Face-Slapping11 min read
The Green Sketchbook, the Cake, and the Long Reckoning
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They put my name on the giant banner and made the whole hotel smell like lilies and roasted meat.
"I didn't ask for all this," I muttered, fingering the edge of the microphone. "Thank you, everyone." The applause washed over me like a warm current; the lights made my glasses glint. I tried to smile small. I tried to be the grateful, polite daughter everyone expected.
"Indigo!" my mother called softly from the front row. "Say something about—"
"Thank you," I said into the mic, and heard a hundred forks pause.
Across the hall a woman moved like she belonged to a different weather system: Joan Lombardi glided in, hand in hand with my father, Roberto Leroy, both of them practiced smiles and practiced poses. Claire Cabrera trailed behind, same dress as mine, same bun as mine, as if she had cut and pasted herself from my life. Jonas Nunes hovered near her with that insincere protective look he'd practiced since he could stand.
I felt my mother's hand tighten in mine. Audrey Feng's knuckles were white. She had spent the last week cleaning, deciding, making herself as presentable as she could without betraying what she had been through. She had lost nearly everything she owned once, and she had rebuilt a life one shoe sale and one honest shift at a shop at a time.
"She's here to steal the light," my mother whispered.
"Let her," I said, though my voice trembled. "We have light of our own."
They took their seats like actors arriving for curtain call. Joan smiled like spring. Claire's grin was sharper than a shard of glass.
"Isn't this generous of them," Joan called from halfway down the aisle, loud enough for guests to hear. "We couldn't let such a big moment pass without joining. After all, family should share the joy."
"Family is a complicated word," I answered into the mic before I could stop myself. "Tonight is about art, not drama."
Claire stepped forward as if drawn by a magnet.
"What a joke," she said under her breath but the mic picked it up. "Who cares about art? People only care about names."
"Excuse me?" My voice betrayed me — higher than I'd intended.
Joan smiled and offered a small box. "Indigo, honey, something small I made for you. A token from us. I thought you'd enjoy a taste."
My brain catalogued the options: accept and appear magnanimous; refuse and look petty; open and risk whatever poison—literal or figurative—that could be inside. I did what daughters of poor mothers learn to do: I smiled and played along.
"Come on, try it," Claire cooed. "For tradition."
I picked up the box with the kind of careful politeness taught by a thousand awkward customer-service moments. I offered it to my father first. "Dad, try this one. For you."
"My little star," Roberto said with the practiced pride of a man who owned more than the city could hold. He didn't ask whose idea it was to come. He didn't ask how Joan had slipped across the threshold of our life fifteen years ago. He took the pastry with a greedy smile and bit.
The event, which had been a celebration, turned in a single second.
"My God—" someone murmured.
He gagged. His face flushed purple. He lurched, hands on his throat. Then he reached for the nearest glass of water and vomited it all back onto the table. The smell hit us like a physical strike.
"What's wrong?" someone hissed.
Roberto pushed the plate away, retching. The pastry had been laced with something foul — foul enough to knot stomachs.
"You put—" he managed, and the rest dissolved into sound.
Before anyone could think, more clear than the sound of cutlery falling, the world split along a moral seam. I acted because I'd seen the shadow of the plan form months ago: Claire's petty envy; Joan's hungry eyes. I had a camera in the studio window; I had watched things happen in small cruel flashes. But none of that prepared me for what my father did.
"Get out." The two syllables left him like a whip. He lunged, grabbed the pastry plate, and hurled it at Joan.
She didn't dodge. She tried to catch the flying box with the reflex of a practiced social predator, and the pastry exploded against her face with a wet, grotesque slap. Crowds gasped. Phones lifted like flowers turning to light.
"Shame!" someone shouted.
He followed the plate with his hands — he threw the water over her hair, then he seized the remains and smeared them onto her cheeks. The room froze; someone started filming.
Joan's laugh broke like glass. "Roberto, how dare—"
He didn't stop. He picked up a napkin and wiped his mouth with a fury that had hung in his bones for years.
"You've had my house," he said in a voice that cracked and then hardened into steel. "You had my name. You humiliated my wife. You spat on my daughter's life. You come here to steal what's not yours." He hurled the napkin back and struck at Joan's face with it as if it were a flag of indictment.
Claire and Jonas clustered, eyes wide with the sudden cold. Claire's face drained of color. Jonas, who had always been the fearful type, tried to step in, but everyone was watching; stepping in would mean choosing sides.
"Get down!" Roberto roared, and before Joan could scream, he grabbed whatever was left of the pastry and slammed it into her chest. Someone started clapping — at first a single, incredulous clap that bloomed into a chorus. Not in approval, exactly, but in the intoxicating combination of schadenfreude and righteous release.
Joan stood there, pastry beading in her hair, tears and frosting mixing on her cheeks, mascara running in black rivers. She looked ridiculous in a way she had never looked before. Her expensive dress hung off her like a costume, and for the first time in years she looked vulnerable and small.
"How dare you?" she sobbed. "How dare you make a scene in front of my friends!"
"You made a scene of my life," Roberto said. "You made a scene of my marriage."
Joan's eyes flicked to my mother, to me. "You," she said, slurring the word, "are nothing. You and your ugly dresses."
"Enough!" I snapped. The microphone in my hand felt like a sword. I may have been the quiet, bookish type for a long time, but there are moments when a lifetime of contained things wants its voice. "You ruined our house. You humiliated my mother. You have no shame."
The room smelled of lemon-scented soap and puke and the kind of tension that makes chandeliers seem like spectators.
Phones were everywhere now. Clips popped up on social media before the napkins had dried. Guests shouted, speculated, debated. Some cursed Joan. Some whispered about how Roberto had the gall to do such a thing in public. Some filmed my mother's trembling hands as she clutched at the tissues I offered her.
Joan lost it.
She stood up, knees knocking, and in front of a hundred cameras she dropped to her knees with a sob that made me ache with contempt and pity both.
"Roberto, please—" she croaked. "Don't ruin us. I've done so much for you. Don't—"
"Ruin?" he barked. "You've already ruined me. Get out." He pointed at the door like a judge issuing a sentence.
She crawled toward him, hands clasped like a child begging a king. "I can change, I will change," she pleaded, voice breaking. "Forgive me."
Roberto turned his face and, with the expression of a man who had reached the end of a long tether, said one word sharp enough to cut: "Leave."
For a full minute Joan begged, each word smaller than the last. Guests stared; forks hung suspended. Phones recorded every sob. Claire clapped her hands once and then went stony. Jonas cowered into his collar.
When they finally left, the music died. A murmur moved through the room, a new kind of noise — the noise of people taking sides. Someone began to applaud my father for his fury; someone else scolded him for the spectacle. News desks called. A clip with the headline "Billionaire's Daughter's Banquet Torn Apart" went viral in under an hour.
That was the first public unmasking. It satisfied a hunger in a thousand observers, and set in motion a chain that would not stop for years.
After the banquet, the videos multiplied. Commentary rained down. My father's outburst became both a meme and a headline. Joan's name was spat like an accusation. Claire's face was posted in reaction thumbnails with comments that would make a lesser person vanish.
But the banquet was only the beginning.
Weeks later, surveillance footage from a small art studio — footage we had chosen, my team and I, to release at the right moment — ran across national feeds. It showed a woman smashing a canvas, tripping a ladder, and then stepping on a prone figure. The person on the floor was me, or at least, what the footage suggested: an assault. In that clip, a metal palette knife glimmered on a table, and a hand reached out, grabbed it, and sank it into soft flesh. The camera caught it. The camera couldn't lie.
Claire's face went white live on-screen. She tried to laugh it off. She couldn't.
"She fell," Claire insisted on stage with cameras in front of her. "It was an accident. We were only—"
"A woman is stabbing another woman in your studio," my mentor, Pedro Beach, said into a microphone off-camera, voice flat and precise. "We all saw it."
"It's sick," someone hissed. "How dare she—"
The police had been waiting behind the curtains, acting on an arrest warrant compiled from footage and testimony. Jonas was cuffed first because he tried to flee. Claire was taken next as my voice, recorded earlier in a quiet hospital room, accused her of attempted murder. The rest played out in the hues of legalese and the bright, unforgiving light of media scrutiny.
Courtrooms are noisy in a special way — pens clacking, phones buzzing, chairs scraping — and our city had an appetite for spectacle. The trial footage played out on morning shows and in late-night commentary segments. The footage from the studio was replayed in slow motion, every twist of the knife turned into a moral moralizing. The prosecution painted a picture of jealousy and fraud. The defense raised a chorus of "misunderstanding" and "honest mistake."
But trial drama isn't the satisfying, instantaneous revenge the internet dreams of. The law is a patient beast. What readers of gossip wanted was the seeing, the immediate collapse. So we gave it to them in stages.
At the banquet Joan had lost her face in pastry and tears. In court, Claire and Jonas were stripped of certain privileges; Jonas's business deals evaporated like dew under the morning sun. Investors who had flirted with the family pulled back, not wanting messy headlines. Claire's supposed "art" was blacklisted in major publications. Her gallery bookings were canceled. She walked the streets with the look of someone being stared at by a dozen invisible judges.
Then came prison.
Not immediate. But when it came, the punishment was public in a different way: the video of their first weeks behind bars. They scuffled in a yard. Jonas's bravado cracked into terror when another inmate — a woman he'd once sneered at in a nightclub — knuckled him across the jaw. The footage circulated, accompanied by scornful captions.
Claire's punishment was worse for someone who had traded on charm. In a courtyard, while a hundred inmates circled and a guard watched with bored eyes, a woman who'd once been trampled in life now trampled Claire's dignity back. Not in the cartoonish "kneel and beg" way but in the real, grinding indignity of being mocked where there is no audience to clap: association after association withdrew support, and when she finally tried to reconcile with those who might help, she found pages of "do not touch" scrawled in the margins.
At a hearing on a gray morning, a victim's family member stood up and read a statement. The transcript hit every local feed.
"No one will forgive you on my daughter's behalf," said the woman from the crowd, voice steady. "You took a life for likes, for petty revenge."
Claire broke then. Her face collapsed, and for the first time since she had stepped onto our lives with a perfect bun and an impeccable smile, she sobbed with raw, honest despair. Jonas, who had spent his childhood being cursorily coddled, cried too. They had no one to catch them; their patrons had moved on.
The punishments took on different colors. Joan, gone from the banquet, wandered for months in corners of the city with a face haunted by both grease and humiliation, and in the end she fell into sickness. She would later be seen in a downpour beneath a market awning, offering to wash feet for spare change, a ridiculous humility after years of commanding men. That footage, too, circulated and inspired both cruelty and pity.
But there is another punishment that is slow and sweet to watch for those who keep accounts: reputation decay. Claire found that galleries no longer accepted her calls. Her "copies" were compared line by line to work that used to be mine; experts published breakdowns of brushstrokes, of compositions, and every comparison was a nail in a coffin. Jonas's partners quietly rewrote contracts. He attended investor meetings and felt the room cool like a building prepped for winter. That humiliation is public in its own way; it plays out econometrically and in boardrooms where the only sound is the clink of a glass.
And the last echo of justice came more personal.
I sat in a darkened room months later, letting all that storm pass, and Coleman Abbott walked in.
"You shouldn't be here tonight," he said softly, then smiled with a tilt that made my heart hiccup even after all the years of watching lighter things fall apart.
"Neither should you," I answered.
He laughed. "I found you because someone kept stealing your name and selling it as someone else's work. I didn't like that."
We spoke for hours in that small, light-filled studio that Seth and Ellianna had helped rebuild. He wasn't a loud man. He never spoke in the clanging tone of someone who owns a city; he spoke like someone who has counted losses and decided to buy compassion.
"You set the fire in your own house," he said one evening, folding a napkin. "You made them show their true faces."
"It didn't feel like that at the time," I said. "It felt like surviving a storm."
He took my hand. "Let me be your shelter."
Our love didn't arrive like a movie. It arrived like slow light creeping across a morning table. He loved the green sketchbook I kept — the one from that flight years ago — because it had a corner smudged with graphite and a dedication in my messy handwriting. He bought that first canvas that had been sold off and returned it to me. He called my mentor Pedro and arranged an exhibit that focused on one thing: truth.
"You can trust me," he told me one night, and I believed him.
When Claire and Jonas were sent to prison for attempted murder and for incitement — when Joan finally collapsed into the city alleys — the public watched, wrote, and moved on. But some punishments were private: Jonas watched his own reflection in a conference room and saw a boy who had been kept away from truth for too long; Claire learned that charisma doesn't sell empty skill. That, too, is a kind of justice.
Months later, in a quiet closing, I stood before a canvas and pressed a small daisy into the wet paint. I had once stood at a grave and left yields of marginal flowers, and I had once watched the sky open over a studio that smelled of smoke. I had once let revenge taste sharp on my tongue and found later that mercy tasted sweeter.
"I don't want to build a museum for my past," I told Coleman, smoothing the cloth. "I want to make paintings that make people feel less small."
"Then make them," he said. "I'll stand in line to buy the first one."
We laughed.
When people ask me about the banquet — the pastry, the smear, the crying — I tell them it's less interesting than they think. The thing that made the difference wasn't one dramatic moment. It was the green sketchbook on an airplane, the small camera in a studio window, the friends who didn't look away, and the steady, ordinary work of living after being burned.
At the end of the day I keep one small ritual: each year I set a daisy between the pages of that green sketchbook.
"Why a daisy?" Coleman once asked.
"Because daisies are stubborn," I said. "They grow in cracks, and they don't care about perfect soil."
He kissed my forehead. "Like you," he said.
There are people who will never forgive me for the way some things unfolded. There are people who will think I played with fire. Maybe they're right. But the world taught me a lesson about leverage and dignity: do not be given the smallness of other people's ambitions. Use your work. Use your truth. And when necessary, let the cameras show what the eyes refuse to see.
I am careful now. I keep the green sketchbook on a shelf where sunlight finds it. I keep a photograph of my mother smiling after she finally laughed properly one afternoon, makeup gone, hair messy, full of a kind of relief.
Once, standing in front of a sea of strangers who had come to see my paintings, a young woman said in a small voice, "Thank you. You made me keep going."
I looked at her, and for the first time in years I felt no hunger for revenge. I felt only the steady peace of a thing repaired.
I traced the margin of my green sketchbook with a thumb and tucked the daisy into a new page.
"Keep it safe," Coleman said. "It's history."
"It's future," I answered.
And I pressed the sketchbook closed.
The End
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