Face-Slapping14 min read
Second Chances, A Cat Named Fufu, and the Day the Sister Broke
ButterPicks12 views
I found the script folded under a glossy magazine and smiled at the opening line: “They loved each other once, then years of misunderstanding pulled them apart, but distance never erased the memory.”
“Lucia?” Madison Sauer’s voice buzzed through my phone. “They just told me—you’re on the shortlist.”
“Really?” I could hear my own hand tapping against the coffee cup. “For Best Actress?”
“Yes. Don’t freak out. Half an hour. We have a dinner tonight.” Madison didn’t sound happy. “Be ready.”
I laughed on the outside and swallowed nerves on the inside. “A dinner? Again?”
“Important. Just—be ready.” She hung up.
“It’ll be fine,” I told the empty apartment. I had five years of television work under my belt, some small awards, and one film that critics liked. “It’ll be fine,” I told the mug as if a charm.
Madison fetched me from the lobby. The car hummed through rain-gray traffic. She must have been thinking of something else because she didn’t argue when I asked about her son. “He’s okay,” she said, looking straight ahead. “We should go.”
Three hours later, my mascara was about to run but the room smelled like roast and false smiles. “Drink,” a producer called, and the table circled like an island I didn’t want to drown on. I hadn’t wanted to be an island in the first place. “One more and we leave,” I said.
“Make it two.” Gerard Farrell, my manager in the old life, flashed me a tight smile across the table. “You’ll need to make a good impression.”
I tried. I refused the director’s hand when he got too close. I refused to bend on things my heart would not let me do. “You’re stubborn,” Madison said later in the car, half gentle and half annoyed. “You know what this world expects.”
“I know what I refuse to be.” I closed my eyes.
I woke up to the taste of river cold.
“Madison!” I called. The passenger seat was empty. The city had shrunk to a blur. I fumbled for my phone, thumb numb, then realized the wind felt wrong. A ceiling of stars I didn’t know hung above me. I could see the road slicing into black. My wrists were bound, my legs numb.
Three silhouettes came down the bridge steps. One was a woman with cropped hair and sunglasses despite the night. She smiled in a way that made something in my chest hard. “I’m Corinne Vega.” She took off her glasses slowly like a show. “You know me now?”
“Corinne?” My mouth tasted like a mistake. Memory cracked and bled: family whispers, a father who lied, a half-sister I’d never chosen. “I heard about you.”
“You heard?” Her smile bloomed into white teeth. “You took everything that was mine.”
“Take what you want from him,” I said, because what else do you say to a woman who thinks a father’s betrayal makes it moral to destroy a life? “My father—” I didn’t finish. I didn’t have the fight I thought I had.
Corinne laughed. “We’ll make sure the world believes you ruined yourself. ‘Famous actress Lucia Dominguez—private photos leak, rumors of her so-called life, and then—’”
“Stop it.” My voice tightened. “You can’t—”
“The press loves a bloodbath.” One of the men grinned like an agreed disaster. “We’ll put the camera on her.”
“Play it,” Corinne whispered to them, and the high-pitched machine whirred to life. “Make a story.”
When the men stepped back to take me, one of them—shorter—smiled in a way that made me think of greed. “We can use her,” he said. “Why waste a pretty thing?”
The other man agreed: “Tonight’s the night. Room, story, end.”
I had enough time for the logic of survival. I texted. My thumb moved like a stranger. I sent location and three words to the wrong name in my phone: “Help. Bridge. Corinne.” I pressed send and then pushed my hands against the ropes until my wrists burned.
“I’ll help you,” the tall man said, suddenly soft. He pretended to loosen a knot. I pretended to believe him. I pretended to breathe.
The air smelled like metal the moment the car reared at me. I saw headlights and thought I could run. I saw a shadow pass across me like an executioner’s hand. Then asphalt consumed me.
*
I woke up wet on my own kitchen floor.
“Lucia?” Madison’s voice was outside the bedroom door. “You okay? You look…”
I touched my face. I was twenty. Not yet a decade of bruises, not yet the rounded edges of media battles. The dorm window showed a younger sky. I ran to the mirror and stared into a face both mine and erased.
“I’m back.” I said it like a prayer and a warning. “I’m back.”
Madison hugged me with the rough kindness of someone who’d seen me shrug and survive. I remembered how I’d died and how the river had felt like a white promise, and I felt heat under my ribs. “No one will touch me,” I whispered. “No one will rewrite my life.”
I quit. I let Gerard go. I signed with a tiny agency called Myth Entertainment. “You’ll have to start from the bottom,” the new agent said. “But you’ll build your own ladder.”
“I will,” I said.
I lived small. I took background roles, I learned how to let the camera find me. I learned to hide power in a look. I learned who Corinne Vega was in the company—an artist director, the puppetmaster who’d stacked the players against me. I learned who she used: Gerard, Madison, the men who thought the world owed them a woman.
Two months later, on a gray night, I stumbled into a hotel room that wasn't mine and woke beside a man whose name belonged to every billboard in the country: Matthew Vasiliev.
“Who are you?” he asked, sleepy, not cruel.
“My name?” I tried to laugh but didn’t have the breath. “Lucia.”
He watched me like a frost could crack. Then he sighed, half-annoyed, half-amused. “You should go.” He slid the cover back over me with a gentleman’s hesitation.
So I did. I ran.
The next morning, footage of a “mysterious woman in Matthew’s suite” hit five trending topics. I kept my mouth shut.
“Who was she?” Julian Han, Matthew’s agent, asked on the phone. “You looked familiar.”
“I’m not going to be someone’s headline.” I lied. I ran to auditions. I learned that survival was more than dodge and prove. It was craft.
Then metal and light tore my world again: a car, a scream, the taste of copper. Sirens.
I woke with a different voice.
“Meow?” A three-note confusion in a body of fur. My paws twitched. The room was huge and clean and the air smelled like lavender and shows. A man towered into view, larger than life, with silver in his hair and the kind of jawlines that made magazines dizzy. His hand reached for me.
“Fufu!” he said, and his voice turned into a melody I was not meant to hear. “There you are.”
I had been more than alive; I had been less than human. I was the cat Matthew Vasiliev picked up two months earlier at a rescue center. He called me “Fufu.”
“Meow!” I cried. My voice was not mine. My thoughts—clear as film—raced like they always had. I, Lucia Dominguez, had become Fufu, Matthew Vasiliev’s cat.
“You okay?” his assistant, Chase Avila, asked. “He found her days ago. She never left his coat.”
Matthew—he was more than a poster. He was a person who talked to me like I was a friend. “She’s different,” he told Chase. “She calmed down when I played that song.” He cradled me like an idea he couldn’t ruin.
I watched him pace hospital corridors, watched him put a bowl of watered-down milk for me, watched him watch the screen when my name—Lucia—flashed as the actress who’d crashed. I learned how to be small and hide big things.
When Matthew brought me to the hospital where my body lay bandaged and quiet, the machines made light noises. I pressed my feline face against the warm smell of my own skin.
“Her heartbeat is flat.” The doctor said. “But she responded.”
It turned out my noisy little body, someone else’s arms holding me, and the memory stuck in my small mind were a pattern the doctors could not ignore. My presence—my purr—was considered a “familiar stimulation.” The monitors reacted. The line, thin and steady, wavered.
Weeks passed. I was a cat with a schedule: morning with Matthew, afternoon watching the hospital bed, evening curled on the sofa. Matthew read lines to me and didn’t even know he was reading to the woman inside the fur. “You’ll be okay,” he’d say. “We’ll play again tomorrow.” He meant it.
The variety show changed everything. Matthew accepted a living show called “Slow Down, Live Slow,” a farm piece meant to show stars living without scripts. He took me with him.
“Fufu goes to the countryside,” one commenter wrote. “We love this cat.”
On camera, on live feed, I pressed against Matthew’s coat. He frowned at me like something private had become shared. “Don’t run off,” he told me. “The crew is watching.”
I used the watching to my advantage. My ears heard secrets. My whiskers twitched when certain footsteps came too close. I watched Valentina Davies—soft-lipped, glossy smile—schedule a private conversation near the pond. I watched Corinne Vega appear on the edges of the feed like bad weather. She came with Gerard Farrell and two men from security.
Inside my little cat brain, the pieces clicked. Corinne had coached Valentina, had her agents looking for cheap ways to feed a rumor mill. Gerard had swapped contracts. Madison had been set up as a small betrayer for comfort. The same pattern, like the same song in a different key.
Late at night, I crept into rooms that women thought were private. I padded across laptop keys and learned passwords. I leapt onto tables and hid memory cards. I sat where people wouldn’t notice a cat but would forget the crumbs of human reckoning left behind.
I learned how to make people uncomfortable in a way that revealed them. I learned to knock over a vase at the right moment, to purr loudly in the laps of men who thought they had control. I saved messages on phones with my paws, or so it felt. The program’s cameras recorded more than a million live viewers. I became a quiet spy with fur.
When the big moment came, it had the glitter of a gala and the hunger of a trap. The awards night had red carpet lights and a broadcast that wanted scandal. Corinne smiled like a woman who had already won—at least in the hush of her own imagining.
“You asked to speak,” Corinne told the producer. She had always walked like her victory was already sewn. “I have something to say.” Her voice was honey on a blade.
She took the stage.
I watched Matthew in the front row. He had once refused the stage of variety, then accepted it for me—because he thought a cat needed him. He sat with a face that made the cameras linger, the way men with reputations did. He looked small now, and somehow enormous, because he focused on a single thing: me.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Corinne said, and the cameras made her large. “A story is ready.”
She smiled at me. It was a smile I’d seen in the black of the bridge. It returned in gilded light.
“You will hear,” she said, “about the fall of someone famous. I will say what I must say. I will show you the truth.” She held a tablet up like a chalice. The room leaned.
“Play it,” she invited.
A hush. The big screen lit.
Instead of staged photos, there were raw things: hotel key logs, car service records, screen captures of messages that had once been edited to shame me. The audience leaned. Flashbulbs popped like restless moths.
Then, the footage changed.
“Cut! Cut!” Gerard shouted. He stood up from where he’d been hiding behind polite posture and stepped forward like a man who thought he could control a tide. “This isn’t—” He reached for the tablet.
“Stop,” Matthew said quietly. His voice was a knife—not loud, but precise. He looked down at his lap, then at the screen. “Show the chat.” He had been quiet; the room hummed.
The screen blurred for a second, then offered another feed: messages that didn’t shame but explained. There were texts from Gerard to Corinne about a staged “incident,” recorded arrangements about the bridge, invoices to buy silence. There were photos of men handing envelopes. There was a hotel swipe that matched the license plate of the car that had hit me—evidence of a hit-and-run organized to look accidental.
“You set this up,” Matthew said. His mouth was small and terrible with calm. Corinne’s smile faltered.
“Wh—” Gerard grabbed the microphone. “This is slander. Fake—” His voice hit the lights and came out thin.
“You wanted her gone,” Matthew said. “You wanted Lucia out of the way so someone else could climb. You paid men. You staged an accident. You conspired to destroy a life.” He turned slightly, and the camera caught the small tremble at the edge of his jaw. “And then you tried to make a spectacle of it.”
Corinne’s lips pressed into a line. “I—” She opened her mouth, closed it, then laughed like a coin tossed into an empty box. “You have nothing. You’re making it up.”
“Pay attention,” Matthew said, and the producer fed the microphones more sound. The room became a living organism, breathing with the exposure. “Listen to the messages,” Julian Han said, voice like a record player finally choosing a song. “This is not editing. This is a chain of custody record.”
People gasped. Smartphones rose. Someone began filming. The feed cut to hundreds of feeds. The social media flood began.
Corinne’s face drained, as if color were a rumor she couldn’t afford. “You edited this!” she spat. “You’re twisting words.” Her hand shook on the tablet now. She looked like a woman watching the world close in like a trap.
“No,” Gerard said, suddenly loud and pleading. He looked at the stage, not at the camera. “Wait. We can—”
“You promised me a path,” Corinne said, and the words sounded small in the chandelier light. “You promised me justice for my mother. He—he—” Her voice collapsed into a huff.
“You promised blood,” I said. My human voice had been quiet for a long time. The auditorium leaned as if to drink it. I stepped forward. The ropes of a world I had once been bound by felt like awards around my neck now. I picked up a microphone like a weapon.
“You kept my name on the back of rumors,” I said. The microphone amplified me until my memory was a story, and the story spread. “You bought men. You bought silence. You thought a woman could be owned.”
There was noise and then a kind of fearful stillness.
Corinne’s face went through stages—polished, then startled, then false denial. “You have no proof,” she said, voice high and cracking. “You’re a has-been. You’re—”
A cameraman shoved a phone into her face. “The messages,” he said, “Gerard, you sent them, right?” He thrust the screen forward like a mirror.
Gerard’s bravado cracked. He swallowed. “It was—” He tried to step back. “It was a negotiation. We wanted—”
“A negotiation for what?” I asked. “For my life?”
The first video of the night—of Corinne planning the bridge—rolled again. It had been recorded by a man who had once worked for them and decided he had enough. He had fed the footage to the press because he couldn’t sleep.
People in the audience muttered. A camera showed Madison Sauer standing at the back, face pale, hands clamped like a woman who had been holding her own betrayal in one pocket and regret in the other. She had been told to say nothing. She had kept a secret because she had wanted to keep a job. Her lips began to quiver.
Corinne’s steps faltered. She took one, then another, then she fell to her knees—precisely the sequence the law loves: guilt turned into a physical act. “No—no—” she sobbed. “You don’t—” Her voice dissolved into the bright lenses.
“No,” Gerard whispered, unable to make an argument that would hold in the light. “No—please—”
The cameras captured her transition from stage queen to supplicant. Her denial thinned into a new tone: fear. “It was supposed to be a rumor,” she said. “I didn’t mean—” She looked toward Madison like a drowning woman seeking an oar.
Madison stepped forward, small but steady. The room waited like a held breath. “I signed the contract,” she said. “I took the envelope. I thought I had no choice.” Her voice rose. “I thought it would keep my boy safe. I didn’t—” She began to cry. The audience’s recording devices multiplied the sound.
“Shame,” someone hissed in the back. “Bring her down,” another said.
Corinne looked up. Her mouth was a tight place for any speech. “I thought—” she started. She tried to build a story out of her actions, to make them into artifice, to hide the ugly truth: she had wanted the world to see my downfall like a crafted scene because she had been unforgiven by life. She had sought not justice but revenge.
The crowd closed in. People filmed, people whispered, some applauded as if exposure were a holy thing.
On the screen, Gerard’s messages were indisputable: payments, named men, dates. The evidence chain was coherent. Journalists shouted questions. Cameras swiveled.
Corinne’s expression hit each stage the rulebook demands: smug to stunned, argument to denial, denial to collapse. She pulled at her hair. “I didn’t—,” she said. “It’s not what you think—” but no one believed the noise.
She scrambled, a woman looking for ways to buy her way out. “You can’t—” she gasped. “This footage—fake—”
“Film from the street,” a producer shouted. “The taxi receipt.” Another journalist held up a paper. A fifth said, “The security footage from the bridge—beginning timestamp matches the messages.”
Lights burned her denial away.
Then there was a public act the evening will show forever: Corinne walked into the center of the stage and sank to her knees. The cameras closed. Everyone recorded. Her hands shook. Her voice dipped so low it was almost private at first. “Please,” she begged, and the microphones ate the syllable and turned it public. “Please—don’t—” She reached toward the cameras as if they were hands, as if the world could catch her from falling.
People turned their phones. They filmed. Some recorded sound for court. A few slow-clapped, a gesture of sharp censure. A cluster of hosts circled like vultures. The crowd watched, breathing in the spectacle. Flashbulbs popped like small thunderclaps.
Gerard’s knees hit the floor beside her. “I can explain.” He looked like a man who had always expected others to look away. “We were desperate. We thought—”
Someone began to applaud—slowly at first—then others followed. The applause felt less like support than an expiration of a spell. Cameras panned the faces in the crowd: some in shock, some in rage, some already uploading the humiliated images to the cloud.
“Call security,” Corinne begged, finally, “please—” She looked out into the faces: reporters with notepads, fans with phones, producers with checks that would never be cashed. She met my eyes and I saw the old mirror: a person broken by choices she had magnified into monstrous strategy.
“You wanted the story,” I said, the microphone steady in my hand. “Now the story is you.”
The rest played out like a legal drama filmed live: statements given, people escorted out, footage downloaded thousands of times. Corinne’s denial turned into bargaining. “It wasn’t supposed to go this far!” she cried. “Please! If I apologize—if I say sorry—” The sound shifted from maniac to pleading.
“No,” I said. “You’ll answer to the law and the court of public record. Apologies mean nothing without return.” I saw someone in the crowd nod. The cameras zoomed in on her face as she finally crumpled, head in hands, as if offloading the entire architecture of her choices.
Gerard began to shake, then to cry, then to bow his head and repeat “I’m sorry” like a child with no more defense. The crowd recorded and muttered. People walked away to catch their flights home. Phones uploaded the footage and memes were formed by morning.
When security led Corinne out in handcuffs, she stopped, faced the crowd, and mouthed a final attempt: “They made me—” but no one in that press room could bring her meaning back. Her posture shifted into the required arc: smug, shock, denial, collapse, plead. The cameras loved it.
“People took pictures,” someone in the crowd said. “They cheered. Some filmed for evidence. Some filmed to shame.”
And yet I felt none of the giddy victory I had once imagined. Justice has a long shadow. The judges and the press and the internet would do their jobs. People would parse lawyers’ words for months. Corinne’s life would be rearranged into court cases and exposés and social media threads. Gerard would lose more than contracts; he would lose the quiet dignity of anonymity. Madison—Madison stood there and cried like a woman who had been given back a small measure of grace by telling the truth.
I stepped off the stage and Matthew’s hands took mine. “You okay?” he asked.
“I am,” I said, “because truth is a messy thing but it’s ours now.” He squeezed. Cameras still clicked. People still uploaded. The night tasted like possibility.
A month later, the police files were thick and the media feeds were a new kind of quiet. I had not planned the public unmasking down to the last frame. I had only fed the evidence I’d gathered—messages Corinne had thought would stay private, receipts Gerard had misplaced, a driver who couldn’t deal with his conscience any longer.
But the punishment had been public: it was on every screen, it was a sequence that made the villain’s reaction plain—pride to stupefaction, denial, collapse, public begging. It was the kind of justice that also served as a warning.
“Is this revenge?” Matthew asked late one night as we looked at edits of the feed.
“No,” I said. “It’s a record. I wanted them to be known. I wanted to be known. That’s different.” I cupped his hand and leaned my forehead against his palm. The cat I had been—Fufu—purred somewhere on the sofa, perhaps still remembering whose lap was safest.
After the cameras dried and the legal work settled, the comfortable and the guilty all found their places. Some fell on the other side of the fence and tried to rebuild. Others found their names too heavy to carry.
I rebuilt, too—by staying small long enough to find what I was. I learned to accept a man whose hands were steady and careful. I learned to keep the cat I had been in my memory like a talisman. I kept Matthew’s hand in mine and my feet on the ground. And sometimes, late at night, I would think of Corinne kneeling in the floodlights and feel a strange mercy. She had been a woman who’d chosen cruelty because she had felt powerless. Power doesn’t justify cruelty; it only forces people to answer for it.
The cameras never stopped watching, but I had become the woman who could choose what to show.
The End
— Thank you for reading —