Revenge18 min read
"Signs of Snow and Lies"
ButterPicks15 views
"I can't breathe," I said into the phone, though the wind did most of the screaming for me.
"Dillon, there are flights—" I forced the word out.
"You stay. I have to sort things here. Wait for me," Dillon Mercier said, calm and small over the line.
I watched the skyline of Reykjavik blur into a smear through the balcony glass. The aurora would come tonight, a promise I'd kept to myself for ten years. Dillon had promised to be there. He didn't take the next flight. He did not keep his promise.
I put the phone down and let the silence swallow it. I had already been hollowed out enough to be a place for echoes. The cancer had started as a rumor in my throat and then moved into the truth. The doctors wrote the rest in careful English. The word that hit hardest was "advanced." I kept taking the white pills each night like a prayer that would buy me one more morning.
My phone buzzed. A group chat. Findlay Davidson had sent ten pictures, one after the other, all of them captioned: "I told you. When the old flame returns, sparks fly. Wait till they are finally free."
I opened the last photo. Dillon and Jenna Fujita in a circle of light on the dance floor. His hand at her waist. Her head tilted close. A laugh caught between them.
A single breath left me and the world tilted. I sat on the balcony, watched the blood leak from my nose onto my sleeve, and decided to sign the divorce. I would sign it and hand him back the life he'd made a business deal out of. I would be neat. I would leave the pain like a suit folded and put away.
"Grace?" Gerard Giordano's voice in my ear steadied me. "Do you want me to send it to him now?"
"Send it," I whispered. "Send it today."
He hesitated like a man about to throw a rock into still water, then promised. "I'll do it."
"Good." I closed my eyes. Rain started. Somewhere, thunder answered me.
— — —
Two weeks later, I sat in a bright office flipping a script called Mosquito Blood. My assistant Anna had set the meeting; she tapped the desk and said, "Grace, I scheduled the meeting. The author is here."
She is here. The woman I had thought about in the group photos sat across from me with a magazine folded on her lap and a patient smile. Jenna Fujita. In a publicist's dream she was sunlight. In my private memory she was an old spark.
"Sorry to keep you," Jenna said. "I know you're busy."
I watched her hands. "Your book is sharp," I told her flatly. "But it's not cinema unless we make it so."
She smiled in a way that said she already had. "Dillon will back it," she said. "He called me himself."
My mouth went dry. Dillon had not told me.
"You said that?" I asked.
"Yes." Jenna folded the magazine like she was folding a hand of cards. "He promised."
I almost laughed. "In what universe does my husband promise the world to another woman without so much as telling his wife?"
Jenna's smile got tighter. "He said it was business."
"Everything with Dillon is business," I said.
She leaned in. "You know his friends have always liked me. They say I was his first love."
"Is that why you wrote this?" I asked quietly. "To make me the villain?"
She tapped the rim of her coffee. "Stories need strong tension. People love a villain. Besides, only a director who has lived through a thing can make it real. You know the little things. I want you to bring it to life."
"I won't be typecast as the bad woman to push your love story forward," I said.
"Then you will," she replied. "Dillon has agreed. He funds it, and you will direct."
"Thank you for the offer," I said, and I walked out.
— — —
The night I saw Dillon and Jenna on the screen of Findlay's post, I had already decided to run the project. Maybe because I thought directing it would let me shape myself into something else. Maybe because I wanted to wear their story like a costume and understand how they had written me. Or maybe I was trying to carve a last real thing in the messy years left to me.
A week later, they announced preproduction. When the cast read the script, the room filled with sharp voices about morality. "She's a villain," they said. "She uses marriage to steal a life."
I listened while a woman in the room declared, "Good. That's justice." It felt like someone was sharpening an ax in the dark.
"Thank you," I told the actor. "Please act—"
That night, my ear went dead.
It came at once, like a curtain. I could feel my heart pounding, but the sounds around me were thin, distant. Later, the doctor called it an intermittent symptom. "We need to hurry," Gerard said quietly after I'd left the clinic. "You should think about treatment here."
"I'll go where the best care is," I said.
So I went to the place I'd always wanted to see and had never made time for: Iceland. Dillon had promised to fly with me. He did not. He told me he had work. He told me it would only be a few days. He did not come back.
"Wait for me," was his last line. In my head the words turned into icicles.
— — —
He came back once when I was already on the plane.
"You look tired," he said the night he finally walked into my living room.
"You're late," I said. "We had an agreement."
"Thirty minutes," he said. "You said you'd be home by ten."
"You're not home," I said.
Silence thickened the air like fog. I swallowed the pill—my pale white pills—and tried to smile. "I read your messages," I said. "Findlay posted the photos."
"You know why," he said. "She was at the event."
"She's named in my script, Dillon. She's written our lives. You sponsor it."
"Business," he said. "Marshall is not a lover. He's an investment."
His words were careful. He had always been an accountant of feeling—measure, measure, then pay. But I could not help dreaming of him wanting me with the same force Jenna had wanted.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.
He looked at me then, and something flickered—annoyance, then regret. "I thought it would make things harder."
"By making me find out from a phone?" I exhaled. "Do you hear me when I'm breathing? Do you notice when I'm gone?"
He did not answer.
"Why does it matter, Dillon?" I asked. "If our life is a deal, let us finalize it."
He left the room and said, "I don't want to argue."
The next morning I told Gerard to prepare the papers.
"You sure?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "I don't want his half-broken affection keeping me alive."
He hesitated, then nodded. "I'll have it to him."
— — —
He called the night before we were due to begin shooting.
"Grace," he said. "Please. Come back."
"Too late," I said. I had already booked my therapy appointments. I had already scheduled flights back for further treatment.
There is a thin place between a woman's hope and her fear, and I lived there a lot. I had made peace with many things. I refused to be small. I also refused to lie.
He left again. The studio called the shoot off. In my absence, the show was handed to others. A new group of investors, a man named Arlo Garcia among them, stepped in. They liked Jenna.
They liked the story without me.
— — —
"Grace, there's an article. It's a smear," Anna said, sliding her phone across a hospital tray.
I saw the headline and the comments scrawl like knives: "Director Grace Copeland the real-life villain." "Her cancer can't excuse her." "Boycott."
"It was leaked," Gerard said when he arrived. He was ashen. "There's legal ground, but it will take time. PR wants Dillon to post a statement."
"Doesn't he care?" I asked.
"He—" Gerard stopped, then said, "He's been busy."
Busy meant convenient.
I lay back and felt the world tilt. The blood returned. The words I'd been saving for him made themselves a quiet armor.
"Sign the papers," I told Gerard. "Send them. Tell him it's final."
He did.
— — —
The day the project aired its first trailer, the network had a launch party. I stayed home.
Findlay posted more photos. "When fate gives you a second chance," he wrote. "To new beginnings."
Dillon finally messaged me. One sentence. "I'll be there after this."
That is how men who break promises console themselves: yes, I'll be there later.
I called the clinic in Reykjavik and booked the next slot. I could sense my breath going faster and slower, like a metronome counting down.
— — —
"I thought you'd be happy to hear the truth out," Jenna said the next time I saw her, which was inevitability dressed in daylight. She had come to the hospital with a bouquet and a kind of performance that would put saints on stage.
"What truth?" I asked.
"That people can change," she said. "We both loved him, once. Can't we let go of the grudges and make art out of it?"
"Can you make art without making me into a villain?" I asked.
She smiled, cold. "The audience loves a villain. They make better heroes because of it."
"I make my own art," I said. "And I won't be anyone's foil."
She put the flowers on my bedside and leaned over. "You are ill, Grace. You should rest."
"You came to gloat," I said. "You came to watch."
"Not at all," she said. "I'm here to warn you not to make a fuss. Dillon can erase stories the way he erases people. Don't force him."
"Don't tell me to be small," I whispered. "Don't ask me to die quietly to save your narrative."
A nurse came by then and Jenna left with a soft flutter of silk. She had the art of looking hurt down to a science.
— — —
When the trailer aired, the noise didn't die. The studio promoted the love triangle, not the sickness. Comments followed me like flies. "Villain," they said. "Actor turned monster. She deserves hate."
I learned the shape of cruelty in online speech.
Then, one night, something broke.
Findlay posted a story. He thought he had done nothing but show charm. He posted an old message thread between himself and Jenna. He bragged about planting photos, about stitching scenes to get the perfect coverage, about the payments he had made to photographers. He laughed through it.
The message also included a bank transfer to a shell company. The shell company's ledger showed payments from an account controlled by Arlo Garcia.
Someone retweeted it. Someone else dug harder. Receipts leaked. Emails popped up that outlined a plan: plant the photos, leak the narrative to the press, create rage, and watch the director fail. The plan had a line item called "PR leverage."
"Findlay?" Dillon's voice over the line the next morning was thin as glass.
"What did you do?" he asked.
"Show the receipts," I said. "Exposed it all."
He called me and his voice was not practiced this time. "They're my friends," he said. "They were trying to help."
"Help? By ruining me?" I said. "You knew the whole time."
"There was more going on," Dillon said. "None of this... I didn't—"
"You said Wait, Dillon. You waited for things to settle. You watched me shiver on a balcony and did nothing."
"I didn't know," he said.
"You knew," I said. "You always knew."
— — —
The next press conference was supposed to be a promotional event for the adaptation. Instead, I walked on stage.
"Grace, you cannot—" Gerard hissed.
"Yes," I said, and smiled without feeling it. "I can."
Television lights always feel like a hundred suns. The room smelled of perfume and the faint metallic tang of money. Journalists leaned forward.
"Ms. Copeland," the moderator began, "Given the controversy, can you comment?"
"This isn't a press conference for a show," I said. "This is a demonstration."
I pulled a thumb drive from my pocket. "This contains copies of all the emails that plan the smear campaign."
A murmur ran around the hall. Jenna's face went slack; Findlay let a glass clink in his hand; Arlo's jaw tightened.
I put the drive into the available laptop and pressed play. Evidence unfolded like a wound. There were messages clearly arranging photographers, paying them, scheduling photos, and agreeing on lines to leak. There were invoices from a private investigator who had been paid to gather "compromising images." There were strings of messages between Jenna and Findlay that admitted the intent: to paint me as the villain in their story.
The room did not know who to be shocked by first.
"What is this?" Jenna cried. "This is private—"
"Private isn't protection," I said. "It is a lie when used to harm someone."
Findlay stood, face a sudden red. "You had no right—"
"I had the right to know who attacked me," I said. "I had the right to answer."
Someone shouted, "Are you accusing Ms. Fujita?"
"I'm accusing the people who paid for a story to be built on lies," I said. "This campaign intentionally harmed someone fighting for her life. They made money selling her shame."
Lights flashed as photographers took a hundred images. People whispered. The investors in the room looked at each other.
Dillon came forward then. His face was raw. "This was wrong," he said. "I didn't know the methods. I knew the project. I never signed off on these actions."
He looked at me without the usual distance. "Grace, I should have come sooner. I should have listened."
Findlay's phone vibrated. Someone showed Dillon a screenshot. It was an email he'd sent earlier that morning to Arlo denying involvement. His brow furrowed in confusion. "I didn't—"
Arlo rose, pale as a ghost. "We never planned to—"
He stammered in a way men do when they realize they are unraveling. A journalist held his phone up and read: "Payment delivered under 'content seeding.'"
"How many of you knew?" I demanded.
"Enough," Findlay said. "Enough to make it viral."
The room turned loud, the kind of loud that smells like knives. A junior editor in the back, finally speaking for the room, said, "These emails show a planned smear. We will run a story."
Someone in the crowd began to chant, "Shame. Shame." It was a small, ugly sound that the internet multiplies into a flood.
Jenna's mask split. Her voice, usually measured, trembled. "I never imagined they'd—"
"You wrote the plan," I said.
She backed up, like an actor suddenly losing the floor.
The cameras zoomed in. A live feed picked up Dillon's face, and he stepped forward. He did not defend his friends.
He looked at Jenna. "You used me," he said. "You used me and you used her."
Jenna tried to speak.
"Stop," I said. "Just stop."
Her composure broke like a brittle plate. She fell to her knees at the podium, hands over her face, and the people in front phones held out like torches began to film.
"Please!" she sobbed. "I'll fix it. I didn't expect—"
"It was a plan," I said. "You staged my ruin and sold it for profit."
She threw herself into a plea that did not make her larger than a human. The crowd watched. People stepped back.
"Get out," Dillon said.
She wept and clung to Findlay. "I can fix this," she begged him.
"Not ours to fix," he said, but his eyes darted for a contract, a way to broker his way out. A PR rep tried to salvage the night, but the feed had already spread.
— — —
The fallout was exacting.
Within twenty-four hours, Arlo's company denied involvement and asked to clarify their position. A sponsor pulled funding. Arlo's partners, afraid of the stain, audited his accounts. They found entries labeled "content seeding" that matched the invoices I had on my drive. The board called an emergency meeting and Arlo resigned.
Findlay's social feeds collapsed. He had bank statements show payments to photographers to capture "scenes for narrative." He could not explain the transfers. He was dropped by a few clients, his agency canceled the releases, and the small circle that had laughed over drinks dissolved into silence.
Jenna's public image, which had been polished for years, shattered in days. Fans turned. The network that had planned to run the adaptation scrubbed Jenna's name from promotional material. She lost representation. An editor I knew in town told me, "They've pulled her endorsements. They won't touch her now."
The internet is a cruel tribunal: hashtags exploded, then receded, replaced by other storms. But the important thing was the boardroom: contracts were being re-examined, sponsors demanded moral clauses, companies did not want to be caught with the stain of a planned smear.
I did not cheer as their reputations fell. I watched the world do what it does: rip down what it once built. It was violent and it was not vengeance I cherished; it was the simple economy of truth.
— — —
Findlay called me once, voice small. "Grace, I'm sorry."
"Findlay," I said. "You knew it would hurt me. Why?"
"Because it would make a story," he whispered. "Because Jenna—"
"Because you decided to make my life an instrument of your fun," I said.
He stammered. "They paid. I got greedy."
"You were not a kid," I said. "You helped a plan to hurt a sick woman."
There was a long, red line of silence. "They are losing everything," he said finally.
"Good," I said.
— — —
Dillon came more. He made soup that he spooned into bowls and insisted I took because a proper meal could deliver more than a message. He began to visit the clinic more often. He sat by my bed while the chemotherapy machine hummed. The first time he showed up and sat in the stitching of my life, I was not sure what to say.
He tried anyway. "Grace, I am sorry I didn't see sooner."
"Then see now," I said.
"I will," he promised, and he did the awkward thing men do—he tried to make up with gestures. He paid for a round of tests, he called Gerard about a new settlement, he tried to use his influence to help get my slander removed online. He spoke in public, calling the campaign "an unacceptable abuse of media." His name opened doors.
But promises and deeds are different. I had been hurt by a man who kept his emotions on a ledger. I wanted more than a book entry of affection.
We started small. "Can you hold my hand?" I asked once in a quiet hour.
He took my fingers and said, "I never should have let this get to you."
"You loved her before," I said. "You told me so."
"I was young," he said. "I wasn't who I am now."
"Then be who you are now," I said.
He tried. He really tried. He came to appointments. He argued with insurers. He turned himself into an advocate when they wanted paperwork and money as the only proof of love. He saved private time like a man hoarding a light in the dark.
— — —
In the middle of all of that, Jenna's humiliation reached a hard edge. At a small awards gala, someone from her publisher leaked a private message thread where she was seen advising a producer how to "shape the narrative to make the audience hate." The comment hit the news cycle with a brutality and then the publisher announced it was severing ties. Her agent called and said it looked like the boards would not touch her for a long time. Her speaking engagements canceled.
One of the producers who'd supported the show was a public person, and when he was named in the emails, his company stock dropped. A few of his investors sued for mismanagement. Arlo's resignation looked like falling dominoes.
At the town hall where the network had planned to present the first season, an empty seat with Jenna's name card remained. The crowd murmured like rain. A woman in the front snapped a picture and posted it with the caption, "When you build your life by tearing someone else down, it collapses."
I watched all this from the clinic's newsletter feed. There was no glee in my chest. Only relief that truth had teeth.
— — —
"Will you sign?" Dillon asked one night, fingers white on a napkin.
"Sign what?"
"The marriage papers. The divorce."
"I signed them in Reykjavik," I said. "I left them on your desk."
He looked as if someone had cut his hand slowly. "You signed and left?"
"I left because I did not want you to feel trapped by pity," I said. "If you loved me, you would have come to Iceland."
He was no longer a man who arranged dinner and left; he was the kind of man who felt stupid for the weather he had not noticed. "I was afraid," he said. "Afraid of what I would feel."
"Then be afraid," I said. "And see me anyway."
He moved as if across a room of glass. "I will lose friends."
"Good," I said. "If they are friends who would trade a woman's life for a story, we are better without them."
— — —
Dillon called a press meeting of his own, not to defend Jenna but to apologize to me in the open. "I have been blind," he told the microphones. "I failed Grace. I will support her, not because she is mine, but because she is a person."
The cameras were hungry; they took his words and they fed them into the night. There were articles calling it a "public mea culpa." There were also those who said he was trying to clear his name. Truth is messy; time unravels motives.
I watched him on the screen and felt absurdly proud and then frightened. Men apologize, yes, but do they change?
He did. Over months he changed like a slow weather.
— — —
The revenge the world wanted was not my goal. I wanted justice. I wanted the ones who used me to be seen. They were. They panicked. They lost everything. Jenna's publishers dropped her. Arlo's investors walked. Findlay became a pariah. They had to stand in rooms with strangers who once called them friends and feel the face of loss.
At a shareholder meeting, Arlo's board pointed to the invoices and asked for explanations. Arlo, cornered and sweating, could not produce the receipts that would make this legal. His career slid. He sold stock that no one wanted to buy. His marriage suffered. The press called it Karma with a headline like a verdict.
At a small café in Finn's hospital, Findlay sat alone, hands on an empty cup. He sent me a message: "I never expected the fall."
"Then don't do it again," I wrote. "Don't make someone's illness into a campaign tool."
— — —
Meanwhile, my treatment continued. I heard the sterile beeps, felt the cold of the sheets. I had days when I could not stand up and days when the light felt like a treasure. Dillon sat with me through the long ones. He rubbed my shoulders, found the corners of my sweaters where my hands trembled. He did the things a good man does when he finally sees a woman who is hurting.
"Do you forgive me?" he asked one night at my bedside.
"I don't know how to answer with the truth," I said. "Sometimes forgiveness is the work of time."
"Then take your time," he said. "I will take mine."
We rebuilt small bridges. I let him make tea and fill the fridge with ingredients I liked. I let him sit in silent company while I slept. Once he stood in the doorway at dawn and watched me sleep, eyes wet, and I understood that even a man who had been cruel once could be faithful after.
— — —
When Mosquito Blood finally aired in a version without my involvement, it was stripped of its most brutal edges. The network, embarrassed, had recut it. Jenna's name was still listed, though fewer guests defended her. The show aired as a pale thing, lacking its original venom.
Then the lawsuits came. A photographer's firm was sued by a woman who had been caught in the crossfire and depicted as a "collateral." Contracts were dragged into sunlight. The legal system, messy and slow, began to pick the bones apart. People who had made money by selling someone's shame had to answer to more than public outrage.
At a hearing where the cameras were allowed in, Jenna was deposed. She sat in a chair, smaller than usual, and had to answer questions about intent. Her voice shook.
"DID YOU INTEND TO HURT MS. COPELAND?" an attorney asked, calm and precise.
"Of course not," Jenna replied. "I didn't think—"
"But your messages said 'make her a villain,'" the attorney read. "You discussed 'darkening the narrative.'"
She cried. The court recorded it. People watched. The public watched. Some were sorry. Some cheered. The law found the difference between public outrage and criminality. Some were fined. Some lost their sponsors. Findlay's firm folded three months later when clients pulled their business.
The fall was brutal. It did not take away my cancer. It did not erase my nights. But it was a clean, loud answer to a web of lies.
— — —
I had days when the radio sounded like a thousand voices singing and I could not bear it. On those days, Dillon took me to the sea and we sat quiet, holding hands like foreigners.
"What if I had seen sooner?" he asked once.
"Then you'd have saved yourself," I said. "And maybe saved me."
"If we could go back," he said.
"We can't," I said.
"Then let's make today better," he said. "For you."
I let him. We made new days like careful crafts. We photographed the aurora even though the sky in my head would never be the same.
Gradually, the anger that had been a constant knot in me loosened. Not because the villains had been gutted, but because I chose to let them be exhausted by their own lies while I learned how to look after myself.
— — —
Months later, at a small benefit for cancer research, someone at a table murmured, "Look, it's Dillon and Grace."
He had come to me now as something like a partner. He stood nearby, and in a corner of the room, someone from the old group tried to make a joke about the "director who cried wolf." The room fell cold.
"She is not a villain," Dillon said, in a voice that did not ask for permission to exist. "She has been fighting."
Applause lifted like tide.
When the benefit ended, reporters clung to us. "Will you return to the industry together?" a camera asked.
"We're not a story," I said. "We are two people trying to heal."
"Are you reconciling?" another voice asked.
Dillon looked at me as if to ask. I looked at him as if to decide.
"Right now," I said, "I want to be alive. I want to be well. I want to be honest."
He nodded. "Then let's be honest," he said. "When you're ready—"
I took his hand. It felt like a small oath.
— — —
The last scene was not dramatic. It was quiet.
Jenna lost publishers and endorsements. Findlay was unmoored. Arlo was gone from the boardroom. They were all humbled differently: public shame, financial ruin, friendships lost. At a lunch where one of Jenna's former editors spoke, people watched her sit in the middle of a room that had once admired her and now recoiled. She kneeled at the table, made a plea, and people filmed it. Her knees hit the tile and the sound echoed. It was not cinematic. It was just a human begging. A man in the corner who had once been her champion hesitated, then walked away.
I watched on the news and didn't cheer.
There is no luxury in the ruin of another person. But the world balanced, and truth cleared the air.
— — —
One late winter morning, I woke to the sound of light snow on the windowsill. Dillon had woken early to make coffee. He brought the cup to me and set it on the bedside table.
"Do you remember the aurora?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "You didn't see much of it."
"I did," he said. "In those photos, I saw something else. I saw how far I had gone."
"Words matter," I said.
"They do."
He took my hand. "If you decide you cannot come back to me—if you can't—then I will not make you. But if you can, I'd rather build something quieter and truer."
I thought of signing the papers, of the balcony in Reykjavik, of the blood I had wiped away. I thought of the nights a man does not return and the nights he finally does.
"I won't make promises I can't keep," I said. "But I will try. If you try for me, then we will see."
He squeezed my fingers. "I will try."
Outside, the snow fell. Inside, we measured our days one by one. The world kept turning, sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful.
I survived more than anyone said I could that year. The internet didn't heal me. Justice didn't cure me. Only the slow, steady work of treatment and the hands that stayed with me did.
When the court cases ended with settlements and apologies, the world noted them and moved on. Jenna faded into private life. Findlay tried, badly, to rebuild an honest career. Arlo left the industry.
Dillon stayed. He learned that loyalty could be practical as well as romantic. He learned that the price of silence sometimes is a life.
I did the hardest thing: I let someone in again. The kindness was not sloppy. We rebuilt trust like a city rebuilds after a storm—one brick at a time, with rules and warnings and sometimes fear.
We kept a small photograph above the bed. It was the one I had taken in Iceland of the aurora. Dillon did not smile in it. But we were together under the same green sky.
"Promise me nothing," I said once, in a hospital corridor when the radiation had faded and hair grew thin around the edges, "except to be honest."
"I promise that," he said.
It was enough.
—END---
The End
— Thank you for reading —