Sweet Romance14 min read
Sign It, and We're Done — The Night I Took Back My Stars
ButterPicks14 views
"Sign this," I said, and slid the paper across the mahogany bed table like it was a verdict. "Sign it, and we are done. One cut, one split."
Evander Coelho blinked once, slow and measured, the way he always managed to make a stare feel like a verdict of its own. "Emerson," he said, voice flat as winter water, "you're very bold now. To look me in the eye—"
"You only got half right," I said. "You were right that I'm bold. You were wrong about everything else. I'm not walking back to you. You won't scare me anymore."
He flinched as if surprised the paper could hurt. "This agreement," he said, "I don't sign it. You won't leave me. Not in life, Emerson. Not while you still draw breath."
I smiled. "I've already taken the children. As for you, go be with your first love, your moon. I wish you happiness."
For a second he looked like a man whose center had been knocked loose. "Mina is—"
"You know she's gone," I said quietly. "You knew she was gone a long time ago."
Evander's fingers closed, then opened. "I loved you," he said finally. "I still do."
"You loved a ghost," I said. "And I am done being anyone's shadow."
I left his bedroom with that moment frozen behind the closing door. I left with two suitcases and two small hands in mine. Daphne's braid kept slipping off her shoulder; Daxton kept peering at every passing face as if he could read a threat in a stranger's eye. Daphne hummed lessons from her system like a spinning toy; Daxton, with his mind-reader look, whispered the names of birds in other languages as if it were a secret code.
"Where are we going?" Daphne asked, fingering her braid.
"Far enough we can sleep," I said. "Somewhere we can drink salt on our lips and forget him for awhile." I lied. We were running toward safety and toward a plan I had been crafting for too long.
On the plane, when Daxton fell and the aisle erupted in sympathetic gasps, Daphne laughed loud enough to make the man in the next row look up from his magazine. "She used a system on me!" Daxton protested, then stuck his tongue out.
"You two: sorry, not sorry," I said, tying a blanket over their legs. The world felt small inside that airplane cabin—like a jar full of fireflies we could keep shaking.
A year later I returned to our city alone with a third small life in my arms: Fergus. He was a wind-child, born on a dune while I watched gulls practice their shape around the sun. I named him for the sound of freedom.
"Mom," Daphne said, squinting when a familiar car drew up beside the curb. "Isn't that—"
I saw it before Daxton did: the Rolls. Evander's car. My jaw tightened.
"Stay close," I told them. "Don't run. Let me handle this."
I walked into the elevator like I belonged there, because I did now. Evander slipped in at the last second, all sharp blue suit and predator smile. There were two other people in the car: a couple. Evander drew closer. "Emerson," he said, voice honeyed.
I turned to him and did something I had sworn never to do in that life: I put my arms around his neck, foot hooked with a practiced, trained motion against his calf, and said out loud, "Evander, why don't you come up to my hotel room? I'm sure your wife won't mind."
The couple gasped. The elevator held its breath. Evander's smile curved, then cracked. He wrapped a hand around my waist as if that could pull me back into a script I had torn out.
"Tell your husband not to rush in, and I'll behave," he murmured, loud enough to be heard.
"Please," I said, and stayed perfectly still as if I were an actress in a scene I had reversed. When he leaned close enough to breathe on my ear, I punched him square in the thigh without warning. He made a sound like a child and bent. The couple fled. For two seconds he clung to me, proud and ridiculous.
"Evander—" I said, pulling out of his grip. "This is neither your room nor your script. Keep your hands to yourself."
He chuckled like a man who had swallowed a whip. "You will come back."
"I won't," I said. I had a plan the size of a battlefield, and I wasn't going to gamble with our children.
On the mountain road at the herbal estate—Jackson Berg's estate—noise and cotton quills floated in the air because Daphne and Daxton had decided to leap into the pile of dried herbs that littered the courtyard and had made the whole valley look like a strange, white winter.
"You lied and now you call me unclean," Jackson said with the calm of someone cataloguing an experiment. "Your daughter has filth on her skin." He sounded like a judge. He expected me to crumple.
I looked at my small girl, hair full of herb fluff, and then at Jackson who had left the signal that led me there in the first place. "If you want to play games," I said, "tie your shoelaces tighter."
Evander came in on his private plane, late afternoon sun enough to make the gold on his cuff shine. He was thinner than I remembered, but his eyes were as dark as tide pools. He kept trying to step into softness with me—too little, too late. I made a choice then: play his game to learn the rules and then change them. I told him his three wishes, a joke he accepted like a lover taking a dare.
"Three wishes?" he asked.
"Yes. The sky, the forest sprite, and the mermaid," I said, and left him with that ridiculous list.
This was not a love story unspooling into reunion. I had been a substitute twice in two lifetimes, loved because I was standing in the place of a woman he never had, and punished for refusing to be small. I had been warmed by his hands and scorched by his cool indifference. Seventeen-year-old me had melted into his arms because a prince's attention looked like rescue. Thirty-year-old me saw a man and his habits—habits of erasure, of prioritizing memory over person.
So I plotted. I gathered allies: Sterling Delgado—solid, funny, the man who wrestled with jade like it were an old friend—had given me a place to rest; Sawyer Gross, the taut and steady figure who called himself my "brother" because he'd scaled walls and leased me time when I needed to vanish; Gary Saleh, whose loyalty to a boss was commendable but whose decisions could be bent if you asked with the right words; and Victor James, who smelled of rain and tea and was the friend I had in England, a golden-haired man with a soft smile and the kind of hands that folded kindness into pockets.
"You're playing too close to fire," Sterling told me one evening, easing a cup of tea between his callused palms. "You know what happens to people who get burned twice?"
"I don't want flames," I said. "I want justice, and then peace."
"Those are often the same thing," he said.
The plan: if Evander had taken our baby, if he had called Fergus "mine" and sent me a message with a paper that said "I will raise him," then I would use everything I had to take him back. I would use the truth and the world to break his ladders.
It began small. I baited him in public, used old scripts to make him confident. I let his men think they had me. Then I baited a public auction where he had to pick between stones—one being a trap, the other a test. He bought both and then, as if fortune were a friend with a cruel sense of humor, was told he couldn't keep both. Sterling sat two rows away and winked. When Evander left empty-handed on one of the stones, his face reddened, and I stood calm.
"You're planning this," he hissed, the night we met by the cars. "You're setting up traps."
"No," I said. "I'm opening doors."
"She will come back for you," he said about Daphne and Daxton.
"I won't be small enough to wait," I replied.
After the auction Jackson Berg orchestrated the next phase. He had "helped" me once—too much like the puppeteers I had known. But he had also caught my attention: calm, clever, a man who put down ploys like fresh stones. He would give me DNA information, the first tiny possible return to the family I had not known. He could be useful. I accepted the contact, but I didn't let my guard down.
Then came the ruin that changed everything. At my return banquet—my "homecoming"—I found a dark ring of gossip following us like bad weather. Evander walked into the room like a man who thought he owned the sun. He wore our marriage certificate like it were a toy. He walked to our table and dropped the old paper like a gauntlet. The room hummed.
"Your pardon," he said, "it seems we were never quite done."
"You made sure of that," I answered, sharp as a snapped twig.
At the table, guests' eyes flicked between us as if we were the new, cruel entertainment. Some laughed. A few looked like they wanted to intervene. My mother—Alfonso Arellano, my father—stood close with Gabriela Ruiz, my real mother, and did what real parents do: guarded, protective, and on edge.
"Evander," Alfonso said, calm but terrible, "your presence is noted."
Evander's jaw hardened. "I am the father of those children."
"You are no father to me," I said.
The banquet shifted; it was the scent of storm before rain. Evander's men were awkward; Jackson Berg watched like a chess player.
I watched Evander forage for apologies like a man who lost the map to his heart, and I heard a voice I had let go of: Victor James, who had sat beside my mother like a shadow of kindness. He stood, smiled, and when he introduced himself it cut Evander like a knife.
"These are just friends," Evander tried.
Victor's gaze was quiet but full of strength. "We are friends," he said. "But Emerson is not yours to possess."
Evander's temper was a meter set to 'explode'. He beat a path to the edge of farce: he hired actors, he staged scenes, he tried to pretend we were still entwined. But he underestimated one small truth: I had grown a backbone. When he pried away my scarf that night to expose marks on my neck, the room held its breath. The scarlet blooms were suddenly obvious. Guests shifted. Murmurs rippled like water across glass.
"Why didn't you say?" a woman asked.
"Why didn't you tell us?" another whispered.
"My—" Evander began.
"Stop," I said. "This is what you wanted, isn't it? You wanted to make me feel small so I'd come running back. But I'm done being hunted by love and memory. I'm done being an understudy in my own life."
Evander tried to argue. He tried to charm. He tried to say the word "sorry" as if it were the cure. But there were thicker arrows I had already aimed: witnesses, recordings, evidence of the ways he had kept parts of my life from me. Jackson Berg had not been my friend for nothing. He had provided a file; Sterling had captured a moment; and Victor had brought the one thing Evander most feared—my choice.
When I stepped to the front of the hall and ripped our old marriage certificate into pieces, the room exhaled. I said, loud enough for cameras and for hearts, "We are divorced in mind, heart, and will. I will not be your shadow. Our children are not bargaining chips."
At that moment Evander's face bled color. He tried to step forward, but Alfonso's hand on his shoulder stopped him. "Do not touch my daughter," he said.
The press cameras turned, and the gentleman we had called Evander Coelho for years—CEO, prince of our skyline—had to stand folded under a public storm. It was small relief and not the full satisfaction; but it was the first time I saw him without his armor.
He lashed back: "She is lying."
I laughed, because it seemed the best response. "No, Evander. The day someone else can call me his shadow again is the day the moon descends."
That was a public sting, but not the punishment the book had promised us. The law had its slowness. The social circle had its late loyalties. I needed him humbled in more than rumor. I needed him to be seen—seen as he had made me feel: small, disbelieved, betrayed.
So I planned the public unmasking.
I asked Jackson Berg to set a charity dinner where Evander would be the chief guest. Jackson agreed, because it amused him. I told Sterling to auction a piece of "antique stone" Evander would bid on. I handed Victor a sealed envelope with a timeline and a list of witnesses. Gary had a team, quietly willing to make calls on my behalf. Sawyer kept things shifting like a shadow.
The night came. The lights were bright, the cameras hungry. Evander arrived in a suit that looked like midnight, hair that had been practiced into carelessness. He smiled like a man who thought his world would click into place with a few good gestures. I sat with Victor beside me and the children at my feet, Daphne braided, Daxton solemn, Fergus asleep in my arms.
When the auction began, Sterling lifted the lot: a jade-carved artifact Evander had coveted for years. He raised his paddle like a general. Evander moved to dominate the bidding. Then I signaled.
First, one witness stood: a former assistant who had kept a voicemail. She placed a call and played, loud enough for everyone. Evander's voice carried from a recorded past, cruel with orders and hush-money. The room shifted. He laughed like a man who thought his jokes were witty; that laugh broke.
"Stop," he whispered.
"What is this?" murmured a patron.
Another witness—someone in his charity group—came forward with a signed delivery notice for Fergus, one he had claimed to "rescue" but had actually arranged to "keep." The notes were public, dated, signed by Evander's man.
Evander's face drained. His mouth opened, closed. His façade had no mortar left.
"You're wrong," he said. Then, "I didn't—"
"Stop lying," I said. "Tell the truth."
He looked at me, anger spinning into something like panic. "You can't do this."
"Why not?" I asked. People leaned in. Cameras threaded the light. "You made us small to keep your pride large."
He resorted to his old weapon: entitlement. "We are family," he said. "I am the father."
"You are a father in name only," I replied. "You threatened my children. You sought to dictate where they belong. That is not fatherhood—it's possession."
The crowd murmured. The charity director tried to step between the witness and the microphone, but there was no stopping the truth now—because the truth had faces and phone timestamps and legal paperwork. Evander's closest board allies had to sit in a room and decide what to do with a man who could make decisions for others but not for himself when the world turned on him.
He stood in the center of the banquet room as I read off the list of his misdeeds, clear and slow: hired surveillance; interfered with my job; arranged to keep Fergus; attempted to use fame and money to buy silence. The words landed like stones. A few guests tittered; others stared in disgust. Phones rose. Someone snapped a photo. A cameraman placed a live feed on the room. Hugo, one of Evander's old friends and a man who had made his way on deals, whispered and then left; he had to think about his name on the same ledger as Evander's misdeeds.
"You're making a scene," Evander gasped.
"This scene is the truth," a woman said. "You can't stage sincerity."
"I thought we were friends," someone muttered elsewhere.
Evander lost more than a night's face. He lost deals that week. A media story compounded the shame into numbers. Brands he had courted quietly withdrew. A public charity wept as donations turned to caution and the board demanded he step down while "under review." He had to stand there, an empire tremoring, while the very society he used to command adjusted their gazes. People he had once courted—chairmen, collaborators—closed their calendars to him. Friendships evaporated at the edges. He found himself at a podium with no applause, only print and recorded proof of a history he had assumed could be edited.
That was the public punishment. It was not violent, but it was real: his power, his cultivated image, crumbled where eyes could see. He went from being the man who could take the world to the man who had to explain himself to everyone. My body shook when I left the podium; not from victory, but from the weight of proof and the cost of making it public. The children slept in the car outside, and I gently kissed each forehead before we went home.
The days that followed were quieter. Evander tried to bargain: apologies sent, public posts half-hearted, lawyers who wrote sterile letters promising change. "Give me a week," he begged. "Let me—"
"Don't," I said. "Not for my sake. For the children."
Evander grew more unstable. He attempted gestures both absurd and theatrical: one night he hired a theater of stars to make a private movie theater appear as if the heavens had been scooped down and placed before me. He brought me blindfolded to a cinema he had rented; the screen rose, and a projection of mountains, fireflies, and a man in green robes—an old story we had whispered in a dream—filled the air. He found every way he could to make my memory of the past feel like something he could own. He called the scene "our beginning."
He handed me small things—stars of light in glass, a "sprite" that would recite compliments, a mermaid show in a tank where he had dressed in a costume as ridiculous as it was intimate. At times he was painfully sincere; at others, he was a man who sought to buy redemption with spectacle.
"Why now?" I asked him that night, when—after he had made a night of all his most fevered attempts—he said, "I want you back because I see I have lost you."
"Because I woke up," he said simply. "The rest of my life without you is dull."
"People who wake up do not get to rewrite what they've done," I said.
"Then let me atone," he said. "Let me prove it."
He stayed for a while. He cried in the small ways men sometimes do, foolishly believing that emotions could be turned on like lights. He began to show up at parent-teacher sessions, small kindnesses for the children, hands offered for school plays. He did laundry—sometimes clumsy, sometimes earnest. He stopped sending the messages that cut like wires and started asking how Daphne did at her reading. He read Daxton books he'd once deemed silly. He built a small, safe playroom when Sterling and Sawyer helped him, because they believed in the children despite the man.
"How long will you test him?" my mother asked when Evander, with a box of cookies, sat across from us and said, "I will be better."
"Until it is steady," I said. "Until he learns that love is work, not conquest."
"Three things," Evander heard me whisper later in private, and he accepted them: the sky, the sprite, the mermaid—silly things, but each a promise. He plucked stars in glass and set them on our window sill. He worked with Jackson to plant small firefly bulbs in the yard. He constructed an aquarium where, with ridiculous theatricality, he dove in a quick suit and kissed me like he had in a bad romantic play. He thought spectacle equaled sincerity.
Then the world became ordinary, and that proved the most telling test of all. He was there when Daxton scraped a knee at the park and did not try to make it about himself. He made Daphne laugh at a school recital where his attempts at goofiness nearly knocked over the soundboard. He delivered Fergus on a snowy morning to the playgroup and stayed put. He apologized with patience, which required us both to keep him honest every time his old habits rewarmed like coal.
There were moments of ridiculous tenderness: Evander once made a train of pancakes shaped like stars for Fergus. "They taste like the sky," the baby gurgled.
There were also jagged moments: Evander's guilt would sometimes bloom into possessiveness. When it did, I'd push back with the caution of a woman who had learned the cost of giving up herself. He would fall into self-loathing, and I would remind him in simple terms that reparations were not martyrdom's theater: to be better was to be steady.
Months later, when a gala hosted by Alfonso and Gabriela asked me to speak on family and reclaimed identity, Evander approached the lecture hall—no fanfare, no announcement. He stood in the back row like a man taking direction. I spoke about small things: choices, the tiny everyday things that rope a family together. Afterward he came up, eyes steady, and asked, "Can we try again—slowly? For the kids?"
I looked at Daphne and Daxton, at Fergus asleep in my sister Sterling's arms for a moment, and then at him. My voice was calm. "Evander," I said, "we will not return to what we were. If there is a 'we' it must be built differently, with respect, with truth, with humility. You must keep being the father who stays when it's hard, not just when it feels good."
He nodded like a man in training. "I will."
And yet I kept the edge. I would not "gift" my life back to someone because they decided to wake up. There were still consequences—boardrooms where his name smudged credit, friendships that had thinned, empty seats where support used to be.
Then the last twist came. Jackson Berg—methodical, sly, but ultimately fair—handed me an envelope. "For Fergus," he said. Inside was a letter from a genetic registry and the name of the family who had looked for me years ago. There were faces: Alfonso and Gabriela who embraced me like a tide. I found names, old hurts, a mother who cried like rain and a father who told me he had never stopped caring. The homecoming was an earthquake of a kind I had been saving for.
At my return banquet—my acknowledgment of self—people spoke of me as "lost child returned" and as "woman who saved her children." There were toasts and roses and a fool of a man who, in front of every camera, was asked, "Are you happy?" He answered, because he believed the moment might return him to the place he had lost.
It did not. But something else happened: Evander, stripped of the empire of his image, humbled under the weight of truth, began to grow into a new shape. He delivered food to the children's school in person, not for the cameras. He baked with Fergus. He listened. He began to ask about forgiveness not as a weapon but as repair.
The world we built was not tidy. There were mornings he failed. There were nights when I cried, not at him, but at the smallness of my own love that had once accepted too little. There were times I forgave myself for letting the first life teach me obedience. There were times I chose to be kind because if I could teach my children to be brave and clear, then maybe the price had been worth the lesson.
I keep the ripped pieces of the old marriage certificate under a shoebox in the cupboard—fragments of what we once were. Every now and then Daphne sneaks a piece and tapes it back together like a puzzle, making different patterns. "Look, Mom," she says, and glues another shard into new shape. "We keep the pieces, but we do not rebuild the same house."
Maybe that is the point: salvage without surrender.
The story ends in a small room with the ceiling full of paper stars Evander had learned to fold. "We have to watch the wind," Daphe said, pressing her face to the window. "So the stars won't fly away."
"Then hold on," I said, and scooped Fergus into my arms. Evander stood in the doorway, a cup of warm milk in his hands, and this time, it felt like a beginning that had been earned.
The End
— Thank you for reading —