Revenge15 min read
"I'm About to Die — Happy, Brother?"
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"I can feel the wind pulling at my dress," I said, and the city sounded small beneath us.
"Gillian," he choked, "don't—"
"I said I'm going," I smiled the way I'd practiced for years. "Am I doing it right?"
"Gillian, please." Graham Clement's voice broke. He was on his knees, a man who had never knelt to anyone I knew.
"Do you remember when Mom used to call you 'little knight'?" I asked, the wind stealing my words.
"Stop—" he sounded like a child. "Please, Gillian."
"I am about to go see her," I said, and the smile didn't leave my face. "Does that make you... happy?"
He lunged, the scrape of his shoes against rooftop concrete, but he didn't catch me. I stepped back, because the space between us had been filled with a thousand small cruelties for twenty years and nothing could close it now. He grabbed at the railing instead and made a sound like it would break him.
"Why?" he begged. "Why didn't you tell me? I—"
"Because," I said, "you told me if I died it would be better."
He swallowed. "I didn't mean—"
"You did." My voice was quiet. "You said it like a verdict."
He stared the way people stare at something they suddenly realize was real all along. Rain-slick light carved his face into angles I had never wanted to see. "I was angry." He tried to explain. "We both were young—"
"But you smiled while you said it," I said. "You didn't try to stop him when he—"
"Gillian!" Graham raised a hand. "Don't—"
He couldn't finish. He never could finish when he had to choose saving me over hating me. I walked to the edge and looked down at the street where life went on in little boxes of light.
"This is my birthday," I said. "And Mom's death anniversary."
"You don't have to—"
"I do," I said, and felt it like a small, inevitable thing. "I'm going to go."
*
It had started early. When I was born, the operating room had a smell I would always think of as punishment: bleach and something burning, the clean smell of loss. My mother, Cecilia Rizzo, left her hand on my doctor's glove and then left the world. My father folded into himself like paper. Graham straightened like a soldier.
"She was their treasure," I had once read in an old letter I kept. "He was their grief."
Graham's grief turned into a map of hate where I lived at the center.
"You took her," he told me once, in the kitchen where dishes clattered and no one noticed me. "You took the only woman he loved."
"She was my mother," I whispered. "She loved both of us."
"Not you," he had said. "Not the one that did this to our family."
The hatred set like frost. It colored every glance, every silence. He loved the idea of being an only son wronged by fate. He was not patient with my existence.
When I was eighteen, Ismael Carpenter found me in a stairwell and broke me into pieces under the indifferent night. He thought of himself as a man who took what he wanted; he was no different from the rest of the world that had never warmed to me. I was small and tired and used to being invisible; I was an easy thing to push down.
"You're worthless," he said later, when we passed in the street as if nothing had happened.
"You should have died," Graham said to me on the same day, smiling like a verdict. "It would have been better for all of us."
"You were there?" I asked when I learned he had been nearby.
He shrugged. "I was angry," he said. "You were asking for trouble."
"You said 'if you died it would be good,'" I said now, on the rooftop. "Do you know how those words sound when you're the only one who hears them?"
Graham's hands curled around the railing until his knuckles whitened. "I thought—" he began, but no apology came that could undo the night of eighteen.
"All right," I told him. "Then let it be."
A few months later, I found a diagnosis in my bag. The paper had been folded and refolded until its edges were soft. For a while I lived in the thin, bright tunnel of hospital appointments and the dull room of my everyday.
"Stomach cancer. Late stage," the doctor said, his eyes steady and tired. "With treatment, possibly two to three years."
"Two or three years," I repeated like a prayer and then a lie. I folded the paper and put it back in my bag and kept living like a person who had already gone, attending meetings and pretending to care about a promotion.
Graham ran the company we'd both been born into, and I had clawed my way up from the very bottom. I believed—stupidly—that work might be where a place would open for me, where I might be seen as something other than the child who took my mother.
"You deserve it," a colleague said one morning, tying her hair fast. "You've been here forever."
"Maybe," I answered. "We'll see."
The company's boardroom smelled like coffee and cheap cologne. When the new deputy manager's name was announced, the air shifted. "Alexis Lane will be our new deputy manager," Graham's voice said. A woman in a soft smile crossed the threshold, a goddess of things I had been told to envy.
"Congratulations," people said to Alexis.
I clapped. My palms hurt afterward.
"How did she get it?" My co-worker Jacqueline Dunn leaned over in the break room and hissed. "She just came back from abroad."
"Maybe she has better connections," I murmured.
"Or she slept her way up," she said, and a chorus of whispers began like a low wind.
Later, in the corridor, Alexis faltered and looked at me. "Gillian," she said, soft as spun sugar. "I'm sorry if—"
"Save it," I said with a smile practiced in mirrors. "You look like a child in a big coat."
She laughed and answered, "Thank you."
Graham watched us from across the room and said nothing. He never did. He always looked at me as if I could be turned off and on: one moment a nuisance, the other a memory.
"Why didn't you fight for the position?" Jacqueline asked, when we finally went to the stairwell. "You're better than her."
"I had other battles," I said, and lied with a small nod. The diagnosis was a private war.
At my desk, a folded letter waited. It was a resignation. "You think I would leave without trying?" I asked myself. I wrote a polite note to HR and then crumpled it up and left it at Graham's door. He opened it with a cold smile and threw it back at me like trash. "Are you being childish?" he said. "This is not about you."
"It never was," I wanted to say. "It was about my existence."
When Alexis came back, she took my hand gently in the hallway as if to comfort a child. I reached out, saw the thread of her fear, and pinched the tender skin under her chin. She went white.
"You know how to play people," I told her. "But you should know: he doesn't love you the way he protected her."
"My name is Alexis," she whispered. Then she laughed with that small, brittle sound. "You sound jealous."
"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "He's not your brother." My hand left her jaw. She tasted like perfume and something else I couldn't name; her eyes went wet, apologetic. She left the CEO's office and came back as if nothing had happened.
"You used to be my sister," I told Graham once. "Do you remember?"
"Why would I want to remember?" he asked, like the answer would peel off his own skin.
*
Chiyo Fernandez was different from everyone else. She said "Don't die" like a command, like she could hold my life by saying it.
"You're stubborn," she would scold, arms folded. "Don't act like the world owes you the option of leaving."
"I don't owe anyone much," I would shrug. "Not really."
She stayed through therapist appointments and late-night video calls. "You are not hollow," she told me when the world felt too heavy. "You're stubborn. That's different."
"Maybe I'm just tired."
"You are not your scars," she said once, and I pressed my head to her shoulder and closed my eyes.
"Promise me one thing," she asked one night, serious, and I looked up.
"No," I said, because I'd learned how promises sting.
Her voice dropped. "Promise me you won't—"
"I can't promise things I don't believe in," I said. "I don't even promise to stand under the rain."
She laughed, and it was the sound of something refusing to break.
*
On my birthday—my mother's death day—I bought a white dress and wore it like a soldier wears old medals.
"You look like an angel," Chiyo said, but her eyes were wet.
"Thanks," I said.
The party was Alexis's idea. She had arranged a small event in the hotel's glittering hall, a place where people pretended to be kind. I could feel everyone's eyes like small, polite knives. Graham and Alexis stood together. She leaned against him as if the world would always let them share a space.
"Will you come?" Alexis asked, touching my arm. "Please come. Be there."
"No," I said. "I won't entertain false kindness."
"Please," she whispered. "For brother and sister."
The room shifted when I left. I stepped out to the balcony to catch my breath. The night was loud and warm; beyond the glass, the city rushed and hummed.
Then a man stepped out of the crowd—a large man with a smile like a used promise. He smelled of tobacco and arrogance.
"You look pale," he said. "Let me introduce myself."
"No," I said, and tried to step away.
The man closed in. He called himself Ismael Carpenter. He offered his hand like a question. The world dimmed and closed like a fist around my throat. I tried to back away. The past opened like a wound. I fumbled for my phone.
"I know you," he murmured. His hand found my wrist and didn't let go. The urge to run was so sharp I nearly collapsed.
I grabbed a tiny folding knife from my purse without thinking. "Don't touch me," I said. The blade blinked small and ridiculous.
"She's got a knife," the man said, annoyed. "Calm down."
A hand struck the blade and knocked it out of my grip. The knife spun and fell to the marble.
"Stop it," I whispered, because the world remembered the worst of nights.
The man rolled his eyes like other men. He hadn't expected resistance. He took a step forward, and the knife flashed on the ground. I lunged for it and it cut his arm. Blood welled on his skin, dark and bright.
"What did you do?" a voice boomed.
"Gillian!" Graham's shout echoed, and then his boot knocked my arm away. The knife clattered and skittered.
"Calm down!" he snapped. "You're making a scene." He took the man aside. "Ismael, go home."
The man wiped his arm theatrically. "She pulled a knife," he said to whomever listened, eyes glittering with self-pity. "She threatened me."
A hush ran like a current through the party. My chest hurt. My stomach felt like someone had tied knots inside it and then set them on fire. I felt the world tilt.
I laughed, a short, high sound. "You remember," I said to the crowd. "You remember what men like you do."
They didn't look at the wound on my wrist. They looked at Ismael with the same half-interest they reserved for news and traffic accidents. Graham's hand found my shoulder and squeezed, not to comfort but like a statement.
"You're making trouble," he hissed. "Stop this now."
I gathered my things and left. The balcony swallowed the sound of the party. Wind cut across the shoulders of my white dress.
"I told you to go," I said to the night and to myself. "So I'm going."
*
When I didn't answer my phone after the party, he came. He came like someone who had finally remembered to care.
"Gillian!" Graham pounded on the door that night until my neighbor called the police. He found the balcony and my white dress abandoned like a flag. He called me on the rooftop and I let the wind steal my voice.
"You said it was my fault," he said. "You said you were sorry."
"I didn't say anything that could help," I told him. "You had to choose to stop him, and you didn't."
"I don't know what to do," he said. "I'm sorry."
"It's too late for words." I felt the world thin.
"You can't—" he began.
"I can," I said, and I stepped.
The wind was cold and loud. I closed my eyes and counted the black specks of city lights. I thought of Cecilia's hands in the operating room, pale and still. I thought of Chiyo's hands, always rough with kindness. I thought of the first time Ismael's hand had been rough and how the world had looked like a bad joke.
"Don't," Graham pleaded. "Gillian, don't."
I smiled a small smile. "I'm going to see Mom," I said. "Do you feel happy now?"
He reached for me and missed.
My fall folded like paper. The air hit my face and left it burning. The world broke into sudden, slow pieces.
*
The noise afterward was a different kind: sirens, slotted voices, the small profane details of a life ended.
Graham did not sleep. He stood outside my building and smoked cigarettes until his fingers hurt. The guilt tied knots in him. He went to the hospital and then to lawyers and to funeral directors. He called Chiyo with a voice that was a child again.
"Please find her," he begged. "Please tell me I can fix it."
"You broke her," Chiyo said, and the accusation narrowed the air.
"Please," he said again. He had consumed two decades of cruelty and now drank from a cup of regret.
At my wake, people filed past and smiled. Colleagues spoke kindness as if they'd been trained. Alexis placed a white lily among the flowers and wept with the polite angles she always wore.
Chiyo waited until the crowd had thickened and then stood. She climbed onto a chair and slammed her palm on the table.
"Stop standing there like saints," she shouted. "You all are cowards."
"Chiyo," someone hissed. "Not here."
"Where?" she answered. "Where else? She deserved truth, not your quiet votes."
The room fell. Graham's face went hard. He looked like a man who had been carved from ice by his own hands.
"Everyone who ever turned away," Chiyo said. "Everyone who thought a life could be folded away because it was inconvenient—speak now."
A silence the size of a rumor held. Then a woman from accounts whispered, "We had no idea—" as if selfishness could be redeemed by ignorance. A man from PR said, "We were overloaded," and shifted his weight.
Chiyo was not done. She sat down, collected an envelope, and pulled out a small recorder. "She left a voice," she said. "She wouldn't let me keep it, but I have a copy."
The chairman's eyebrows lifted. "That isn't—" he began.
"I will play it," Chiyo said.
The room listened to my small, uneven voice across its speakers. "When I was eighteen," I said, "I was taken. The world didn't hear me. Graham told me to die. Ismael laughed. I tried to live."
The recording crackled and everyone heard what I had whispered in the dark. "I tried to tell them," the voice said. "Nobody listened."
As the voice finished, people shifted like guilty animals. Some left. Others stood rooted, unable to choose.
"Ismael Carpenter," Chiyo began, voice like a blade. "You were invited to the party. You left with a mark on your arm. You spoke with him like he was the injured man. Where is your conscience?"
Ismael, who had found a comfortable corner in the room, flushed and tried to protest. "That recording—it's selective," he said.
"Selective?" Chiyo laughed. "Selective like the way you select your allies."
"You can't prove—" he stammered.
Chiyo held up another envelope. She had something else. Messages, photographs—evidence of phone calls, the disgusting jokes he traded with men about me. She placed everything on the table like small, sharp objects.
People gasped. Someone in the back took out a phone and started to record.
Ismael's face changed. The ease slid away like a mask. He tried to backpedal into excuses. "I don't remember everything—" he said. "She looked strange, she lunged—"
"You stabbed me," the recording said. "You remember."
Now the murmurs turned to noises closer to contempt. A woman in a sequined dress threw down her glass. "I hired him," she said. "I trusted him." Her voice shook.
Ismael's excuses vanished beneath the weight of evidence. He lunged for the recorder and tried to snatch it. Guys grabbed him and pushed him back.
"Look at him," Chiyo said, voice pulling a cord in the room. "A man who thought words like knives and then thought himself above the damage."
Someone pushed Ismael out into the lobby. Photos and messages spread across everyone's screens like a contagion. Within an hour, corporate HR called, the board issued a statement, and Ismael was escorted out. A hashtag gathered momentum. A video someone recorded of him, angry and flustered, surfaced with captions. He lost clients, then friends, then invitations.
It was not prison. It was worse for him—the slow unmaking by other people's scorn.
That was one punishment.
Alexis's punishment was different.
Chiyo had a long memory of small things. She had watched Alexis move like a shadow across the family and plant herself where love was missing. At the memorial reception, Chiyo walked straight to Alexis and took her hand.
"You took his arms," Chiyo said. "You took space that belonged to a child who deserved warmth."
Alexis's smile tripped. "I loved him," she said. "I—"
"People don't 'love' the people who let them use others as furniture." Chiyo's voice was mild but merciless.
Alexis felt the sudden sharpness of the room. People who had once praised her professionalism found their eyes drifting away. Someone from HR whispered about conflicts of interest. A board member shook his head. "We need to review the appointment," he said. "We cannot have... complications."
Alexis's face paled. Emails flagged her as troubled, calling into question how she had been selected. Her contacts went quiet. Invitations ceased. Corporate support retracted like a tide. The social press wrote small, elegant obituaries and then tiny profiles about the woman who had been so close to a man who had let a sister fall.
She stood there as her future evaporated into polite murmurs. People murmured about ambition and morals. She tried to explain and everyone had suddenly found their hands full.
Her punishment was public exile: the loss of place, of power, of social currency. Her career buckled not with a stroke but with a thousand small rejections. She begged acquaintances for meetings and was turned away. Her offers dried up, replaced by a public appetite for stories about people who had used others' pain as ladders.
It was not dramatic, but it crumbled a life in a way that made her hollow.
Graham's punishment unfolded in another vein: he had been spared legal consequence; the law did not press charges for words and private cruelty. But the world, which loves to keep the ledger in stories, had a way of making private sins public.
At the funeral, after the recording had played, the attendees—friends, employees, distant relatives—stared. Some refused to look at Graham; others held him with a kind of wounded scorn.
He stood at the side and tried to speak to me at the casket as if he could conjure me back with a litany of apologies. People recoiled. A woman from the company—one who had been on the other side of his decisions—stepped forward.
"You fired me once," she said. "You called me lazy in the boardroom. You never thought I mattered. You never thought she mattered. We thought you were a strong man. We thought you were a leader."
A chorus of small voices followed—people who remembered his cruelty in little things: the way he dismissed someone's idea, the way he made a joke about my scars in a team meeting. He had been a man who had normalized cruelty.
And now they turned.
"You called my sister a liar," murmured one. "You called me petty when I tried to help her," said another. "You said she was dramatic," said yet another. One by one, they listed his offenses—little ones that mattered like fingerprints.
Graham listened and then tried to explain. "I'm sorry," he said. "I was a different person. I—"
"Different person," someone echoed. "You're the same person who chose words over hands."
He tried to step forward and the chairman stopped him. "No more," the chairman said. "This isn't a stage for your performances." His voice had no pity.
Graham's legs buckled. He sat on the stairs and looked like a broken statue. He could not believe his life had amounted to apologies that would not build bridges. His friends tried to help, but the room's sympathy had a shape—the shape of people who had spoken and been ignored for years. They had now been given the microphone.
His punishment was not jail or public humiliation with shouts and arrows. It was the more ancient, corrosive thing: the social unmaking.
He woke with the knowledge that the people who had once praised and followed him now whispered that he had been small, and that his cruelty had a body and a name. He had not been publicly disgraced by sentence; he had been stripped leave by the gentle, steady hands of collective memory.
For hours he sat on the funeral stairs and watched as people filed past my casket and then left with the chord of their lives rearranged.
Outside, rain had begun to fall again. The white dress had a small smear near the hem when they finally folded it away.
When it was over, Chiyo took a pair of gloves and walked straight to the man who had been my rapist. He had been dismissed, yes, but dismissal left him wandering for a while. She approached him as if she had no fear.
"You took something from her," she said. "You could have said sorry. You didn't. There are other ways to break a man besides a legal charge."
He hadn't admitted his guilt aloud. He had been too cowardly to speak the truth. Now he had no place to hide. People took pictures. The mob's voice rose and he stood in the middle of it without armor.
"Please," he whispered. "I didn't—"
"Save your breath," Chiyo said. "Your work is done."
He tried to defend himself until the world made his excuses into the texture of lies, and then he dissolved into a man everyone remembered as small and petulant.
The punishments echoed in different halls. Careers ended. Friends turned away. The man who had been my brother crouched and pressed his hands to his face and sobbed as if he had been carved from salt.
You could say justice was not perfect. But the city kept a ledger in its small talk: the names repeated in offices and on screens, the quiet removal of invitations, the deletion of contacts. That was a kind of public punishment—slow, collective, visible.
*
They buried me under a tree my mother had once loved. Chiyo placed a small bunch of magnolias on top, and the petals fell like someone else's tears.
At the grave, Graham stood and spoke in small fragments. "I thought you were a thief," he said. "I thought you took our mother. I was wrong."
He faltered, and Chiyo looked at him with a face he had never seen when he was a child: unpitying.
"You traded your kindness for hate," she told him. "You gave your silence to the wrong side."
He fell to his knees and sobbed the way a man does when the ground is all that holds him.
"This isn't a punishment," he whispered. "I cannot forgive myself."
"No," Chiyo said. "But maybe this is the only thing that will make you stop doing it to someone else."
Graham never found peace. He moved through a life that had lost its applause, and the ache in his chest was as real as the hole in mine. He attended my grave often. He would stand there in rain and cold and say nothing.
And the white dress that had been on my back the night I left was folded into a box. In it, the hem had a small tear where the world had caught at me.
I had dreamed death would be quiet, but revelations make a noise. People talk. They think they are sorrowing, but some of them are sharpening knives out of truth.
In the end, I did what I wanted to do. I went to a place where pain could not find me. For a long time, I thought I had failed at everything, but maybe I had only chosen the only place left to myself.
From the railing, the city had looked like a small, indifferent map. My last smile was not for those who turned away. It was for Cecilia—the woman whose hands I'd never feel again.
"Goodbye," I said into the wind.
"Go see her," Chiyo whispered later, when she stood at the foot of my grave. "Tell her what you couldn't say."
I had always believed I was a bad gift. Maybe I was only a truth they couldn't hold.
The rooftop remembers my white dress. The railing keeps a memory like a bent bar of color. The words I said—"I'm about to die, happy?"—hung in the air and did not leave until people had spoken them aloud and then swallowed them.
The End
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