Face-Slapping15 min read
The Contract and the Chipped Bowl
ButterPicks14 views
I was sitting on the low couch, the knitted blanket pulled up to my collarbone, when I said, "I'm going home today."
Todd Zheng stopped buttoning his shirt. He turned only enough for me to see the line of his back, then answered, "Go ahead."
He walked out without another word.
I pulled the wrecked lingerie from the floor. The strap was torn; his hands had been rough and quick, the way he treated marriage like a transaction. I threw the ruined bra into the bin and put on a fresh piece from the closet.
"You're leaving?" An elder housekeeper called from downstairs.
"Yes," I said, and texted my mother as I sat on the sofa. {Mom — I'm coming.}
He sent one short note moments later: {Five o'clock at the old house.}
We had married to stitch an alliance between families. The agreement had teeth: my father would deposit thirty thousand every month to my account. I agreed because every month I could breathe a little easier. I agreed because my mother, Jemma Callahan, needed medicine and someone had to pay.
I walked to the car with boxes of cakes in my arms and a blister pack of contraceptives shoved deep in my pocket. The driver knew nothing beyond the addresses; he asked, "Do you want anything from the pharmacy on the way back?"
"No, thanks," I said, swallowing the pills like candy.
At my mother's noodle shop, she was sweeping a bucket of scraps into the alley when she lit up at my arrival.
"Katherine," she said. "You're here. Sit before I make you eat."
"Mom, you shouldn't be lifting that bucket," I said, taking it from her.
The shop smelled of broth and fermented garlic. I put the cakes on the counter and said, "I bought you something."
"You didn't have to spend money on me," she said, with the same fierce pride that had let her leave my father twenty-one years ago and carry on with a noodle stall and stubborn independence.
"Please," I said. "Try it."
She accepted one piece, closed her eyes, and smiled like it was summer. After soup and small talk, I told her, "I will take you to the hospital for a checkup."
"No, no," she refused. "Money. The doctor takes money. I don't want to waste it."
"You can't skip it," I insisted.
We went. The bill came—twenty-eight hundred. The kind of number that made me count my fingers and realize that thirty thousand a month sounds like more than enough until the years of hospital visits strip it away.
That night, in the car back to the old house, I received Todd's terse message and answered "Okay." At the old house, we both wore our smiles like props. "Grandfather," we said in unison when we entered the library.
Todd squeezed my hand when we walked down the hall, and I let him.
Grandfather sat up in his chair with the newspaper folded across his lap. "When will you give us an heir?" he asked plainly, looking at us both. "You are married. We need the family to continue."
I kept my face polite. "We are trying, Grandpa," Todd said. "We are preparing."
Then the servant served dinner, and we played the part.
Later, returning to the car, we didn't speak. He lit a cigarette, hesitated, and then tossed it. "You're late," he finally said when I climbed out.
"I was at my mother's. It took longer," I said.
"Thirty minutes," he said. His tone made it a trial.
I stepped into the villa. Upstairs the house slept as if unaware. He caught me in the hallway and pulled me into his arms. I felt the old instinct—resist, then brace, then endure. I said, "Not tonight." He hummed in my ear and did what he wanted.
Afterward I found myself in the bathtub hours later, cold and startled. He tossed a towel at me and left. I swallowed two pills to stop the shaking and pulled a dressing gown over my shoulders.
My phone buzzed. A voice lit my screen: "Katherine, it's Faith. You okay? Are you home yet?" It was Faith Bruno, my friend from the kindergarten. I forced a laugh into the receiver. "I'm okay. I promise."
We talked until the late hours and then I slept, face down on the bed, thinking about bills and how my father had promised money if I married into Todd's family. "Marriage," my father, Isaac Martini, had said on the phone, "isn't romance. It's an arrangement."
I was being used in plain daylight by everyone like a ledger entry. My mother—proud and sharp—had taught me there are some things you endure for your family. My father had taught me another lesson entirely: make arrangements, and some men will sell you the safety of monthly deposits.
The next morning I didn't tell Todd I had gone to work. I brushed my hair and left for the kindergarten. At the school, kids squealed and their tiny fists patted my legs. "Teacher Katherine!" they shouted.
"Miss Katherine," Quincy Romero, the teacher who liked to joke and always kept an eye on the children, greeted me with a grin and a thermos of jasmine tea. "You look like you could use this."
I sat with them, and the day passed in small joys: finger paint on a cheek, a crayon that broke and made the kids laugh, a chorus of voices singing nonsense songs. The world outside my marriage still had color.
That evening, the nursery had a staff dinner at a fancy restaurant. As people drifted in I saw a familiar silhouette at the entrance—Todd. He didn't look away as he walked in with a cluster of people. Our eyes caught for a second, a thin strip of recognition, and I felt oddly exposed.
"Come," Quincy whispered, placing the jasmine on my palm. "Go. Finish early?"
I answered messages from my father—Isaac had arranged for me to collect a bank card. He had placed one hundred thousand in it as a convenience, a "use it for what you need" gesture. I knew it was both a gift and a price. I had to keep the farce alive.
At dinner, a woman named Kaitlyn Benton—alarmed by the luxury of the bag hanging from my shoulder—made a show of touching it. "Is that a Huashi?" she asked loudly. "Those cost a fortune. Do you buy these on your own?"
I smiled and shrugged. "You have no idea how I go out."
"Is it real?" Kaitlyn taunted. "Or is it fake?"
She was loud and thin-boned, the kind of person who measured her worth with who looked at her at parties. I had always tried to be invisible in places like this. The room turned; voices pulled like a tide toward the bag.
"Enough," I said calmly, and the room stilled because I had once been a child who'd learned the best way to stop a fight was to throw a question at it.
Kaitlyn hurled the bag at me, and the items inside spilled onto the carpet—lipstick, cards, a small compact. She strutted like a cat. I watched her for a moment, then picked up a china plate and, in a movement more theatrical than violent, poured two plates of dishes onto her chic leather bag.
"Pick it up," I said.
She went white as a sheet. "You... you can't—"
"Pick it up," I repeated.
Her boyfriend, a soft man named Walt Andre, tried to stand up and do something heroic. He failed to find his courage. He clutched at Kaitlyn and sputtered apologies. The room laughed like water falling into a bowl. I used no force more than words and a steady hand. I had no wish to hurt anyone; I only wished to correct the balance of shame.
Later, as the busyness of the night spilled out and reconciliation was a currency no one wanted to spend, Todd called and told me to come downstairs. His voice had the same low calm it always did. I thought he wanted me. I thought he might have mercy.
I entered the car; he had asked me to buckle my safety belt. He reached over and did it for me. His hand was warm, his fingers steady. He looked at me and said, "You like to pretend that you can be independent."
"I'm not pretending," I answered.
So he kissed me in the car, an experienced and practiced kiss, and I surrendered because it was smaller terror than resisting.
The next morning his message was short: {Be downstairs in twenty minutes.} He met me and said, "Come with me. I'm going to my mother's at the lake." He pressed a key into my palm and said, "They will pick you up."
At the lake house, his mother Ellen Rose fussed with the plates and called me "child" in a way meant to own me. She told me to help in the kitchen, as if I were a servant and not a daughter-in-law. Todd backed her up. "She's not a servant," he said once when she sneered. "She is my wife."
"You should be grateful," she pouted to me. "It's not every woman who gets a seat at this house."
Between the laughable lectures and thin comforts, I cooked. The mother-in-law accused me of being careless and took every chance to throw me small jabs like wind. In truth she was afraid of what anyone might say if she were seen as weak.
On the drive home I stopped the car at a corner. My leg hurt where I'd been bumped by the car door that morning. I told the driver I wanted to walk.
Todd watched me open the door. "You can call me if you need anything," he said. His voice carried. "I'll… I'll send someone."
"You don't need to," I said and walked into the clinic.
When I returned, Todd seemed nonplussed, but as midnighted meals had taught me, the house had its own patterns. That night he came in and sat on the edge of the bed. "Do you think I'm a child?" he asked.
"No," I replied sharply. "You think the world owes you everything."
He smiled. "I do what I must."
The next few days were a cadence of small slights and subtle title fights. He mocked my new friends at the kindergarten, he questioned why I had a friend like Quincy, who had the decency to show up at my mother's noodle shop when a pair of bullies came through and tried to extort money. Quincy fought like a man with a protective stubbornness and two quick fists; he broke their plan with a well-timed punch and called the police. That was the kind of quiet hero I liked. He cleaned my mother's fight and stayed to sip tea.
At home, my house staff—wary of standing up to Todd—kept quiet. At a corporate gathering, I received a call: my father Isaac wanted me to come and talk. When I obliged him with the graciousness of someone who had learned to take money and give smiles, he slid a bank card at me.
"Take this," Isaac said. "There are ten thousand on it. And if you can persuade Todd to lower his price on our goods with him, I'll increase your stipend."
I took it and felt the old contracts of love and convenience twist like rope in my hands.
A week later, Todd's cousin Gillian Novikov—sharp and subtly dangerous—started to whisper about "loyalty problems" where she happened to be at every meeting. The small coalitions of in-house politics were organized like a sheaf. They needed heirs, profit, and appearance. I gave them none of those things at first, and they reacted like wolves.
At the kindergarten, a boy named Big Dan tripped over a desk and nicked his lip. He cried out in pain. His grandfather—Evert Torres—came and demanded compensation of ten thousand dollars. The man shouted and called the director names until I almost laughed at his own brashness.
"One thousand," the director, Faith Bruno, said calmly, handing the man the medical bill.
"One thousand? This is extortion!" Evert roared. He threatened to ruin the school's reputation.
I took down the camera footage, left it on the table. "You want to play this game," I said when I spoke to the parent group. "We have video."
The footage showed the child shoving and a small scuffle. He had fallen alone. People read the truth and, more importantly, sent messages in the group chat. Parents sided with us. Evert's threats shrank to impotence in the open air. In a time where anyone brands a smartphone and opinion as justice, lies die quickly.
At home, things escalated. Todd became possessive, small about the world. He demanded that I delete Quincy from my contacts.
"Delete him," he told me once bluntly.
"No," I replied. "He is a colleague. A friend."
"Then you choose: him or me."
"Choose what you like," I said. "But choose carefully."
He didn't hit me that night, but he kept pushing. He liked to leave evidence, a way of reminding me I was his property. He left photos of me in the car with Quincy, pictures gathered and arranged in a way that distorted what happened into something obscene. He laughed and told me that if I wanted to keep my place, I'd have to earn it.
I had had about enough.
The plan took shape in my mind like a small, steady flame. I would not be the woman they sold to each other with a handshake and bank transfers. I would not be someone who accepted humiliation for a salary. I wanted the money—God, did I want the money—but not at the expense of my self.
Months of small humiliations taught me an important thing: the public eye is kinder to spectacle than to whispered cruelty. If a lie can implode in front of everybody, it implodes for everyone. That morning I began to collect evidence: Todd's messages—his callous talk about women and 'using' me for children; Gillian's emails; a set of audio clips in which Todd joked that "as long as she produces an heir, she'll have the role of a porcelain doll." I put together the medical bills, the hospital receipts for my mother's surgery, and the timeline of what had happened with the kindergarten and the extortionists.
I sent an anonymous note to the family solicitor suggesting that we stage a "family celebration" later that week, a place with the whole board and many of Todd's well-heeled friends. I suggested we present awards. It was the kind of event any company would host: a gala, candlelight, speeches, a charity component. They were happy to show the world their gold.
On the day, I arrived in a dress that belonged to no one but me—no borrowed money, no bribe. I brought with me the small, chipped ceramic bowl from my mother's noodle shop. It had a hairline crack, one edge flattened by years of use. I held it in my hands like a talisman.
Todd swept in, all smiles and lean confidence. People greeted him with handshakes and pecks on the cheek. The room thrummed with polite clinking. Grandfather sat at the head of the dais.
I asked for a minute with the organizer and arranged for a film to play at the climax. They set up the screen. The room thought we would see a corporate recap; instead, I had prepared a different reel.
When they dimmed the lights, my chest thudded. The projected screen first showed Todd in his own voice, pre-recorded. He laughed and said, "Heidi is just a tool; finance is clear: she brings a baby, she'll serve her purpose; then we'll move on." It played, and the expression in the room changed like a tide. Murmurs cut across the rows.
I waited. The projector moved to the next clip—the message thread between Gillian and the head of HR discussing "keeping appearances." The next shot showed audio of Todd describing my mother as "a convenient illness" that lets him keep me checked. I had recorded him in private conversations, the words that stung the deepest.
Then I stood up and walked to the microphone.
"Good evening," I said loudly. "If you'll indulge me, I have something to tell you."
Todd's face hardened. "Katherine," he said in a tone that expected pity. "This is not the appropriate place."
The projector continued. Witnesses around us began to take out their phones, some to film, some in disbelief. My voice didn't shake.
"I married into this family because my father offered me support for my mother," I said. "I did it because I wanted to buy her time, not because I wanted to be forgotten."
I took the chipped bowl from my clutch and set it on the lectern. "This bowl is from my mother's shop. It is used every day to feed people. I bring it into this room because it has value. It's not a necklace for show. I paid for it with her labor, not with my shame."
"Now," I said, and in the background the projector played a string of texts from Todd: {She's only good for one thing.}, {Find me someone who can bear children on demand.}, {She is convenient.}
A woman from Todd's investment circle stood; she whispered, "That's him, that's his voice." Gasps rippled soft as cloth.
Todd's smile faltered, then cracked. He stood and tried to take the microphone from me.
"Stop." Grandfather's voice took the hall's air. "What nonsense is this?"
He couldn't stop the projector. He couldn't stop the phones.
My voice grew louder. "Do you remember, Grandfather? Do you remember when you told me to keep the family line intact?" I held up one audio line where Todd muttered, "Sell it, sell it, keep the breeder, move on." "You told me to have a child for the family's sake. You forgot how a child is also made of a mother's wages. You forgot that my mother is a person."
Todd's face shifted from sardonic to pale. The audience was no longer a corporate audience; they were witnesses. People began to speak—sharp exclamations, the clacking of meal forks as precursors to uproar. I played the chat where Todd had bragged to a friend about being "untethered." The friend laughed.
"Who gave these to you?" Todd snarled.
"Your messages," I said. "You left them where anyone could find them. You thought you were clever."
His face moved through shock, then irritation, and then denial. "This is elaborate slander," he said, voice high. "This is staged. You—"
A middle-aged man filmed with his phone. "Wait—" he muttered. "I have receipts. He texted me the same thing."
The room's mood swung. There were whispers, followed by the clicking of cameras, recording everything.
"You're lying," Todd hissed. "You planted this."
Someone in the front row laughed openly. A woman whispered, "I thought he was decent." Her eyes were distant, the gleam of betrayal swimming into them.
Todd's mouth became a thin line. He tried to charm the room with a practiced smile. "Somebody is trying to hurt me. This is personal. I will take legal action."
He shifted: shock to denial. The audience's attention became a spotlight, exposing every small infidelity. The board members at his side reached for their phones; some whispered. One man commented in a low voice, "We need to call the PR team." A woman next to him took a photograph and uploaded it.
Then the scene changed. The projector began to play the footage of Todd in the car, a conversation in which he had been unmistakably callous. People began to record, to broadcast. The murmur rose.
Todd's jaw loosened. For the first time I saw him falter—he was not the man in control. He paced, then stopped, and he said, "You can't do this."
"Why not?" I asked. "You did this for hours."
He grew frantic, his eyes flitting to the exit. "This is influence. This is—"
"It's the truth," I said.
"You're ruining me!" he cried. "You don't understand. You will ruin the company."
"But I've not ruined the company." I glanced at the board. "You did that yourself."
The crowd became a living thing. Phones rose like a raised field. People recorded his unraveling.
Here is the sequence that changed him: he moved from arrogance to shock, from shock to furious denial. "This is false," he roared, then heard his voice echo and felt it fall apart.
He began to tremble. People stopped applauding. Someone hissed, "Pathetic." A woman laughed cruelly. Children of the guest tables covered their ears.
We had gathered them to a feast and instead fed them truth. He looked around—the board members who had once smiled with him were checking their watches, murmuring about fallout. He tried to salvage the moment, called for legal counsel. "This is blackmail!" he shouted.
"Enough!" Grandfather banged the table and pointed at him. The old man's voice, once composed, now had a metallic edge. He looked at Todd and said, "You are a disgrace to this name."
Todd's face crumpled. For a moment he seemed small and lost. He took a step forward and then down—onto his knees on the polished floor.
"Please," he said, voice shaking. "Please, Katherine, I'm sorry."
The transformation from swagger to pleading was sudden: his shoulders slumped, and he began to beg. "Please, don't—please. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Tears were wet on his cheeks.
A ring of guests had formed. Phones recorded the scene. Someone clapped, a single slow sarcastic clap. Another guest started photographing; others began to post live. People murmured, "He always thought he could get away with it." Another voice said, "He needs to be taught a lesson."
He crawled and bowed his head. "Please, I'm sorry," he said again, voice cracked.
He had gone through the required stages: smug, then stunned, then denial, then collapse, then begging. The crowd witnessed his humiliation. People took pictures; someone called a reporter. The room's air smelled like the metallic tang of gossip.
"Get up," Grandfather said. "You will not kneel before her this way." He helped Todd to his feet and turned to the crowd. "Let this be a warning—no one uses another's life as a ledger."
Phones buzzed. Someone clapped slowly and a ripple of derisive laughter swept through the tables. A few people—surprising the crowd—them whispered, "Good," and somebody else shouted, "Justice!"
I walked down from the lectern, placed the chipped bowl on the microphone stand, and said, "This bowl fed my mother's family for twenty years. You cannot buy the right to trample on people for a title."
The room hummed. Cameras streamed. The story took wings.
Afterward, Todd's pleas became less coherent. "Please," he said, half to Grandfather, half to me. "Don't take away everything."
"No apology can unring the damage," I said. "You made your choices."
He begged. He wheeled. People watched, cameras focused on the man unmasked.
It would not be enough for him to be private shame. He would live with the public memory—his kneeling, the room with its verdict. The internet loved a fall. For days messages and clips circulated. People recorded their whispers. The shame lived with him like a second skin.
In the following weeks, my story changed the calculus of the deals around me. Grandfather called for damage control and an internal hearing. The board removed him from a set of responsibilities. I watched from a distance—my mother was still alive, still cooking; Quincy still checked in; Faith still smiled.
The remaining battle was not only about the money anymore. It was about dignity. I had wanted to protect my mother, and in exposing Todd I had also freed myself from the pretense.
But the world is not clean-cut. My father, Isaac, called and told me he had repeated his offer in private letters to the family: more money for quiet cooperation. I said no. The money had strings.
At night, I took the chipped bowl and set it on my kitchen shelf. It had a hairline crack and a place worn smooth from years. I set it there as a reminder: some things are hard and functional. They keep feeding people.
When it was all over, I signed the documents that freed me from some obligations but kept others. The money my father put in my hand also helped my mother get the treatment she needed. The kindergarten carried on; Quincy was promoted. Kaitlyn Benton left the staff list after a week, humiliated and petty, and moved on with softer audience.
Todd? He learned about humiliation in the slowest way: he was never totally stripped of his title, but every public meeting had someone who remembered the night of the bowl. He tried to sue and found that the law is porous—truth had an easier time than he had imagined it would.
One evening, I visited the noodle shop where my mother still measured out bowls and watched her while she folded the dough. I reached into my bag and pulled out a small paper-wrapped package from the cake shop. She laughed and set it between us.
"Do you regret it?" she asked, as if she knew every answer already.
"Sometimes," I said. "But the regret is small next to certainty."
She smiled and handed me the chipped bowl she used to scrape the last broth into. "Keep this," she said. "It has fed too many to be thrown away."
I held it, and I knew what victory was: not humiliation for others, but the recovery of my choice.
Months later, when someone asked me about that night, I would take the chipped bowl down and run my finger along its hairline.
"People ask why I'm not bitter," I say, like it's a private ritual. "Because bitterness would mean giving them the work of my life. I have a child to raise someday, maybe, and my mother's bowls to keep clean."
The chipped bowl sits in my shelf. When the kitchen is quiet, I can hear the small clink it makes on the counter and it's like a clock that reminds me, "You kept something honest."
The End
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