Face-Slapping12 min read
The Birthday Slideshow That Broke Two Lives
ButterPicks11 views
I was supposed to spend the sixth day of the Lunar New Year visiting my grandfather, laughing at jokes about which niece had the best marriage, and pretending every family life was tidy. Instead, a careless remark from an aunt landed like a stone in my chest.
"Did you know Blake dated Stella before?" Aunt June said as if gossip about other people's love lives was harmless.
"How long?" I asked out loud, trying to sound casual.
"About a month," she mumbled, suddenly like she had spoken too much. "Stella's picky. She dumped him."
For a few seconds my head went blank.
Later that morning I sat with my hands around a cup of tea and thought of the early days: Blake asking my mother for permission, the third day pulling my hand, the fifth day a stolen kiss. He'd met Stella too — I'd introduced them once, taken them to dinner like it was nothing. I felt like a fool.
"Did they...?" I asked myself aloud until the question wouldn't stop.
A week later, at my grandfather's house again, I watched the room when Blake arrived. He walked in with a confident smile, two cases of wine balanced in his hands, clean cut in his bank suit. People clustered around him; he was the family’s latest pride — newly promoted, newly important.
I wasn't looking at him. I was watching Stella. She wore a tight cream dress and a smile like polished glass. She greeted him and took one of the wine cases with a quick, practiced motion.
"Isn't he the new vice-branch manager?" she said, sounding delighted.
I felt hollow. I kept pretending I didn't see how they watched each other.
That night I asked Blake flatly, "Did you ever go out with Stella?"
He stiffened and gave a little laugh. "Who said that?"
"Did you two go beyond a blind date? Did you...sleep together?"
He made a face. "We dated, but she never liked me that way. You know that, Liv. How could I marry you if I was serious about her?"
He reached for me, playful, and I slapped his hand away.
"How far did it go, really?" I demanded.
"Just dinner. No hand-holding," he said quickly.
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to close the wound. But the seed of doubt had taken root.
Stella was gorgeous and free in a way that made people talk. She'd married once for money and left with nothing, rumor said, after a scandal. She had charm, and she had been back in town not long before I and Blake started dating. People said she enjoyed attention. I didn't believe everyone, but betrayal stays under your skin.
A few days later, small things started to stack. Blake's phone pinged at odd hours, texts he called "spam" that he treated like truth. A transfer showed up on his bill — one big payment at 10:12 p.m., one month earlier: 10,000. The recipient name was "free breathing fish."
I am not a patient private investigator by nature, but I am stubborn. I stared at the name until it looked like a joke. I opened Blake's contacts. There was no "free breathing fish." I scrolled, but that one mysterious message had been deleted. I took a screenshot of the bank alert anyway.
That night I couldn't sleep. At three in the morning, when Blake slept, I took his phone. I checked messages. I found a deleted line missing at 10:08 p.m. The bank transfer still showed: ten thousand to "free breathing fish." I matched timestamps. My stomach dropped.
In the following days I watched him like someone watching a slow leak. I pretended to be ill, pretending to sleep, and I checked his messages after he left for work. Then one night I saw it: an unread message from "free breathing fish" with the line, "Too late, let's sleep. I will miss you." I pressed my hand over my mouth to keep from making a sound.
Who was "free breathing fish"? The answer came sooner than I thought.
I had a colleague, Samuel Crow. He was quiet, thick-set, but kind. He drove a car with a clear badge and had a reputation for being solid rather than flashy. When I told him what I suspected, he agreed to help and used his charm to get a simple selfie sent. The next photo my phone showed was of Stella: the same lips, the same tilt-in-mouth she'd used around family. It was Stella.
My chest felt like somebody had taken a fistful of air out of it.
Samuel sent more. He prodded Stella into feeding him pictures, and Stella's images were a parade: hotel lobbies, late-night selfies, and a photo on a single sofa that matched the curtains in Blake's video call background to me. When Blake had answered my video call, he had been sitting in a room that looked exactly like the hotel Stella posted about earlier that day. They were lying, and I had more than suspicion now. I had evidence.
"Are you sure?" Samuel asked when I messaged him. "I can find more."
"I need everything," I said. "Photos, times, transfers—anything."
Samuel kept finding breadcrumbs. He shared messages where Stella called Blake "my darling" and he sent me one of Stella's messages to him with a coy "I'll be there, be gentle" sort of tone. In the chat backups I showed him, Stella called one man "husband" and another "big brother." She fed both at once.
Samuel's next move was elaborate and risky. He arranged to meet Stella for a drink, took photos, left her in a hotel room alone with the option of waiting for him, and then told me he had evidence that, if I wanted, he would hand over everything to me. He didn't pretend to be a knight — his motives were clean but blunt: "She crossed a line with you. That's wrong. You deserve the truth in front of everyone."
We planned.
"There’s going to be a family banquet soon," I told him. "Grandfather's seventieth. It's perfect."
"Are you sure?" Samuel said. "You want to make this public?"
"I want them to feel it," I replied. "I want them to see what they did to me. And I want them to pay back what they stole from our life."
Everyone thinks the bravest part was making a slideshow, or the courage to speak, but the real work was collecting a timeline and preparing the presentation. I sat up nights compiling screenshots, bank transfers, photos, and video clips Samuel had staged. I numbered everything. I created a timeline like a prosecutor: dates, times, locations.
"If we make the chronology clear," I told Samuel, "no one can pretend. The more concrete, the worse it will be for them."
On the day of the banquet, I moved like a woman carrying a live coal in her mouth. I had called Frost Coffey, a lawyer I'd met once through a friend's cousin, and given him the list of transactions. He assured me the moment would be useful for civil claims later. He also told me to have copies of everything.
"You should ask for the apartment transfer back as well," Frost said. "If he paid for it, that's a joint asset situation."
"That's the plan," I said.
The restaurant's private room smelled of flowers and expensive broth. People sat, laughed, and lifted glasses. Family always looks the same at these events: polite, quick with compliments, slow with the truth. I watched the clock. Five round tables filled the room. Blake arrived last with my in-laws. He smiled, unknowing. Stella arrived looking exactly as she had planned: dark dress, glossy hair, an air like a cat who'd just found a cushion there to settle on.
"You're late," I heard my aunt whisper as she took her seat beside Stella.
I did what I'd rehearsed. Before the main course, when everyone was still settling and the room that would later listen like a jury was comfortable, I stood up.
"Excuse me," I said, and the room fell into a curious hush.
"Everyone," I said, voice steady. "I need three minutes of your time."
"What's this about?" Blake asked, his voice thin.
"You'll see," I said. I plugged the USB into the restaurant's laptop and sent the file to the big screen.
The first thing I played was short and ordinary looking: a clip from a phone taken the night Samuel had filmed them at the side restaurant. On the screen, Stella laughed as Blake fed her a bite of noodles. She wrapped his arm. The sound of their voices, distant but clear, filled the room.
"Stop it," whispered one aunt.
My mother went as pale as the white plate in front of her. My father's jaw tensed. I kept speaking.
"This starts in August," I said. "Here's their timeline." I clicked, and a string of screenshots scrolled: messages where Blake called Stella "my dear," where Stella called him "my darling," photos of hotel lobbies and then, the image that froze the air — a screenshot of a bank transfer: 980,000 paid to an account — a deposit for a property.
"That's our house money," My father said, too loudly.
On the screen I enlarged the messages where they planned how to act at family events. "Act unfamiliar in front of her," Stella's message read, then a laughing emoji, "so she'll never suspect." Blake's reply: "I know. Dress casual."
"What is this?" Blake exploded and lunged toward the laptop to yank the USB.
"You're the one who made me borrow it," I said. "You're the one who lied."
"Liv, don't do this in front of everyone," he pleaded.
"It is exactly where it needs to be," I said.
The next twenty minutes are what I rehearse in my head like a cold, sharp film. I had decided to drag everything into the light. I played the sexual noises, the messages that were unambiguously intimate, photos of Stella in a hotel robe, later Stella admitting to Samuel she had two men on the line. The room's atmosphere shifted from casual to electric. People began to whisper, then to murmur, then to shout.
"You must be crazy," Stella said at first, voice bright with denial. "This is harassment."
"Cute," Blake said, face twisted as if he'd swallowed something bitter.
I kept the dialogue on the screen — their words. I read aloud the financial transfers: dates, amounts, and the name of the realtor company that received the payment.
"They used our joint funds to buy an apartment for her," I said. "That's theft. That's adultery. That's betrayal."
Then the hard part: I stepped down and let the room react. I wanted public. I wanted people to see how they acted when their secrets were projected in front of a family that trusted them. Their reactions follow a trajectory I had mapped in my head but never believed I'd witness so fully.
First came disbelief.
"Impossible," Stella shrieked. "Those messages are fake. You edited them."
"Enough," my father said, voice low. He stood up and punched Blake. The sound of the slap echoed like a final bell. Blake stood there with a stunned, swollen cheek and for a second looked like a child caught doing something wrong. People gasped.
Then came denial and excuse.
"It was a mistake," Blake said, rubbing his face. "We were drunk. I didn't mean—"
"Leave him!" someone shouted from a corner table.
Stella's face changed color. From the cool arrogance she'd worn, she crumpled into something else: panic, then fury.
"This is a setup!" she cried. "You trapped me!"
"Stella," my mother hissed, stepping forward. "How could you? In front of the family?"
Stella's expression flickered — from contempt to the brief flash of something like fear. "You don't understand," she pleaded toward my mother, "he promised me—"
"Stop," my uncle said, standing up suddenly. He leaned forward and slapped her hard enough that her head turned. Her wiggle of hair caught the light. Someone in the room, perhaps my aunt, began to sob. Another relative reached for their phone and started filming. That little bright rectangle began to multiply; people wanted proof that they had witnessed the fall.
Stella moved from denial to rage to bargaining in the span of breaths. She clutched her clutch as if it were an anchor, eyes wild.
"You're ruining me," she wailed. "You're making me—"
"Ruin?" my mother spat. "You ruined her marriage."
Around the room the chorus turned ugly. Some relatives hissed insults. Some whispered "shame." Several older women in my family had their hands over their mouths, eyes wide with horror. Younger cousins whipped out phones to record, not because they liked the spectacle, but because in our age any public scandal must be captured to be real.
The dominoes fell. My father grabbed papers and pushed them toward Blake: bank statements and transfers, printed and double-checked. Frost, who had been sitting quietly, rose and said in his even voice, "This is common household evidence. We will pursue this legally."
Stella ran out with her head held like a beaten flag. One of my uncles shouted at her directly as she fled, "Shame on you!" Her mother tried to follow, crying and calling after her name. The restaurant manager came and asked us to keep quiet, but the room was no longer a private dining area; it was a tribunal.
Meanwhile, Blake found his voice again and turned on Stella, pointing, accusing. "You led me on! You knew I loved Livia!" he cried.
"You loved me?" Stella spat back. "I used you. You were a wallet and a warm body."
He staggered, then collapsed into a chair, the color gone from his face. The look on his face had the sharpest turn: from arrogant to stunned to pleading. He tried to speak, and his explanations sounded thin.
One of my uncles — the loud, moral one — walked over, grabbed Stella by the shoulder, and slapped her across the face. The slap was heard by everyone and almost felt ceremonial. "Get out," he said.
Outside, people had gathered in the hallway. Some whispered with disgust; others showed shock. Phones lit like fireflies: the banquet had suddenly become public. Someone started recording the whole thing. Someone else called a cousin and said, "Come see her, she's being kicked out."
Back inside, Stella's eyes had turned wet. She tried to bargain. "I didn't get the whole amount," she sobbed. "I needed a place to live—"
"You never tried to ask me," I said softly, and the smallness of my voice made the accusation heavier.
She fell through the range of emotions on camera: arrogance, entitlement, shock, shame, and finally a kind of pathetic supplication. The spectators' reactions mirrored that arc.
Some of my cousins began to clap, a brittle, cruel sound. Some older aunts shook their heads and muttered curses. One cousin, who always liked dramatic confrontation, took a photo and posted it live. "Is this real?" people texted their friends. The restaurant staff, embarrassed and watching plates go uneaten, looked sick.
As for Blake, his face twisted from hurt to anger to desperation. He knelt, briefly, in front of me.
"I'm sorry," he said, voice broken. "Please forgive me. I'll stop."
"Stop what?" I asked. "Stop lying? Stop stealing? Stop sleeping with her?"
He started to cry. He went through denial — "It wasn't like that" — and then bargaining — "I'll go to counseling" — and then humiliation: family members say awful things, cousins shout accusations, and my father told him directly, "You used my daughter."
That was when the crowd truly turned. People who had been on the sides watched the center and suddenly felt their betrayal too. Mothers who had praised Blake earlier announced they would never have allowed a son like that into marriage, uncles who had admired his career called him selfish and weak. A man who had once lent money to Blake pulled back, saying "I shouldn't have supported him."
The public punishment was not a legal sentence. It was simpler and worse for them: exposure, contempt, and loss of status. They had to watch the people who mattered to them turn away.
I had prepared for this. I had prepared for the looks, the whispering, the camera phones, the broken cheeks. I had not prepared, and could not have prepared, for the lightweight, horrible satisfaction when one by one those closest to them turned eyes away.
When the evening ended, Stella had left in a cab with her head down. Later, the family forced her to give back the money she'd been sent. The property she thought she'd bought with other people's cash was transferred back to our names. The bank records were now in Frost's hands and would be turned into legal claims.
I left the restaurant feeling strange and hollow, like a mouth after a cold wind had passed through. That night my mother held me and cried. She said, "Why didn't you tell us sooner?"
"How?" I asked. "How could I have done it without proof?"
"You're brave," she said. "You were brave today."
We filed for divorce the next week. I met with Frost again. He told me how the property transfer would happen, how the evidence would back up a claim for reimbursement. Blake sat across from me with swollen eyes and tried to explain and apologize and promise. I listened and signed papers.
A month later Stella, pale and hollowed, came to the property office and handed papers over. She avoided my eye. She left like someone trying to become smaller than her shadow.
Life after public humiliation is not instantly clean. There were nights of rage and days of silence. There was a period where people asked me to go be with family and I refused. The world had watched me torn open and had begun to thread me back together at the same time.
Samuel stayed. He called sometimes and checked how I slept. One evening he invited me to dinner and I went, because small kindnesses are heavy anchors. He wore a plain shirt and a different, calm face. He had been there when I had needed someone without making noise about it.
"You were right," he said later, hand over mine. "She had two men. He was weak. You deserved better."
"Do you always make plans to ruin people?" I joked, but he didn't. He smiled and said, "No. Just to make sure the truth sees light."
We moved slowly. I didn't want to be rushed into anything; I had grown careful as a kind of shield. Samuel persisted with steady gestures: rides to work, an umbrella when it rained, a plate of dumplings when I worked late. He was not glamorous but he was present. He was his own kind of brave.
One unexpected thing happened months later: a call from Blake.
"Livia," he stammered on the line. "You should get checked. I... I just found out I have an infection."
My hand went cold. I went to the doctor. Tests came back clear. I was relieved and then oddly reflective.
Two years later, Samuel and I married. We kept the wedding small, family present but restrained. The house felt quieter in a good way. Samuel worked, loving carefully in the small ways. A year later we had twins, two crying bright boys who woke us up and made tired mornings into something we laughed about.
Rumors reached me again from family grapevines: Stella had been caught up with dangerous people, had been arrested for drug possession and was now in a rehabilitation facility. I felt a complex knot of pity and no pleasure. Her choices had led her to a bitter place. Blake faded from my life. I stopped looking for updates; sometimes severing a story's last page is the best kind of mercy.
Once, on a late autumn afternoon, Samuel and I walked by the restaurant where the banquet had occurred. I touched the small watch I kept in my pocket — a gift from my grandfather many years ago — and felt the tick of time. It sounded very ordinary. I smiled at Samuel, who squeezed my hand.
"Do you ever regret it?" he asked slowly.
"I regret the night I didn't know how to protect myself," I said. "I don't regret making sure everyone saw the truth."
He nodded, thoughtful. "You turned a painful thing into a kind of justice."
I laughed softly. "I turned a wound into a schedule. And the schedule was on a big screen."
He grinned. "My wife is a dangerous woman with a PowerPoint."
"You mean I'm thorough," I corrected, and we both laughed.
My life had burned and been rebuilt. I had lost naive faith in some people and gained a careful, steady love. The banquet was forever stamped in my family's memory. Whenever my grandfather's pocket watch clicks now at night, I remember the slide that exposed what they tried to hide and the quiet that followed when the room realized they'd all been fooled.
I put the watch back in my pocket and kept walking by Samuel's side, knowing that truth, once shown, has a way of setting things right — even if that rightness arrives wrapped in ruin.
The End
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