Face-Slapping12 min read
The Peach Plan: How I Stole My Life Back
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I count days like prisoners count stones.
"Two hundred seventy-five days, six hours, thirty-seven minutes," I muttered, my voice small in the cold ward. "Not a single one of them was deserved."
"Number forty-six, med time!" a nurse barked, the words like metal.
I sat on the iron bed, knees drawn up, the mattress groaning under me. Around me, the ward buzzed with nervous songs and half-finished games. They called them patients. They called me patient number forty-six. I called myself Jolene Collins.
"Open your mouth," the nurse ordered.
I didn't move.
Delaney Chandler came closer, the same pinched smile she wore when she took the tablets from their blister pack. "Don't make trouble," she said.
I had been planning trouble for two hundred twenty-nine of the past days. The wrench under my pillow had a habit of cold-steel patience. My fingers had a habit of holding on.
"Delaney—" someone else warned.
The woman's hand pinched my jaw. "Open," she demanded.
I let the moment drag, let the ward's lights smear across her face, and then, without thought or mercy, I swung the wrench.
It hit her temple. The world burst into a clean, angry sound. Delaney's knees folded. The other nurse screamed and ran. I ran, because running is a muscle I had sharpened in my head.
"Down! Down!" I shouted, and the others dropped as if my voice had been a switch. We had practiced this for two months. Kayla had taught them the rolls and the faces, the slow breath that looks like illness. I had taught them the timing.
I was out the west door a minute later in a cleaner's jacket, phone in hand. The cleaner—Brooke Herrmann—dropped in a stupor, the wrench turned red with guilt and ash. I filmed the ward with her phone as I left. The director's men were brutal. They called the meds "care." They called the locks "safety." I called it theft.
I had stolen myself back.
"Jolene?" Kayla's voice trembled when I found her later in our shared apartment. She had bands of ink wrapped around hands that shook when she laughed. "You look like a ghost."
"It's a clean kind of ghosting," I said.
She made coffee. We sat on the threadbare couch while I told her, in short sentences, the things I had left unsaid for ten years.
"My mother—Jewel Ashford," I said, tasting the name like iron. "My sister—Kennedi Camacho. They switched us. They sent me here and pretended she was me."
Kayla's jaw dropped. "You mean—"
"I was wearing someone else's life while she wore mine. She sits behind my desk in a Dior dress, and my husband—Cornelius Andrews—is missing, or worse."
"Wait," Kayla said. "Cornelius Andrews? Your Cornelius? He—"
"The woman in my bed isn't my husband," I said. "Someone has either buried him or turned him into a shell. I have to find him."
We planned.
"I recorded the ward," I told Fidel Roberts later, over the phone when I dialed the director from a pay phone. "You helped. You will keep one path open."
He swallowed. "Miss Jolene, this is big. Very big."
"Two choices for you," I said. "Cooperate and get paid. Or the videos go public."
He agreed.
That night, I did what I had trained to do. I used two cheap dorm dancers at the Bellevue Club to drink down Kennedi. Kayla's contacts were small wolves but loyal; for coin they did anything. Kennedi drank until her head fell. We hauled her to a motel. Kayla's needle made sleep deeper. I traded earrings for patient gowns and tattooed a mole onto my left ear's back. Kayla removed Kennedi's mole and stitched a lie into my skin.
"You sure?" Kayla whispered as she drove the needle.
"As sure as someone who spent half a year awake in a sleep that wasn't hers," I said.
The mole matched. The voice matched. The clothes fit in places I had not expected. I watched myself in mirrors that night and did not recognize the person who smiled back—the person who had been Kennedi.
I went to Jewel's yard the next morning and slipped into the house like a thief who had the right to be there. I left the micro camera I had planted on the balcony, where it could pick up everything and betray nothing. I listened.
Kennedi's voice on the clip made my blood boil.
"That plant," she said, between laughs, while my mother fussed with a cup. "I told him to go under the stairs. He didn't die. I had to give him something. He won't get up again."
"Kennedi," Jewel cooed. "You're awful. You know how it was—your father, poor thing. You were always the good daughter."
"Good, ha!" Kennedi laughed. "He looked at me like I was the wrong one. So I pushed. And I gave him something."
My fingers went cold. I recorded everything.
We baited Kennedi into the club. She pretended to be everything I had been, and she forgot that she lacked the bones of me. She stumbled home when her sleep drug wore thin and found the house set like a stage that did not belong to her.
"Open the door!" she screamed at the weathered wood.
"Mom! Mom! It's me!"
I opened the door. Kennedi's fingers clawed the wood, blood under her nails. Jewel reached for her.
"You—" Kennedi shouted at my face. "You stole my life!"
I smiled. "No," I said. "You stole mine."
She lunged. My mother slapped her like she had slapped me as a child. The slap echoed with old seasons.
"Don't play this," Jewel hissed. "You always pushed and then cried."
"Stop!" Kennedi screamed. "She—she's lying! Mom! She's lying!"
"Is she?" I asked.
Jewel grabbed my ear and pulled. She looked for the mole. She looked for the marks she had learned to use like a cheat sheet. She grabbed my left ear's back.
"She's not me," Kennedi sobbed.
"No," Jewel said, and then the old mania crawled over her like a fever. "You are not my daughter. You're not my nice one. You're the one I hate."
She pushed Kennedi toward the car because Fidel arrived with a van and staff, just like I had arranged. Kennedi's screaming twisted into the same kind of thin sobs the ward made. She was hauled away.
I left smiling into the porch light as the van pulled off.
I drove straight to the basement where Cornelius should have been. The house smelled like rot. Cornelius lay on a thin bed under damp walls, shriveled from negligence. Tubes in his arms. His skin a pale map of shame.
"Cornelius," I whispered.
His eyes opened like someone waking from a misremembered dream. He tried to speak and a thin sound tore out. I took his hand and choked on a laugh and a sob.
"I found you," I said. "You were the light. You have to come back."
He blinked and squeezed my fingers once, twice, and then his eyes closed like curtains. But the movement meant something. It meant the beginning of a repair.
I moved him to a hospital even though it cost everything. I used our old accounts and begged favors and spent nights on call with doctors. He slowly learned to breathe without me holding his ribs. He began to wake.
"Jolene?" he said one morning, voice a dry twig.
"Cornelius," I said, and this time he smiled.
That was not the end. My life had been stolen, and I had to take it back in public with lights that cut and people with taste.
The company—our company, made from our names and years of sweat—was a runway and a battlefield. Kennedi had been spending like it was endless. Jewel had been wheedling the board with falsified signatures and fake orders. People were starting to whisper about mismanagement. They whispered less when Kennedi was pretty and loud.
I called a shareholders' meeting by technicality. I had regained a fraction of control, enough to demand an extraordinary general meeting. I sent the invitations in my sister's voice and in my hand. The board room smelled of coffee, linen suits, and the soft hum of wealthy expectation. Cameras lined the ceiling like small, watchful birds.
"Ms. Kennedi Camacho will preside today," Jewel told the attendees with a practiced smile. She stood at the head of the table, wearing a pearl necklace she had never deserved.
"Ms. Camacho," I said, stepping into the room wearing my sister's coat, hair teased and makeup heavier than mine. "May I speak?"
Jewel's smile stiffened. "Of course."
The room grew the kind of quiet only money can buy. Investors leaned forward like gulls over a baited sea.
"Before we begin," I said, "I'd like to show everyone a short video."
"What's this?" Jewel hissed.
I clicked the remote. The lights dimmed. I had Fidel forward all the ward tapes, the motel camera footage, the balcony camera, and the tiny recording of Kennedi's admission to my mother. The boardroom's screen filled with images of the ward—men with peach juice on their lips, nurses ignoring bruises, Delaney's hand with a pill bottle, the motel bed, Kennedi laughing while she admitted the plot.
There was a sound like a dropped plate somewhere in the room.
"That's the Bellevue Club," someone muttered.
"That's Jewel Ashford," another voice said, sea-cold.
The video cut to my mother's kitchen. Kennedi's voice, drunk and bright, confessed. My mother's laugh was ice. Then it cut to the basement—Cornelius with tubes. Someone gasped.
"That's our founder's home," the eldest investor said. "My God."
Jewel's color left. "You cannot—" she began, and then the footage played the motel audio: "I pushed him, then I gave him something. He wouldn't get up again."
"Stop it!" Jewel shrieked. "This is slander!"
I felt the old dinner table in my throat—the way my father had once smiled at me before the accident. I felt the wrench's metal in my hand again. I let myself stand in the center of that room like the person I had stolen back.
"Aren't you tired of lying?" I asked. "Haven't you exhausted cruelty?"
People reached for their phones. Clicks like beetles at a harvest. The room filled with live feeds as someone in legal pushed "Record" and someone on the other side of the table started a video on their phone. A journalist's email pinged, and a young PR intern who had been watching with eyes wide as spoons started filming.
"Security!" Jewel cried.
"Please," I said. "Watch."
I had more. I had the ward band recordings. I had emails from Kennedi stealing funds, transfers to names that didn't exist, signatures under my name. I had staff testimony—I had bribed the right frightened people with protection and small fortunes to tell the truth into a microphone that afternoon. Fidel had provided the final closure: the nurse's receipts, the ledger where drug payments crossed into the private account named Jewel Ashford.
The tide changed. Investors' faces shifted. "This is embezzlement," one man said. "This is criminal."
"Shut up," Jewel snapped at someone who dared to question her. She looked like a woman who had been costumed into being greedy and had misread the scene. Her hands trembled.
Kennedi's collapse was theatrical. Her mascara ran into black rivers as she cried out and accused me of being cruel.
"You stole my car! You did this!" she wailed, flinging her hands toward me.
"Kennedi," I said softly. "You pushed a life down the stairs. You played with needles. You told men to drink and you sold the bond of this company to your friends. You call me thief? I am taking back a life you sold."
The room watched Jewel shrink like paper in flame. Her eyes darted like a trapped animal. The chairman tapped his pen as if the sound would order the chaos.
"Call the police," someone said.
"Call the police?" Jewel's voice broke. "They'll see the evidence. They'll see the motel footage."
"Yes," I said. "They will. They will see the messages where you and Kennedi coordinated. They will hear the nurse's voice counting meds given without record. And they will know you bought silence with petty sums."
A hundred phones lit up the room. The paperwork on the table looked suddenly obscene.
"How could you?" one investor cried. "How could you betray the founder's name?"
"Mom," Kennedi sobbed toward Jewel, "you left me to take care of everything. I was desperate. I—"
"You are a liar," Jewel said. Her rage transformed into pleading. "Please—"
But the tide had turned. The PR intern's live stream now had thousands watching. Comments scrolled into a window like stardust. "Shocked," "Why didn't the media know?" "Is this true?" The chairman called security, but not before the police arrived—someone had already dialed them. The company lawyer, who had once been willing to sign anything, now refused to be complicit.
Jewel's face went through stages. First flame—white-hot incredulity. Then the pale frost of fear. Then denial. "This is a setup!" she shouted. "Jolene, you are mad! You were in a ward! This is—"
"You're the one who placed me in a ward," I said. "You called me crazy. You told the man who loved me that his wife was broken. You took the man who nursed me and hid him in a damp cellar. For what? Money? Control? To wear my life like a dress?"
"Please," she whispered at last, the voice of a small thing caught. "I didn't mean—"
"Do you hear the room?" I asked, and cameras hummed like bees. I walked forward and took two steps toward her. Investors watched. The chairman watched. Cornelius's sister—a quiet woman who had flown in—captured every tremble.
Her eyes filled. "No," she said. "Please—"
"There's no please," I said. "You gave them peaches."
A ripple of confusion went through the room.
"You will have choices," I told her. "The police will have evidence. The board will vote to remove you. The company will distance itself. People will know your name. You either go with the law, and face them, or you answer my public questions first."
She stared at me as if I were someone who had appeared from a library of her sins.
"Why are you doing this?" she begged.
"Because you sold me for a life I didn't want to wear. Because you made the man who loved me a vegetable so you could pretend. Because you let Kennedi play with lives. Because I want my name back."
The security man gently guided her toward the exit as the police stepped inside. People clapped and murmured, more in relief than in joy. A reporter shoved a microphone forward.
"Ms. Ashford, will you comment on the embezzlement allegations?" he asked.
She only looked at me. Then she turned to the officers and put her hands in front of her like a child.
The humiliation lasted hours. It was public, it had witnesses, and it had the slow corrosion of people turning away. Jewel begged. Kennedi sobbed and accused me of every crime she had committed. Delaney's name surfaced—Fidel turned a videotape to the camera and played the nurse's ledger. The staff who had beaten patients were called by name in the live stream and forced to stand under the white lights as they denied everything. They had been paid for each silence. Their faces betrayed them.
The crowd murmured in the lobby outside the meeting room, as onlookers put faces to the names that had been whispered. A board member's wife pressed her hand to her mouth and cried. A long-time seamstress who had built the first collection for the company stood in the hallway and said, "I knew." Her voice trembled with grief and something like pride that the truth was finally out.
It was more complete than I had imagined. The law would take its time, but the court of public opinion had already decided. They watched Jewel's face as she transformed from a connoisseur of cruelty to someone stripped bare and humiliated in public. She collapsed against a marble pillar on the way out, and for the first time in years, no one reached to steady her.
After, as the crowd thinned and the cameras rolled off, Cornelius squeezed my hand under the table. "You did this," he whispered. "You—"
"I did what had to be done," I said. "I took the life you kept alive with your kindness. I took it back and gave it back to you."
His eyes shone with tears and a feral relief. "I will forgive you in time," he murmured.
That night, when the city finally slept, I walked down to the old park where Kayla had once given me a tattoo when I was nineteen, drunk and defiant. I thought of the mole and the peach and the motel light. I thought of two hundred seventy-five days of counting.
"Will it ever be normal?" Cornelius asked me once, on a white hospital morning when he first clung to me and we both burned with a shared, fragile kind of hope.
"No," I said truthfully. "Normal is gone. But our life can be honest."
Kayla came over and hugged me. "You are terrifying and beautiful," she said.
"Thanks," I said, and I meant it. I thought of the micro camera on the balcony that had been the fulcrum of our plan, the tiny lens that watched and let me watch back. I thought of the wrench that had started it all, cold and heavy in my hand. I thought of the peach—the bait and the poison and the thing that tasted like summer and killed pretension.
The legal saga would continue. The board would reshuffle. Jewel would face charges. Kennedi would be examined and, if the law wanted, tried. The ward would be investigated and Fidel would either fall or survive on the crooked ledgers I had fed him. But in the quiet between things, when Cornelius slept with his hand over mine, there was a new contract: no more lies, and a watchful, cautious love.
"Do you regret it?" Kayla asked one night, the city's lights like loose coins beyond the window.
"I regret the days I lost," I said. "I don't regret this."
A week later, the hospital called with news that flattened me with joy: Cornelius had woken properly. He could speak. He could remember fragments of our life—the morning we opened our first boutique, the night we folded our first orders under a single lamp. He remembered the peach tree we had joked about planting on the terrace.
"Two hundred seventy-five days," I whispered to him.
He smiled, thin and real. "You kept counting," he said.
"I kept counting because someone must."
Outside, the world had changed its story about me. Inside, the world had changed the way I slept. I held Cornelius' hand and we listened to the steady, small noise of the hospital clock. It sounded like a second chance.
I kept the micro camera file. I kept the wrench in a drawer. And sometimes, when the sun warmed the balcony and the city smelled like laundry and diesel, I bit into a peach to remind myself that even the sweetest things can be instruments, and that some things we owe to ourselves.
"Don't ever let them know what price you paid to get here," Kayla said.
"They already do," I said.
She laughed. "Then they'll know how dangerous you are when crossed."
"I prefer useful," I said, and Cornelius squeezed my hand.
I had stolen back my life. The public would watch Jewel and Kennedi's fall. The law would decide the rest. But the small private things—his hand in mine, the way he frowned when concentrating on a stitch, the quiet way Kayla hummed while she inked—those were mine, and they hurt and healed the same.
Two hundred seventy-six days passed after my escape before the board finally released a statement clearing the company name. Cornelius and I walked into the sunlight together for the first time in a year. I kept my mole where it belonged now, on the left ear where truth and history could be read.
"Will this end?" he asked me as we stood outside, the street warm under our feet.
"It will..." I started, and then I smiled without finishing, because endings were for novels and I preferred the hard, unglamorous work of living.
I took his arm and we walked into the city, and the peach I'd bitten that morning warmed on my tongue like a promise.
The End
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