Sweet Romance12 min read
My First Love Came Back Rich — And Then He Knelt on a Durian Shell
ButterPicks12 views
I opened the villa gate and almost walked into Corbin Bonner.
He stood on the driveway with a roll suitcase, suit sharp and posture straighter than I remembered. For a second I thought time had frozen to the day we split. Then a footstep from the second floor made his head snap toward the house.
"Who is that man?" Corbin asked, narrowing his eyes.
"He helps around the house. He's family to me," I said, keeping my voice level.
Corbin's gaze sliced across the yard and landed on the heavy, middle-aged man who was stepping down the stairs—Boris King, big and round and exactly what Corbin called "a pig" in the old days.
"You're married?" Corbin's voice tightened like a wire.
"I never said I was married," I answered.
Corbin flinched as if I'd thrown a bucket of cold water in his face. "You live here? In a place like this?"
"Why not?" I tossed back.
He looked at Boris with something like disgust. "You married him? Really? For this house?"
I watched Corbin collect himself, see his hand tighten on the suitcase handle, and walk away without another word, the same sharp back I once loved and later learned to hate.
"She had a choice and she picked money," he muttered before disappearing between other villas.
After he left, I laughed at the memory of him five years ago—tight with pride, always measuring people by their bank accounts. I had chosen survival then, not love. Survival had given me a son, Knox Sommer, and a small, stubborn joy I would not trade for anything.
Three days later I bumped into Corbin again. This time he chased me down in the neighborhood, breathless from running, very alive and very Corbin.
"Can we talk?" he asked.
"No," I said.
"Please. You can't keep avoiding me." He sounded annoyed and almost hurt. "Why are you living here?"
"Because someone offered me a roof and a decent life." I said the words without softness.
He stared at me for a long beat. "You could have told me. You could have stayed."
"Why? So your pride could pay a wedding? You left," I said.
"I didn't mean to—" he began, then stopped as if a script he'd been carrying finally ripped.
He had always been the kind of man who made decisions for the world like he was rearranging furniture. Back then he asked me to wait while he fixed a company problem overseas. He lied about a woman in his arms. I never asked who she was. Instead, I told him I couldn't wait forever for a life I couldn't see. He told me I was shallow. We ended things with both of us wounded.
"I hate how you say that," he whispered now. "You think I wanted to leave you?"
"I think you made a choice," I said. "So did I."
"I can give you everything now," Corbin said suddenly, and the old words—rich, success, grandeur—fell from him like an old petition. "Work with me. Come to my company."
I snorted. "You're offering me a job?"
"Yes. As my chief assistant. You were the best at finance in school. I need someone I can trust."
"You want me to leave my life? My son? My work?"
"Not your son. I just mean position." He leaned closer. "I'll pay whatever."
"Ten million a year," I said without thinking.
"One billion," he blurted.
I couldn't help it—I laughed out loud. "Try again."
He didn't. He simply said, "Tomorrow. Come tomorrow."
That night, I added him back on my social messenger in a half-mad move and typed, "I can't be your assistant."
The message wouldn't send. He had blocked me already. Of course he had. Corbin had always been stubborn.
The next week we met at a conference. He stood at the head of a room full of people and looked every inch the titan he'd become. The Corbin in the suit was not the poor, apologetic boy who asked me to wait; he was someone else entirely—Calm, dangerous, precise.
"Good work," he said later, once the audience filed out. "I want your team on our next project."
I took the work. Business is business. Knox is four and deserves a life where his mother isn't always late, scared, or broke.
Two months into the project, I woke up to a phone call that made my stomach drop. An accusation: proprietary files stolen, leaked to a rival, and somehow my name was on the trail.
"You're accusing me?" I asked frantic when the head of Corbin's legal team called.
"There's a trail that points to one of your devices."
My hands went cold. I had nothing to do with leaks. I'd spent nights writing these proposals. I said, "I'll come in. I'll prove it."
At the office, Corbin stood by the server room like a sentinel. He didn't look at me at first. Then he said, "I'll make sure you're cleared."
People watched. Rumors laughed behind curtained smiles. The room hummed with suspicion. Then someone on the team—Case Danielsson, our systems manager—looked up from the monitor with a flash of triumph.
"Play the backup. Check the last session," he said.
A file opened on the big screen and a video began to play. Raffaella Clemons—the woman everyone had admired for putting on the soft voice and white dress—sat at the console. Her fingers flew. She typed an email, sent a zipped file to an external account, and then looked straight into camera and smiled, like a villain revealing the trick in a play.
"She did this?" I asked.
Case nodded. "All tracked. Timestamped. She used a hidden account to send the data overnight."
Raffaella's face suddenly lost its soft mask. Her eyes darted. In that room, the air turned sharp as glass. People started whispering, leaning forward. Corbin's jaw clenched.
"Raffie," Corbin said, "explain."
Raffaella laughed like a small bell. "Explain? I'm a loyal employee. You're accusing me of...of betrayal?"
"You're the one who sent the files," Case said. "We have logs. IP addresses. And a copy of the outbound emails on your workstation."
Her lips trembled, and then she was ready with a lie. "I was testing a backup. Maybe someone else did it using my account. Look at me—do I look like a saboteur?"
The room filled with murmurs and phones lifted like small cameras. Someone recorded. Someone else streamed.
"Raffaella," I said, and my voice was cold. "Did you try to frame me?"
Her face went through armory of emotions—shock, then a flip to denial.
"No. You can't say that. I would never—" She stopped and her smile cracked. The cameras recorded. People who once praised her at dinners, once sat at the same table with her, now looked down like they had been bitten.
"Why would you do this?" Corbin demanded. "Why spy on us and send our tech to our rivals?"
"Because—" She swallowed. "Because she gets what she wants by taking credit. Because she always wanted to be me." Her eyes flicked to me with ugly heat. "Because she has access."
The crowd erupted, and Raffaella's power crumbled in front of everyone.
They rushed her. No, not physically. They swarmed her reputation with their words and smartphones. One colleague shouted, "You used us. You lied."
"How could you betray—" another started.
Raffaella began to pace, hands trembling. She flung out accusations in a desperate circle. "You're all wrong. You don't understand. I—"
"Save it," Case said. "You signed in from here. You uploaded it to that server. There is no denial."
Someone had already called security. Someone else announced she had sent similar emails offering to 'rescue' the company to a competitor—indicating a deeper betrayal. It felt like the walls of a stage collapsing.
Raffaella's face went white, and she made a last, frantic bid for sympathy. "I did it for the company," she cried. "I wanted a settlement. I wanted safety."
"By stealing and framing an innocent woman?" Corbin's voice rose, cold and utterly steady. "You wanted to destroy her."
I watched her change. She had been smooth, a masquerade that people trusted because she smiled well. Now the smile was gone and the mask was breaking. She moved from defiant to frantic.
"Don't—" she whispered, but the room had already decided. People whispered into cameras, the footage spread outside the building within minutes. Outside, strangers saw the woman who had been a favorite being stripped of trust.
Security escorted her to a small conference. Instead, she ran to the rooftop.
The rooftop was full of wind and the city below. A crowd had gathered around the building; people were livestreaming and shouting into their phones. Raffaella stood at the edge with a look of someone who had played one role for too long and then discovered she had no other costume.
"You can't jump," someone shouted.
"You won't get away with this," Corbin said, his voice reaching her like a rope.
Raffaella turned as if suddenly aware she was being seen. Her eyes crumpled. She had been cornered by surveillance, evidence, and the court of public opinion. She fell to her knees at the ledge and began to scream accusations—of being betrayed, of being misunderstood, of how much she'd "sacrificed."
"It was for me!" she cried. "It was for my future, my life! I was going to—"
She reached for her pocket and pulled out a list of names—people she had used, people she had meant to control. She flung it into the air like confetti. The papers fluttered down and people below scrambled for them like vultures. A young intern in the company livestreamed it all, saying, "She was the spider in our web."
"Stop!" I shouted without meaning to. My voice cut through the cacophony.
Raffaella turned. She found our eyes—mine, Corbin's, Case's—and the small line of people who knew the truth about what "safety" really meant.
"Why?" I asked. "Why do this to people who trusted you?"
Her confession came out raw, like a wound exposed. "They would have eaten me alive. I was being promised nothing. I wanted to be safe. I didn't think—"
"You planned this," Corbin said. "You planned it all. You thought you'd pin it on me, on her, and come out clean."
"She's lying!" Raffaella screamed suddenly, pointing at me like a child and an adult at once. "She started seducing the CEO. She flirted her way into trust. She ruined me!"
People laughed like a wave. "Why would she want to ruin you? She's never been like that."
"Because she wanted everything!" Raffaella howled, and in that howl I saw a life of small humiliations turned monstrous. She had held grudges like currency. She had grown a character from petty hurts, and now it was tearing her down.
I had to steady myself. Corbin moved closer, and I could see his pupils small and bright. "What do you want now?" he asked.
Raffaella looked at him with sudden, ugly pleading. "Don't ruin me. Promise me—please don't ruin me. I'll pay back everything. I'll do anything. I can fix this. I can help—"
She reached out for him. Corbin's face was unmoved. "You cannot fix what you broke," he said. "You betrayed a team, a life, and your own honesty."
She crumpled, a puppet whose strings were cut. A phone lit up. A known influencer who had been watching the whole thing said, "Look at her now. The charm is gone." Comments exploded. Some cheered. Some were angry. Someone posted her old 'save the day' speeches beside the video of her typing the emails. The contrast cut like winter wind.
Then Raffaella's demeanor went from pleading to fury to denial. She called security liars. She cried. She blamed me by name. She threatened lawsuits. She begged Corbin. She slapped the ground with both palms. She ripped at her hair and then sank into a sob that sounded like breaking glass.
"Please," she begged, and tiny flecks of spit flew from her lips. "Please, please. Don't ruin me."
"No," Corbin said simply. "You chose yourself over others."
That public rooftop moment, the crowd watching as a villain's image fell, was the start of what came next. Lawyers knocked on our office doors within hours. The company pressed charges for corporate espionage. News outlets ran the footage nonstop. Sponsors withdrew. Raffaella's phone filled with messages pointing to her duplicity, and the bank froze accounts pending investigation.
But the real punishment beyond legal action was social. The people she had used for praise now turned away. Her friends called to drop her. The charity boards that once took her calls closed their phones. She tried to get an editor to run her side but the editor had already been sent the leaks and the emails showing her hand. No one would speak for her.
I watched her in court days later. She wore a tight face and a thinner dress. Her eyes were rimmed red. The judge read charges. Her company position was terminated the moment the board could legally do so. She stood there and watched as the public dismantled the persona she had built. It was, in every sense, the world against her.
She begged in front of cameras: "I was scared!" No one felt sorry for her. The camera lights took her pleading like moths eating at a candle. People in the crowd shouted, "You betrayed us!" A woman I worked with—Hermione Elliott—came close enough to hiss, "You used my trust. You deserve this."
Raffaella's face moved through the stages: smugness, panic, denial, plea, breakdown. The crowd recorded. People spit words of contempt. Someone—too many someones—posted a montage of her smiling in charity galas and then typing the email. That montage became a top trending clip for days. The damage finished her. She lost her job, her reputation, the chance for rehabilitated trust. Her legal team tried to bargain; the judge ordered restitution and a public apology with the full details of what she had done to be read in front of the cameras. She couldn't deliver because the fury in the room made her tongue thick.
In the end, she stood in the center of a hall full of witnesses and said, "I'm sorry," but her apology sounded like a trick. People who had once applauded now spat the words like final nails. She crumbled. Tears washed her cheeks. Some people recorded. Some clapped. Some shouted for more.
She was not physically dragged from the stage, but she experienced a different, more complete fall: everyone she had used, belittled, and plotted against turned their backs. Her networks closed. Her bank accounts dwindled under legal fees. A few months later, the company that once welcomed her sued her privately for damages. She went from being a social darling to a cautionary tale.
I watched it happen and felt odd at how clean everything seemed. Justice had a sharp edge. But the scene I remember most was later, when Corbin, in front of my family and the people who mattered, did something predictable and ridiculous—it was him, not the court, who completed the punishment.
He knelt—literally—before Knox's little bed, on the linked-up durian shells from a market far away. He knelt with a blunted theatricality that made my mother gasp. He stayed there until his knees hurt and the durian shells left bruises. He looked up at me with an awful sincerity and said, "Evangeline, I'm sorry. Let me see my son."
Knox watched from the doorway with a stubborn face full of distrust. He wouldn't open the door at first. He was four and capable of a long grudge.
"Don't be mean," Corbin pleaded, voice shaking. "Please. I was wrong."
Knox's small voice came through: "You called me ugly."
"I was wrong," Corbin repeated. "I shouldn't have said that."
Knox hesitated, then opened the door a crack and peered at the man kneeling like a supplicant. He didn't say "dad." He didn't hug him. He didn't run. He sniffed and then went back to bed. The durian shells under Corbin's knees creaked and finally broke.
It was not the end of punishment for everyone involved. Raffaella faced corporate ruin and social exile. The manager who had once been cruel—Case Danielsson's assistant who had tried to manipulate—was demoted and made to publicly apologize for spreading rumors. People paid with reputations, money, humbleness.
But for me, the healing came slow and private. Corbin tried to make things right—small acts of care, like reminding me to put an umbrella in the car, like showing up to pick Knox and me up from events. He was awkward and earnest. Sometimes he was sweet in ways he never had been when we were young.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked him one night in his office. We had stayed late to check a file.
"Because I was wrong," he said simply.
"That doesn't fix five years," I said.
"I know." He closed the laptop. "I just want to be here."
"I don't know if I can accept what you want," I admitted.
"Then let me try," he said.
There were three moments that made my heart skip after he came back.
First, the night he showed me the purple hairpin—the small thing I'd mentioned long ago and thought he'd forgotten. He handed it to me with shaking fingers. "I remembered," he said. He smiled in a way that cracked something in me.
Second, when he stood in the rain with his hand on the car door and took off his coat to cover my shoulders because I was cold and too busy with plans to notice. He didn't put on airs; he just sheltered me like someone who had learned what mattered.
Third, when he fell to his knees—on those monstrous durian shells—before my family, asking to be in Knox's life. His pride had been a wall. That wall had crumbled into something human.
Knox never called him "Dad" right away. He called him "that man" and "the strange uncle" and refused candy if it came from Corbin at first. But slowly, his small, stubborn defenses fell—because Corbin kept coming without fanfare, because he kept apologizing with acts instead of speeches, because Corbin made lunchboxes and told silly, horrible dad jokes Knox would groan at, and because he never tried to force affection.
As for Raffaella, the worst public punishment had been only the start. Her fall was thorough: everything she had built collapsed. She tried to salvage her image with an interview, but the clips of her hands typing the leaks were already viral. People who had once defended her washed their hands of her name. She had no stage left. When she came to the company gate once to beg, security called the police. Her voice in the crowd was small and hoarse. People who'd seen her rooftop sobs took pictures and sent them to the networks. "We don't want her here," an assistant murmured.
Months later, when the dust settled, Corbin and I stood in my living room. Knox sat between us on the carpet playing with a little car. Corbin watched Knox and then looked at me.
"Will you marry me?" he asked in that earnest, ridiculous way he always had. It wasn't a demand. It wasn't a plan to fix every wrong. It was a question.
"I don't know," I said. "I need time."
He nodded like a patient, determined student. "I'll wait."
I looked down at Corbin's handphone on the table. The screen saver was a photo of us during college, arms around each other under autumn trees, the kind of photo he had never hidden because he had never needed to. He had kept it through everything. I felt a small word rise up like a balloon.
"Maybe," I said.
Outside, someone threw out a durian shell like garbage. Corbin picked it up and placed it in a corner of the garden. It sat there like a small trophy of humiliation and also of a ridiculous love that could make a man fall.
And at night, when Knox slept and the house was quiet, I would sometimes see Corbin in the doorway, watching us both like a guard who had finally found his peace. I would close my eyes and let the sound of the house hold me. The durian shell creaked in the distance, and I knew the world had shifted. It wasn't a fairy tale. It was a mess of apologies, stubborn attempts, and slow forgiveness.
But in that messy place, something steadied.
The End
— Thank you for reading —