Face-Slapping13 min read
My Father's Party, My Trap, and the Jasmine Promise
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I never expected a hospital hallway to become a stage.
"This is the men's clinic, the women's department is downstairs," the doctor said without looking up.
"Come in, my husband, quick—" I called, fingers already on the door handle, watching the man's face shift the way a painting loses light.
Pax Duffy glanced up. For one slow heartbeat I thought he recognized me. Then his eyes slid away like a curtain closing.
"Everlee," I said, soft, the way you say someone's name when you try to remember the sound of them. "Long time."
Pax adjusted his thin spectacles and clicked a name on his screen as if the word "Everlee" were a file to be archived.
"This is the men's clinic," he repeated. "Next: Carson Esposito."
"Carson?" Pax said, like he had to name the crime.
Carson—my friend who had been at my side since we were seven—stopped playing the game, took off his cap, and walked toward the door. The waiting room turned like a slow tide toward him.
"You're really handsome," a woman whispered to her husband. "Bet he's not bad—"
Her husband didn't say anything. Carson flushed, trying to ignore the attention.
"Everlee, go wait outside," Carson breathed when he was beside me.
"No. I'm staying," I gripped his sleeve. We moved together toward Pax's desk.
Pax's fingers whitened on his pen. "You should step over there. Take your pants down—"
Carson's face went blank. "What? A check?"
"Yes," Pax said, clinically. "If it can't be helped, think ahead."
I faked a hurt laugh. Carson defended me like the old friend he is. "I'm the big problem," he snapped. "Not him."
Pax's eyebrow barely twitched. "Urge, frequency—less water; visit the urology clinic."
He pushed the next ticket and the intercom called another name. We left, ears full of the quiet hurt of a man who refuses to see.
Outside, Carson muttered, "What a jerk. You said he'd fall to pieces when he saw me. He didn't even look."
"He didn't look at me either," I said.
"Also wasted your three hundred on an expert fee."
We stood shoulder to shoulder. Two bruised egos, ten seconds of stunned silence.
"Never mind," Carson said, putting his hand on my shoulder the way he always did. "You tried. That's enough. Look, I'm not bad, you know."
He looked at me like a single sentence could change our lives.
Back at home, my phone pinged. Pax: "Add me on WeChat so I can refund you."
I replied: "Alipay. My husband doesn't like me adding male friends."
Three seconds later, three hundred showed up in my account. Exact change. No apology.
I thought it was over.
The next morning Pax appeared at my door.
He stepped into the entryway and planted himself like a blockade. "Where's your husband?"
"He left early," I lied.
"I've been outside all night. Where is he?"
I told another lie and watched Pax smile like someone letting a small ship sink.
Then he kissed me, feral and precise. I shoved him back. My stomach rolled. I vomited.
"Sorry," I said, red-rimmed eyes. "I drank last night. I'm dizzy."
Pax looked at my shoes and smirked. "You always do this before anything. Don't use that face—tell me you don't like me."
"I have reasons," I said. My fingers found his hand and he pulled away.
Carson appeared in my bedroom doorway, bare-chested, hair messy, a silly neck pillow slung around his neck like proof of my chaotic night.
"Everlee," he hissed, then wrapped me in a steady, warm movement. I felt steadied.
Pax smiled, pale, and left.
"Don't bother her," Carson said when Pax was gone. "You were the one who left."
"It's you who came and bothered my patient," Pax said over his shoulder, the unspoken claim hanging.
Carson scooped me into his arms like an old habit. I wanted to believe we were safe.
I told myself I wasn't seeing Pax again. I told myself I was done.
Then my father called.
"Carlos Benton," I said when I answered.
He hesitated. "I need you to schedule a specialist for me, Everlee."
"Why mine?" I asked flatly.
"Your stepmother found this hospital's doctor, says you're friends with him. Can you get me an appointment with Dr. Duffy?"
"Fine." I called Pax. He answered on the second ring. "I need a favor. My father needs an appointment."
"Don't use this to see me," he said, soft.
"I won't. Nine AM tomorrow. I'll be there."
We arrived to find my father sitting stiffly with Kendra Hart, who laughed too loud and wore a dress that told the room she was in charge.
"Come, sit," Pax said. "Family members outside."
"Kendra, leave," I snapped and walked out.
She followed, fingers interlaced with my father's, smiling like a cat that knew every corner of the house belonged to it.
Inside, Pax told us my father needed a small operation that required consent. He asked to speak with me alone at dinner. My father jumped in with that red envelope of cash like it makes a situation right. Pax shook his head. "I don't smoke."
When Pax called me later, his voice sounded almost human. "Come to dinner," he asked.
I said yes. I told myself I was testing him, that this was all professional. Inwardly I tasted something like revenge.
Dinner was a quiet arrangement of salt and attention. Pax slid food toward me and watched me, an intensity like rain in a heavy season.
"Are you really with Carson?" Pax asked finally. The veneer slipped.
"No," I said. "My father has new problems. Ask your patient list."
"Someone told me differently," he said. "Someone wanted to make me jealous."
"That someone?" I unspooled my explanation like a string of beads: my stepmother's small public displays, the rumor mill, the way Kendra went out of her way to be noticed. "Funny, isn't it? She said she was trying to make me jealous, too."
Pax hesitated. "If I could make her go away, would you give me another chance?"
The elevator doors shut on us. It felt like a decision time but I pressed the close button. I couldn't let him trap me like that again.
Carson waited outside in a raincoat, cigarette in hand. He handed me the umbrella and the world smelled like wet pavement and trouble.
"Carson," I said. "I'm sorry."
He smiled in that crooked way he does and said, "You're mine soon enough."
It was small. It was enough.
We held tightly to ordinary things—chicken soup, a borrowed jacket, a shared radio song.
My father’s sixtieth birthday landed like a storm in our calendar. Fifty tables, a banquet hall, a perfect place for a trap.
I invited Pax. He accepted.
Kendra came that night wearing craft and confidence. She spread her sweetness like jam. She gave everyone dessert she'd made herself. Her pregnant belly—she told people it was two months—glowed with her lies.
At one table she leaned in and said, "Everlee, please enjoy. I hope my future son will be as filial as you are."
I smiled. I pressed my thumb into my palm so the click would remind me I was not a person to be fooled anymore.
When she reached me, her face was a mask of honey.
"Thank you for hosting, Everlee," she said, and pushed a little covered box into my hands. "It's my favorite. I practiced."
"Thank you," I said, and carried the box to Carson.
Carson looked at the box and sighed. He tossed it straight into the trash.
"What?" Kendra stammered. "How rude!"
Carson didn't flinch. "I'm allergic to powdered tea, ma'am," he said. "Green tea and I don't get along."
People laughed—an easy noise. Her smile tightened.
I had told Laurel Mortensen the plan. She had been the one to pull strings, to whisper where Kendra's habits had cracks. She'd told me where Kendra liked to sit, who she invited to run interference—and who she paid.
At eleven, the world spun into the stairwell. I took the service staircase, the ones that hold secrets.
There, under a humming light, Kendra sat on the floor and wailed like someone had cut her open and found nothing.
"Pax, you can't love her," she cried. "You promised you were just going to make me jealous. I gave up everything."
He looked like a statue that had forgotten how to melt. "We were done," he said.
"You said you'd marry me if I made you forgive your family!" she kept saying. Her fingers clung to his shirt like a drowned sailor clinging to a spar.
I sat on a step above them and watched. I had a recorder in my hand, a little device that had witnessed their words for hours.
"Tell him it's over, Pax," I said, stepping down.
Kendra lunged as if to stop me, and the whole thing unraveled.
She screamed. She clawed at me. She said she was pregnant and pointed to her belly, a theatrical motion. "It's his!" she screamed. "Three months!"
"Prove it," I said, icy. "Prove it now."
She tried to snatch my phone, tore. I slapped her. She fell. Then she tried to run—she wanted the phone gone. Her helper, a local boy, tried to block me but Carson stepped out of the shadows.
"Say it," Carson said.
"Don't!" Kendra wailed. "I will lose everything!"
"What else have you lost that you want to keep?" I asked.
If you are imagining she fell apart and crawled away quietly, you don't know Kendra Hart.
Now comes the punishment. We had prepared the room—Laurel had the proof, the pictures of Kendra's late-night getaways with a man who was not my father. The banquet hall was full. When the word went out, fifty heads turned toward the staircase, then the foyer, then the microphone.
I walked up to the microphone with my recorder in my hand. My voice was small but clear. "I have something to play."
Pax pushed back as if on lifebuoy. "Everlee, don't—"
"What do you mean don't?" I said into the mic. "The truth should be heard in front of everyone. This is not private anymore."
The banquet quieted, the clinking of spoons paused, and forks hovered in mid-air like an audience holding its breath.
I hit play.
A man's laugh, Kendra's voice saying, "Don't worry, my husband will never find out," and a soft 'yes'—not to my father but to the other man—filled the room.
Kendra's face changed. First she looked startled, then pale, then furious. "You—what is this?" she cried, stamping like a child.
"Where did you get that?" Pax asked, but he didn't reach for me.
Laurel stepped forward. "Photos," she said, and held up a set of glossy prints: Kendra getting into a car at midnight, in rain, with a man who had visited my café twice. The photographs were time-stamped and clear.
Someone gasped. "Oh my God."
My father—Carlos Benton—stood there slowly turning thirty shades of red and gray. "What is this?" he demanded.
"You wanted to protect your son, Mr. Benton," I said. "But when the son is the accomplice, protection is not the word. Your wife is not pregnant by you. She is not faithful."
The crowd turned. A cousin whispered, "She lied about the baby..."
Kendra's mouth opened and closed. "You're lying—you're lying—" She pointed a shaking finger at me. "You are the liar."
Pax's jaw tightened. He'd been unmoved all evening, but the color in his face ran out. He opened his mouth, closed it. He had been a doctor—precise, detached. Now his face was a map of wrong turns.
"Play the voicemail," Laurel said.
I tapped the recorder. There it was: Kendra's voice in the dark, making arrangements, saying, "Make sure he picks me up at twelve. Hide the car in the basement. My husband will never see."
The banquet hall fell into a heavy second of silence. Then the crowd splintered into noise—shock, whispers, camera clicks as guests took photos. Someone said, "She cheated on Mr. Benton?" Another asked, "Is that the doctor?"
Kendra's transformation was a performance: from anger to denial, to the small, practiced coquettishness she'd used on my father, to panic. Her hands flew to her belly. "It's true," she sobbed. "It's mine. It's mine!"
She had forgotten that children and grandchildren filled the room. An aunt reached for a tissue and sniffed hard, eyes sharp as knives.
"How could you?" my grandmother cried out loud, and that made three women in the front row audibly weep. A friend of Kendra's tried to defend her, then stopped when she saw the photos.
People pointed their phones at Kendra. "Post it," someone said. "Call the news."
I felt their eyes like hot rain. There was a slow roll of people moving away from her as if the rooms themselves were trying to keep the stain from spreading. Some guests applauded me softly, no longer as guests at a party but as a jury.
Kendra went through the clockwork indignation: "How dare you! You ruined everything!" Then she denied, "It's a setup! He—" Her lips trembled. "Pax, say it's not true!"
Pax looked at her for the first time that entire night like she had shifted from a rival to a small, foolish animal that had bitten a hand it needs. He stepped toward the table and, to everyone’s shock, told the room: "Kendra, I never... I was angry at you for lying to your husband. But I did not—" He couldn't finish.
Kendra's face crumpled. "You promised me—" She dropped to her knees in full theater, hands clasped. "Please, Pax. I need this. I told him I was pregnant and he... he gave me money. I didn't mean to hurt anyone."
Around her, guests drew back, some whispering "gold-digger," others shaking their heads with the mechanical pity of those who think the scandal is more interesting than the sorrow.
A cousin had already begun to pull up her phone, live-streaming. "Everyone's watching," he whispered. "Let's get justice."
"J ustice?" Kendra spat, then sobbed. She began to plead with faces she'd once charmed: "Please don't let him ruin me. I need his house. I need his name."
The crowd split in two responses. Some turned away with disgust. Others, who loved station and the right alignment of reputations, clucked and whispered, "Shame." The older women leaned in, not to help, but to ensure they saw with their own eyes.
Kendra's performance began to fail. Her voice shook; she flapped on and on, grasping for sympathy like a drowning person grabbing the rail of a ship.
Pax's demeanor changed slowly from detached doctor to a man who had been forced into the light. He looked like someone who had realized he had been part of the wrong scene. He stepped forward and said in a voice that carried in the hall, "I did not promise marriage. I did not promise to be with her. I was wrong to be involved. I never—" He stopped when he saw my father's face, broken and furious.
My father, who had spent his life thinking money fixed the frays, stood trembling. "You—" he snarled. "You took advantage of me. You lied to me. You made me look like a fool in front of my friends."
People nodded. Some whispered about compensation. Others suggested he throw Kendra out then and there. My aunt shouted that she always suspected Kendra would do something like this.
Kendra lost all control. She pleaded, then begged, then accused. She threatened to expose secrets she didn't have. She cried for a son that might not exist. She called me a "bitch" in a shaky voice.
Then her helper—someone who had been paid off—stepped forward and, out of nowhere, confessed. "She told me to hide the receipts," he said. He said the names of hotels, the dates, the plate numbers. Each word landed like a brick.
Carson, my friend, walked to the center and with cold clarity said, "You picked the wrong house to burn."
It was a public beating of a liar with truth as the whip. The room watched Kendra's ego peel away. Her supporters looked embarrassed and then angered, and then smaller. The sound of phones multiplied as people recorded her collapse.
Kendra's reaction went through the required stages: smug to shocked to denial to complete breakdown. She begged, "I didn't mean—" Denials, then small, useless apologies as everyone recognized the pattern.
The crowd's reaction was a different thing. Laughter, applause—some cruel, some approving—mixed with whispers and camera flashes. A woman near the buffet spat, "Good. I hate cheaters." An older man shook his head and said, "Children will remember this."
Pax stood with his head down. His pride, once a neat surgical coat, was now slashed. He had wanted to be clever; he was foolish. In front of everyone he lost his place.
Kendra was escorted out, not violently but with no small amount of scorn. Guests pointed at her as she left, children pulling their parents away. Her face was wet with her own ruin.
I watched them go, and when the room calmed, there were only two small sets of voices: those who wanted to scold me for exposing family in public and those who saw the necessity. My grandmother pulled me into a hug. "You did the right thing," she whispered, even as tears soaked her cheek.
Afterward, Pax found me in the quiet of the service hall. He had been exposed and he knew everything. He rubbed his hands together like a man trying to warm them.
"Everlee," he said. He didn't ask for another chance. He didn't dare.
"I don't want explanations," I said. "You lied and you let someone else lie to my father."
He swallowed. "I thought I could make it right. I thought I could protect him by lying. I was wrong."
"You hurt everyone."
"I know."
It was a public punishment, exactly the kind described: evidence, witnesses, reactions. Kendra broke, Pax's dignity recognized itself as ruined in public, my father's pride dispatched. The banquet had watched the liar fall and cheered. That was the point. I had not wanted quiet revenge. I wanted exposure so the lie could not nest under gilded paper.
Carson and I walked out in the rain later that night. He offered me his jacket. "We're not built from broken things," he said simply.
"You waited?" I asked.
"I never wanted to miss you for long," he said.
We went to the cemetery when the heat broke. I found my mother's headstone and set some jasmine tea on the base. Carson had fixed the stone earlier; he smoothed cement and left jasmine tea and dumplings each year. He talked to my mother like he talked to me—soft, careful.
"One day you'll be my daughter-in-law," he joked, and I pressed a kiss to his knuckles like a promise.
On my mother's day, under a sky that threatened rain, I told him everything from when I was seven to the banquet. He listened. He did not tell me to forgive; he told me he would be there.
"Everlee," he said quietly as we walked away, "I will be your home if you won't be anyone else's."
"That is a grand promise," I said.
He turned my hand and slipped something small into my palm. A small ring he said he had kept in the drawer for years. "I was going to give this when you were ready," he said. "Give my mother something to smile about."
At the cemetery, I made him promise again, this time to my mother's picture. We laughed and cried, shared tea and dumplings, and made up futures in two sentences.
Later, I texted Pax once: "Refund the rest."
He replied with a single word: "Sorry."
I didn't answer.
Weeks passed, and the scandal spread like wind through a field. Kendra's counselor called off meetings; her social friends disappeared like spilled sugar. Pax's colleagues looked at him differently; some said he had a lapse in judgment. My father, after the feast, learned to keep his wallet closed and his ego quieter.
Carson stayed. He left me cold coffee and warm soup, and in the small hours he hummed while he fixed the light. He patched my nights like a careful carpenter.
One evening, under the jasmine-scented air at my mother's grave, he asked, "Will you marry me?" Not with words of the kind you see in those magazines—just a quiet hand and a small, earnest look.
"Yes," I said.
He laughed and then kissed me, gentle as a promise.
In the months that followed, the scandal faded like bruises. People moved on to other amusements. Kendra tried to rebuild but found respect does not come with money. Pax moved hospitals, trying to find a place where no one knew his mistakes. My father learned to be smaller and kinder, not because he chose to but because his audience had shrunk.
Carson and I opened a small cafe with a jasmine sign. We served jasmine tea and dumplings by the picture of my mother, and Laurel cleaned the tables and saved every tip. We decorated the place with small things—Pax's old surgical lamp turned into an overhead fixture that still hummed like a hospital but in a gentler way. People came to us for warm food and quieter hearts.
Once, in a soft light, Pax came to the cafe. "I'm not looking for you," he said at the door.
"You shouldn't be," I said, and the music played on. He left without much trouble.
Carson put a tiny ring—a small plain band—on my finger later that year by the gravestone. "To remember the jasmine," he said. "To remember a promise kept."
We kept the promise. Every year, when the heat came, we brewed jasmine tea, sat at my mother's small stone, and remembered that sometimes truth must be loud. Sometimes it must be a banquet room, a microphone, a recording. Sometimes love is simple and delivered with a bowl of soup.
I learned to trust my heart, even when it trembled. I learned that small gentleness can survive a scandal. I learned that secrets, when revealed, can clear the air.
We ended our days—not with fireworks or vows that fit in novels—but with a quiet kitchen light, two spoons, and the jasmine fragrance that means home.
The End
— Thank you for reading —