Regret14 min read
My Name, His Lies, and the Thermos of Chicken Soup
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I am Lucia Petrov.
"I wasn't always Lucia," I started telling people once, and they would look at me like it was a neat little origin to file away.
"My mother wanted me to be Lucia," she used to say with a half-smile, "because she liked the sound of it. My father thought 'Lucy' was better. He changed it, like he changed everything he could."
"Why would he care so much about a name?" my friend Ernesto Hawkins asked once. He was always blunt.
"Because he liked orders," I answered. "He liked things tidy. He liked being the kind of man who made decisions for other people."
My father, Elden Coppola, had a voice that did not shout but arranged the room. My mother, Claudia Bradford, had a laugh like a bell and a temper that burned precisely when it needed to. They argued about big things and small things. They argued about my name.
"He said 'Lucia' sounded too soft," I told Ernesto. "He called it impractical. So he planted 'Lucy' into the sentence and refused to give in."
"I thought you liked 'Lucy,'" Ernesto said.
"I grew into it," I said. "Names are strange. Sometimes they live in you and grow bigger."
At thirteen, I learned how unreliable names could be.
"Your father left," my mother told me one night when I was eight. "He cannot stand how I am. He wants things that are simpler for him."
"Are you serious?" I asked. I was too young to understand all the shapes of betrayal, but I knew how the background of my life shifted.
"Yes," she said. "He says it's best."
Dad did not storm out. He made neat lists, he signed the papers, and he started seeing somebody else in a different life. I found him one Father’s Day leaving his office, holding a small boy's hand. The boy's hair curled the same way my father's did.
"He's his son," I told myself on the stair that day. "He's choosing him."
Later, my cousin Judith Beatty told me more: the baby had been on the way before the decision, and the other woman had been someone my father had known. My mother and I held our silence like a coat.
"I don't want to be his Lucy anymore," I said.
"You don't have to," Claudia said. She looked at me and smiled as if she had planned this.
So I became Lucia Petrov, the name my mother had wanted at first. It felt small and brave, like picking up a new book to read.
High school at Westbridge High did not teach me to be gentle. The school liked rules; my mother liked order; my father liked his illusions. I liked rock music and late-night bookstores.
"You're going to the best college if you keep this up," Ernesto would tell me while we smoked behind the gym.
"College, sure," I said. "But I want to be the kind of person who surprises people."
Ernesto and I both liked to surprise the world. He was brilliant and soft, and he loved boys in ways that made boys uncomfortable and me grateful.
We were a pair that dodged detention and aced the exams. The school thought we were lazy; the grades said otherwise.
"Do you ever want to be someone normal?" Ernesto asked.
"What's normal?" I asked back. "I want dangerous in a good way. I want to keep my edges."
I learned a little fighting in a class my grandparents signed me up for after the divorce. I won trophies. Winning felt honest.
"You're loud," my grandmother would say. "But that's not a bad thing."
When I went to university, everything widened. If high school was a stage with set directions, university let me walk off-stage.
"Hey, Lucy," someone called from the stairwell one sleepy morning as I was on my way to the kitchen. He stood like a figure in a photograph I had not seen before: tall, steady, mark of authority in his posture.
"Do I know you?" I asked.
"You might." He put his hand to my arm to steady it and his name fell into the room like a stone—Hayes Freeman.
"You look like trouble with a badge," I told him, because I had to.
"Someone needs to watch out for you," he said. His smile wasn't much of a smile; it was an agreement. He had the sort of face that left room for secrets. He had a way of being both simple and thick with experience.
That first meeting would seed everything.
"You hit a man in a bar," Hayes said to me once, years later, when he walked into the kitchen where I stuffed dumplings into my mouth as if I had not been in trouble. "You don't have to always fight. You have other strengths."
"Do you think I could be quiet?" I asked.
He did not answer directly. "Maybe you could be heard, different from how you pound to be heard."
The more I saw him, the less I understood the rules of who owned me. I moved in to split a large flat with him because my internship was far. He agreed with a single brow-lift. He let me come into his life.
"You'll be safe here," he said the first night.
"Safe?" I laughed. "You mean safe from being bored."
He was older, ten years older. He smelled like coffee and old books. He fixed things around the flat. He stood in the doorway and watched me like a lighthouse.
"You're reckless," he said, one night as we both sat on the couch after he'd cooked my favorite garlic prawns.
"And you're boring," I said back, because something small and brave brewed in me when we were near.
He laughed. "I like boring that keeps a person alive," he said. "I like boring that keeps my people alive."
We fell in pieces toward each other. We were careful in public. We were loud in private.
"Do you love me?" he asked once, low, while the fan whirred.
"I don't know," I confessed honestly. "I like that you are always there. That counts, right?"
"That's everything," he answered. "That's my morning."
Our evenings were full of small games. We played silly dice games and then we tested each other with truth or dare. I taught him how to roll a dice without wobbling. He told me stories about a life that had been more serious than mine in ways that did not make him unkind.
"Tell me a secret," I said once.
He looked at me, then he looked away. "I fell in love with you because you are loud about what you are," he said. "You do not hide the jagged parts."
This was true. I loved him the way someone loves the safety of a cliff edge: thrilling and terrifying.
All the while my mother climbed. Claudia Bradford worked like she had a deadline with the sky. She became the kind of woman you would listen to, the kind you would not argue with, but the kind you would follow. She saved because she meant to be free.
"Live how you want," she told me. "Don't depend on what men will give you. Depend on what you can make."
So I worked. I took a job and an internship. I paid rent. I made mistakes and I kept going.
Then came the nights people show their true colors.
One winter evening, the flat door banged and an unknown figure lurched in. I grabbed a baseball bat from the desk as muscle memory.
He pounded the door like he wanted to be let out or let free. When I opened it a crack and the silhouette came in, it was Hayes.
He stumbled like he'd been in a storm. He swore at himself and he broke the vase. He had been drinking heavily and he had a look on his face like he had carried an ocean.
"What happened?" I asked.
Hayes sat down and his hands shook. "I thought about the men I lost," he said to me. "I thought about the job. I thought about things I couldn't fix."
He drifted from order into grief. He spoke, here and there, about someone named 'Xiao Yi'—someone lost. He held his head and used words like "guilt" and "can't forgive myself."
I did what I had been taught to do. I held him. I told myself I had hit him earlier in the bar because he was a stranger then, because I had been defending a friend, because the world was brutal. Holding him made me softer.
He slept on my couch and later, we went to the hospital.
"Put the story like this," Hayes told the attending nurse, eyes heavy. "We're people. We made a mistake."
He let me apologize. I cried and he did too. I thought I had done something terrible; he laughed at my guilt and told me not to be a child. That moment, the closeness that could only be described as something like truth, set the course.
The weeks turned into months. We danced around labels. We kissed in the back of his old SUV. We slept in each other's clothes.
Then life zipped forward: finals, internships, parties, and an unsteady incline toward graduation. I watched my friends scatter to cities. Ernesto applied for schools abroad.
"You'll come," he promised at the airport.
"Of course," I said and I hoped I would.
But some promises get weighed.
One evening, my mother called me to the living room and told me an odd thing—she had arranged a small dinner with some of her office people, and had invited Hayes.
"He just helps around sometimes," she said. "He's a good man."
I stood in the door and watched Hayes laugh with my elders. He wore my grandmother's apron once. He answered their questions carefully. He was at ease.
"You look well," my grandmother said. "You eat more. You stay warm."
Hayes bent as if listening to an old radio. He was both much and little.
At some point, my cousin Judith, sharp as she was, asked us to sit down. The mood shifted like a page turning. Juice, light, and gossip started to slither toward us.
"Hayes," Judith asked innocently, "have you ever thought about settling? About marriage?"
He laughed in a small way, and Claudia blurted, "He should meet our Judith."
"Maybe," Hayes said. He turned his head and looked at me a little too long. "I don't want to be a burden."
"You never are," I said. My voice was small.
A month later, I found a video on Judith's phone: Hayes had driven me to a hidden alley one night and kissed me under the yellowed streetlamp. Judith had stood there and filmed. She looked at me with a smile that said, "I know things."
"How long?" she asked when she showed me.
"Long enough," I said.
But life is messy because people are messy. When Ernesto left, Hayes said, "Come with me on long breaks. We'll play games." I hesitated.
"Stay," Hayes would say. "I'll be back in the morning."
A month after Ernesto left for a new country, my father, Elden, came back into the picture in a way that turned out to be poisonous and then glorious. He had climbed some corporate ladder somewhere else and lived a life of small power.
At Claudia's company's year-end gala, the room was full of lights, cameras, and the kind of people who only smile for a living. She had accepted an award that night for leading a team that built a staffing program. The place smelled of flowers and roast meat.
"He looks good," my cousin Judith whispered to me as Elden walked in with his new family. He wore a suit too neat to be sincere.
"He never really left," I muttered.
Elden mingled, shaking hands. He smiled with the practiced softness of someone who has never loved honestly.
The micro-phones were on. The lights were on. It was as if the room had been set to watch a small sun rise.
"He's shameless," I said.
My mother squeezed my hand. "Let him sit. Let him look."
For months I had been building my small life—studies, work, an internship that would lead to something better. The small things were mine. Then I decided to do one big thing.
"Tonight," I told Claudia, "let's stop pretending he's fine. Let us stop pretending his choices were private and harmless."
She looked at me, surprised and proud. "You are sure?"
"Yes."
The gala had five hundred guests. The stage had a giant screen. The band was tuning on one side. Camera crews hummed like bees.
"He doesn't know," Hayes said to me as we sat at the edge of a long table. He had his hand on my knee, steadying me. "He hasn't been the kind of man to expect a public answer."
"I want him to know," I said. I thought about that boy he'd had with another woman. I thought about being a child that father had half-chosen and half-abandoned. I thought about how clean his life seemed now.
At the dessert course, the host asked the audience for a moment of silence. The room hushed. That was the exact moment the giant screen behind the podium lit up with my phone's camera.
"My name is Lucia Petrov," I said into the microphone I'd been given, and the chorus of polite claps stopped. Hundreds of eyes swung to me. I could feel the air go sharp.
"Tonight I want to tell a story," I said. "I want to tell the story of the man who left my mother, the man who built a new life and pretended the old one never mattered."
Elden's smile froze like glass.
"Do you have the footage?" Claudia whispered, putting her hand behind my back.
"Yes," I said.
I pressed play.
The giant screen filled with chat logs, photos, and audio. The first file was a message thread between Elden and a woman who called him "honey." The messages were not sweet in a romantic way. They were transactional.
"I don't want to pay for milk," one message read. "You're supposed to handle that."
"She will do it herself," Elden answered. "Besides, I'm getting what I need."
The room broke into a puzzled whisper. The phone's camera caught Elden's jaw hardening into a line.
"I am showing exactly what I found," I said, eyes scanning the crowd. "Do you remember how you told me to be 'how a girl should be,' father? Do you remember telling my mother she should stay home?"
"Elden, what is this?" he asked, voice calm but brittle. He had that self-possession of a man who only ever showed the needed face.
"Play the next clip," Claudia said.
The screen showed a video. It was an old footage of Elden congratulating himself at an office party and laughing as he announced there would be no raise this quarter. It cut to a message where he wrote of my mother, "She was useful once. Now she just fights me."
"Why are you showing this?" someone in the crowd called out.
"We are showing the truth," I answered. "Because truth changes things."
Elden's face flickered—first, an arrogant curl like he could not understand what he had gained by walking away. He cocked his head as if waiting for applause. That was the smugness.
Then the screen showed bank statements, bills he had promised to pay but never had. The hush in the room turned into a stir of sympathy for Claudia and confusion for Elden.
"That's not fair," he said, loud enough so the microphones heard. His voice was small now, an attempt at denial. "Those are private." He laughed, a thin sound. "You can't show that here."
"Why not?" I said. "This stage is the only place you thought your life would look good."
I had arranged for a friend at the gala to press a key on my phone. The next files loaded: a recording of Elden telling a colleague, "My wife can be useful for status. But she'll never be allowed to step ahead of me." The audio made people shift.
Elden went from denial to trying to charm. He walked to the podium, smiling as if he could spin it back into the movie he liked to live inside. People half-expected him to joke, but the jokes had an empty ring.
"I loved," he said, voice almost pleading. "I provided. I did the best I could."
"No," said my mother, and she was quiet but hard. "You had another family. You started another life. You left us without a word. You lied."
Elden's face turned to shock. Not because of the facts—the facts were before his eyes—but because the world had gathered to watch him be the man he had pretended he was. The shock hit him like someone pulling the rug. He tried to smile. The smile cracked.
"You're making a scene," he said, with a small, ugly laugh that was thin as paper.
"No," I said. "You made the scene all those years ago."
The guests began to murmur. A woman at the next table took out her phone. Another guest said, "This should be on social." Some people looked away. A few people applauded awkwardly. The cameras on the press wall began to pivot like bees sensing nectar.
Elden's face shifted: from smug to confused, to denial, then to panic.
"Stop this," he said, his voice thick now. "Stop it. You're lying. You're lying."
"I am not lying," I said. "You walked away. You left us. You told my mother she should stay home and be content and you told yourself you were right. You said you were 'a man' and 'she was not.'"
He started to cry, helplessly at first. Then he dropped to his knees in the middle of the table-lined hall.
"Please!" he shouted. "Please, Claudia, don't do this. Please!"
The first electric shock of the crowd was silence. Then came the little sounds that break people down: the sharpening of whispers, the click of cameras, the rustle of chairs. Someone laughed badly. Someone else began to tape with their phone, the screen glowing like a small altar.
"Please," Elden begged. "I can change. I can—"
"You loved comfort more than us," Claudia said. She did not shout. She just said the truth the way one says the weather. "You loved the idea of being a man who provides while keeping another life."
"No!" he cried. "No. That's not—"
The denial did not hold. His breathing hitched. His hands pressed his hair. He looked at the room as if expecting a rescuer. There was none. People started to stand. Some left. Someone recorded his sobs like a live news clip.
At first, a few in the audience tried to console him. "Elden," someone said. "We're all human." They reached out and their faces looked awkward and embarrassed.
"It was years ago," another whispered. "Maybe we should leave—"
But the murmurs turned to judgment. Sounds of "oh" and "my" and "how could he" drifted like smoke. Cameras swivelled, phones rose. People circled like they always do when something fragile breaks.
He crawled onto the polished floor and begged as if the world was a god he had to appease.
"Please," he said. "I will give you everything. Please—I didn't know. I didn't realize."
No one moved to help. Some recorded; some recorded and then, with a shamed face, turned their cameras off. A middle-aged woman stepped forward and pulled out her phone, but she didn't film. She stood in the doorway, hands shaking, eyes wet.
"Begging," my cousin Judith said to me quietly. "He looks small."
"Good," I replied, voice thin.
He clutched the floor as if it were the only thing that would hold him up. "Forgive me," he said, for the last, for everything. He looked to Claudia, to me, like a man trying to be reborn out of soap and blood.
The crowd's mood shifted into the spectacle of consequence. People murmured in an odd way—some were shocked, some were titillated, some made notes for later conversation. Not all of that reaction was cruelty. Some of it was the human hunger for truth to be seen.
We had done it. We had forced a lie into the light. We had watched a man go from pride to ruin in minutes.
Later, the video from that night ran on newsfeeds for days. He was called names in comments. Some people made him into a monster. Some people tried to explain him. But the thing that settled in my chest was not revenge. It was a quietness that came from naming.
"Is that what you wanted?" Hayes asked me in a back hallway after the crowd thinned. His voice was small and steady.
"I wanted him to stop pretending," I said. "I wanted him to know being caught isn't the same as being sorry."
Hayes took my hand. "You did well," he said. "You did right."
And then the world moved on. Claudia's promotion rose into an unbothered brilliance. My life did not get simpler. But it got clear.
After that, Hayes and I settled down into a life that was small in the best ways. We kept secrets and we kept each other's wounds. We argued. I told him ugly things about my father and my past. He told me stories I'd never thought he'd tell: about partners lost on the job, about his guilt he carried like stones.
"Will this job take you?" I asked once, afraid of the truth.
"It will sometimes," he said. "But I choose how I come back."
Two years into our life, Ernesto's messages from abroad came like warm postcards. He was happy. I was happy for him, small-chested and complicated. I had my plans: applications, internships, a list to become someone who did not need rescue.
The night before I left for an exchange program, Hayes stopped me on the stair.
"Stay," he said, which was the most dangerous and sweetest single word.
"I will," I lied with a smile. I kissed him on the mouth and ran for a train.
At the edge of my packed life, I kept one simple thing: a thermos of chicken soup my mother had insisted I take the night of the hospital. The thermos was dented. It kept things warm. It had a little sticker that said "Do Not Spill." I hid it on my shelf like a relic. When I got homesick, I opened it and the smell took me back.
Years later, when people asked how I had learned to forgive and to rage, I would point to that thermos in my mind.
"This thermos," I would say, "keeps the soup warm no matter how far away I go. It is honest in a way we often forget."
On the day Hayes retired from the job that had taxed his bones for years, he stood in our kitchen and handed me a small paper bag.
"I still remember that first dice we rolled," he said. "It was silly. But some things are small and hold huge meanings."
I opened the bag. Inside was the pair of dice we had used the night we confessed secrets. One side was chipped. It gave us both a laugh.
"Keep it," he told me. "For when we forget who we are."
"I won't forget," I promised.
When I put the thermos on my shelf that night, there was a quiet that felt like an answer. The thermos was the last echo of both my mother's care and the life I had been given freely. It smelled of chicken and ginger and truth. I screwed the lid on, light in my hands, and said nothing out loud, but I felt the motions of a life closing and opening at the same time.
"Here," Hayes said, squeezing my shoulder. "You did well."
"I did," I answered. I thought of Elden on the floor of that gala, scraping the room for mercy. I thought of the cameras and the crowd and the way truth can make someone small.
I looked at my thermos, the dice, and the alley where Judith had filmed us. I looked at Hayes's tired smile and the kitchen we had made.
"Let's eat," I said.
We ate in the light.
The End
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