Regret12 min read
The Fox Mask, the Green Cap, and the Night I Stopped Running
ButterPicks10 views
I have a habit of sitting in the same seat at the same café. I like the way the light at five in the afternoon falls on the table like a thin promise. I like the way the chair remembers the curve of my back. I like the quiet that lets me hear my own thoughts before I send them out as headlines.
That evening I told the waiter, "No tiramisu. Black Americano. Ice."
He smiled like he already knew me. "Enjoy your writing, Tova."
I set my phone face-down and got to work. I had to finish a draft before seven. I had to be at Imani's Halloween party. I had to be awake and sharp for the world.
Then I felt a look. It was little at first, a pinprick on my spine. Journalists learn that feeling early. Call it an antenna. Call it caution. I turned.
A man across the room had his gaze fixed on me, and he kept smiling like he owned the moment.
I said nothing. I put on my glasses. I tried to look professional, busy. He kept looking.
I said, "Excuse me," and snapped my fingers the way you do to shoo a fly.
He just smiled louder. So I hooked the ghostly Halloween mask I had in my bag—an ugly, absurd paper face—and I put it behind one ear like a joke. Then I turned and fully faced him.
The cup of coffee he was lifting to his mouth suddenly blew back up and all over his shirt.
"Ah—!" he spluttered, coughing. People looked. Phones came out. Someone laughed.
I didn't laugh. I didn't want to. I liked the sharpness of the moment.
"Maybe don't stare," I said flatly, and walked out before the room could name me a villain.
That was foolish pride. I told myself I was brave. I told myself he had no power. Later I found out I had simply moved him from one place to another.
By seven I ran into Imani in the crowd, a walking disaster of polyester and glitter. "Tova! Where has your creativity gone? Year after year, the same mask."
"Some traditions are efficient," I said, slumping beside her.
"That ghost you are now is a classic," Imani said, then a voice called her name.
A tall figure in a white veil—part zombie bride, all confidence—swooped in and dragged Imani away without even a courtesy. I blinked, listening to the rustle of the crowd, when someone sat across from me.
He was wearing a fox mask. He pushed the mask down so his whole face was visible—handsome, dangerous in the way handsome men sometimes are. He looked like a photograph that decided to walk.
"Nice mask," he said.
"Thanks," I said, stiff. "You shouldn't sit with strangers."
"You're the stranger here," he said, smiling easily. "I remember you."
"I don't think so."
"You do," he insisted, voice soft. "You just forgot."
"Then remind me," I said.
He did. He told me a story that was not a lie and not the whole truth. He moved like someone who was used to making people uncomfortable then soothed. He knew too much about my coffee order. He knew I always sat in the same spot. He had a way of leaning that made me impatient.
"You're a little full of yourself, aren't you?" I said.
"Maybe," he answered. "But I'm also impatient. I wanted to see you."
"Who are you? What's your name?"
He smiled in a way that turned his mouth mean and kind at once. "Miles Blair."
Miles. The name landed like a stone. It hurt.
"I know that name," I said.
"You met me at a cafe," he said. "I might have been rude."
"You might have been a creep," I said.
He blinked like I had slapped him. "That's fair."
Imani came back, dragging her new friend—Katelyn Banks—by the arm. "Tova, this is Miles? You two know each other?"
"I do," I said. "We have history."
"What history?" Imani asked, playful and dangerous. "Love triangles? Ghosts? Drama?"
"All of the above," I replied.
Miles laughed. "No triangles, only bad timing."
"You disappeared," I said suddenly. The memory of his absence was a raw sore. Three years without a name, then a return wearing a mask like it was nothing.
"I didn't disappear," Miles said. "I was dragged under."
"Dragged under by what?" Imani demanded.
"By an accident I don't like to retell," he said.
"Tell it," I said. "Tell me now, clearly. I was young and I was lying awake for three years because of you."
He leaned back and exhaled. "There are versions. The legal version. The private version. The version that hurts the least. If you want the least, I can give it in six words."
"Give it."
"Life went wrong. I left. I'm sorry."
"That's six words," I said.
"I can give you a story if you want a story," he said, and for once he looked tired, not sly. "I want a proper conversation."
"All this for a conversation?" I asked. "You know what would have fixed a lot? Telling me you were leaving."
"I couldn't," he whispered. "I thought it was better for you."
"Better for me to not know?" I asked. "Better for me to burn?"
We spoke like that until the party dissolved into separate groups. I left with Erik James waiting in his white car, the boyfriend I had because life had taught me to stop chasing ghosts. He was calm and efficient. He kissed me like he would read a script. "Long night, Tova. You okay?"
"Fine," I said, and we drove away in the cold light of the street.
After that, things got messy in the way of old wounds. I kept seeing Miles. He was both stranger and memory.
"Why didn't you tell me you were coming back?" I asked him once, drink in hand.
"Because I thought I'd appear like a ghost and then you'd forgive me," Miles said.
"For what? Letting me get sick without answers? Letting me have a life that wasn't honest?"
"It wasn't a choice," he said. "There was a crash. They took my passport. By the time I could move, it was complicated."
"Complicated," I repeated. "You left. You didn't call. You didn't send a postcard. You just vanished."
"I thought you'd be safer that way," he said, eyes honest. "I was wrong."
"I lived," I told him. "I didn't wait."
"Then why does my being here matter?" he asked.
"Because it hurts," I said. "Because I had to imagine a thousand reasons over three years."
He did not argue. He only looked at me like someone who'd brought a map to a city that had been erased.
Then came the ugly things — the men outside the café who followed me, the texts from numbers I didn't know, the time someone's hand lunged for my camera in a dark alley. People like Briggs Bartlett make careers out of other people's fear. Briggs is never on time for honesty. He is always on time for trouble.
"You should let me help," Miles said the night the three men cornered me outside the small station.
"You don't need to be my knight," I said.
He didn't ask me twice. He moved without thinking—hands, feet, a sudden animal will—and the three men learned what happens when someone fights like a man who has been trying to outrun something for years.
Later, after the police and an embarrassing trip to the emergency room, I replayed it in my head and realized the thing I feared most wasn't the danger itself but what the danger meant. That I had been vulnerable. That someone could have taken everything.
"You okay?" Miles asked, pressing a cold towel to my forehead.
"I will be," I lied, because the truth was soft and jagged.
Graham Duncan, the officer who handled the complaint, was a steady presence. "We have enough to keep them for now," he said. "But watch your steps. We'll do patrols."
"Thank you," I said to him. "For doing what you do."
Graham was all official kindness. He was the kind of man who knew how to take the temperature of a situation and find the exact medicine.
We opened other doors. We chased down small leads. A pattern emerged: some men targeted people leaving bars, others waited near underground parking lots. One of them—slick, professional—would often talk about "settling quietly" and "keeping it off the record." His name was unknown then. Later we learned his face and his arrogance. Later we learned his business card said nothing about mercy.
I kept going to work because the newsroom had rules: deadlines, facts, publication. It grounded me. Miles started helping me with practical things—pushing a cart of equipment, lending phone chargers, staying near when I had to work on the street at night. He was a bridge between my old anger and the patience that comes with time.
Then the extortion case came to us through a trembling man named Briggs Bartlett. Briggs had been in a fight the week prior. He had a daughter in the hospital, he said, and a bill no one could cover. He told a story smooth as a con. I knew it was a lie within minutes.
"You're sure it's not a scam?" I asked.
"My gut says it's organized," Miles said. "It's not amateurs."
"Who runs this?" I asked.
"Someone who watches, waits, and picks the easy prey," Miles said. "Someone who thinks money buys silence."
We followed breadcrumbs. We found recordings, timestamps, payment records. We found a number of fathers who had paid for quiet accidents, for quiet repairs, for quiet silence.
I arranged a community meeting. It would be a small press conference at the city's safety center. I wanted to publish a story. I wanted men like that to know they couldn't hide in the dark.
On the day of the press meeting the room smelled like cheap coffee and lemon cleaning spray. I stood at the podium and touched the microphone. I had Miles and Graham by my side. I had a clip of CCTV footage, bank transfers, a voice recording, and the phone with the mp3 that made me blush because it was the night Miles had caught my ridiculous, loud sleeping voice. I had everything in a manila folder with an elastic band.
"Today we are here for two reasons," I announced. "To talk about drunk-driving prevention and to expose an organized group that preys on drivers at night."
"You're going to call them out?" someone from the crowd shouted.
"We are," I said. "We have evidence."
I played the footage on a big monitor. It showed a man steering his car strangely, another car that hit him on purpose, then demands, then threats. The room murmured. Phones went up. The man who had been confident in his anonymity sat at the back of the room, sipping coffee like he had time.
He stood when I paused the footage and asked, "Is this yours?"
He spoke with the arrogance of someone crowned by his own lies. "I am a private citizen," he said. "You cannot broadcast—"
"Briggs Bartlett," I said, and the name hit the room like a cue.
He smiled and his face changed like a mask. "You have the wrong person."
"You set the trap," Miles said calmly. "We have your calls recorded. We have bank transfers. We have the driver who paid you caught on film. We have the man who took your money here. We have your threats."
Briggs's smile stayed, then faltered. He looked at the screen. The crowd had gathered around the monitor. Phones recorded each frame.
"That's not me," he said. "I didn't—"
"You're denying it," someone in the front row said. "That's brave."
"Do you have anything to say that isn't denial?" Graham asked. His voice was a professional blade.
Briggs's face flushed. The color came fast. He had been comfortable when he thought he was invisible. Now the crowd's eyes pinned him like insects. "This is defamation," he gasped. "You can't—"
"You were seen," I said. "You accepted a transfer three times this month. We called your number. You answered."
He stumbled, trying to find a script. "You can't prove the intent—"
"I can," Miles said. "We have your own words. We have witnesses. We have the money trail."
For a moment Briggs recovered his bluster. He straightened, tried to play the alpha. He raised a hand like a conductor and shouted, "You have no proof! These are stolen edits! You are liars!"
The murmurs became louder. Phones clicked. Someone in the back laughed, a nervous sound that spread into a chorus. A woman pulled out a battery pack and kept recording. A man clapped slowly, a single sharp sound that snapped across the room like a starter pistol.
Then the screen played a voice message Briggs had sent to one of his accomplices. He had explained in clear, uncensored words how to "target the drivers" and how to "secure the money." His voice had the smooth cruelty of someone who had practiced threats as if they were breathing.
At first Briggs looked proudly untouchable. Then his smile twisted.
"That's not me," he hissed.
"Listen," I said, my voice low. "You begged for money. You set a plan. You did not hesitate to threaten people who wouldn't pay."
"You're lying," he whispered.
A woman in the front row stood and shouted, "My cousin paid him! He threatened to crash our car!"
"You are a coward," another voice cried.
Briggs's posture broke. The arrogance drained away and left naked fear. His chest trembled. He stammered, "I—no—it's not like that—"
Someone in the crowd took a photo and uploaded it. Another opened a live stream and began narrating. The room filled with a new sound—electronic buzzing, the crowd capturing every second. People leaned in, whispering, shaking their heads. Some taped the scene. Someone started to clap; others joined in, another gesture, not of mockery but of relief to see a predator unmasked.
Briggs dropped to his knees right there on the linoleum.
"No—please—" he cried. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
"Begging?" a man called from the back. "Now you beg."
"Get him out of here!" Briggs howled. "You can't ruin me! I'm a father! I'm—"
"That's what you said when you took the money," I replied. "You thought it would be enough to buy silence. You were wrong."
He clawed at the carpet. For a while he thrashed between fury and shame. He looked up at the faces and their cameras and the law forming around him. Then he looked at Mile's face, which held no glee, only a tired kind of justice.
"Please," Briggs begged, voice breaking. "Please. I'll return it. I'll—I'll do anything."
The crowd's reaction was a choir. Some shouted that the police should be called. Some hissed with disgust. A woman recorded his begging and cheered like it was a sport. Phones lit the room like fireflies.
Graham moved forward. "Sir," he said quietly, "we will take statements. Stand up."
Briggs found he couldn't. He crawled. The room watched. He tried to plead with the press. He tried to appeal to faces now recording him for posterity.
"You thought you could hide," Graham said. "When you prey on people who come home drunk, who are afraid and vulnerable, you pick the wrong city."
"Don't let him go easy," someone muttered. "Make him answer."
Briggs's expression slid from shock to calculated denial to crumbling shame to a small, animal pleading. He covered his face with his hands. The cameras did not stop.
The footage of that day ran on the city's pages for three days. People dissected Briggs's words and his timeline. They filmed him being led into the police van. He screamed threats at cameras and later begged in front of the magistrate. He was stripped of his bravado. He was exposed.
When the legal system did what it does, there was paperwork and fines and a short stay in a holding cell. That is not the end of punishment, but it is one form of consequence. Public shaming is ugly, but it can also be a kind of cure when the usual systems are too slow.
After the storm, Miles and I stood on the sidewalk. He looked at the cracked-screen phone in his hand and then at me.
"Why did you stay?" I asked.
"Because running was a lie," he said. "And because you didn't deserve silence."
"Why did you leave?" I demanded, and the old ache came back.
He searched my face as if trying to read a book he'd once loved. "I thought I was protecting you. I thought my absence would keep you clean of the chaos I was in. It didn't. I'm sorry."
"You cost me three years," I said.
"I know," he said. "And I will take that. I will try to make up the rest."
We did not solve everything. Erik and I tried to speak in normal tones and failed. He sat at the cafe one afternoon and said, "We are not the same as before."
"What are we then?" I asked.
"A partnership," he said, gentle as always. "A partnership with a filter."
"A filter," I repeated. "So we are married to convenience."
"Not married," he said. "Just...compatible."
That answer smelled like a compromise. I left it sitting between us like a half-drunk cup of coffee.
Miles and I grew into a cautious conversation by habit. He started inviting me into his world, the messy, practical parts. "Your jacket is leaking," he'd say, and then he'd hand me a bag.
"You are my insurance company," I told him once, and he laughed.
"You're my stubborn reason to be a better man," he said.
We were idiots in love with an old map. We kept coming back to a place where we had been young and reckless. We kept bumping into the past like furniture in a dark room, bruising knees against memory.
One night I found the velvet box with the jade bracelet buried in my bottom drawer. Inside, a child's memory—Miles at twelve, a tiny box, a promise of being brave.
I took the bracelet out. I touched the beads. I thought about leaving it alone, about burying him in the place where other youthful ghosts lie.
Instead I called Miles.
"I found it," I said.
"Found what?" he asked, breathless.
"The bracelet," I said. "The one you gave me all those years ago."
There was a silence like a held breath. Then he said, "Keep it. Keep it for when we aren't afraid."
The story never promises that all wounds will heal. Briggs answered for his crimes. I wrote the article that made the city notice a network and pushed the police to patrol parking lots more often. Miles and I moved forward in tiny increments. Erik and I separated the soft ties that had kept us safe but static.
When I put the fox mask back on the shelf, I did not think of tricks. I thought of the night I pressed the paper to my face and made a man choke on his coffee.
I keep the green cap—the silly baseball hat they broadcast over the mall long ago—in a drawer. It is a ridiculous little trophy.
Sometimes at night I take the little mp3 file Miles sent me—the one where I snore and croon like a bad singer—and I press play. I hear myself sound human and foolish and warm.
I used to be afraid of being noticed. Now I write so people see. Miles sits near me at the desk sometimes and we bicker like kids about sentence flow. He uses a pen and he corrects me. I tell him that is unprofessional.
"You are my chaos," I said to him one evening, looking at the light through the blinds.
"No," he corrected, smiling. "You're my work—and my stubborn rope. When you pull, I don't let go."
We have not promised forever. We have only admitted to staying.
And that is enough.
The End
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