Face-Slapping11 min read
"Take Her Back — Or Burn It Down"
ButterPicks13 views
“Slap!” I woke to the taste of glass and rain.
“Anna, how could you? She’s your sister!” a voice roared in my dream.
“My sister is pregnant,” the man in the dream said. “I trusted you.”
I sat up, chest heaving, fingers clamped to the sheets.
“Anna? You awake?” Emersyn’s voice came over the phone, thin with worry.
“I’m here,” I said. “Where are you?”
“You have to help me,” Emersyn sobbed. “Someone at the club—he won’t leave me alone. Please.”
“I’m coming,” I said. I swung my legs off the bed and pulled on jeans.
The last time I saw Fletcher Vargas, he called me a monster and walked away.
Six years later, his name still felt like a blade.
“I don’t want you to go!” Emersyn cried.
“Stay put. Lock a door. Don’t answer another call.” I shoved the phone into my pocket and ran for the car.
“Anna, be careful,” Emersyn said. “Please.”
“I will,” I promised.
Thirty minutes later we pushed into the fluorescent hum of the club. Lights, noise, and the kind of people who think money buys silence.
I found Emersyn at Table 205. A fat man had his hands where hands shouldn’t be. She was crying.
“You okay?” I said, stepping between them.
The man made a grab at me. I smiled and let him think he’d won an inch.
“Ladies, tonight a treat.” He laughed. “You look like you want a private corner.”
“Get your hands off us,” I said.
He tried again. I took two steps closer and let him hold on. Then Fletcher’s hand slammed across the door.
“Anna.” His voice was low and hot.
I froze.
He looked at me like I’d stolen something valuable and then he glared at Emersyn.
“You let her in here?” he said.
“Fletcher, you don’t get to—” I began.
“How dare you come here?” he snapped. “After everything—”
“After everything?” I laughed out short. “You dumped me. You called me names. You loved my sister more than you loved me. Now you stand here and judge me?”
He stalked forward. “You’ve changed,” he said. “You look different.”
“Of course I look different,” I said, and I wrapped my fingers tight around the handle of my phone. My pulse beat fast enough to sting.
Fletcher’s jaw tightened. “You’re a show,” he said. “A game.”
“Then play,” I said.
He grabbed my wrist and the world narrowed. He said my name, soft and ugly. I let him pull me out.
“I won’t let him touch you,” the fat man said, offended. “You are mine.”
“You are not mine,” Fletcher said, and the fat man stepped back.
We left the club together and he forced me into a car. Inside a hotel room, he unbuttoned his shirt with hands that didn’t care if I wanted to be held.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“You know what I’m doing,” he said.
He turned on the shower and aimed cold water at my back. I slipped and fell and pain flared like a memory.
“Stop,” I whispered.
His hands paused, and for one pulled-breath second, his eyes were soft. Then they were cold again.
“You lied,” he said. “You lied to me before. You lied to me about—”
“I told you the truth.” My voice broke. “You left. You married her.”
He leaned down. “You were never mine to keep,” he said.
I closed my eyes and let the memory of that first night spin in my mind—the one where he told me I’d saved him, the one where he said he owed me everything. I would not beg him for pity now.
When he left the room, leaving me soaked and shaking, his phone buzzed. He smiled and spoke in a voice for a home, for a girl with a name that had once meant everything to him.
“You coming out?” he said on the phone. “Okay. Wait at the club.”
I pressed my face to the pillow and let the old hurt tear out.
“Why do I keep running into him?” I asked my empty room.
“Because the world is small,” Emersyn said when I called her after. “And because men like him have a way of staying in the center.”
I let the tears come. Then I wiped my face and stood up. I had work to do.
“Tomorrow I fly back to A-city,” I told Emersyn. “I have a meeting to go to. I’ll be gone for a week.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”
The next morning I stepped into a stockholder meeting that the whole family would stream. The second largest shareholder’s seat sat empty.
“Who is the second largest shareholder?” my father, Aurelius Koch, whispered when I walked near.
I smiled and sat down in the chair that belonged to the second largest shareholder — my seat. Cameras caught my shoes, my hair, my face.
“You’re late,” my father said, whisper thin.
“Better late than never,” I answered.
“Even so,” someone said. Someone called for the company books. The chair shifted under my fingers.
“Open the books now,” I said.
They laughed at first. Then the laughter died.
I slid my laptop and a file onto the table.
“Here,” I said. “All of you look for what you want.”
I opened the ledger and bright numbers and lines came to life under the projector. Money moved where it should not. Accounts had names. Shell companies.
“What is this?” someone demanded.
“It’s your truth,” I said.
My father’s face flushed. “This is a trick,” he stammered.
I smiled. “No. It’s your work. That’s why it matters.”
By the time I left the meeting, the board had called for a shadow audit and the media was already texting.
“You’re here to do damage,” they hissed to me in whispers. “You came to hurt us.”
“I came for justice,” I said. “I also came to collect.”
Two days later, the stock prices plunged. Investors called lawyers. The firm’s best men found holes and lies and ways the family had paid itself for decades.
The crowd outside the building murmured like a storm. Cameras were hungry. The white mansion of my childhood was a hive of men on phones and two women in satin who could not stop trembling.
That night, I sat alone in my small rented suite and opened a video file the kids had sent.
“Mom,” Joaquin said over the screen, no more than six years old. His voice was proud. “We found the club payments.”
“Good,” I said, trying to smile. “Did you get everyone?”
“Yes,” Jordan said. “We made sure.”
“Then get ready,” Farrell said. “We do the big screen tomorrow.”
The boys had learned the world faster than I had the right to breathe. Three children, two laptops, one plan.
They hacked a club server and a bank feed and a hotel feed. They threaded one thing into the other and made the lines connect.
On the day of the wedding the family had planned for my old life — the one with Juliette Rizzo and her fake smile — we walked into the hotel ballroom as their guests arrived.
“Anna,” someone whispered. “Why are you here?”
“For a wedding? For a funeral now,” I said.
The lights shut off. Panic flickered in the chandeliers. The big screen above the stage lit and then showed a sentence.
“Give us Anna Oliver,” it read. “Hand her over.”
Gasps. A woman shrieked.
The screen went black for a beat and then a surveillance video played. There it was — not a fake but the raw tape — taken months earlier in a hotel corridor. Juliette’s hands on a face not hers, a whisper, a shove. A tireless man escorting a woman into a room. The belly line. A doctor’s office receipt. A test.
“Is that—” Juliette’s voice cracked.
The screen cut to another file: bank wires from the family company to a private clinic. Receipts. A contract for silence.
“You lied,” I said, softly.
“Lies?” Juliette’s laugh split like glass. “I am his fiancée!”
A reporter shoved a mic forward.
“Juliette Rizzo,” she said, “does this prove you faked the pregnancy?”
“No!” Juliette cried. “I would never—”
“You used a lie to take a life,” I said. “You used a lie to take a child. You paid to bury truth.”
“You have no proof,” Aurelius screamed. “You—”
“We have proof,” I said. “And we have witnesses.”
The room began to turn. Phones were out. Voices rose. The crowd’s mood snapped from worship to hunger.
I stepped forward.
“You taught me the cost of keeping quiet,” I said. “You taught me what silence did to my mother. Today you will pay that cost.”
“Anna!” my father hissed. “You will regret this.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m tired of being afraid.”
Then I pushed the final button. The screen filled with messages and videos the boys had put together: a string of payments, business records, receipts from the night my mother fell. An old man — a long-hidden witness — came forward on the live feed and named the people who had done the hiring, the money trail that led to the top.
“Turn him over,” someone shouted.
The riot flared. Guests rose. Security shouted orders. Bottles broke.
Juliette’s face turned white and then red. She tried to laugh it off. She stumbled, fell into a pillar, and a hundred sharply angled phone cameras caught her face.
“You can’t—” she said. “This is slander!”
“Is it?” I asked. I pulled a new video. There it was: an old recording of her mother and her family planning the cover-up. Voices, names. Admissions.
Juliette lunged at me.
“You liar!” she screamed. “You ruined me!”
“You ruined a life,” I said. “You ruined mine first.”
She fell to her knees. She pulled at her hair. “Please,” she sobbed. “Please stop! I didn’t mean—”
Someone in the crowd who had been silent lifted a phone and posted the live feed. A thousand more people joined. A hand slapped Juliette’s cheek — not mine. Cameras flashed.
Police arrived forty minutes later. Reports poured in. The family’s legal team scrambled. The woman who had been living in silk and varnish had pills and lines to explain. Her calls went unanswered. The stock crashed. Partners dropped deals.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” Aurelius bellowed as people filmed him like an animal.
“I know,” I said.
Juliette begged at my feet. Her mascara ran. She pushed her face into the carpet and screamed the way people do when their whole life is rubble in front of them.
“Please!” she cried. “I will do anything! I will confess! I will give back the money! I will tell everything!”
A thousand strangers watched and judged as if the theater of it was their dessert.
“You want anything?” I asked.
“No— no—” she choked.
“You’ll tell the truth in front of the press in one hour,” I said. “You will sign papers to return the money. You will resign every post you have. You will apologize to my mother. You will not come within a mile of my sons.”
Juliette’s legs went weak. She crawled toward me and touched my shoes.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please.”
The cameras did not blink.
Aurelius stood by and his face had lost blood color. Men who once kissed his ring now stepped away. Law firms called. One after another, sponsors pulled their name from his companies. His board told him he had no choice but to face a criminal probe.
Later, as the room emptied and the lights calmed, the papers were already landing in the hands of agents and lawyers. The internet had not waited for security. The video was everywhere.
By dawn Juliette’s name was a hashtag spitting shame. Her phone stopped ringing except for one number — lawyers offering terms. She had no allies left. She scanned the net and saw herself reduced to a thousand angry comments and a few vindictive shares. Her last choice was to run. She was caught on camera breaking a lamp and falling into a fountain as she fled the hotel.
When the cameras had their fill, when the police took statements and the board accountants closed files, I walked out into the street and felt the air on my face.
“Mom?” I heard from behind me.
I turned. There were three boys, handsome and fierce. Joaquin was the same stubborn leader he always had been. Jordan kept looking at his phone, satisfied. Farrell, the soft one, reached for my hand.
“You did it,” Joaquin said.
“We did it,” I corrected.
He grinned. “Team work,” he said.
That night the family I had come from was hollowed out. People who had eaten at their table were leaving them. The stock that once lifted them now sank.
Good.
But this was not enough.
Fletcher had watched everything from the edge. He had watched me in a way men watch a storm — helpless and fascinated.
He came to my door the next morning, hands raw from anxiety.
“Anna,” he said. “Can we talk?”
“You want to talk?” I asked. “About what?”
“About all of this,” he said. “About us.”
“You left me,” I said. “You left me with a memory and a hole.”
“I know,” he said. “I was cruel. I believed them. I believed lies.”
“You believed the person who promised you a life,” I said. “You chose her when I told the truth.”
He closed his eyes. “I thought I was protecting her.”
“You protected the lie.”
“I know.” He looked at me and something like shame made his face small. “I can’t change what I did.”
“I don’t want you to beg me for forgiveness,” I said. “That’s not mine to give on pain.”
He laughed, a short hard sound. “Then what do you want?”
“For you to see me,” I said. “For you to see the scar and the flower beneath it.” I pulled back my shirt and showed him the long scar across my belly. Around it, a poppy tattoo. A line of ink that had meant pain and memory.
He took a breath. “I didn’t know,” he said.
“No,” I said. “You didn’t know.”
He reached out and did not touch me. “If I could take back six years—”
“You can’t,” I said. “But you can try to be honest today.”
Fletcher stayed in the city. He resigned from a post he’d been leaving for months. His family was not untouched by the fall of the other family — their money did not protect them from scandal and rumor. People who wanted to mock him did. Friends who had been close moved to the shade.
Juliette’s punishment was public and hard. Aurelius lost power and half his deals. Lin Wanqing, who had helped hide things, lost her social posts and a long list of quiet favors. People whom the family called friends turned their backs as their own reputations cooled.
The thing the watchers loved most was the fall — the crowd eating the spectacle — and it was done.
But I did not want to build my life on someone else’s ruin. I wanted to build it on the small bright things I had: my three boys, Emersyn’s laugh, the quiet work I did with words and screenplays, and the safe, slow life my children deserved.
So I boxed up my old anger and used it to buy a new stake in my life. I bought shares in a small company that made good films. I used the money the boys had hidden in old accounts for emergencies. I took a seat on their board — not to control, but to guard.
Fletcher came to meetings. Sometimes he stood at the back and watched me from a distance, a private storm. Sometimes he talked to me about business and strategy. We did not have words ready for love again. We had small acts: he put my coffee on the table in the morning. He read a passage of my work and gave one small comment. He watched Joaquin’s first public talk about the fund the boys had launched.
One night, after a long day, we found ourselves alone on my roof. The city light hummed like a quiet current. My sons slept. Emersyn had called to say the final edits were done. I looked at Fletcher and felt a shape forming.
“Do you still love me?” he asked.
I looked at the scar and said, “I loved you. I was hurt because you couldn’t see me.”
“Can you love me now?” he whispered.
“I don’t know what I will feel tomorrow,” I said. “Today, you see me. You stood when it was hard. You did not run.”
He swallowed. “I am here,” he said. “I will be here. I will not—”
“Promise?” I asked.
He put his hand on the poppy tattoo. His fingers were warm.
“I promise to be honest,” he said. “No more lies. No more excuses.”
I closed my eyes. The city smell was faint—oil and rain and distance. I pressed my forehead to his and felt his breath.
“Then stay,” I said.
He kissed me then, gentle and exact, like a man who had learned how to keep small trust.
At the trial that followed, Juliette's confession and the records I put forward fed the case. She stood in front of the press and told the truth. She cried and begged and was fined and faced civil suits. The company she used to run had to return five million in ill-gotten funds. Her social life collapsed. People who once cheered her left empty seats in restaurants and empty hearts in comment threads.
Aurelius lost his chair on several company boards. He had to answer to the auditors. He faced the press in a small room and the cameras recorded his thin apologies.
The part that pleased people — the public fall — had the reaction it deserved: cameras, shame, the sound of a life unstitched in public. But then it was done. The feeds moved on.
“What did it feel like?” Emersyn asked me later.
“Like a book closed,” I said. “Like the quiet after applause.”
My boys kept their promises. Joaquin ran the fund. Jordan kept the servers safe. Farrell invented equal parts and made our life sweeter. They were children who had stepped into a hard world and held my hand.
One afternoon as we sat in the tiny yard I’d made for them, Fletcher leaned back on a chair and watched them play.
“You always build forts,” he said.
“They are safe forts,” I said. “We practice building things strong.”
He smiled. “Do you ever want to leave?”
“No,” I said. “Not here. Not this life. Maybe once, for a while. But not now.”
He looked at me. “Then stay.”
I looked at him. The world was rough, but the small acts of care were true. I had taken their money, their lies, and returned them to the world with interest — a public apology, a contract to repair, the truth that had to be told. But I had also kept my sons close and built a life that would not lean on ruin.
On the day the final papers were signed and the last of the old men’s deals were unravelled, I walked to my mother’s grave.
“Mom,” I said, fingers tracing the stone, “we did it.”
I put a small poppy on the stone — the same flower as my tattoo. The wind blew and the petals trembled.
Behind me, Fletcher stood a step back and folded his hands. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.
I turned and smiled at my boys and then at him. The future was not an easy road open before me. It was one I would choose step by step.
“Are you ready?” Joaquin asked.
“For what?” I said.
“For life,” he said.
I took Fletcher’s hand. The simple warmth of it felt like a small promise.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m ready.”
—END---
The End
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