Face-Slapping11 min read
Missed Chances, Lasting Choices
ButterPicks13 views
"I can't make it tonight," Leonardo said, like it was nothing more than traffic.
"You promised," I said.
He was already half-dressed for the door, cufflinks glinting. "I have a dinner with old classmates. Don't wait up."
"I made your favorite," I said. "Spicy boiled beef, just like you like it."
He glanced at me once, the way people glance at paintings in a gallery—interest without feeling. "You always try too hard, Isabel." He said my name with that slow tone, like reading a label.
I was used to being small around him. I learned to fold myself into the corners of rooms for his warmth to pass overhead. I had grown up in a small town, studied hard to get to a better place. He had always been the sun in every room: brilliant grades, a family with an old name, a smile people stopped to study.
The day he asked me to be his, we were both drunk and the campus steps smelled of rain and beer. He had been the kind of man who made the future look like a movie trailer, full of promise and too bright to be true. "Will you be my girlfriend?" he had asked under a streetlamp.
"Yes," my voice had been a whisper and a leap.
We dated. We married. For years I told myself the stories that kept me warm: that he loved me enough, that his friendship with Hermione was casual, that ghosts of the past never become living things again.
On the night I woke with blood on my hands and panic in my bones, he was not coming home. "Don't wait up," he'd said earlier. When I called, a woman's clear voice answered before his. "It's Hermione. Tell Isabel not to wait. We have friends here."
"Hermione, give me Leonardo," I said, hysterical.
"In a minute," Hermione said, silky. "He's with friends. Don't worry. I'm here."
The phone went dead. He hung up on me.
I drove to the hospital myself through rain that beat against the windshield. I signed my name on the consent form with trembling fingers. My child was gone. The operating table was cold. The bright lamps hummed above me like indifferent gods.
The next day, they arrived together. Hermione with makeup that could have been designed to mock the pallor of a woman in a hospital bed. Leonardo looked like a man carrying a costume of regret.
"Hermione, I didn't think…" he said, eyes quick and small.
Hermione's voice was the first. "I am so sorry. If I had known… this wouldn't have happened. We were just celebrating my return. You know how it is."
Leonardo patted her hand as if comfort could be a seal. "Surgery goes badly sometimes. We'll try again," he said to me, then turned and put his arm around Hermione as she sobbed, big and public.
"Give me the phone," I said.
"What's the point? Nothing's the point," he answered, and walked out of the room with the same impatient tilt he'd used on dates.
Carolina, his mother, barged in and began to rage. "You always were reckless," she said to me, a shrill, practiced voice. "You couldn't even keep the child. What were you doing, skinny and foolish—"
"Mom," Leonardo shot her a glance. "Lower your voice."
Carolina kept shouting. "You can't keep him fattened with only charity!"
There was no kindness left that afternoon. No one reached for my hand except the nurse when she measured my blood. The family took its performance outside, as if glass walls could hide cruelty.
Hermione sat nearest to Leonardo, face wet with tears she did not truly feel. "I never meant for this," she said to the room in a voice meant to be heard.
"Take the position back," she announced later in my bed, as if she were returning borrowed keys. "I've done enough. It's time I take my place."
"Take it," I said softly. "I don't want the position."
Her smile faltered. She had expected hysterics and pleading. She had expected me crawling or at least crumpling. The truth was simple and cold: the child was gone and with it the last thread of naïve hope I had for Leonardo.
Time does something to people when grief is turned into a scene. I learned to trade my vulnerabilities for plans. Over the next weeks I did the quiet things: the legal forms, the applications, the phone calls. I collected receipts and records. I arranged small traps like tidy mosaics. When I found photos of Leonardo and Hermione—intimate, careless, proof of more than a late-night embrace—I did not display them. I put them away like a loaded tool until the moment the lock would be turned.
There are three moments I will never forget in the months that followed.
"Isabel, you look cold," Enoch said the first time he came to my door with two steaming cups of tea. He had moved into the apartment next to mine like a small miracle, turning familiar routines into appointments I wanted to keep.
"Thank you," I said. "It's just been a week."
Enoch watched me like someone mapping constellations. "Do you need help packing?"
"I don't need help," I said. "I need quiet."
"Then take the tea," he said. He handed me the cup with his fingers brushing mine. That light touch was small, but it landed with the weight of someone who had chosen to stay.
"Why are you being so kind?" I asked later, when the city had melted into night and we stood in a doorway that made the streetlamps look like stars.
"Because it's not putting out a fire to let someone else suffer," Enoch said. "Don't ask me why. Ask me to stay."
"Will you?"
He smiled like a man who had been waiting to be asked and had rehearsed a dozen answers. "Yes."
That was one heart-quickening moment—his hand, his voice, his choice. Another came when he, without asking, slipped his jacket around my shoulders when I forgot mine at a restaurant. A third came when he kissed me in the doorway that first night, a soft press that felt like a promise rather than a taking.
"You're smiling like a trapped animal," Leonardo said once—sharp, thin voice as if he were sampling resentment.
"At least I'm smiling," I said.
He had been blindsided by my calm. Leonardo had expected me to bargain, to beg, to be afraid. When I placed evidence on the table, he thought it a bluff.
"This is blackmail," he said coldly, looking through the photos and the witness transcripts and the videos from the night his mother struck me.
"Call it negotiation," I replied.
The divorce papers were drafted on my terms, not his. I asked for what I felt I had earned—fair division—because I had built my share with my own hands in his company for two and a half years. He spat out words like "ingratitude" and "shame." I kept my head.
But the punishments were not finished.
Punishment One: The Police Station — Carolina's Collapse (Public, detailed)
"You're making a scene," Carolina screamed as the police car stopped at the precinct steps. "Who do you think you are bringing me here?"
"You're the one who struck her," one officer said, clipped and businesslike. "We need a statement."
"I will not be bullied!" Carolina shouted back, the high rooms of the police lobby catching her voice like a bell.
I recorded on my phone before she realized. "This is evidence," I told the officer. "Her hand, the witness, and the video we took."
She tried to grab the phone. Her nails clipped the edge of my palm, but the screen stayed stubborn. The lobby filled—security personnel, a woman waiting to report a stolen wallet, a couple arguing about parking. They all looked up when her voice pitched into real anger.
"Mr. Arellano, you cannot let her do this," Carolina cried when Leonardo tried to calm her. "You promised me you would not—"
"You promised me you'd stop," I said, louder than I meant to.
"Quiet!" Carolina slapped at the air with theatrical fury. She was used to being believed on her voice alone. But now there were cameras—cellphones lifted by strangers—and a crowd that had decided to lean toward spectacle.
A police sergeant, broad-shouldered and patient, read instructions. "We will take a statement. There should be no physical contact. You will sign a written apology or face charges."
Carolina's face changed like a sky at dusk. First, an inflated bravado that said she could out-shout anyone. Then, a flash of calculation—what would happen to a woman who admitted she had assaulted someone? She'd be a subject of gossip, of shame. She'd lose reputation she had spent a lifetime buying with small cruelties.
"I will not," she hissed. Her mouth trembled; her hands clenched like fists hiding fear. "This is a set-up. She is trying to ruin my son."
"Show the video," I said.
The sergeant watched with neutral interest. When he nodded, I played the clip on my phone. There we were: me standing in my apartment doorway, Carolina's hand raised and then the flat, resounding slap. The sound cut through the hum of the station like a stone in a pond. A hush fell. Even the couple arguing about parking fell silent.
Carolina's expression moved through stages. There was alarm—pupils widening, a forced straightening of the back. She tried to wave it off, to laugh it off as dramatization. "That... that's edited."
A woman waiting at the bench said, "It isn't. She hit you."
"You wait," Carolina sputtered. Her voice cracked. She started speaking faster, the words scattered like a bird beating against a cage.
"Read the apology," the sergeant said.
Humiliation began to set in like cold rain. She had spent decades barking orders and pushing people into being small for her comfort. Now, the light focused back on her, and in that light, the petty cruelty looked enormous. She swallowed. Her hands shook. "I… I apologize," she read, the words of the written transcript awkward and metallic in her mouth, "I am ashamed for striking Ms. Miller."
There were several people nearby who had already had their phones up, faces committed to the footage. They murmured. A few nodded. Some looked away, embarrassed but satisfied in the righteousness.
Carolina's eyes were wet with tears that were not purely from contrition. There was panic: how would this look at society brunches? What would her friends say? Her voice dropped to a strained whisper. "I'm sorry… I didn't mean…"
"That's fine." I kept my voice calm. "This is not about you. It's about making sure this doesn't happen again."
Around us, people looked at me differently. Some faces were smug; others were surprised. A man in a suit who'd been reading the paper stopped to say, "Good for you, young lady." A clerk peeked out of an office and whispered, "You shouldn't have to take it."
Carolina's collapse did not happen in dramatic one-second gestures. It was a slow unspooling: indignation thinned, then silence, and then a red-rimmed face at a public counter, her name recorded in a police report. It was the kind of punishment that didn't include jail but included the social collapse she had always feared—being seen the way her victims had seen her.
When she left, a few women in the waiting area gathered and shook their heads. "How could she?" one said.
Carolina's humiliation had the effect I wanted. It was not revenge for me, not really. It was a recalibration. She could no longer stand in rooms and belittle others with impunity. For a woman who had used small cruelties like currency, the loss was large.
Punishment Two: The Boardroom Reveal — Hermione and Leonardo
The boardroom had glass walls and a long table. I sat at the far end with my laptop open. Leonardo's company had called a meeting—rumors of cashflow problems, nervous investors, and too many missed profit forecasts. I walked in with a calm I had built like armor.
"Isabel, this is neither the time nor the place—" Leonardo began.
I hit play. The room listened to a private recording: a conversation between him and Hermione planning to meet that night, laughing about alibis, boasting of being untouchable. Then came images—photographs a private detective had delivered the week before—Hermione in asymmetrical light, Leonardo careless and entangled. Faces in the room shifted as a show of guilt moved through them.
"How did you get these?" someone whispered.
Enoch stood up. "Because this company deserves better than a CEO making decisions with one foot out the door." He had been the quiet investor in the shadows, the one who'd watched the numbers sink and the PR morph.
The investors' phones began to vibrate. Emails were sent—screenshots forwarded. An old friend of Leonardo's, a man who had once courted him for partnership, asked a blunt question: "Is this true? That the CEO is engaged in conduct that undermines confidence in the company?"
Leonardo stammered. Hermione sat frozen for the first time in her life, the practiced airs gone, the mask slipping. "You can't do this," she said, voice small. "This is personal."
"Everything that affects the company is not just business," I replied. "This is about trust. We trusted leadership to be present."
Investors, whose chief concern was the bottom line, began to ask about contingency. The legal counsel muttered. Stock analysts in the city began to call. The boardroom, which had been a place of performance for Leonardo, became a place of unmasking.
Hermione, who had had society at her heels and cameras on demand, found herself bullied not by women or fans but by a room of businesspeople calculating risk. They measured her in short breaths and cold eyes. An investor stood, declared himself uncomfortable, and said he'd withdraw support if leadership didn't change. Within days, partnerships evaporated. Hermione's invitation to be the center of social attention thinned into non-appearance. Her phone received fewer calls. Where she had once walked into rooms like a comet, she now received the gutters' glance.
Leonardo tried to salvage, to promise reform and apology. The damage had not been legal in the sense of an arrest but it was social and financial. People who had come for charm and titles were now counting losses. The board asked for an emergency audit and placed the company under interim management. The humiliation I delivered was not private; it was the right kind of public—where the people who mattered began to look elsewhere.
Punishment Three: Internet and Alumni Verdict
In less than forty-eight hours, messages began to bloom across chatrooms. An old alumni group posted a message. "If there's a wrong to be righted, do it clearly," Enoch wrote in that group, blunt and to the point. Then other voices came. Comments suggested he speak for what was true: "If you wronged someone and were wrong, owning up is the only decent thing."
The chorus was not violent but it cut. Leonardo's name was no longer whispered with admiration; it was a cautionary tale. Hermione found that her invitations halted. The man who had been confident now found his phone quieter, his table at clubs empty. The kind of ostracism that is not violent but complete is more painful than most punishments. They had to feel their absence—absence of reverence, absence of fans, absence of automatic forgiveness.
Enoch and I stood together after a long week. "You did well," he said.
"I did what I had to," I replied.
"What do you want now?" he asked.
"Freedom," I said. "And a life where my body and choices are mine."
"You can have both," he said, and when he took my hand it was a quiet settling. We found a rhythm that was not full of spectacle but of small steady days: coffee at sunrise, Enoch's impossible patience, the impulse to be better because someone had chosen me.
We did not play games. I told him about every plan, about the night in the hospital, about the way my trust had been squandered. He listened without pity, without drama—just steady presence. He tasted like safety; the kiss at the doorway tasted like home.
Sometimes, late at night, I would pull out my phone and watch the clip of Carolina's apology, not for triumph but as proof that cruelty could be checked. I kept the photos of Leonardo in a hidden folder not to brand, but in case the world needed to be reminded: people must be accountable. The photos did not define my future; they were the lever that changed my past.
"Do you ever think about forgiveness?" Enoch asked once, when the wine was almost gone.
"Forgiveness is not forgetting," I said. "Forgiveness is a door I don't have to slam open if I don't want to. Some doors are better left closed."
He nodded. "Good," he said. "Then let's build somewhere with doors that open inward."
Months later, I stood in my kitchen and cooked without anxiety. Enoch stood behind me, his hands light on my hips, stealing a spoonful of sauce.
"You make good food," he said.
"Maybe," I replied. "Mostly, I make food for people who appreciate it."
He kissed the back of my neck. "And I appreciate you."
On a cold morning, walking to the commuter rail, I saw Leonardo across the street. He looked smaller in daylight, his eyes tired. Hermione's name floated on gossip like a shriveled balloon. Carolina had retreated from every place she had once owned; she stayed home and learned to be invisible. For them, the world had tightened and left less room for the petty cruelties that had once been currency.
Leonardo saw me, hesitated, and then walked past with a look that asked for something I no longer had.
"Isabel?" he said weakly.
"No," I said, and kept walking.
Enoch took my hand. "Ready?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
I had lost a child, yes, and had known a kind of loneliness so deep it made me professional in grief. But I had also learned how to collect proof, to set boundaries, and to choose myself. The city felt like a room I could walk into again.
That night, before sleep, I opened the videos one last time. Carolina's apology scrolled across the screen, halting and mechanical. Hermione's invitations were gone. Leonardo's emails asking for "another chance" filled my junk folder unread.
Enoch's hand tightened over mine in the dark. "You deserve a good life," he whispered.
"I know," I whispered back. "So let's build one."
The End
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