Sweet Romance13 min read
Sunrise and Old Scores
ButterPicks14 views
I was the rumor people loved to sharpen like knives.
"You don't have to hear this, Isabelle," my father said the night I first moved back into the house he called his. "You're complicating things."
"Complicating things?" I repeated. "Wade, I am your daughter. Which part of that is complicated?"
He looked away. Stefania Davis, with the same slow, soft voice that had once erased the woman who raised me, smiled like she had never had to choose sides.
"Sweetheart, maybe now isn't the time," she said. "We have guests tomorrow."
"Guests?" I laughed. "I've been your daughter for half my life and tonight I'm 'complicating things.'"
Frances Makarov watched me across the room with those thin, practiced smiles people reserve for public photos. "You are just a wild child," she said when she thought I wouldn't catch it.
"Wild?" I tilted my head. "You mean honest."
"You are a scandal," Frances said. "You belong to gossip, not to our family table."
They believed the story they'd written for me—cheap, convenient, and loud. I learned that people preferred stories that made them comfortable. The truth would have required effort.
I met Tristan Falk the first time I had to stand on stage and accept a plaque for something he and I both earned: the same math prize, the same rank, the same unfair spotlight.
"You're up," he said quietly, nodding to the curtain. His profile slashed perfectly in the half-dark; the auditorium lights made a cliff of his jaw. He had the rare look people stop to admire without knowing why.
"Thanks," I said, and the world narrowed to the hush before applause.
Later, in the hallway where winners exchanged perfunctory congratulations, someone whispered, "They look like an on-screen couple."
"You think so?" a girl behind us laughed.
"It fits, doesn't it? Genius pairings, like a TV plot."
Tristan only shrugged, but he waited for me that afternoon in the courtyard. He folded a paper into a neat square and tapped it against the glass of the classroom window until I looked up. He had a way of being still that felt deliberate.
"You're Tristan?" I asked later, when we found ourselves assigned to the same competition group.
He smiled. "I'll be merciless if you don't do the same."
"You sound like a threat."
"Call it motivation."
He became my shadow and my shelter. He would knock twice on the glass when I was late, hand me a wrapped rice ball when I confessed I had missed lunch, correct my grammar with mock cruelty and then wait as if I had just performed the greatest favor in the world. My days filled with his steady presence like pressed flowers pressed into a book—delicate, inevitable.
Then someone threw hot water at me in school.
"You see her? She deserves worse," a girl shouted, and the water splashed my uniform. Laughter came like a tide.
"Don't look," I wanted to say, but my hands found the biggest mouth in the flooding of faces and the biggest throat in my chest screamed instead. I was furious and embarrassed, which is often the same thing.
Tristan took my arm and led me away. "Keep your distance," he murmured to the gossiping crowd like a spell. "Leave her alone."
He wrapped his jacket around my shoulders as if it were a barrier.
"Are you all right?" he asked, wiping at my face with a tissue he pulled from his pocket.
"Stop fussing," I snapped, because I could not bear the pity. He did not answer. He simply kissed me to shut my mouth.
When his lips pressed against mine, the world shivered. I remember thinking: if the universe had a way to fold nice things into a neat parcel, someone had put this inside mine. I remember also that in the aftermath he said, "So now I'm dirty too. Happy?"
"Very," I lied.
We became something like a quiet public rumor of our own. People started to talk about us as if we had been framed into a single sentence: Tristan and Isabelle, the two top students who were too good for ordinary adolescence.
"Don't let Frances get to you," Tristan said once when we hid under a canopy of wisteria to practice speeches.
"She won't stop," I said. "She can hide everything in a smile."
"Then we'll make them stare at something else," Tristan replied, and he kissed the top of my head like he held patents to small rescues.
We studied together, competed together, and he taught me the mild cruelty of being proud without being cruel. People assumed we were a pair.
"Are you two...?" whispered a classmate.
"We're partners in the contest," Tristan said with his usual flatness. "Nothing more."
"Then why do you look like that?" she asked. But we ignored her and went back to polishing our arguments.
Once, after a debate, a group from another school came to celebrate with us. There was smoke from the grill, the clink of bottles, the nervous sweat of boys who thought their bravado could charm everyone. One man from the other team, Mariano Robin, laughed too loud and leaned too close.
"You're fierce in there," he told me, hand still lingering in my. "I like that kind of girl."
"That's flattering," I said, moving away.
"Don't be rude," Tristan said.
Mariano slid a smile at Tristan as if they had an unspoken history. He asked to shake hands and then refused to let go.
"I prefer mixing," Mariano said, and then he turned his focus back to me. "You were savage in the finals."
"Thanks," I said.
And then the trouble began like a drum crescendo; small things added up and pounded. Rumors, half-true and wholly malicious, spread. I had been told I had slept with men, lost a pregnancy, used my body as a ticket. They called me cheap, common, unworthy. The noise made my chest tight.
When a girl hurled a bowl of water and a boy laughed and someone else flung a rumor like a stone, Tristan didn't ask permission. He dragged me away, sat me down on the curb, and painfully, he told me that none of it mattered. He wanted me to let him decide how much of it mattered.
"You don't get to be a spectator," I snapped.
"I don't want to be," he said simply. "I want to be in the front row."
He kissed me in the dim hallway until the world narrowed and my face no longer burned. It was a dangerous, ridiculous privilege to be loved with such bluntness.
Then life made us adults sooner than we'd expected.
Tristan's life was tethered to obligations I had not foreseen. His mother, Juliette Hansson, had that composed air somebody practices in front of a mirror: refined, cold, convincing in small kindnesses. When she told me she was worried about compatibility, she was polite but final.
"Tristan deserves someone from his world," she said over coffee as if she were making a suggestion about a menu. "This is not a judgment. Stewardship calls for suitable unions."
"I can adjust," I told her. "Adaptation is a skill."
"It's not about your skill," she said. "It's the optics. We have fragile negotiations with partners. I can't have him linked to...rumor."
I left because leaving cost less than arguing. I told myself I would grow, get distance and then return sharper. I left with a scholarship and a suitcase, with bright promises to myself.
Years later, I came back.
The company that had given me my first real work arranged to open a branch here. I came back not with a suitcase but with a business card thick enough to make people notice.
"Isabelle," my secretary, Maria Hayes, said blandly as she slid me the invitation. "Wade's family dinner. He insisted you'd be invited."
"Did he?" I smiled and touched the engraved card.
Wade Benton, who had called me complication, had not changed his habit of controlling the narrative. He had been using me as a lever in drawing rooms without telling me. But this time I would be the one holding the fulcrum.
At the dinner, the house looked like a theater set made to flatter small ambitions. Crystal, gleaming plates, that curated warmth families use to keep their stories safe. Frances glided in like someone who had been raised to command.
"You need to be kinder," she whispered to Stefania as if I couldn't hear.
"Oh, Isabelle," Stefania said, with a warm low voice dipped in poison. "How brave of you to come."
I sat and watched them gather like birds familiar with the same branch. Then I rose.
"This is mine," I said, and placed the envelope I'd carried onto the table. "All of it."
Wade blinked. "Isabelle—"
"Don't," I said. "Let me finish."
I told the room what I'd done in the years I had been away. I had used networks, reputation, small favors, and long nights to secure a few contracts. I had listened to lawyers speak in plain terms. I had quietly moved project by project into places where the family needed me. I had done the work they had always expected to be convenient when the time was ripe.
"My mother left a list of things she'd wanted to fund," I said. "You turned your backs then. You took what suited you. Now I'm returning what is rightly hers."
Frances leaned forward. "You—"
"You never worked for it," I said. "You used someone's grief like wallpaper. You made a living off pretending not to notice her emptiness."
The room tensed. Someone coughed. My uncle's eyes widened. Old men shifted in their chairs like trapped weights.
Then the punishment began.
Wade stood, his face flushing crimson. "You ungrateful—"
"I am not your charity," I said. "You gave me a name and then hid me when it made you uncomfortable."
"You are my daughter," Wade snarled. "You have no right—"
"You have the right to be wrong," I said. "You have the right to be a coward. But you don't have the right to cover your cowardice with my life."
Stefania gasped, and for a moment she seemed small, like someone who had been rehearsing kindness and found the lines empty.
"You stole from me," Frances shouted. "You lie—"
"Stole?" I repeated. "Isn't it strange that you preach theft when your mother's wedding ring sits like a prize on your finger?"
Gasps circled the room. Stefania's hand flew to her mouth. Someone whispered: "What wedding ring?"
"It was meant to be sold if budgets failed," I said. "You never bothered to ask my mother. You saw an opportunity and you took it. You built a life on that taking."
I had prepared for this. I had copies of letters, bank transfers, and the signatures of people in the family who had stepped away when my mother needed them. I had saved voicemails where my aunt asked me to stay with her at the hospital. I had lawyers ready outside the drawing room, because you never humiliate a house without witnesses and a plan.
"Isabelle," Wade pleaded, every ounce of paternal pretense slipping like paint. "You're making a scene."
"This is not a scene," I said. "This is accounting."
I walked to the center of the room. "Everyone here remembers what it looked like when someone left us. Some of you remember the long nights. Some of you remember the bargain. Some of you remember looking the other way."
"My father paid for my schooling," Frances started, voice rising. "He gave me things."
"And he gave my mother a promise he didn't keep," I answered. "He gave her a life and then he swapped it for someone else's comforts."
Faces pressed forward. A cousin whispered into a phone, then looked up, confused, then horrified.
"You've been kind to her," someone said to Stefania weakly. "You helped—"
"You helped yourself," I said. "You helped yourself to inheritances, to hospitality, to children raised by someone else. You helped yourself to a role that wasn't yours."
Stefania's eyes flashed then narrowed. "You are cruel," she said. "You will regret this."
"Perhaps," I said, "but regret is an honest coin and it's cheaper than the company stock you bought with a donation you never made."
The younger cousins, half-drunken from welcoming toasts, began to murmur. "Isabelle's hard," one of them said. "Is she really our family?"
"She is blood," another replied. A self-made uncle cleared his throat. "We should ask Isabelle to explain her claims."
I named the signatures they had assumed they'd erased. I read passages from letters where decisions had been made in hushed rooms. Watt after watt, I shone a light until the skeletons looked ridiculous and small, not scary.
Frances crumpled. Her practiced face failed like a borrowed mask, revealing a real, shallow panic.
"You liar," she cried. "You were always scraping—"
"I left because I couldn't stand the performance," I said. "I came back because I wanted to stop it."
Someone in the doorway—our elderly grandfather's closest friend—rose and said, "I remember a young woman who used to laugh at storms." He turned to Frances. "This isn't the way our house teaches its children respect."
A cousin pulled out his phone and started recording. Others followed; the smart phones captured every breath, and soon the company's PR team who had been casually invited to the dinner found themselves pointed at a scandal that looked like a tabloid and a judgment alike.
Frances screamed, "You will not ruin us!" then she laughed in a strangled way that sounded like a broken record. "You think money makes you right?"
"You think silence makes you pure," I returned. "Silence only makes you complicit."
By the time I finished, the room had split. Some people looked at me with pity, some with admiration, some with fearful calculation. Wade sat frozen by a realization he hadn't permitted before: his reputations had been the wrong currency. He had been spending it to buy comfort for people who despised what he'd sacrificed.
"Isabelle," he said finally, helpless, "I—"
"You have your conscience," I told him. "And you have your choices. Keep your comforts. Keep your wife. I want my mother's name restored, and I want to be treated like a living person, not a problem."
"What do you want?" Frances shrieked, tears streaming, the veneer of control gone.
"I want acknowledgement," I said. "And I want you to leave my life if you cannot be honest."
The crowd around the table started to talk: "Did she really…?" "I always thought so…" "My God." Phones clicked, whispers floated like pollen.
Frances stood, hands shaking. Her expression moved through stages so fast my head swam: triumph, shock, denial, then a collapse into sobbing that made the chandelier tremble. She tried to say something—"This is”—but words failed.
"Don't call me liar," she tried finally, voice splitting.
"You sold your story," I said quietly. "You sold your mother's name and thought no one would notice."
"People were watching," a neighbor said, voice loud, not unkind. "You can't take that back."
Juliette, who had been composed until then, looked stunned. Her eyes blinked once, sharply. For the first time that night her mouth trembled. She had been an architect of social calm, but in the presence of truth she found the plans obsolete.
"Juliette," Tristan said quietly, stepping between his mother and me. He had been watching from the entrance, jaw tight, hands clenched as if he'd been smoothing a fold in his chest for months.
"You told me you would take care of things," he said to her. "You said you'd protect me."
Juliette's face hardened. "I thought I was protecting you."
"Protecting you from what?" Tristan demanded. "From the truth? From love?"
"My son should not struggle—"
"Is struggle worse than losing our names?" Tristan snapped. "Was my comfort worth a mother's grief?"
Juliette's face crumpled in a way I had never seen. Her gestures lost polish and became human, flawed. Tears came unsummoned to her eyes. For a second she was not the woman who'd counseled me to leave. She looked like someone who had been told a story and finally heard the full sentence.
People murmured. Someone muttered, "I can't believe Mrs. Hansson would—"
"Stop," Tristan said. "No more coverups."
That night, cameras and witnesses kept the story alive. Frances's rage turned into pleading. She tried to twist the narrative—"She stole our family—" but her words drew only a little sympathy. The family had been watching her sense of entitlement crack in front of everyone.
She clutched at Stefania. "Do something," she wailed.
"Do you want me to beg?" Stefania snapped. Then she caught herself. "Isabelle, I'm... I'm sorry if—"
"Sorry won't stitch the nights my mother waited for a call," I said. "It won't return her the dignity you took."
A few of the younger relatives began leaving the room, disgusted by the turbulence of the older generations. Some stayed, though, and their judging eyes felt like jury members. My words had made a case; the room had been the courtroom.
When it was over, my phone buzzed with messages from people who had witnessed it all. Some were scathing, some were supportive. The story traveled faster than any dinner could. In the morning, social feeds were streaming a-version of the evening that did not spare anyone.
Frances's public collapse was not melodramatic. It was a slow, terrible unwinding. She walked out of the house and was stopped by a neighbor who asked if she was okay. She stood on the steps as other neighbors whispered and snapped pictures from the safety of their hedges. Her face folded into smaller and smaller pieces. I could see the scene through the net of phone screens, each framing her in a way she could not control.
"Look at her," someone said. "I don't want to see them like this."
But the seeing had already happened. The world had watched. The moment of reckoning was performed in full view, and Frances had to feel the hardness of her own choices mirrored back at her.
Tristan stayed close to me that night, steady like a lighthouse. When the press mentions came the next day, he stood with me in meetings, his hand a fixed presence when my fingers worried at a paper. We rebuilt the parts of our world that needed repair, together.
We had moments that were soft too. We danced at a friend's bar, pretending we were still reckless teenagers. Kailey Mendoza, the owner, smiled and waved us into the center.
"Isabelle, Tristan—show them how it's done," she shouted over the music.
"Don't you know how to behave?" Tristan teased when I tried to skip the dance floor.
"Not tonight," I said, and he pulled me into a slow turn. His hand was at my waist, his thumb a familiar metronome. Our mouths met occasionally, not to hide but to promise.
Later, he kissed me and said, "When you came back I thought—"
"What?" I asked.
"That you would be different." He laughed softly. "You're different, but not in the way I feared."
"You left me a little older," I said.
"You left me with work," he said. "But you returned."
We kept our small rituals: breakfast he insisted on bringing when I had a morning meeting, text messages with pictures of coffee, the habit of calling each other to check if we remembered to eat. And on one winter morning he took me to the beach where we had once watched a sunrise.
"Do you remember how we promised to see all the sunrises?" Tristan asked, bags of sand clinging to his shoes.
"Yes," I said. "You vowed to make me look at them."
He set up a small cake with candles, silly and impossible at dawn, and he pulled out a cheap guitar. He sang off-key and I laughed until my throat hurt.
"Will you marry me?" he asked suddenly, as if he had been saving the question like a surprise.
"You are ridiculous," I said, but my hand went to his cheek. "I will marry you if you keep singing at sunrise for the rest of our days."
He grinned. "I will."
There were no grand proclamations after the public reckoning—only a quieter public: boardrooms where I held my own, family dinners where boundaries were finally spoken aloud, and the sound of Tristan's voice in the night.
We were not perfect. Some bridges still smoked at the edges. Frances sent me messages that screamed and pleaded. Wade called occasionally with a voice that had lost its certainty. Stefania, though softer at times, refused to admit wrongdoing. Juliette and Tristan worked through a silence that had become a complicated truce.
But what I learned that year was simple: truth is loud, and to wield it you must be ready to stand in the light.
"Will you still be mine when things get ugly again?" Tristan asked one night as I closed a deal.
"I won't let you face ugly alone," I said. "But I won't be the person who runs either."
He smiled and kissed me like he had six years ago in a school hallway. "Then let's keep looking at sunrises," he said.
"We will," I promised.
And sometimes, when I wake before dawn, I can still smell the sea on the mattress and hear the faint echo of guitar chords Tristan used to practice at the sand. The world was messy; there were betrayals and taxes and meetings and stubborn people who refused to change. But there were also small things—candles that made you silly, a voice that insisted breakfast matters, a promise to keep watching the horizon.
At my mother's old piano—recovered from an attic we thought forgotten—Tristan sat and thumbed a melody.
"Play what you used to sing," I said.
He looked up, eyebrows raised. "Which song?"
"The one you changed for me," I told him.
He smiled and began to sing off-key and right, both at once, filling our house with a song that had become a promise and a kind of living map: sunrise, guitar, a small cake at dawn, and the day we made our lives answerable to something kinder than pretense.
The End
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