Revenge15 min read
The Aurora She Never Saw
ButterPicks17 views
My name is Lucille Neves. I am writing this in the present because the past will not stay quiet.
The day Dyer told me the tumor was in my head, Cormac Ortiz proposed.
"You said yes?" he asked, kneeling like it was a joke.
I stared at the ring in his palm. My brain refused to follow my heart.
"This is my parents' plan," he said after a while. "If you don't agree, forget it."
I let my hand fall. I smiled like the girl who had always learned to smile.
"If I say yes," I said softly, "will you marry me?"
He looked at me and did not speak.
The air shifted. It was the answer I had always known without knowing how I knew.
"You might not have a tomorrow," I said because I had been to the hospital and the word "maybe" was thick in my mouth.
He shrugged, indifferent. "Will there be a tomorrow?" he asked, like a test.
I remember the first time I leaned into him, rain sliding down the window like little coins. I remember kissing him because I had no other courage. He kissed me back and called me "stupid" between soft breaths.
He has always been a small book of contradictions.
"You woke up?" he asked one morning later, like the world had no memory of our years.
"Morning," I said. I tried to be the bright girl people expected.
He opened a finance magazine and read with an indifferent face. "You were talking in your sleep. Something about Norway. What's that?"
"I want to see the northern lights," I said. "I want to see the aurora."
"Next March," he said. "This year is tight."
"Promise?" I asked.
"Yes," he lied in the way he always lied when he wanted the answer to close like a drawer.
There were times when the child in him showed—when he protected me from bullies, when he carried my books, when he fought for me in the kitchen as a small boy. There were notebook entries I later found in his shelf that explained—he had written that he did not like me when I first arrived, that I took their parents' attention. I read it like a verdict and felt my chest hollow.
"You are welcome at my parents' house," he said when I packed seeds and planted carrots for his mother and father. "They're happy when you come."
"Then I'll go," I said and laughed the laugh of the grateful child.
He had a scar on his arm from the car accident that saved me. He had lost the steady skill in his fingers. He could not throw a ball. He could not even hold a full glass without trembling.
"You were the one who pushed me out," I told him once, in the quiet that sometimes arrives like a small animal.
He looked away.
When the headaches started, I still made him meals and stitched his sleeves. I hid pills. I laughed when he was rough.
"You look tired," he said when sweat made my hair damp.
"It's nothing," I lied, because my pride kept me small.
One afternoon he brought his secretary, Ellen Inoue, to see a site for a company project. They walked ahead of me like two halves that matched. She coughed; he offered his jacket. She thanked him and called him "boss" with a smile that looked like a pact.
My nose began to bleed in the café. I found the bathroom and called Dyer Anderson.
"How bad is it?" he asked on the phone, like he had always been my tether.
"Just nosebleed," I said, but the truth was under my tongue like iron.
When I returned, Ellen's shoulders were warm under his coat. He did not move.
"You are ill too?" he asked me with an edge that felt sharp.
"I have low blood sugar," I lied again.
He suggested Ellen go to the hospital. I said I would take a taxi home. He watched me go like someone appraising a painting.
I did not go home. I bought a beer by the river, wrapped a shawl around my shoulders, and waited like an animal listening for the wind. I called him once; he told me to stay put and he would come.
He arrived quickly. His coat smelled of perfume. He wrapped it around me with the same indifferent care he had shown in front of Ellen earlier.
"She wore this," I said later, because I am petty sometimes and the truth sometimes tastes like metal.
"So what?" he said and pushed the coat closer like it belonged to him no matter what.
There were moments he was gentle. There were nights he finally let his hands be patient, and I believed what I wanted to believe. We planned Norway like prisoners planning a bank heist. He muttered delays, "work," "project in England," "half a year." When he left, he kissed my neck like a man bribing a coin.
"Wait," I told him at the last second before he left for England. "Not that long. I'll wait."
"Next year," he promised, and his promise was the thing that broke.
His kindness and care and careless cruelty piled and balanced into the shape of our life. And when the ache in my head got worse, I learned to hide. The doctors said the tumor would make things worse: seizures, pain, blurred vision. I lied to my aunt and uncle because I could not stand their pity. I told them I was traveling abroad.
Dyer told me once, "If you want to leave quietly, I will take you. We can go where they let people go."
He looked at me like a man who could not decide whether to build a bridge or burn it down. "You're not asking me?" I said.
He smiled and said, "You can make your own choices." A doctor's smile is a soft blade.
I made a list of small mercies: the bowl of noodles he cooked when I cried from a spike of pain; the way he kissed my forehead once when he thought I was asleep. I kept a brown plush bear on the couch because once I had tied a paper to it: "Bear, for Ellen." I was childish and lonely and I wanted the bear to have a new owner who smiled the way I could not make him smile.
The collision came out of nowhere—an electric bike, a shout, the world folding in on itself. We were a car with a roof of glass. He hit the stone that could have killed me. He carried Ellen free of crushed metal, like the story of him being brave. I was trapped. He rescued her first.
"What happened?" she cried afterwards. "I remember the door…then you were gone."
I remember the smash of glass, the hot acid on my leg, the sound of him swearing and then saying, "You're okay." In that mess he chose Ellen's safety like a reflex.
I kept the memory like a petty bill due. He had been my shelter and my hunger and my smallness all at once.
We grew more distant. He left again, this time for fireworks abroad with Ellen. He posted pictures the night the sky burst; his arm around her shoulder. Dyer texted me that night: "Don't look." I looked anyway.
I walked away from everything I had in that house. I took a suitcase, some dishes, a note, and the brown bear. I sold things, I gave things away, I cleaned out the pockets of a life that belonged to two people but felt like only mine. I left a note on the bear: "Bear goes to Ellen." It was childish—an insult wrapped in cotton.
A month before my birthday my body betrayed me further. Pain climbed like a vine. Dyer and I had a plan, small, secret. "If you want," he said, "I will stay. But you need to tell me—did he ever know?"
"He does not know," I told him. "He would be relieved."
The last gift I wanted was an aurora. I wanted to see a green light like a bruise but beautiful. I wanted to think of luck as not a thing he could buy with a flight or a ring.
"Promise me you'll go if you can," I said to Dyer more than once.
"Okay," he said. He was learning how to be a friend to someone who would not ask him to be anything more.
I picked a night when the river smelled like fish and cold. I left a short letter for my aunt and uncle, telling them I was going traveling. I left Dyer instructions. I left a long email scheduled to go out. I called Cormac once.
"Where are you?" he asked, breath wrapped in someone else's laughter.
"By the river," I said. "Don't come."
"Don't be stupid. I'm coming."
"Don't come," I said again. I wanted him to not waste his time on me. I wanted him to be free. He came anyway.
He and Ellen took pictures under fireworks that night. I watched his feed while the tide took the light from my phone and went under. He posted a photo—a burst of color and two smiling faces—while a little phone under the rocks vibrated with my scheduled message.
I walked into the water because the world had been very small and I wanted to leave it small and clean.
Later, Dyer told me the first thing he did was send me a message. I did not answer. He called the police. The police found me. The ocean kept me like a locked box.
A public life cannot keep its secrets for long. The scheduled emails went out. My aunt and uncle opened my letter. Dyer handed a copy of my note to the police and then—he waited. He did not wait for me to die to act. He made a choice to show the truth.
One week after I was found, Cormac Ortiz returned. He had been abroad. He walked into the hospital with his hands empty and his face white.
Dyer found him in the corridor. "You knew the day I told you," Dyer said in a voice like gravel. "You asked. He didn't tell you."
Cormac's knuckles were pale. "What did she—what did she leave?"
"You can ask them yourself," Dyer said.
They led him to the mortuary.
He stood in front of the glass. He did not cry. He folded his hands and tried to fold himself into a shape small enough to be forgiven.
The real punishment, however, happened later, in a room that once smelled like perfume and finance, drenched now with the glare of phones and the press that loves scandal.
It was a company gala, a supposed celebration of a new project—one he had flown abroad for. The room was full: his board members, clients, his parents, investors, reporters. It was the sort of place where people's faces are made up to be polite and the champagne simmers cold.
"Let's begin the presentation," someone said.
Dyer had asked for five minutes to speak as a friend. The board, thinking it would be a courtesy, agreed.
Dyer stood at the front, small under the chandelier. He looked like a man who had decided to dismantle something piece by piece.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "I am here not as a doctor, but as Lucille Neves' friend."
The room stirred. Cormac glanced at his watch, irritated.
"I have in my hand," Dyer said slowly, holding up a slim notebook, "the diary she found in Mr. Ortiz's study. I also have phone records, scheduled emails, and a few photographs."
Phones came out like a bloom of black beetles. Someone whispered, "What photographs?"
"Photographs of a couple watching fireworks abroad," Dyer said. "On the same night Lucille jumped into the sea."
The room shifted like a boat.
"Lucille wrote things in this diary that I think you should hear." He clicked a button, and the lights dimmed. A page projected onto the screen: a child's handwriting saying, "She thought he loved someone else. She said 'I'm sorry' on the back of his book."
"She left a scheduled email to many of you," Dyer said, "including Mr. Ortiz's father and mother."
A reporter leaned forward, hungry. "Did she blame anyone?"
Dyer's eyes met Cormac's. "She blamed neglect, not a single person. But she described a series of choices. She described being alone with pain. She described seeing, on his feed, fireworks and two smiling people while she was dying."
A murmured string of voices threaded through the room.
Cormac's face flushed first with heat, then with color draining from it. He stood rigid, jaw set, a statue carved from embarrassment.
"She couldn't bear to tell you," Dyer continued. "She kept everything under a smile. She also recorded messages. One of them was sent when she was by the river, and it was scheduled to open if she didn't respond. It contains a short video of her reading a note and then looking at your phone's feed."
Someone gasped. His father covered his mouth with his hand. His mother sat down as if hit.
"Do you deny this?" Dyer asked Cormac.
Cormac's mouth opened. "I—no. I didn't—" His voice broke like ice.
"Let me read one line she wrote." Dyer gave the page to the camera. "She wrote: 'I told him the ring was my parents' plan. He smiled as if he had won. I will not take his pity to keep breathing.'"
A heavy sound in the room—like a door falling off its hinges.
People reached for their phones. The CEO whispered into a reporter's ear. An intern snapped a photo. Someone began to film. I could hear the metallic taste of shame in the air.
"I did not think she would do this," Cormac tried to explain, hands beginning to tremble. "We were—it's complicated."
"It is never complicated when someone is dying," Dyer said, calm and clinical. "You chose a flight that night."
"My flight was for work," Cormac said, desperation sharpening his voice. "We had a schedule, a contract."
Dyer showed a screenshot of a social feed. There was the bright image of fireworks. There was a smile. There was a heart emoji from Ellen. The dates matched.
People began to move like a wave toward the doors. Whispers became audible.
"How could he—" someone said.
"Shameful," another voice murmured.
Cormac's face did something crumpled and raw. For a while he tried denial. He said the tone of messages had been misread. He said nothing had been deliberate. He tried to call the evening "a misstep."
"Isn't it true," Dyer asked, "that when she had a nosebleed in public, she stepped away? You gave Ellen your jacket."
A journalist stood up. "Is this something the board knew?" she asked to the CEO. "Did the company know his personal life looked like this while the missing woman was pleading in messages?"
He reached for something like an answer and found only air. The cameras clicked and a woman in the corner began to cry. His mother covered her face and then looked up, eyes full of confusion.
"How long did you think you could hide this?" Dyer's voice held no flourish. "She wrote she forgave you. She wrote she was sorry. She wrote 'I deserve more than being a comfort you can return to when it's convenient.'"
By then the room had become a theater. Cormac's hubris, which had looked like composure when seen across a boardroom table, was crushed to dust under the stares of those who had once admired him.
He shifted from anger to disbelief. "This is exaggerated!" he snapped. "She misread things. She was ill. This—this is cruel."
"She told me," Dyer said, unblinking, "that she did not want to be kept alive by pity. She wanted to see the aurora."
The crowd hummed with response. Phones hissed as people recorded.
Cormac tried to reach for a defense, a legalist's cold fact. He muttered about obligations and busy schedules and the pressures of a project in England. He named dates and meetings like a litany. He tried to make time an alibi.
"The truth," Dyer said, "is that his phone shows he posted fireworks with the woman he was with that night. He chose fireworks over picking up a call. He chose a smile for social media over answering his girl's pain."
Clearly anger had become raw in his chest. He moved from shock to denial, to a brittle, jittering plea.
"It's not like that!" Cormac said. "She dramatized things. She—"
"She dramatized pain," Dyer said. "She could not breathe. She told her doctor she wanted to see the aurora. She told me she would not tell him. He didn't ask."
The audience closed in with sound. There were shouts. Someone asked, "Where is Ellen?" A few people called for her to step forward. She remained at the edge of the room, looking small and white under the chandelier.
"Why did you not come here?" a reporter asked Cormac's father. "Why didn't you know?"
He could only shake his head. "We were assured everything was fine," he said, voice raw. "We trusted them."
"Trust," someone repeated, and the word fell like glass.
The final shift occurred when someone produced a voice recording from Lucille's scheduled email. It played in the hall—her voice thin and steady, naming names and not naming them, telling a story with the calm of someone who has chosen her departure. Her words landed in the room like small stones.
"Why didn't you care?" she asked in the recording. "Why did you pick fireworks?"
Cormac's face lost its battle against color. He walked to the center like a man stepping out into a stage. The first reaction was dull denial. The second was anger—he snapped and tried to call Dyer a liar. The third relief—he tried to present himself as a victim of gossip.
A group of employees began to chant, quietly at first, and then louder: "How could you? How could you?"
Phones thrust forward, fingers tapping, faces leaning for a better angle. A woman began to clap—sharp, not congratulatory but cutting. A younger man spat, "You ruined her."
His mother turned and faced him, and in that moment he saw his reflection in her eyes. Her face folded into something like grief and reproach.
"She is gone," she said softly, and the room held its breath.
He dropped into a chair, his shoulders folding inward. There was denial for a moment. He tried the lie that this was a misunderstanding. He tried to plead that he had been working.
"She said she wanted the aurora," Dyer told the room. "She wanted luck. She wanted a chance at happiness. You went to fireworks with a woman you had worked with for years while she was alone with a tumor."
By then the public had done the rest. The humiliation was not a single blow. It was a thousand small ones: a click of a cell phone, a whisper, the wide eyes of Cormac's parents, the quiet disgust of colleagues, the sudden distance of clients.
Cormac's composure cracked. First came anger—he leaned forward, cheeks red, voice rough with disbelief. He accused Dyer of theatrics, "This is a setup—" he began.
Then the shake of terror. "She is—dead? She was—" his sentences broke like thin glass. He began to sob, low and raw, the sound of a man who had never been taught how to hold his own sorrow without performance.
The crowd watched his transformation with animal curiosity. Some called for his resignation. Someone shouted, "Shame on you!" A woman took a photo of his father weeping and posted it with a bitter caption. A young employee walked out in tears because the man he had admired now seemed a hollow statue.
Finally, he reached a different stage. He went from denial to bargaining; he tried apologies, in the way of thin steel. He tried to say "I am sorry" as if it were a coin he could throw off a bridge. The words did not land.
"I didn't know—she never told me," he said as a last defense. "I would have—if I had known—"
"But you had her in your life," Dyer said, cold and precise. "You chose to be absent."
The room had become a tribunal of public opinion. People filmed him pleading, recorded his raw sentences, sent them to their feeds. The press took his shaky words and matched them with Lucille's quiet letter. Her death had become a mirror held up to his life, and the reflection was lit by harsh neon.
He broke down finally when his mother asked, "Why did you not see?"
His collapse was not cinematic. It was private and also public—a man unmade by the sight of the parents he had already disappointed.
The punishment was not a prison sentence or the cold clang of law. It was the stripping of the costume he wore before the world: the respect, the polite nods at meetings, the handshake deals. It was the realization that people could not unsee the photos, the recordings, the diary pages.
People left the room slowly. The cameras kept rolling. Cormac sat, hands limply in his lap, while the board cleared out. His reputation was a tablecloth gone muddy. He tried to speak to his parents; they would not answer. Reporters circled like birds. His phone buzzed with messages he had no appetite to read.
That was public punishment: not a single act of violence, but a dismantling in front of a room full of witnesses—his colleagues, his clients, the reporters, his parents, the people who had once thought him a man of steadiness.
He learned shame in the only way the world can teach it now: by witness. By the clicks and the replays and the shared posts. He learned that some things cannot be reassembled after the light has been shown.
Later, in quieter hours when the cameras had gone, Cormac tried to call me. He called Dyer. He sent messages of regret. He begged for forgiveness on social media the way a man asks for mercy from an audience.
There was no miracle. There was no appointed punishment besides the slow erosion of people leaving him. Ellen left the company a month later; the board removed him from his positions. The house we had shared went to market and sat empty like a hollow tooth.
As for me, I had no hand in the public spectacle. I only arranged the timing and the letters and the video. I arranged it because I wanted the truth to be seen and because I had no more need for his excuses.
People say I was dramatic. Maybe I was. Maybe I was selfish. I wanted the world to see him the way I had seen him in short flashes: indifferent, capable of tenderness, capable of leaving.
When Dyer came to tell them at the hospital, Cormac staggered weeks later into the gallery of his own defeat.
"If I had known," he kept saying, words flapping like a trapped bird. "If I had known, I would have—"
He learned too late that knowledge doesn't always undo the damage that choice has already done.
There are small things he never got back. The pages of my diary with his boyhood penciled lines. The brown bear with a scrap of paper. The idea of an aurora. The truth of my last calm night by the river.
I wanted to see the aurora. I never did.
I wanted a kind of justice, not the legal sort, but the kind that shows a man his reflection and asks him to hold it. That is what I left.
When my aunt opened the scheduled email, she read me as I had tried to be: funny, petty, tired, and honest.
When Cormac's father read the pages, he found the boy who had once been hurt, the boy who had written "I don't like her" and then matured into a man who still did not know how to love properly.
When the world watched the company gala that night, they saw a man unmasked.
I wanted him to be ashamed. I wanted him to wonder.
I wanted the people who whispered in the corners to stop whispering about me as a dramatic girl and to start asking, "What kind of person keeps silence until it kills them?"
The aurora was a small dream. The fireworks were public spectacle; I chose the sea for its final silence.
When the waves took me, I wanted the last image in my head to be green light, like luck, like forgiveness for those left behind.
Dyer stayed. He read every recipe I left for him and learned my way of cooking. He came to my aunt and uncle and told them the truth straight. Cormac's parents wept. They had trusted the wrong things.
They say in the papers that he was punished. He was. The world is sometimes the judge that matters.
I had many petty loves and bitter graces. I had days where I would have rather stayed for a bowl of soup than leave for an aurora. I had nights where I chose to keep my pain secret because I thought it would be kinder.
If you ask me if I regret the way I left, I will tell you this:
"Do not make the people you love guess," I would say to anyone who will listen. "Do not make them pay for the silence you keep."
My last line in the journal was small: "I'm sorry." I had written it on the back of a page where Cormac had once written something childish. I left behind the toys of a life; I left the bear; I left Dyer the recipe book.
They will speak of me in the small dinners and the quiet corners of the web. They will say I dramatized my death. They will say many things.
Cormac learned a terrible schooling in shame. Ellen moved on. Dyer kept my papers and my recipes and sometimes whistles the tune I once hummed when I cooked.
If there is a final image I can leave in your mind, let it be this: a brown bear on a sofa with a paper on its chest that reads, "Bear goes to Ellen," and a single line at the bottom of a page in a notebook—"I'm sorry"—the only apology I thought might matter by then.
I wanted the northern lights. I never saw them.
But the world saw him.
The End
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