rose that kept its petals even in the rain, the tick of a watch someone no longer wound. He kept all these things although time kept moving away.
And on a day when the city had learned something about greed and cruelty, and a father had to answer for choices that had been made in a dim office with money changing hands like a small storm, I think—if for nothing else—he learned to look at the ledger differently.
I did not see him learn in time.
He learned afterward. He learned at a cost more expensive than any of us could have counted.
The city turned and made new scandals. People moved on. But if anyone ever whispers the story of a woman who once stepped into a lie to save an old hand's life, and paid in ways the ledger could not compute, they will say, quietly, "She chose the only certainty she had."
If there is another life, I do not want to meet him. I do not want the same choices repeated.
I only want the tiny bracelet to rest where hands that loved and burned and tried are remembered.
The End
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