Face-Slapping11 min read
The Blue Icon and the Red String
ButterPicks14 views
At lunch I tapped a bored thumb and opened a thread. I didn't mean to change my life. I only wanted to watch the mess like a bystander.
"What's the worst secret you've ever told anonymously?" the question read. The top answer was new—posted last month—with a photo. The writer said he was engaged. He said his fiancée was local, an only child, her family had money and a house, and he would marry her for the house. He wrote, "If not for the dowry, who would marry a sow?"
I froze at "sow." Then I froze harder at the photo. Blurry but clear enough. A woman in a white dress, trying on a gown. A red string tied around her wrist. The dress was the same style I had tried on last month. The red string was the same one on my wrist that day.
I sat in the office break room, my sandwich untouched, and my mouth dry. I did not know the writer. I only knew my man—Ezra Arellano—who had been my boyfriend for three years. He was ambitious, yes, but not that kind of man. He had climbed out of a small town by study and grit. He held a good job. He would not write something like that about me, I told myself.
That night, I asked in the dark. "Ezra, did you take the photo that day when we tried on dresses?"
He was scrolling on the bed. He paused, then shrugged like it was nothing. "No. Why?"
"Just wanted to send it to Leia," I said. Leia Lambert was my best friend. "I thought you'd snapped a few."
He turned, smiled, and wrapped his arm around me. "Anything my wife wears looks beautiful."
His lips breathed on my neck. The words should have warmed me. Instead they tasted like steel.
When he went to the bathroom, he took his phone. He always left devices outside before showering, but that night he did not. Something small crawled inside me and I opened the backpack on the bed.
There was his iPad—mine, one I had given him for his birthday—and his wallet. I had no right, but I touched the blue app icon that is like a hollowed stone on the home screen. The browser history showed the thread. The same thread. The answer still there.
The next morning I acted normal. He kissed me, said he had to go to the office, and hugged me tight. "I will bring cake," he promised. He smelled like sugar and a smell I could not name—too sharp.
When he left, I used the tracking app. The dot stopped at his building in the business park. I told myself to calm down. He had worked late before. But when the dot stayed put for hours and he sent a photo of an office lunch from a desk on the other side of the building, the worry turned into a heavy coal in my chest.
I waited at a cafe near the parking lot. I watched cars and people. A woman in a white dress ran across the street and wrapped herself around Ezra like a vine. They laughed and kissed. Her laugh was loud enough for me to hear through the glass. I paid the bill and left. My fingers trembled when I sent him a message. "You coming home for dinner?"
"Not yet," he texted fast. "Handle it. Eat first."
That night he came back with a small cake and a smile. "How was your day, baby?" he asked, as if his arms around me had been the only story of his day.
The next days blurred into a quiet search. I stalked his social feed, the department photos. I found scraps—an extra hand in group shots, a photo cropped in a weird way. I felt foolish, like a woman waiting at a riverbank for a beast.
Then a number appeared on his phone call log from another city. When I searched the number it belonged to a woman. The profile picture was real. Her name on her profile read "Kaede." She answered my friend request quickly. Her first message was short.
"Ezra's sister?" she asked.
I swallowed. "No. Who are you?"
Her voice came in audio notes, breathy and small. "Sisi, are you… can you help? He's my boyfriend. He borrowed money. I can't pay my rent. I'm in the hospital." Her voice cracked. "He owes me two hundred thousand."
Two hundred thousand. I closed my mouth. Go slow. Two hundred thousand was more than my car. Two hundred thousand was more than a false rumor.
I took a train to the next city that night. We met on a bench by a hospital garden, and Kaede was smaller than her photos. Her eyes looked like they had been crying for days. When she showed me her chat logs with Ezra, the pattern came into focus.
He had charmed her at work two years ago when he was on a project. He told her he was single, sent sweet messages, promised a future. Then, three months earlier, he began to ask for money. First a small sum for a friend, then more, then bigger and bigger dramas. He made a fake "friend" account to send desperate messages that pushed her to lend more. He borrowed like a net, always longer, always "I will pay you soon." He borrowed twenty thousand, then ten thousand, then twenty more. He lied, used pressure, and made her feel guilty for stopping him.
"He used a fake account," Kaede said. "He and the fake man sent messages so I'd help. He promised everything. When I couldn't cover the hospital bill, I passed out in the street."
I cried with her and then the anger came. I held her hand. "We will take this back. He did this to both of us."
We made a plan. Part of the plan was to be patient. Part was to move the pawn so he would blunder. Kaede agreed to call him and act like she might come on a weekend trip. I would be the accidental sighting. We needed him greedy and public, not careful.
The weekend came. I put on the dress I had once tried on—nothing like a wedding gown, just a white summer dress—and a red string tied like a memory on my wrist. I left the movie tickets unused and went to the mall.
I saw Ezra sitting at a café. He had the open, confident face he used in public—safe and smiling. Kaede came in like a cloud, and she froze when she saw me. Her expression went from shock to hydraulic anger, then a quiet, terrible clarity. I walked up to Ezra and put my hand on his arm.
"Ezra," I said, smiling like a blade wrapped in silk. "You work too hard. Who are you with?"
He turned and paled. "This is a client," he said. "We are meeting about work."
Kaede's phone buzzed. She stepped forward and said, "Ezra, this is the woman you told me was just a friend."
He tried to speak. He tried to pull his arm away from me. His face moved like film—fear, then guilt, then calculation. He said, "Sisi, why are you here?"
"To see if you're as generous with the truth as you are with lies," I answered. I shook his arm lightly and laughed. "You told Kaede you had no girlfriend. You told me different. Who am I supposed to be today?"
People nearby started to notice. A waiter stopped. A mother nearby slowed with her stroller. Kate—Kaede—looked at him like a woman finding out a tooth is false.
"What does this matter?" he said quickly. "She's a client. You are overreacting."
Kaede took a step forward and slapped him. The sound cracked like a whip. The crowd hushed.
"How dare you," she said. "You used me. You lied. You took money."
He tried to bargain, taking a breath to say the words he used to use, the lies sewn in velvet. He said, "I didn't mean—"
"Save it," Kaede said. "You owe me twenty thousand. And you owe her more than that."
He pulled his face like a man treading on glass. He took out his phone and sent a quick message, his fingers trembling. It read, "Sisi, I will pay you. I'm sorry."
"Hand over proof," I said. "Not words."
He slid his wallet out like a magician revealing a card. "I paid—I've already paid three thousand back. I will pay the rest."
Kaede's shoulders dropped, but only a little. She said, "Three thousand is not two hundred thousand."
The café had gone still. A man near the door clicked a photo. The sounds of the mall—piped music, children's laughter—grew thin.
We decided to pressure him slowly. Kaede said she would accept a small immediate transfer if he did it right then and there. He hesitated. He looked at me like a man hoping a tide would turn. He turned away, left the wallet, and left the café. He kept texting.
We followed him to the parking lot. He made a call and then, in a moment of hunger and stupidity, he tried to split the two of us again—hands out to both, pleading.
"Please," he said. "Don't make this worse. I will set things right."
I had stopped believing his straight-face used to make me feel special. His words were now the rope he had thrown around himself.
The battle went on in small ways. He transferred some funds and then froze. He begged me on the phone. He lied about friends and debts. We used a lawyer friend to ask for written repayment promises. We saved messages, screen shots, bank slips. Kaede got a chunk of her money back. I watched her breathe easier.
But Ezra grew worse at the edges. Losing control is like a pocket of hot air under a jacket. One night he came to my door and begged to reconcile. I said no. He asked me to hear him. I said no. He turned ugly.
He slapped me in the street when I tried to leave. A few people watched. A man pulled him off. Someone called the police. He was taken away, fists red and blistered from pounding a wall of shame.
The public punishment that followed was not a simple courtroom note. It became a show—because sometimes the only way to make a liar small is to let light pour over every lie and watch his face react.
We staged a public truth that was long and loud.
On a Tuesday afternoon I arranged to meet some of his colleagues in the building lobby. I had copies of the chats, the fake account messages, the bank transfers, and the small payments. "Just tell them you'll explain," I told Kaede. We placed printed pages in a clear binder, neat and severe, like a book of evidence.
At noon the lobby filled slowly. People in suits, security guards, and a handful of neighbors who overheard filled the polished marble. I walked in first with my binder and the look of a woman whose eyes had been open to the sun.
Ezra was escorted, smirking, convinced that a clever apology would fold this into dust. Petra Keller—his other partner who had become his comfort, the one in the white dress from the mall—was there too. She had heard rumors and expected loyalty. She did not expect the binder.
"What's this about?" she asked, high and sharp.
"Petra," Ezra said nervously. "Please, not here."
I turned the binder toward the crowd, thumbs opening to the first page and then the next. "This is everything," I said, speaking loudly enough that the echo in the lobby took it forward. "Messages, transfers, the fake account used to guilt Kaede. The anonymous post that called my fiancé a name—written by him."
Someone in the back gasped. A coworker I barely knew took my hand and nodded. A security guard's mouth opened. A woman from HR came forward.
"You're making a scene," Petra said. Her voice had the note of someone who loved her own image. "This is private."
"Private?" I said. "He took my life private and sold it. He took Kaede's money and pretended to care. He posted a photo of me with a cruel caption in a public forum." I felt my words roll out like stones. "I want the truth out where it matters."
People started to record. Phones rose like a field of metal flowers. Ezra's face changed. At first he was insulted—how dare these people? Then startled—why are they so interested in him? Then cornered—what will they do? He swung through a wheel of emotions. He tried to negotiate. He tried to charm the HR woman. He tried to hide behind "I was under pressure." He tried to blame a "friend." He tried to cry.
Someone in the crowd read aloud, "If not for the dowry, who would marry a sow?" The words sat in the air like a slug. People whispered. A woman laughed in a cold, short way. A man took a photo and posted to his public timeline: "Our colleague exposed." Comments sprang like sparks.
"How could you?" Petra demanded, face pale. "You wrote that? To the whole internet?"
"I—" Ezra faltered. He tried to smile. The smile failed. His hands moved like a stage actor trying to catch ropes that weren't there. He reached for Petra, who recoiled. "I was stupid. I was trying to be funny. I didn't mean to—"
"Don't say that," I said. "You meant to hurt. You meant to hide. You meant to steal."
The lobby was a fishbowl. Voices rose not only in accusation but in wonder—how had he been like this under their noses? A colleague who had once praised his work stepped forward. "You used her. You took money from Kaede. You lied to both of them. To all of us."
He turned, and then everyone watched his face break. That was the most human moment. The man who had sold confidence for a smile was tiny and raw. His jaw moved. He stammered. "Please, I—"
"Tell the truth," Kaede said simply. She stood tall, and her voice did not shake. "Tell them who you told lies to and who you lied to."
He tried. He said the words that would shrink him further. He admitted to the fake account. He admitted to the transfers. He admitted to duping me and Kaede. Each sentence made the crowd sound—some angry, some pitying.
For the next hour he stood in the middle of his colleagues and the public and confessed in pieces. People recorded his face that changed from smug to pale to broken. Petra's eyes went from proud to shocked. She clutched a coffee cup like a talisman and then dropped it. A co-worker whispered, "We were told half-truths. He lied to all of us." A security guard said quietly, "We didn't know."
At the end, a neighbor who had watched from the balcony pointed a finger and said, "You told her she'd never find better. You told her the truth was yours. You were a liar with a suit." He turned to the crowd and said, "Shame on you."
Ezra tried to salvage his pride. He reached for me with wet hands. "Diana," he said, and the name fell like a pebble. "Please. I can fix this. Please."
I opened my mouth, and the truth loosened like a bell. "You are the one who has to live with the truth now," I said. "You will be known for what you did. You chose to be small."
A few people clapped quietly—more out of relief than celebration. Some of the younger staff took photos and held them up. Passersby muttered. Someone shouted, "Refund Kaede!" A man I did not know took the binder, flipped through it, and then—an odd mercy—wrote down the numbers to a city legal aid office.
Petra whispered, "I want nothing to do with you," which felt more like an assignment than a real cry. She walked away with a man who had been watching; she did not look back.
Ezra's face crumpled in a way I had never seen. He had been the person my old self would have trusted to build a nest with. Now he sat like a child who had broken a store window and could not buy it back.
The day made him small in public, yes, but it also made him thin and human. He went from smirk to pleading to silence. He begged for forgiveness, and his voice turned hoarse. He tried to act, to put on a show of remorse, then slunk away.
We did not celebrate. Kaede and I sat on the bench outside the building and let the wind catch our hair. People walked by and stared for a moment and then continued. The crowd dissipated, leaving his shame like wet ink. News spread across his office like a stain. In the following days gossip turned to HR inquiries. People who had once smiled at him crossed the street to avoid seeing him. His phone filled with calls from angry friends. Petra posted a short message: "I don't stand with liars." People watched his career unravel.
The humiliation in public was more than spectacle. It was a mirror held to a man who had chosen to lie and to use. He had to walk through every hallway now with people who had seen the binder, who had seen the proofs. He had to answer corporate questions and family comments. Each time he answered, he shrank back.
Weeks later, we heard he had been passed over for promotion. Some said his client accounts were taken away. Someone joked that the anonymous post fame had turned on him like a boomerang. I did not gloat. I only felt the steady slow recovery of my own life.
The police file grew into the rest of his punishment. The strangling incident in front of witnesses meant charges. He had to answer for the violence. He sat in a hearing room, not on a stage now but under court-lit eyes. Friends who once defended him could not. He was asked to leave his apartment. He had to enroll in anger management and to make restitution where possible. The story spread to his family. They called. They argued. I answered none. I did not want to fold back into old warmth.
Life after the public scene was quieter. I moved. I changed jobs. Kaede found a new roommate and started a course. Petra vanished from our street. Ezra sent one last message—broken and brief—begging, "Please forgive me." I did not reply.
Months later, walking past a café I saw a blue app icon on a stranger's phone. It made me smile and then look away. The red string on my wrist had kept me steady.
I am not the same woman who once trusted his smile. I am someone who learned how to read a line of code for what it was, someone who discovered her own stubbornness in the small acts—calling Kaede, booking a train, saving evidence. I found a life that does not bend to a false star.
"Do you regret it?" a friend asked once, about the public scene.
"I regret wasting time," I said. "I regret my softness. But I do not regret the hours I spent building a fence around myself."
Sometimes I replay the moment at the mall—the way a slap sounded, the silence afterward; sometimes I look at the binder and thumb through the pages that once burned me. The blue icon that started it all sits quiet on my phone now. When I close my eyes I hear a light "ping" like a second hand, small and steady. It is no longer a signal of danger. It is the sound of a small, stubborn heart learning to beat alone.
The End
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