Sweet Romance16 min read
My Second Life: Smile, Stir, and Serve Revenge
ButterPicks16 views
I wake up coughing in the dark, heart pounding as if someone has just crushed it and decided to try again for fun.
"Brother..." I whisper, the word slipping out like a secret I won't keep. My chest is a tight, empty room. For a moment the memory of broken glass and screaming traffic sits heavy behind my ribs. The smell of burning rubber is still fresh in my mouth.
Then my fingers find warm skin. My hands pat my own arms. I am alive. I am not the bleeding, flattened version the internet tagged yesterday. The ceiling lamp hums above a shabby little room I've known for ten years. The room contains everything I own and nothing I do not need. My small kitchen. Two plates. A chipped mirror I bought online for ten dollars.
"You're back," I tell the face staring at me from the mirror. The girl inside the glass looks like she always did: wet-eyed and fragile, the kind of beauty that makes strangers cluck soothingly. Eighteen again. My eighteenth birthday is a lie and a gift.
I laugh, low and hard, the sound breaking like something brittle. "Vivienne Cohen," I say slowly, tasting the name. "You thought you'd buried me. You thought you could step on me until I was gone."
The name comes out like a promise.
I remember the cold asphalt. I remember the camera phones and the silence. I remember the hands that pushed, the voice that laughed. I remember the fandom wars, the vicious comments, and the night I bled into the gutter while everyone filmed.
Now I'm eighteen. I have five more years inside this industry. I have the knowledge of every bruised move I made last time; I have the map of every trap. This time I will be careful. This time I will plant seeds.
"First," I tell my reflection, "we eat." My stomach answers with a sour, audible gurgle.
I put on rabbit slippers. I cook rice and fry an egg like I am assembling armor. I measure nothing. I move fast. The simple egg fried rice is a relic of home and memory. It tastes like survival.
"Hey! Open the door," a voice bangs outside.
The knock is a knuckle drum. I know that knock. It always heralds Vivienne's arrival like she brings sunlight and a storm in the same breath.
I pinch the noodle-thin smile onto my face and open the door.
Vivienne stands there, lips red and sharp, hair like a glossy helmet. Beside her is a girl with a ready smile and a practiced look: Beatrice Muller.
"Diana—" Vivienne sings, the syllables coated with something that could be charity but is mostly condescension. "You're so slow. My time is precious."
I paste my best doe-eyed smile on and say, "Good morning, Vivienne. Thank you. For the assistant and for the show."
"My assistant is Beatrice. She will be with you. Remember to smile. And if you get lucky on the show, don't forget who opened the door." Her last sentence is a blade with a practiced edge.
Beatrice puffs up as if already expecting her script. "Diana, I'm here to help. Or to make sure you look the part."
I keep my mouth closed. The old me would have thanked them both like a child who believes the teeth that bite are gifts. The new me bows gently, voice like silk. "I'll be ready."
When the door closes I breathe like I've run a race. The anger is hot and sharp, but it's useful. It is a tool.
"You're impossible," I tell Beatrice the instant the hallway is empty of footfalls.
She starts, turning. "What did you say?"
"Nothing," I lie. My hands are wrapped around a bowl of rice. Inside me, a promise grows like a root. "Start tomorrow. For now, I'm working."
*
The morning at Orange TV is full of people who are already stars and people who are trying not to be seen as small. The set for Heartbeat Farm smells like fake straw and new lights.
"Hi, I'm Diana Freeman," I say into the camera. The director gives a soft nod.
"Look at the camera," a technician whispers.
I do. I practice a wink I'd rehearsed in secret all night: the corner of the mouth lifts like a secret. The team laughs. A young staffer, Zhao, whispers, "She's like a real doll. Our doll."
"That's Diana," someone says aloud. It feels like a tiny victory.
The guests arrive and the room folds itself into roles. Christoph Ibrahim, the old school actor, smiles like a granddad who can still command a battlefield. Ethan Olivier wears quiet gravity—he is polished and, yes, an industry star. Karter Peters bounces in with the kind of bright which hides ladders.
Then Marlena's car squeals into the lot and out steps Margherita Singh in platform shoes and a dress that demands headlines. A thread of laughter bars through the room.
"And here's our bright guest list," Bodhi Bradford announces. "Remember, this is about living rural, not glamping. No phones for shopping, no food deliveries with cash. Work for your meals. It’s real-life farm experience."
"Doable," I say, and everyone smiles at my voice like a new rule has been learned already.
When the preview airs online people watch. I watch it with a small community of people on my screen—fans who have stuck by me and one account that keeps showing up to fight the nastiness.
"Not on this watch," a keyboard warrior shouts at trolls. The name Denver Crawford appears in my notifications, a man fighting small internet wars with the zeal of a protector. He lines up words like stones.
"Who is that?" I ask aloud.
"My champion," a fan comments. My inbox pings.
I reply out loud, "Thank you."
"You're welcome," Denver writes in a way that makes me want to know the sound of his voice. He is not on set. He is somewhere else, typing like a man who remembers details.
*
The farm is hotter than the studio lights. We load in our suitcases onto rickety vehicles. Margherita's four suitcases seem to hum with entitlement. She complains before the camera even rolls.
"Who arranged the luggage?" she demands. "This is a disaster."
Bodhi, the director, smiles like a man who trims roses. "You can pay to have them returned. Or you'll carry them. The show is about the experience."
She looks at him like he accidentally addressed a peasant.
"Fine." She snaps and then tries softer eyes on Karter Peters. "Can you? Please?"
Karter goes red but obliges. I try not to watch the script of her world unfold and instead watch the people who are not made of glass.
Esperanza Schulz watches her with a knife of cold. She had been the girl with the short hair and the martial aura, the one who said "I like to eat." Later I learn her childhood was an apprenticeship of hard hands. She doesn't suffer fools because she cannot. The way she stands says a thousand early mornings.
"Don't act spoiled," she says quietly to Margherita when Margherita begins to pout. Her voice is not loud but it lands.
Margherita feigns hurt. "I am not like you."
I am small. I have always been small. I have always learned how to hold more than my size allows. When someone tries to push me down to make herself larger the reflex is to shrink. This time the reflex is to set stones into my hands.
"Today we harvest corn." Bodhi says. "We will bring it in, dry it, and convert it to funds for the next episode. It is honest work."
Margherita is offended by the honesty.
"Can we have a cart?" she asks.
"Carry or get your luggage returned," Bodhi repeats.
We start.
The field is high, green in a way the city can't copy. We split into teams. The men carry and climb. I wear a sunflower hair clip I bought with the hands of someone who can save three dollars for a small treasure. Someone on set—a crew member—calls it "the carrot hairpin" like it's new folklore, and I laugh.
I laugh and I work and sweat. I pick corn and it is as simple and honest as any scene I've ever filmed. And that is the rub; being honest is a role none of them expected me to play.
"You're strong," Esperanza says once we drag a basket down together.
"I'm used to hard things," I say.
"You'll have to stop saying you're small," she warns, smiling.
We fill baskets. We climb. At the bottom, Margherita's polished face is red and real. She trips. Karter helps her up, breathing like a kid who suddenly owns an adult's responsibility.
"Thank you," Margherita says, drying her cheeks theatrically. Karter smiles like a man who has seen the raw and calls it beautiful.
*
The evening sun tastes of dust. We cook on campfires by ourselves. Christoph serves as an old professor of taste. He teaches us how to keep a pot from burning, how to fold meat into a chorus.
"Try this," he says, proffering a strip of smoked meat.
"It's delicious," Esperanza says, closing her eyes.
"All of you can be better than labels," Christoph says with a kind of doctorly kindness. "Acting is about truth. You can fake everything else but not the truth on the camera."
Ethan asks about scripts and the ways truth bends into career. He is kind and gravely important in his small gestures.
That night the cabin hums with stories. We play stupid games like adults who don't want to be lonely. Someone loses and must wash the dishes. Margherita and Karter lose often; they become the dishwashers.
I watch Esperanza as she sets down a bowl and exposes a patient, guarded smile. My own chest warms when she catches my eye over a steam of noodles.
"Thank you for the sugar," she says once, after I had slipped her a candy because she once offered me ointment for my rubbed hand.
"What sugar?" I ask.
"That thing you gave me," she answers. "It was childish. It tasted like kindness."
"I'm childish," I say proudly. The night folds and we sleep like people who will have to be alive tomorrow.
*
When the first episode airs the internet is a boiling pan.
"They've made me a doll," people say.
"She winked," others gush.
But there are knives. A smear campaign pounces—someone has purchased negative comments to push me back down. Some account calls me "a washed actress" and "a shameless cling." My manager, Daniela Mayer, stares at the screen with cramped lips.
"Don't read it," she says. "Ignore those accounts."
"Who starts that?" I ask.
"Whoever has money and time," she says. "There are always people who do not want your light."
Denver Crawford is already on my side, by then a name known to me as he defends my comments and counters attacks. He is blunt, rough online, but his fingers type with deliberate care. When he shows up as a private message asking if I'm okay, I am surprised to find my palms turn warm.
"Thank you," I type back. "For the army."
"You did not create those armies. You created yourself," he says. "That matters."
He is a man with a jaw that looks like it would break chains if need be. He is a protector in a digital age. I do not yet love him. I do not yet know him. But there is a steady steadiness in his messages that makes the night lighter.
*
Months pass—no, the script forbids "months passed." I refuse it too. I describe instead small, slicing days.
I practice smiles and winks and how to nod so the camera thinks I'm candid. I cook and I learn to speak with my hands. I film short clips. I build fans out of the people who love the taste of my voice when I tell stories about home.
Vivienne watches all this and smiles the way someone smiles at a moth. She praises me in public and steps on me in private. She sends Beatrice to arrange my schedule, to make sure humiliation is a series like a rerun.
I keep a ledger in my head. Every slight goes into it like a tally. I practice quiet victories: a better line delivered at a read; a winking moment that lands; a meditation on camera when she expects tears. I build a friend group: Esperanza who does not laugh false, Christoph who is a grandfather, Ethan who meets my eyes as if we both know grammar of truth, Karter who is a little incandescent, and—somewhere farther away—Denver who types like a friend shaped by duty.
One night I sit in my small apartment, staring at the chipped mirror and whisper, "If the only thing they remember is that I was cute, I will make sure they also remember what I can do."
Then I move.
*
Vivienne's cruelty escalates. She has secured opportunities by offering bright but soulless work. She signs me onto variety gigs where my edits are sparse and my presence is made to look silly. Beatrice smiles while arranging my schedule like a spider weaving a cage.
"You're lucky," Vivienne tells me once, all charm. "I gave you the assistant. I put you where you could be seen."
"You gave me nothing," I say. "You arranged my smallness."
She feigns a shocked expression. "How dare you?"
"How dare you?" I echo quietly. "You are the storm that wants to be the only weather."
She laughs like someone crueling wine. "You'll always be grateful, Diana. Remember that."
"Remember this," I say, softer than wind. "I remember everything."
*
The turning point is not a cinematic reveal at first. It is a grainy, small truth. I discover that Beatrice had been paid not only to sabotage but to lie—lie at auditions about my temper, leak false stories about me in private chats, and plant the seeded comments that trended. The evidence is a chain of messages in which Vivienne is not delicate but transactional. She calls me "brand" with the same detachable clinical warmth you use to sign off on a bad business deal.
"She bought comments," I tell Daniel, my manager, in a voice that sounds like stone. "She paid people to call me a liar. She put a girl in my home to make me look bad."
Daniela turns gray. "We have to bring it up to the studio. We have to keep proof."
"We can show them proof," I say. "We can let people see who she orders and who she uses. Vivienne thinks she is untouchable. She is not."
Daniela's eyes light up with the cautious fever of someone who is tired of being careful. "We will go to the press."
"Not small press," I say. "Public. Live."
She breathes out. "If we're going to do this, we do it right."
*
The day of the reveal, I have rehearsed every syllable, every breath. I sit in a small conference room full of lights and microphones. Vivienne sits across from me with the same smile she wears to dinner parties, like a Victorian mask.
"Vivienne," I begin. "People watched me die online. You were there with your crew and your phone. You told everyone what to see. You sent the one who would whisper in the right ears."
Her laugh is small and controlled. "Diana, darling, you are making a show — turn it into glamour." She flips her hair.
"Do you remember this chain?" I ask and lay out screenshots. The room hushes. The studio lawyer leans in. The feeds light up with murmurs.
One by one the messages reveal the plan: Beatrice's pay, the comments ordered, the private chats where Vivienne brags about getting a "problematic" actress out of the way by salt, by smear, by undermining at auditions. She calls me "a liability" in one message. Later she types "We will bury her, profit on the funeral of her reputation."
The live feed catches the first crack in Vivienne's smile. She tries to speak, to mock, to turn the room into her stage.
"You think this is a game," I say. "You think people are replaceable like props. You told people to film. You told them to watch me fall. They did. They filmed me crushed. The footage trended. You sold the story for fame. Do you understand what that is?"
Her cool begins to slip. "You are lying-"
"Not lying," I interrupt. "Truth." I push my final slide across the table: recordings of Beatrice telling the lie on Vivienne's direction, a line where Vivienne laughs—that laugh—about "making an insurance claim against bad press" for a rival.
Vivienne's face loses color. She tries first denial.
"I never—"
"Yes, you did," someone in the room says—a reporter whose voice is sharp as a blade. "We have proof of payments. Bank transfers. Witnesses."
Her hand trembles. The wave of her poise erodes into panic. For the first time I see the stages play out on her face like a public tragedy:
First, a flash of contempt as if she could buy her way out.
Then the thin, tight denial, the "I never" like a child.
Then, slowly, the realization of the witnesses gathered and the feeds rolling and how the room is full of people who are not hers. Her eyes search the exit as if looking for an old friend who can walk her out. There is no friend willing.
"I didn't mean—" she tries to say.
"Say it again," I ask softly, and the cameras catch the way her voice breaks.
The crowd around the conference table reacts. Some gasp. Samantha, a junior editor in the studio, raises her hand and says, "You asked me to help spread the page. I thought it was promotion. I didn't know you'd mean—" Her voice falters. The room smells like pooled emotions.
Beatrice, the one who was used, now sits very still. The script is done. The heroine in the dramatic piece is not me but truth. The villain—Vivienne—has been unmasked.
"What will you do now?" I ask, not triumphing but pragmatic. "Will you apologize in private? Will you pay damages?"
She swallows. The attempt at control is gone. Her voice is thin. "I—"
But the rules insist on spectacle. This is not a courtroom. This is a public square. The studio insists on a public hearing. The press is outside. The cameras are live. People in the lobby gather like hungry birds.
We step out into the glass foyer. Vivienne is a figure in front of the steps and the light. The studio's public relations chair takes the mic.
"Due to recent findings, we will temporarily remove Vivienne Cohen from all upcoming projects pending investigation."
The sentence is administrative but it hits like a bag of slates. Around us people gather. A few staffers pull out their phones to film. Some clap. Someone records.
Vivienne staggers back as if struck. Her face is a broadcast of shock to collapse.
"You're—" she starts, like she will accuse me of falsifying, like she will demand sympathy.
Hands press phones closer. Beatrice doesn't look at her. Beatrice stares at the ground like someone who has been both the animal and the cage maker. Tears begin to well in Beatrice's eyes, not for herself but for a debt of conscience she cannot repay.
Vivienne's voice cracks through the mics. "This is slander! I have— I have never—"
A kind of chorus rises from the crowd: the art directors who resented her, the assistants she used and discarded, the junior editor Samantha who had texts to show, the PR lady who couldn't find a defense for a woman so blatantly underway with transactional cruelty.
"Vivienne, what do you tell the fans who watched you film?" someone shouts.
Her fingers curl. Denial. Pleading.
I step forward. I am not full of vindictiveness. I am full of something worse: the relief of a ledger balanced, a wrong made visible.
"Look at them," I say softly. "Look at who left me to die."
She flinches like a child surprised by thunder. Try as she might, she does not have an alibi. The confessions of her minions pile up like evidence. The video looped again: Vivienne's silhouette by that car, her voice arranging which angles to shoot. The feeds replayed the way a scar is shown.
Vivienne's shifting emotions are the most important part of the punishment. The crowd watches as the confident face curdles. First, denial: "I never." Then anger: "You made this up!" Then bargaining: "Please, I can fix this." Then collapse—no grand acting collapse, but the very real thing: she looks old all at once, her chest heaving. Witnesses watch her move from insolence to fear. Cameras move in like flies to sugar.
By the time Vivienne stumbles away from the mic, people are talking. The judgment is not only legal. It is social. The producers cancel her projects. Brands pull her endorsements. Her inbox fills with messages. Her followers dip like a bird that has been shot.
The biggest blow is not money. It is spectatorship. People who once applauded her now cross the street to avoid being near her brand.
A few crowd members record. A line forms. "Shame on you," someone whispers. A teen in the crowd says it aloud.
Vivienne stumbles into an empty car. The door shuts. She is on the outside of cameras now, an actress without a stage.
I stand in the light, and people look at me with a new curiosity: who is she, the girl who asked for a reckoning, not revenge, but the right to be seen as a human.
I think of my brother out in that impossible place. I think of the blood on the asphalt. I think of the cameras that filmed while people laughed.
The punishment is slow and cruel because it is public and unsparing. It is not my joy. It is justice in a plain daylight that keeps her from hiding.
Beatrice comes to me later with red, swollen eyes. "I didn't know," she says. "I thought— I thought it was promotion."
"I know," I say. "You will have to live with what you did. You will have to fix it." My voice is not harsher than that.
Beatrice falls to her knees, and the camera of life records the fall: a person who used someone getting used in return.
Vivienne's last message on her social feed is a short apology that looks like a sentence written by a PR team. It receives a thousand reactions. Most people press "angry."
I do not revel. I do not dance. I remember my brother. I remember the pavement.
I go home and I cook egg fried rice for myself. It tastes like victory and ash.
*
I keep working. The show sells my story. People tune in to see me and to decide whether I have the right face. Denver becomes a steady presence in my comments, and sometimes in messages, and once in a small, cautious call.
"Are you okay?" he asks.
"I am alive," I say. "Alive and tired."
"Come to dinner," he says. "I want to meet the girl who can handle a confession."
We meet in a small restaurant near the river. He comes with quiet hands and an attention more precise than foxes and wolves. His laugh is rarely performed. He is protective like someone who keeps first-aid in his car.
"Why me?" I ask as he folds his napkin.
"Because you are not flashy," he says. "You are honest in a world that barters honesty. That is brave. And it makes me want to stand with you."
He holds the plate for me. We talk in small pieces. He is surprised when I say I cook with my hands the way a soldier handles an instrument. He wants to meet my brother. I want to find him too.
We do not fall in love that night. We form a truce, a treaty, an arrangement of patience. He is a steady gravity. I like that. I like the way his eyes locate me in a crowd.
*
Back on set later, I watch Vivienne's downfall ripple outward. She tries to ask for forgiveness in places where it does not matter. Her sponsors go silent. Her friends divide. Some quit. Some stay.
The public punishment I orchestrated is not bloodthirsty. It is the slow, disassembling collapse of a platform. It is a ruin she could have avoided if she had ever seen the people she used as people.
"Why didn't you hurt her more?" someone asks me once. "Why not break her?"
"Because breaking is what destroys you, too," I say. "I wanted people to look. I wanted truth. This is enough."
The studio hires me for better roles. The network wants the girl who cooked and survived. They liked the image of the small woman becoming a larger star.
My fans fill the comment section and my direct message box. Denver sometimes sends me a photo of some ridiculous thing—a cat wearing a tie—and I laugh alone in my apartment. We talk on the phone. He tells me about his day dealing with shareholders who do not know how to be humane.
"Do you ever want to perform?" he asks.
"I always did," I answer. "Now I just make the choices."
He smiles on the line. "Good. Then decide slowly."
*
Life is not a clean story. Vivienne's punishment is public and painful—she loses deals, her PR dissolves into apologies, her friends distance themselves as if social gravity is contagious. Beatrice is left to repair herself through work and charity, answering for every small bruise she caused.
But outside of cameras, in minor scenes: a girl who used to film me at an accident now works at a café and apologizes in the form of a free cup of tea. The people who laughed at me at the gutter post public apology videos and try to make it right.
I am not vengeful. I am merciful where it counts. Mercy looks like fairness. It looks like being allowed to stand.
At a charity dinner months later, Vivienne appears. She issues a statement, eyes red—more from fear than regret. The cameras catch her, but the room does not lean in. People look away. She reads what a PR team has written and the audience empties their applause into polite creaking.
"It's public," someone near me whispers. "That is her punishment. She has to repeat her apology and watch the audience be bored."
I know the truth now: humiliation is not fun. It is a lesson.
In the quiet after dinners, at the end of long shoots, I sit with Esperanza and she tells me stories about running before dawn. I tell her the recipe for my fried rice.
"You're mine," she says once, small and precise.
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"I mean, I will go to war for you. Not because you're pretty. Because you earn it."
"Keep that price," I say.
She laughs and for the first time in my life, I receive defense without exchange.
*
The seasons turn. I grow into my career like a plant finds soil. I act. I host. I cook. My hands learn every way to handle a prop that is real. The man Denver keeps holding my hand when cameras are off. He says he likes the way I move when I cook.
"I like you," he says once, very plainly. "You are stubborn enough to survive and honest enough to be dangerous."
"I like you," I say back, truthfully.
The industry continues to spin. People still sell scandals. But now there is a ledger—one I helped correct. There is a boundary.
And at home, where I keep coalball the little black puppy I won at the village fair, I sit on the floor and slice an egg for my fried rice, just because I like the sound of the egg in the pan and the smell of oil and the way the spoon glides.
Coalball snuffles my toes.
"One day," I tell him. "One day we will find my brother. Until then, we build a life that he would be proud of."
Outside the window, a billboard lights up with a smear brand's apology. Inside, my pot whistles.
I stir.
The End
— Thank you for reading —