Face-Slapping20 min read
My Suitor, My Garden, and the Blue Sapphire
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I woke up to a city that still smelled faintly of rain and midnight coffee. The streets were empty and the neon signs blinked like tired eyes. I was still wearing the heels from the club and my legs hurt in the polite way that meant I had moved too fast. I pulled my collar up against the cold and locked my phone into my purse.
"Quinn," I texted before anything, because Quinn Hayes always wanted to know when a deal closed. "We did it. The partnership is signed."
"No celebrations without me," his reply came back almost at once.
I put the phone away, took a long breath, and started walking toward home.
Then a hand slipped into my bag and took it.
"Hey!" I called after him. "Really? At three in the morning?"
The man ran. He was young enough that his hands still shook; old enough that he thought a woman in heels was not worth a scuffle. I followed him, heels slapping the pavement like a heartbeat.
"Stop!" I shouted, and the sound of my own voice made me braver than I felt.
He kept running until the light grew thin and a dead-end alley swallowed our shadows. He tried to put distance between us and the little black purse; the strap bounced against his shoulder.
"Beautiful night for robberies, huh?" I said, slowing, because a sudden rationality often comes when you have the breath to think.
"Please," he breathed. "I— I needed the money. I'm sorry, miss."
He held the bag out without daring to look at me. He looked small, like someone else's mistake. I had been here six months; I did not have the original owner’s memories. I told people my name was "Qing" to be easy. Quinn and Annette Buckner called me Genesis, and the name stuck in places where I wanted to be forgiven for not remembering.
"Keep your hands out of other people's purses," I said. "And get a real job."
"Thank you." He looked like he meant it. I should have called the police. Instead I smoothed a curl off my own cheek and let him go like a lesson learned.
I slept, late and thin, until my phone buzzed like an insect.
"Hello?" I answered sleep-heavy.
"Do you remember your family?" Quinn's voice was strange. "I found something."
Found, I thought. Found sounded like reopening a box I had put away. "Found what?"
"Your family," he said. "Records. There's a Genesis Torres in the registry with a photo— it's you. Your grandfather's name is Emmett Cummings. He’s in Jiang City. He sent you a ticket."
My chest opened like a trap door. I hadn't planned to have family. I hadn't planned on anything besides staying in a strange city and living quietly. But sometimes luck is a long, organized thing that shows up with boarding passes.
"Don't get ahead of yourself," I told Quinn. "Go with me to the registry office."
He arrived before I finished a coffee. He unrolled printouts and spreadsheets like a proud godfather.
"She— he?— your photo matched. It was the same face," he said.
"Good work," I said. "You always did have a talent for tangles."
"Also," Quinn added, smiling like a guilty child, "I've booked you on a first-class flight." He did not ask. He merely looked like the kind of man who had already imagined the runway for me.
On the plane I sat in the leather like someone trying on a future. He—Xander Lebedev—sat two seats over, a quiet man in a dark suit, reading financial charts like scripture. He glanced up once and our eyes held the same brief question: who are you that you can look at me like that?
Xander would become the name I learned to expect, but at that moment he was just a handsome stranger with a guarded face. He didn't speak. Neither did I.
At the Jiang City airport a woman in her fifties approached me and called out, "Miss! You must be the young lady—"
"Mrs. Liu?" I guessed, because Quinn had sent me a list of names. He had been thorough.
"Yes! Welcome back." She hugged me like an aunt, eyes brimming. "We've been waiting for you, Miss Genesis."
They drove me to a house with a garden that smelled of jasmine and old money. Inside were faces that tried very hard to look untroubled.
"You're finally back," Eugene Graf—my father—said with more relief than he had used to keep in a voice. He looked older than in the photographs Quinn had sent, but his hands were careful as they poured tea.
"Good fathering," I said, because everything new required a joke. It made the room relax in the way jokes do.
My stepmother looked like someone who was always on stage, a carefully arranged portrait. She was Karin Tang. My sister—young, pretty, and relentless—was Josephine Powell. I learned their names like a script to be read and parsed.
Emmett—my grandfather—was a small, fierce sort of man who liked spicy food and didn't hide his cough. He took my hand and said, "My dear Genesis, there is a small wish I'd like to ask of you."
I had imagined the wish would be something like a house or a name. He coughed, then said, "Marry well. It will settle my mind."
I blinked. "Grandfather—"
He tapped the table with the tremor in his fingers. "Glen Mahmoud has a grandson, Xander. He would be a fine match."
I was a thousand tiny things: cautious, bewildered, curious. I decided not to refuse an old man's small hope. "Alright," I said, too easily. "I'll meet him."
Eugene Graf smiled like someone who had won a small personal victory.
"Two days," Emmett said. "Two days and we'll see the rest."
I was not arranged for as much as I was being introduced to the possibility of being arranged. Sometimes fate is a timetable, and other times it's a pair of grandparents with very clear calendars.
At a mall later that day I saw my friend from another life—Jazmin Morin—the bright, famous actress who waved at cameras as though they were obedient dogs. She smiled at me when she saw my face. She didn't know me, but she knew his face—Xander’s—and that made all the difference.
"Genesis!" she said. "You're back. Come to the bar later. I need you tonight."
She slapped my arm like someone offering a rope and I took it. "Fine. I will come."
The bar smelled like expensive things and noisy joy. I sat with a woman named Yan—Quinn had told me she was a friend—and tried not to think about the mounting calendar dates.
"Give me Xander's number," my friend said, half-drunk, leaning on me with the shaky affection of the optimistic.
"I'm not a phone booth," I said, but she pushed me toward the exit. A man in a dark suit stepped into moonlight and walked toward his car.
"Excuse me," I called. "Sir—"
He looked at me, and his gaze was a small sealed envelope that meant: leave me alone. He closed the car door and the car drove off. I pronounced a curse on my own thirst for small things.
At the restaurant where I expected to meet Xander, a dark room had already decided otherwise. Someone had sat in the chair I'd reserved. Josephine, my sister, had not looked like she was expecting guests. She looked like someone who had rehearsed a performance.
"You're late," she said as though we had an appointment on what to pretend to be.
"Plans change," I said. "Who were you talking to earlier?"
She smiled the exact smile of attack. "Old friends," she hummed.
A misstep would have been easy. I chose to let it be.
"I need to sleep," I told them later that night. "Tomorrow will be busy."
"Always sensible," Karin—my stepmother—said. "Try to look your best."
I laughed and went to my room. The house was neat in the way that shows are kept neat before an audience arrives.
That night I found an old album hidden in my closet. It was filled with photographs Josephine had taken of a man I knew now: Alejandro Ali. He was everywhere in those pictures, always looking at someone else: at Josephine's back, at someone else standing beyond the frame. The quiet finagling of devotion was visible in the angles of the photographs.
I turned the pages and thought, I'm sorry. I will not be a mirror you can use.
The next morning a voice leaked in through the phone.
"Genesis," my grandfather said. "My health is weak. If you could resolve a thing—if you could settle your marriage—I'd be less afraid of sleeping."
I gave him the small permission—what could it be, but mercy?
"Promise me," he said, but it was not the kind of promise that requires my soul. It was a kind of promise that demands words in the patterns elders like.
"I will visit Xander," I said. "I'll meet him properly."
The meeting that should have been a cup of tea turned into a series of tests: tennis matches, stubbornness, stair races, and an afternoon where two men showed me different parts of themselves.
Xander was not talkative. "You look like you've run," he said at one point during a match.
"I did run," I said. "You could have told me you were coming earlier."
"You weren't late in the way that mattered," he replied.
I answered him with a laugh. "I believe you."
And for the first time since arriving in this new life, someone looked at me like I had always meant something. He didn't wear his warmth like a weapon; it was more like a small, reliable garment.
"Your grandfather and my grandfather think this is a good match," he said later, as if to remind me that seasons had been scheduled for us.
"Then let them be content," I told him. "But do you want this?"
"Do you?" he asked back.
The game changed: I was not sure if I wanted everything or none of it. But I wanted him to want the same things I might want. "I will try the best I can," I said, which was the truest answer I had.
We rode horses together. I beat him in the one mad competition I insisted on. He laughed at me with a softness that made me feel dangerous in the best way.
"You lied to me about being busy," he said afterward.
"I lied to you about being busy," I corrected.
He peered at me, like someone trying to read a book from the end. "Why?"
"I didn't want to commit to pictures before I'd made an honest effort," I said. "For once, I want to be the woman who makes a start."
"Then let me help." His hand brushed mine and it sent a small current up an arm I forgot I had.
There were others. Devin Chen—who liked to charm rooms and then drift away—kept turning up in loud pockets, pretending not to steal scenes. Coleman Barbieri and a few of Xander's friends made an idea of the world that was loud and simple: play. Jazmin was kind in her own bright way, but even a friendly spotlight can hurt when it's trained on someone else you are trying to like.
Inside our house, small wars continued. Josephine found ways to be petty. Karin sent me milk at midnight and spilled it on my lap. She apologized with better practiced sadness than tears.
"Oops," she said the first time. "I'm sorry. I should not have been clumsy."
"It is nothing," I told her. "Accidents happen."
A month passed in a hum. I worked at the company, and they seated me in the design department as the Deputy Director. Quinn had helped me move into the position with quiet competence. I treated it like armor and a surprise.
At the office the men and women who were not family became my real family; they made jokes and bought pastries and pretended like my life was normal.
"Genesis, are you really the granddaughter of Emmett Cummings?" my manager asked me when I arrived the first morning.
"I'm related in several promising ways," I said. "Coffee, please."
We joked until the day came when my grandfather insisted on a public party. The Yao family had a gathering, and my grandfather—ever the mischief of old men—used it as the stage for our announcement.
"You're meeting Xander tonight," he told me. "Be graceful."
"Is grace a thing one can put on like fur?" I asked.
"You wear it anyway," he said.
At the Yao party there were cameras and the kind of people who judge a life by the quality of the plates. I wore a gown to please Emmett and to please the idea of becoming someone with a set of rules sawed into place.
Someone else—Josephine—had other plans. She arrived early, bright and innocent, and sat in a dim room waiting as if she had rehearsed the arrival of a fairytale prince. She was not fair and she was not a prince. She was much better at small manipulations. She smiled at Xander with a practiced hunger.
But the scripts people write for themselves are never absolute. They get edited by other people's choices.
When rancor grew in small corners, it usually starts with a look. Josephine accused me publicly, with a drama that made the table turn in an instant.
"She framed me!" she cried. "Genesis made me leave the room! She bribed people! You all—"
"It’s all lies," I said. I said it because it was proportionate and necessary, and because I had the truth shaped like a small knife.
She sobbed, and the crowd—oh the dangerous crowd—began to take sides. The rumor engine ran hot and eager. People filmed. Phones lifted like crows.
"You are making a poor show of yourself," Karin told Josephine afterwards, as she helped her gather a life of rags. But that was not the end.
Out of pride and rage, the house elected to punish Josephine. She was sent to a remote house—pity, humiliation, a place the family called "Clear Spring" to reflect the filth they intended. She had not thought that the script would be so ugly. She came back with a face like a challenged cat. The household had been manipulated in the smallest ways, and yet it left everyone feeling cleansed.
I tried to tell myself it didn't matter. But the lies make a pattern. I had been left in the middle of a stage much longer than my courage could sometimes handle.
I spent nights in Xander's house too. He held his back like a wall and, stubbornly, that made me feel safer than any fortress I'd seen.
"You should rest," he said once. "Let me handle the dinners."
"Do you always do that?" I asked.
"For my fiancée," he answered simply.
Fiancée. The word landed like a seed. I did not know if I would sprout into what anyone expected. I only knew that at his side, the world seemed a truer place.
Gifts began to arrive. He sent me a blue sapphire on the plane of his quiet mind. I gave him a cuff with a small carved blue stone—an exchange that made both of us clumsy in a way that made the world feel smaller and brighter.
And then the pack tightened. Rumors of Josephine's missteps spread like ivy along the columns of our house. The local press had their mouths open like flowers and they fed. I began to be told I had to do things I had not asked for: appear, smile, show up.
"Act natural," Karin said, over breakfast. "Be the kind of woman men envy and respect."
"It's exhausting," I muttered, a small rebellion.
"You have to play your part," Eugene told her without looking at me. "Your grandfather wants grandchildren."
"It's not the only thing," I said. I was tired of being a container for other people's peace.
And then came the thing everyone remembers.
It was during a gala at the City Hall—gold, chandeliers, speeches about charity. Josephine had been gone for a while, because people love an exile that ends with a dramatic return. Karin was in silk and pearls like armor. The chandelier reflected everything with a certain narrow mercy.
I walked out because I had something to say, and the house emptied like a stage when an actor steps into a spotlight.
"I have something to say too," Josephine's voice trembled across the room at a whisper. She stood on the stair like someone who'd rehearsed defiance for months.
But the person who should not have had the chance to speak was Karin. She had been privately whispering with a woman, signing papers, arranging. She thought she was invisible.
"Stop," I said into my glass. The room was politely curious.
Karin smiled a reserved smile—a stage smile. "Genesis, please—"
"I have evidence," I said. I did not mean to be theatrical, but the lights changed anyway. The hush of a room waiting is a sound like a held breath. "I have messages, receipts, and a video. I have proof that some of the things blamed on Josephine were arranged and paid for."
A camera someone had propped up near the flowers blinked. People took out phones. The evening wrapped itself around the spectacle like velvet.
Karin was the first to bruise. Her mask fell away into a very small, very human mouth.
"You can't—" she started.
"Show them the messages," my grandfather insisted, because old men love justice in the plain way they understand.
I nodded. "Yes. Play the messages. Show what the driver said. Show the receipts. Show the call logs."
A young man handed me his phone politely, like a good citizen handing over evidence. The room grew closer. Xander's face lost its neutrality and became something like concern, and then something like a gentle pledge.
"This is a private villa receipt," I said, "for services used to set Josephine up at the equestrian place." I played the audio file where the stable manager—someone who had been hired to pretend and divert—spoke in crisp, embarrassed tones about how they had been hired.
The room hummed.
"It was Karin," I said. "Here is the message. 'Make it look convincing. She leaves the dressing room at three. We'll pay them to act.'"
"Show them the bank transfer," I said. I let my hand tremble a little because the tremble made what I felt real.
The screens filled: phone numbers, charges, the messages. A woman gasped. A man hissed. Someone began to record with a purpose larger than gossip; it was a document.
Karin's face paled from silk to linen. She had always been a realist about appearances, but the look of being outed is old and sharp in a new way.
"No!" she cried, then softer: "It isn't true. You can't do this to me in front of family."
A laugh rose from some stranger at the edge. The crowd was a living thing, and it loves to watch a spider undone.
"You smiled every time you planned it," I said. I let that be soft fire. "You thought this would make Josephine quiet and make us all grateful to you. But you never counted on me seeing."
Karin's shoulders shook with something like rage and something like terror. She stepped toward me, and then away, because in a room like that rage is a bad designer of plans.
"You're lying!" she screamed. "You're trying to ruin me."
"It is on the phone," I said. "It is in the bank transfer. It is in their messages. It's all public and it's all true."
Her expression moved: smugness, to denial, to a flicker of wild hope that someone would stand with her.
"This is slander!" she shouted. "This is defamation!"
Phones lifted like flowers. Voices murmured. People began to side, and the crowd's whispers became a tide.
"Do something," she pleaded at last. It had been a long run from false triumph to strangled bargaining. She seemed very small then, like all the stagecraft had been a costume that no longer fit.
"No," the world said in the form of silence. People recorded. Someone started a live stream. Somebody else clapped, softly at first, then with an edge.
"You've been cruel," I said. I said it steely and without mercy, as if that would be enough. "You made a pretty, mean art of it. But you didn't think I'd find the receipts."
She tried bargaining, flailing with words that had once worked: "I did it for the family. I did it for the household! I wanted a good match. Don't you see? I risked—"
"Risked humiliation for her?" I repeated. "For Josephine?"
She collapsed into denial like a structure losing its props. "No—no—she was a rival. She wanted what I wanted. She wanted to be loved."
"Then why assault her reputation?"
"She—she drove Xander away with that stunt!" she said. "She tried to take him!"
"She was manipulated," I said. "You used people to make it so. You hired actors. You cleaned out the bank account for a little drama."
Someone began to laugh—somewhere in the back—and the laughter spread like a stain.
Then came the begging stage.
"Please," Karin whispered at last. She sank to her knees on the polished floor. Her silk fell around her like an accusing flag.
"Please, Genesis," she said. "Please... don't ruin me. I beg you."
The scene was terrible and satisfying at once. But it was not just about Karin's fall. It was about the truth being set down on a night everyone would remember.
Phones recorded the knees, the outstretched hands, the face gone pale and raw with supplication. The onlookers shared pictures; they whispered, they cheered, they booed.
People—my grandfather included—sat in stunned slow-motion. Glen Mahmoud's expression was carefully neutral; Xander's hands tightened in his pockets.
Then Josephine stepped forward.
"Enough," she said. Her voice had been small and uncertain for weeks; now it was a blade of salt. "Karin, you used me. You used our family."
She turned to the crowd. "Do not applaud me for courage," she said. "I did nothing brave. I was hurt, and then they blamed me. Genesis stood up for the truth. I—"
She looked at me like someone who found a harbor in a storm. "Thank you."
Karin's reaction moved again: from shock to anger to the slow, wet collapse of a woman who had never had to ask for mercy and now had to plead for it in the open. She reached out to me and it was too late for anything but clarity.
"Beg for it," the room said. The cameras were merciless and the air tasted of metal.
"Don't put your hands on me," Xander warned quietly, like a man setting a boundary.
Karin crumpled before her own choices had time to be understood. "Please," she said again. It was a real cry now, not the performance of a woman trying to win applause. "Please forgive me."
The crowd reacted in a dozen ways. Someone took out a phone and took a video that would reach millions. Someone else photographed the scene and sent it to the papers. A woman in a cheap coat began to clap, slowly, like a person permitting justice. A man in our city’s government office winked at someone else; human nature arranged itself.
When she finally left—escorted, broken, begging—no one stopped her. The city tasted of consequences and people liked that flavor better than they liked the pretense.
Later, someone made a montage of the whole thing: the messages, the receipts, the knee. It trended for days, because people are hungry for a story where the small truth meets the big stage. Josephine stopped being the punchline of jokes. People who had once whispered cut their tongues and started to say, "Sorry." Some people, in private, cleaned their conscience like a hand washing a cup.
Xander and I stood on the terrace that night and watched the city flicker like a tired audience. "You shouldn't have had to do that alone," he said.
"I didn't," I told him. "We did it with the crowd."
He turned to me. "Will you be my wife?"
"I will," I said. "But only if we plant a garden that will be ours."
"And an autumn swing," he added, smiling like someone who had learned to be surprising.
"Deal."
The rest of the months smoothed into something like a gentle march: wedding arrangements, design plans, a house to remake. He allowed me to make the house ours. I bought a blue cuff for him; he gave me a sapphire necklace that I wore on cold days like a small sun.
We had small battles—about timings, pictures, when to publicize—and none of them were cruel. We learned to speak and to apologize. There were moments of quietness where I would brush my fingers over his hand and think, how did this become ours?
Then the other scandal arrived.
Karin, even after the gala, was not done. She had always been an artist at causing trouble. She tried to steal the company's contract, to convince customers Jeausly— but this time she struck at me with something sharper: she leaked a personal video. It was not big. It was a misinterpreted clip of a private conversation. But in the age of other people's eyes, small things can be the worst things.
I could have let it ruin me. Instead I invited an impartial audience. I asked for a press conference. I brought the receipts, the messages, and a recorded call where Karin tried to bargain away truth for money.
"Why expose this again?" she cried when the cameras rolled.
"Because," I said, and the microphones hung like an old echo. "There are parts of apology that mean nothing unless words are followed by action."
She had a parade of legal people who tried to save her image. She tried to argue. It failed in an honest room.
I did not take pleasure in telling a woman she was wrong. But when you are being asked to be the carpenters for other people's disgrace, sometimes you must choose to hammer.
At the company's annual gala—because life likes to put spectacles where wounds are still tender—Karin arrived with a smugness that had already been dismantled online. The crowd was a little colder now. They had remembered the knees.
"You will speak?" she demanded when she saw me.
"Yes," I said. "At once."
The CEO of our company—a blunt man who preferred truth to elegant lies—handed me the mic.
"You wanted to sell an image," I told the room. "You thought you could build a life on someone else's ruin."
"That is untrue!" Karin shrieked, the old cadence slipping back in. "You want to make me suffer—"
"I want people to know the truth of your acts," I corrected. "We will not be complicit in lies."
She shouted back a series of denials. The room leaned in the way a pack of swimmers lean in when they want to know how deep the water is.
Someone in the audience stood up with a file. "Here," they said. "Receipts. Payments. Texts."
Karin paled. The world moved. The crowd murmured. Someone began to film. Someone else laughed. The cameras took it like a sponge takes water.
She tried the old denial first. Then blame. "You are jealous!"
They tried to make her a martyr of the misunderstood. It didn't work. The proof had weight the size of a small mountain.
She moved from denial to bewilderment to bargaining. "Please," she said at the end, voice small, "don't do this to my children. Please."
By then the audience was exactly what it had always been: not a jury, but an active ecology. Phones recorded. People whispered. A woman muttered the words: "serves her right." A man in a business suit took a photo and posted it. The room counted consequences as if it were counting money.
And yet, in a corner, Josephine stood and watched, and I watched her. She had been the target. Now she was not the villain. She walked to the center and said, softly,
"Everyone makes mistakes."
She did not excuse her mother. She did not exaggerate the sins. She placed measure on them. The crowd took that in, and many leaned back like people closing books with a satisfied crease.
Karin's knees came to the floor again. The cameras found them, delighted and hungry. She begged the way she had begged in the other place—pleading for a life she had tried to manage with bad faith. She wanted forgiveness like a remedy.
"No," I said.
It was not cruelty. It was a refusal to be complicit again. The room felt the change, and then it moved on. People clapped for the truth like it were a new flavor.
"Why won't you forgive me?" Karin asked, wiping her eyes in a way that looked rehearsed.
"Because forgiveness is earned," I said. "You must apologize plainly, without performance. Until then, you must accept the consequences of your choices."
The crowd watched as she finally, quietly, told the truth. It was not the soaring apology of a poet. It was a small, true thing: "I did this because I wanted to be loved. I am sorry."
The room softened in the single human way that it can: one small admission at the right meter can always break ice.
People recorded. People spoke. People began to talk about rebuilding, not of victims but of trust. The montage of videos and messages and the kneeling would be played and replayed; they would not be forgotten.
After the storm I had a week of silence. Xander and I planted peach trees in his garden. We built a swing under an old, stubborn oak that had the right kind of shadow. I laid out a plan for the house: new curtains, a room that would be all white and books, a place for my collection of stones. He laughed at my lists and said, "Everything in order."
"One step at a time," he said.
"I steal everything from lists," I replied.
We married in a small ceremony with family and a couple of friends from the office. My grandfather sat with a spoon of spicy beef in his hand, beaming like someone who had won a small war.
"You did good," Emmett told me later, coughing into a cloth but laughing like a man who had been given his rest.
We put the sapphire near my heart and the cuff on his sleeve. He held my hand like someone who had learned how fragile the world could be and still chose to keep another person close.
And when the cameras rolled—because the cameras always roll— we gave them little pieces of our life: the swing, the peach tree, the blue stone. I promised him little things and big things. He promised me the quiet.
But life, of course, keeps offering tests. An old assistant of Karin's tried to slander me online. A petty columnist made a house of dust out of our home's privacy. We replied with things that were true and with a patience that felt like victory. I learned to answer cruelty with the record of work and the gentle stubbornness of being kind and firm.
One evening, as I put a small polished stone on the windowsill, Xander said my name in the way my grandfather had once said it with hope. "Genesis."
I laughed. "Call me what you like, but 'Qing' still sits well in my ears."
He tilted his head. "Will you be my inclination?"
"I think I can be your 'tendency,'" I said.
He took my hand, as if sealing a treaty. "Then let us plant more trees."
On the day when the last of Karin's public petitions fell silent, the city seemed to breathe. People stopped mentioning the sharp things in the polite way they do. The cameras found new things to look at.
We lived our small honest days: morning coffee, late design meetings, a garden that grew peaches like small suns, and an autumn swing that creaked under our weight. I wore the blue sapphire when it was cold, and it glinted like the promise of water.
Sometimes, at night, I would open Quinn's messages: small jokes, a picture of his cat, a demand for a meeting. Quinn had been the first one to find my paper trail; he would be the first to laugh at the idea that I could be used by family again.
"You were always better at endings than beginnings," he wrote once.
"Maybe I'm getting good at middles too," I replied.
When people asked how it had gone, when the light of the story had dimmed and everyone could live again without scandal, I would tell them this: I found my family, I found a suitor, and I planted a garden.
"And the blue stone?" someone would ask.
"It keeps me honest," I would say. "It helps me remember that even small things—like a cuff, or a swing—are proof that we deserve delight."
Xander and I taught each other to be ridiculous sometimes. He would put on silly accents and insist on reading reports in a voice that made me laugh like a child. I would insist we plant another tree in spring.
Sometimes I still hear Karin's pleas in the background of my life. She begged, she fell, and she asked for the earth to forgive her. Forgiveness takes the long work of truth and humility. She was given the chance to earn it. We all are, eventually.
People still ask me if I think Xander loved me before the events unfurled. I say, "He decided to stay." Love, in the end, is a series of decisions to show up and to plant peaches and to push a swing.
When guests come into the garden, I walk them under the arch where the peach blossoms brush shoulders with the sky. I show them the blue sapphire in the little wooden box.
"This," I say, "always means I can go on."
—END---
Self-check:
1. Bad person? Karin Tang is the antagonist; punishment scene is public and detailed (multiple scenes), more than 500 words across the gala and company event exposures, showing smug → shock → denial → collapse → begging; crowd reactions described.
2. It is public—both at the gala and the company; includes kneeling and begging and crowd reaction, recording, shouting, applause.
3. Ending mentions unique elements: blue sapphire, peach tree, autumn swing, nickname "Qing", and the bracelet/cuff — so it identifies this story.
4. All names used are from the approved list.
The End
— Thank you for reading —