Face-Slapping14 min read
The Red Wine, The Fake Uncle, and the Last Laugh
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I am Jensen Baldwin. I graduated with a master's degree. I had a boyfriend, Raphael Davenport, who was kind, steady, and from a family that owned a factory. I thought what we had was simple and honest. Then my aunt Susanne Cotton and her daughter Adelyn Moreau started a storm I never saw coming.
"It'll be fine, Mom," I told my mother the night before we drove to Raphael's family's house for New Year. "We're just visiting."
"Just visiting," my mother repeated, not sounding convinced.
We arrived with the winter cold clinging to our coats and a box of wine in Raphael's hands and a little nervous laugh between us.
"Jensen, you look so happy," my mother said, proud and tired at once.
Raphael smiled at my parents like he always did: polite, quiet, a little shy when the family fussed. He handed my father his business card, and my father nodded as if meeting a good son-in-law was a factory meeting.
Then Susanne Cotton came in with a big bottle wrapped in silk.
"Oh," she said loudly, puffing with pride as if the silk itself had spoken. "This is rare. It came from overseas. For family, of course."
"Thank you," my mother said, but I felt the air change.
"What's that?" Susanne laughed at Raphael's smaller bottle. "This packaging looks similar, just... smaller. Are you sure it's real wine, or is it imitation?"
"Mom," I said, trying to laugh it off. "Raphael bought his bottle legitimately."
Susanne's smile sliced the room. "Oh? With what car did you get here then? People should be honest about the car they drive."
"What does the car matter?" Raphael's father, Hugh Patel, asked before Raphael could answer. He was a man used to numbers and machinery, not gossip.
"A regular SUV," Raphael said, soft and steady.
"A regular SUV," Susanne repeated, brightening as if she'd found a flaw. "Where? Let's go see."
By the time the family walked downstairs, Susanne had already cast her net. Her eyes flicked over the license plate, and she said under her breath, "Just a Volkswagen."
"Just a Volkswagen?" a cousin said, intending to belittle and failing. "That could be sixty thousand, too."
The mood changed again when someone checked the price online. Susanne's expression tightened; for a moment she had no words. I felt relieved, but the relief was shallow.
Dinner wandered through polite conversation, then Susanne steered it to me, smiling like a blade.
"Jensen," she tapped my shoulder and pulled me aside, "you found a fine man. But, you know, my Adelyn hasn't had any luck. You're younger; you could be generous. Let Adelyn have Raphael."
"Let him have her," I laughed, thinking she must be joking. "Aunt Susanne, you can't be serious."
"I am serious," she said. "Adelyn would mean well in that family. You'd be doing a good deed."
"Do you mean—" I cut in. "You want me to hand my boyfriend over like a package?"
Her smile hardened. "Sometimes families make arrangements. You're sensible; you have a degree. You should be reasonable."
"Reasonable?" I snapped. "You want me to be reasonable about losing the person I love?"
"Think of the family," she hissed. "Think of appearances. Think of your future."
The words were poisonous. I told her to leave. She looked affronted, then threatened, then openly furious.
"If you want us to ruin your reputation, go ahead," she said in a voice that tried to sound calm but wasn't.
"Do your worst," I answered.
I thought that would be the end. I was wrong.
A week later we arrived at Raphael's house again to talk about planning our wedding. The day was gray, the kind of sky that makes you feel like truth is heavier than usual.
Susanne and Adelyn were sitting in the living room already, grinning and whispering. They burst into a story about me that made my skin crawl.
"She has always been a loner," Susanne told Hugh Patel and the other relatives. "She's jealous. She steals from Adelyn and never confesses."
"That's a lie!" I said.
Susanne pointed at Raphael. "If she hadn't been involved, Adelyn and Raphael would have been together."
Raphael blinked. "I don't know her."
"No recognition at all," Susanne said with that smugness that meant she had set something in motion. "You see? She's trouble."
The room shifted. People murmured. My cheeks burned.
"That's not true," I said, but her accusation hung in the air like a foul smell.
When Raphael's father, Hugh, who kept his shoulders square even under pressure, stepped between me and Susanne, the woman shifted tactics. "I didn't expect this," she told him. "If you marry into that family it's your curse."
Hugh frowned and the room went silent. Later that night, when I lay in Raphael's apartment and he stepped into the shower, his phone lit up and I saw a message from Adelyn.
I didn't snoop. I told myself I didn't. But the picture thumbnailed on Raphael's screen felt like a needle.
"Is that Adelyn?" I asked, holding the phone now.
He came out, towel around his waist, and his face fell. "She just added me. Why would she—"
"Listen to her voice message," I said.
We listened together. In it, a trembling voice said, "Brother, do you like this photo? Are you free tonight? I'm lonely."
"She called him 'brother,'" I said. "And her photos—"
"They're not professional, are they?" Raphael said, frowning. "She just sent a lot of... images."
"She is directly hitting on you," I said. "Your aunt asked me to give you away. She is baiting you."
"I will block her," Raphael promised, and he did. But Adelyn kept getting new accounts and new messages. Then she began to leave messages that were slanderous about me, accusing me of being a homewrecker.
"She's lying," I said to Raphael. "She is lying to everyone."
"We could sue. We could call the police," he said.
"Not before the wedding," I answered coldly. "If this goes public now—"
"Then what?" he asked.
"Then our wedding is ruined. Let them make the first mistake."
They did not wait. The next act in Susanne's show was subtle: rumors in the relatives' group, pictures of me tampered with. Adelyn had taken a photo of me and doctored it, making it look as if I were kissing Raphael—pictures meant to shame me and tag along with her family's lies.
"This is fraud," Raphael said after I uploaded the original photograph online and showed how the other was clearly Photoshopped.
"Who will believe us?" I asked. "People always believe the loudest voice."
They believed Susanne's voice. The relatives turned on us. My mother nearly fainted from the stress. Susanne came to the hospital where my mother fainted—pure shamelessness—and started making wagers about the house that had been my parents' life savings. She offered to buy it for the original price and then act as if she were saving us.
"You're blackmailing them," I hissed at her in a hospital corridor.
"You don't understand business, Jensen," she purred. "We will give you a good name. We only want a fair price."
My father looked beaten. "Maybe it's better to get the trouble to stop," he said in the kitchen. "Maybe we should sell."
"No!" My mother snapped. "That house is for Jensen's wedding. It will not be sold to thieves."
Susanne came in, played the hurt card, and then—out of nowhere—pushed my father. She accused him of violence, then sneered when he told her to leave. In the ward she laughed aloud.
"I will not be bullied by you!" I shouted, and my voice woke everyone up.
She would not stop. She followed us to our house, to our friends, calling, threatening. She called my father's old business associates and told them the company was in trouble. She made my father's boss worried. She dragged our entire life into chaos.
"We need to stop them," Raphael said. "No more letting them set the terms."
"Then we will make them set the terms," I said.
I started planning the long game. Raphael and I talked late into the night. I bought food for our neighbors, made sure my parents had somewhere to stay away from harassment, and I spent my savings on a plan that sounded ridiculous even to me at first: a setup to expose greed with greed.
"An actor?" Raphael asked when I told him.
"A living, breathing, wealthy 'uncle,'" I said. "We will rent a villa. We will rent cars. We will rent status."
He swallowed. "You mean to trick them?"
"We won't lie about who we are," I said. "We will offer them a mirage of what they want. Then we'll give them the mirror."
I hired professionals: an actor named Gunther Crane—older, elegant, practiced; stylists who could turn any rental into a showroom piece; a team to run social media; actors to be guests. We painted the villa in gold light.
"Are you sure?" Raphael asked after he had met Gunther. The man had a soft laugh that smelled of whiskey and old money.
"Positive," I said. "They will think the world is at their feet. Then the truth will crack everything."
Susanne had, by then, been borrowing money from relatives, running up bills, and gambling on status. Adelyn had spent the last of a modest inheritance trying to appear richer than she was: custom dresses, fake jewelry, credit cards maxed out. She wanted a life that wasn't hers; she wanted to buy a future on debt.
We let them see the mirage. We made sure Adelyn heard we had an old "uncle" who might be a match for her ambition.
"He's extremely rich," I let slip at the family dinner. "He buys paintings for fun."
Adelyn's eyes went to me like a hawk spotting movement. The next thing I knew, Adelyn had arranged a chance meeting by the pool in that fake villa.
Gunther performed. He was a master at being languid, at laughing as if the whole world owed him a rose. Adelyn swooned, then began the ancient dance she had rehearsed with Susanne: flatter, flatter, promise and crisis, buy this time and love later.
But we had more ingredients. I asked Gunther to pretend to be interested, but to have a weakness: he loved to be lied to, and he hated insincerity when it finally showed.
"Say you like my watch," I told Gunther in a whisper the night before. "Let her try to buy you. Let her show you everything."
He obliged. Adelyn threw money at him. Susanne watched, salivating.
"She is a perfect candidate," Susanne whispered to me once, utterly failing to hide her glee. "She's so beautiful, and she knows how to dress. If she gets in, she'll secure everything."
"Is that what you want?" I asked softly. "For them to be secure?"
"Of course," Susanne said. "Why wouldn't I?"
I left the villa and let them have their banquet. I sat back and watched through the safety of my actors and my tech team.
"Do you want me to speak right now?" Gunther asked me once, smiling.
"Not yet," I said. "Let them spin their web. Let them believe in themselves."
They did.
Adelyn used everything she had left, and then some more she didn't have. She overdrew, she paid for staged dinners, she bought a watch she couldn't actually own, she even offered bribes to people who could introduce her to higher circles. Susanne, seeing the money slide away, doubled down. They both started borrowing.
"Just a little more," Susanne told a friend over the phone. "I'll pay it back with interest. You'll see."
"Where will you get the money?" the friend asked. "Are you sure?"
"I'm sure. My daughter will marry into a family of money."
When the time came, it broke. We had arranged for a staged scene at the best downtown hotel where Susanne believed we would present Adelyn. I had anonymously leaked a photo of the event to certain people—people I knew would attend.
The banquet room filled. Susanne glowed; Adelyn trembled with calculated excitement. People from their circle came. Gunther was there, tilting his head in indulgent amusement. I sat in a corner with Raphael, watching.
"Relax," I whispered.
Adelyn was called to the front to make an announcement. She had promised to clear debts tonight, and people were waiting for their money. The room hushed. She reached into her bag for a card and tried to tap her phone to show a confirmation.
"It didn't go through," she said. Her voice was small.
"Which card?" a creditor asked.
Her fingers shook. "My—my—"
Her bank app showed red numbers: investments gone, links frozen. The twenty thousand she had put into a stock—gone. The second card said the same. Her breath came short.
"What happened?" Susanne whispered, fury and fear making her voice high.
"Maybe it's a mistake," Adelyn said, but her face—pale, lovely, and finally powerless—told the truth.
Suddenly, a guest—someone we had asked—stood.
"Wait," he interjected. "I think the signals are that... she used a borrowed name. Maybe it's time to check her records."
"Check her records?" Susanne scoffed at first. "How dare—"
"Do you have proof of where you got the money for tonight?" Gunther asked in a voice that sounded like velvet tied around a chain.
Adelyn had none. Susanne had none. The room, which had been a stage for their ambitions, turned into an examination room. Guests murmured. Phones came out. The guest with the camera started playing back clips from the villa—Adelyn's frantic praise, recorded words of the actress we had hired cursing the "old man." Adelyn's edited conversation we had helped splice together played like a confession.
"She called that 'old man' names," the recording showed. "She said she only wanted his money." The room went cold.
"You lied to us," Gunther said slowly. "You dressed the truth and hoped it would look better than the original."
Adelyn's face crumpled. Susanne's smile faded. Phones flashed. People who had lent them money, relatives who had given them favors, stepped back.
"How could you?" a creditor shouted. "You promised to return money tonight!"
Adelyn tried to speak. Her voice was strangled. "I—I thought—"
"You thought we'd cover your bets," Susanne said, furious, and she lunged toward the guest who'd exposed them—the one who'd confronted their lies.
"No!" someone yelled. The room stilled.
"Call the bank," someone else said. "Get the police here."
The banquet room erupted into an argument. People who had been applauding minutes ago now turned away. The humiliation spread like a stain. Footage of the moment spread into group chats and social feeds. By morning, the video was everywhere: the woman who had begged, the daughter whose credit lines were broken, the aunt who had tried to wring money from family.
But that evening was only the beginning of Adelyn and Susanne's public downfall. They had borrowed heavily from unscrupulous lenders—shadow creditors who do not accept polite refusals. Money men came by at dawn, knocking not politely but in a way that sounded like the closing of a trap.
They painted threats on the outer wall of the house in red: "DEBT = PAY." They posted notices, they turned the gate into their stage and shouted. The neighbors gathered and pointed. Security footage of the shouts, of the red paint, of Susanne trying to bar the debt collectors, of Adelyn weeping on the front steps—these images traveled.
"Why didn't you stop?" a cousin asked Susanne on camera.
"I thought we'd manage," she said, voice thin and brittle. "I thought—"
"—that you'd be taken in by the glitter," the creditor finished.
What followed was not just shame. It was a cascade: people who had lent money reclaimed it by legal notice. Employers found out and cut ties. The relatives who had once supported them stepped back. Adelyn's credit rating evaporated; applications for work were denied. People who had relied on their borrowed charm found there was no real collateral behind it.
I had not wanted the violent sideshow, but I had wanted the truth to be visible, to make greed reveal its cost publicly. The hotel scene had been the first public knife. The debt collectors were the second.
Adelyn's collapse—how she went from prim and falsely confident to pale and pleading—was graphic and long. She begged Gunther one morning on the stoop to give her another chance.
"Please," she said, voice shaking. "I can pay you back."
Gunther looked at her the way an old man looks at a child who has broken a heirloom.
"You knew the rules," he said. "But you didn't know how to keep the promise."
"But—" she reached for him. He stepped away, a polite distance that was also a judgment.
Then, in front of a dozen neighbors, she attempted to touch his arm and he flinched.
"You must leave my property," he said. "And you must accept the choices you made."
She fell apart that way: the staging, the jewelry, the dresses—all worthless as tissue under a sudden wind. The neighbors watched, not with pity so much as with a sense of a moral ledger being settled.
Later, the police came because of the scuffles at the hotel. Adelyn's name was on a list of those who had caused the dishonest press. Susanne's face was recorded as she begged lawyers and relatives to stand with her. No one came forward.
The best punishment was the quiet: doors that once opened for them stayed closed. Invitations stopped. Loans dried. Those who had cheered for them in warehouse lunches found reasons to be elsewhere. People photographed their home with the red paint and sent the photos to group chats. Their names became shorthand for "taker" and "not to be trusted."
Word reached old acquaintances that they were "unreliable." Business contacts terminated relationships. The shadow lenders sent men to collect in nights. The humiliation lived on social feeds. The new points system of online reputation—no likes, no endorsements—sealed their social death.
Susanne's bravado turned into frantic phone calls, then into bargaining, then into silence. Adelyn, who had once posed and thrummed like a queen, now sunk into the back room, avoiding cameras. They were not jailed or beaten. Their punishment was the public unraveling of the life they'd been pretending to live, with onlookers and comments as their jury.
At the worst moment, Susanne stormed into my parent's small living room, smearing the red paint on the door like a warning. "You will regret this," she spat.
"We already did," my father answered, calm with the tiredness of a man who has worked for decades. "You gambled away your dignity."
The neighbors overheard. The rumor mill that Susanne had once run now turned on her. People stopped giving her the benefit of the doubt. They whispered about us, but in the end their whispers were about her more than about me.
After weeks of pressure—social, financial, and personal—Adelyn's borrowed suitors scattered. Even the rich young man who had briefly shown up and then been slapped by his fiancée pulled away completely once his world saw the facts. He left a coda: his fiancee, Hermione Garza, in a car with her hair unruffled and her jaw set, confronting Adelyn in the hotel corridor and giving her the beating that was both physical and symbolic. Videos of that scene circulated too, and the woman who had sought to buy her way into security suffered the final loss of face.
In the quiet that followed, our house regained a strange peace. Raphael and I could breathe again. My parents felt less under siege. Susanne and Adelyn, stripped of their illusions, could no longer easily con neighbors or strangers.
"Was it worth it?" Raphael asked me one night, when all the videos had calmed and our wedding plans resumed their slow, steady path.
I thought about the early days: his hands in mine, the way he smiled at me when he thought I was asleep, the small, unremarkable kindnesses that no staged dinner could ever buy.
"It was necessary," I said finally. "They forced us into this. They turned our family's life into their board game."
"Did you ever feel guilty?" he asked.
"Sometimes," I admitted. "But guilt is different from regret. I regret the pain they caused. I don't regret stopping it."
We married the following spring. The wedding was quiet and honest. Gunther came as a friend, not an actor, and his small, truthful speech made the room smile. Susanne did not attend. Adelyn did not send flowers.
Months later, I saw Adelyn at a market near my parents' house. She was unadorned, her cheeks hollowed from stress. For a moment she looked at me as if at a mirror, at what a life of buying affection can do.
"Why did you do it?" she asked without preamble.
"Because you were hurting people," I answered, and I didn't soften it.
She flinched. "I thought I could buy safety."
"You thought," I said, "that someone else's money would buy you a life. But you spent your own life trying to buy it. You did not get it."
We did not shout. We did not make a scene. The market hummed. She walked away with her head low. That sight, more than the banquet room or the red paint, felt like the end of a wound.
On the day I hold my wedding photos now, there is a small image I keep returning to: Raphaël laughing with his father, Hugh Patel, over a lived joke about a faulty assembly line. It is ordinary. It is safe. It is the opposite of what Susanne and Adelyn tried to create.
Our lives went on. I learned to lock my accounts, to keep family group chats at arm's length, to tell my parents when I worried. Most important, I learned that some battles require tricks and theatre and a long slow patience. I also learned the sharp truth: people who build their house on other people's misfortune will one day wake up to empty rooms.
I keep a small bottle of wine from the night Susanne first arrived. It sits in my kitchen now, unopened, a reminder of how quickly fine things can be twisted into tools. When I dust it, the label's letters glint and it looks like a secret we survived.
"Do you ever think of revenge as a lesson?" Raphael asked me once, folding laundry by the window.
"It was never revenge for me," I replied. "It was a mirror."
He folded his shirt and kissed my temple. "Whatever you call it," he said, "I'm glad you stood up."
"Me too," I said, and we laughed, small and private in our ordinary house.
The scandal left marks, but it also left truth. Susanne and Adelyn had wanted our life; they lost themselves trying to buy one. The last time I heard of Susanne she was moving cities and living on small loans, the sort of life she'd mocked years ago. Adelyn worked odd jobs, learning the hard gravity of payment and of earning back trust.
I do not wish them harm. I wish, quietly, that they learn to build honest things.
My ending is not a dramatic line about "always" or "we face it together." It is not a universal platitude. It is the very specific image of a small bottle of wine on my shelf, labeled in a language I once thought I could not be fooled by. Now, when I pass it, I think of the jazz of town in the winter, of a villa rented for a day, of the red paint on a wall, and of a laugh Raphael made when his father told a joke about a machine that refused to work.
"Don't forget to bring that wine to our future anniversary," he says sometimes, joking, as if the bottle were a talisman.
I still laugh. It is a private laugh—the kind that tastes like relief and like the first warm day after a long winter.
The End
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