Face-Slapping15 min read
The Silver Ring, the Photo, and the Last Goodbye
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I am Kaede Picard, and I woke up to Easton Ruiz’s voice sounding like an accusation in our living room.
“You can leave. Go find someone better,” he said, like he had practiced the cruelty.
I stood still. My eyes stung. “You can’t be serious,” I managed.
“You heard me.” Easton’s face was flat. “If you don’t like it here, go.”
I pressed my hand to my chest as if I could keep him from saying it again. “Did you mean that? You really mean it?”
He put his cigarette down on the ashtray without looking at me. “I do. I won’t force you to stay and suffer with me.”
I stared at him; the memory of two years ago — the promise, the small silver ring, the way he had held me like sunlight — crowded my mind.
“You were poor, Easton. I chose you knowing everything,” I said, trying to find the old warmth in my words.
“Times change,” he snapped. “I can’t drag you through the collapse. You deserve not to be tied to ruin.”
“You said we would face everything together,” I said. “You said—”
“Enough,” he cut in. “You can’t cook, you can’t manage a thing. You’re useless.” His voice was a blade.
I had come home that morning with the first attempt at making him dinner. I had burned the fish, scalded my fingers, left a mess. I thought I would laugh it off together and tell him something big — the reason I had been clumsy and nervous.
“I am pregnant,” I whispered into my palm, like a secret to my own heartbeat. I had planned to tell him. I had wanted his arms around me, not his words like knives.
He didn’t see the kitchen smoke, the little bandage on my finger. He only saw imperfection.
“Find someone better?” I said. I heard my voice break. “Fine. I’ll go.”
I left then. I took a cab, and I whispered the news to the driver because there was no one else I could tell.
“I’m... I’m pregnant,” I said.
The driver smiled, not understanding the private tremor of my life and pain. “Congratulations, miss.”
The word surprised me into a little laugh that was half-sob. I clutched my belly.
I sat on a stone bench in the park and told the tiny person inside me everything.
“You wait until you’re big enough,” I said aloud. “Then we’ll make him—your father—kneel for sure.”
I cried and I talked to the future we had been promised.
At the same time, Easton sat back in our villa, smoking to silence the ache. He had Ellis Brandt and Arturo Crosby with him—two men who pretended to be neutral but carried decisions like weapons. Ellis said, softly, “Easton, are you sure this is right?”
Easton rubbed his temple. “I can’t let her suffer and then watch her stay out of pity.”
“You love her,” Arturo said.
“I loved her.” He crushed the last word. “This is what’s best.”
I thought then that he was acting out of noble selfishness. He was breaking us so I would not break. It sounded like something brave until I found him later with Sofia Novikov in his office.
“What are you doing here?” I had demanded, fingers white around the thermos I’d brought.
Sofia’s lips curled. “You’re embarrassing yourself, Kaede.”
Easton’s eyes looked away. “This is out of the way. Please leave.”
I pushed the door open and saw them there, so close that I tasted betrayal.
“What is this?” I cried.
Sofia laughed like she deserved a stage. “He told me to wait. He told me this was necessary.”
I slapped her. “You—shameless—”
“Hit me if you must,” Easton said, sudden and cold. “Hit me.”
I slapped him instead. Two hard slaps. It did not fix anything. He only said, quietly, “Then we are done.”
That night, the world narrowed to a single sharp point: our divorce the next morning. I walked out without telling him I was carrying his child.
On the street I stepped into the path of a car and blacked out. I woke up in a hospital with a man by my bed.
“Are you all right?” he asked. He was calm. He was not Easton.
“I think so,” I managed. My voice was dusty. “Who are you?”
“Nicolas Buck,” he answered. “You fainted crossing the road. I drove you here.”
There was steadiness in his face and a gentleness in his hands. He was not the thunder of my past; he was a handhold.
“You should call someone,” Nicolas said, “or I can call.”
I shook my head. “No. I… I don’t have family to call.”
He looked at me. “Then let me make sure you’re safe. And if you want, I can take you home when you’re ready.”
He held a card out anyway — business-like, but I noticed the careful print. “If you need anything, Kaede.”
That evening Easton’s voice reached me again, but different: desperate. “I have to go to work. I’ll be back”—or so he said. The next day he invited Ellis Brandt to pretend he didn’t know me, to stage a scene with Sofia Novikov.
I decided to go to the civil bureau anyway. I had thought the place would be a battlefield. Street after street was lined with people holding hands, and then pairs that looked like they would break.
Inside I signed papers that said we had no children, that we had no assets, that I would leave without a claim. I lied when I checked the box next to “No children.”
“You’re sure?” the clerk asked. “Are you sure you want to give up everything?”
“Yes,” I said. “Do it.”
Easton smiled a small, hollow smile and said, “Take the house. Take anything. I don’t want any—”
I laughed once, bitter. “I want nothing from you.”
We signed. We posed for the photograph that would be the mark of the end. I watched the two of us in the composite portrait and felt like a stranger.
Outside, there was a man in a dark suit watching us: Nicolas. He watched my face when I stepped out. Later he followed and then, without drama, he offered me a quiet place to regroup and a ride to my friend Leah Bradford’s home.
“Leah will take care of you,” Nicolas said.
Leah met me that night with practice and kindness: balloons, warm soup, and a bright, ridiculous banner—“Single and Strong!” It was ridiculous and I needed it. I slept in a bed that was not mine with a silver ring in my suitcase and a photograph that used to mean the world.
Easton returned to his office and found that Ellis Brandt had already placed somewhere a phone call. Later, he received a message that would change everything. He had been certain his company was finished; in one day a new investor, Edgar Lemaire, stepped in with a massive offer. The company had a lifeline.
“Call her,” Ellis urged. “Tell her.”
Easton dialed my number, and when I did not answer he left a message that said, “I didn’t... I can fix it. Please.”
I hung up before his second call. But he sent something else: a video. He said the video would prove that he had not been unfaithful—that Sofia had been acting out, that it had been theatrics, that the truth would absolve him. I opened the file.
I watched footage of the day. The cameras in the office told a different story. There were pauses where Easton looked like a man cornered by his own failure. There was one cut where Sofia leaned on him with the kind of theatricality that was meant to enrage. There was another cut later that showed Sofia’s mobile messages to a client, promising favors for investment deals.
“You can’t trust her,” Easton told me on the phone. “I can explain.”
“I saw them,” I said, small. “I saw—”
Then I fainted.
When I came to, the hospital was full of people. The lines at the reception became a crowd. Leah had called on friends. The rumor of Easton’s betrayal had spread faster than any private confession. People clustered like birds. Someone uploaded a shaky phone video to a social feed. The scene that followed would become the worst and best day of his life.
I decided I needed to know the whole truth. Not a call, not a clip — the truth. I asked Nicolas and Leah to go with me to the company’s public investors’ reception where Edgar Lemaire and his associates were due to meet the board. It was the only public stage left to us.
We arrived an hour early. The hall brimmed with chairs, with reporters, with investors who smelled like coffee and power. Ellis Brandt sat poised at the front and announced that Easton Ruiz had one last presentation.
Easton walked in looking over-tired but composed. Sofia sat nearby, smiling a practiced smile. The room listened to his pitch for the new capital, then settled into quiet afterward. The lights hung still and the air tasted like waiting.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, stepping forward. My voice shook but the room hushed. “I need to speak.”
A dozen cameras clicked. “This is private.” Someone by the stage muttered.
“It’s not private anymore,” I answered. “I have watched a video. I have watched the messages. I have evidence.”
Sofia’s face lost color. Easton’s composure flickered.
I pulled out my phone and hit play. The room watched a sequence of messages where Sofia made promises to Edgar Lemaire—messages negotiated like commodity deals. There was another sequence: a recorded audio of Sofia rehearsing a scene with Ellis and Arturo, with the two of them coaching her on how to get Easton to look guilty. The video ended with the private footage showing Easton distracted, torn, and then leaving the room while Sofia performed for the camera.
“You used me to save your company,” I said. “You used me to close a deal.” My voice sharpened. “And then you told me to go.”
Easton’s mouth opened. “No—Kaede—this is not—”
“You told me to leave because you thought I would suffer,” I continued, unladylike with my anger. “You thought I would be spared. But you spared yourself the trouble of choosing.”
Sofia stood up, suddenly defiant. “You think you’re so righteous—”
“Sit down,” I told her. “Everyone, please.” Cameras moved closer. People began recording. A ripple of whispers took hold like wind through dry grass.
Sofia’s smugness evaporated into a flash of anger. “You think you can stand here and—” She stopped, because the hall was suddenly full of charged attention.
A reporter stood and asked a question. “Ms. Picard, do you accuse Mr. Ruiz of staging his own downfall?”
“I accuse them of theater,” I said. “I accuse them of dressing a lie up as truth to get money. And I accuse him of trying to discard me to save his name.”
A chorus of shuffles: breaths, phone shutters, tiny gasps. Easton’s expression crumpled. He had been proud, but pride is paper under a flame.
“I... I did what I thought was best,” he started. “I—”
“You made me leave our home while I was carrying your child,” I answered. “That was your choice.”
He tried to find words. “Kaede, I wanted to protect you. I thought—”
“You wanted to protect yourself,” I said. “Protect your reputation. Protect a fragile company. Protect your pride. You used someone else’s favor—this scene is your favor—and you asked me to vanish.”
“No,” he said, and his voice went thin. “You don’t understand—”
Several people in the room started recording in earnest. An older investor coughed and said, “This is a scandal. Ms. Picard, if you have evidence—”
“Play it,” a young reporter demanded. “Let’s see the messages. Let’s see the receipts.”
I held up one piece of paper I had kept: a screen capture of Sofia’s message to Edgar Lemaire with a promise of intimacy in exchange for influence. I felt foolish holding a phone like a trophy, but I felt vindicated.
Sofia’s face changed. Stage-smile, then shock, then indignation, then denial.
“This is defamation,” she spat. “You have no proof.”
“You do,” Edgar said gruffly, standing with his crisp suit. “Do you deny corresponding with my associate?”
Sofia blinked. For the first time, she looked small.
“You colluded to stage a scandal to push for a deal,” I told the room. “And you made a fool of me.”
Sofia’s eyes hardened. “You can’t prove—”
“Oh, we can prove it,” Ellis said. He stepped forward with a folder. “We have copies of messages. We have timestamps. We have witnesses.”
Suddenly the room filled with the noise of a hundred devices capturing the fall of a plan.
Sofia’s expression dissolved in three stages: smugness, confusion, then something like terror. She staggered back as reporters shouted questions. Someone in the back started clapping, a slow, cruel wave that turned yes into a mockery.
“Look at her,” a woman said near the front, whispering loud enough for a mic to catch. “She’s all smiles until the cash is gone.”
Sofia tried to deny, to deflect. “You can’t—this is private—”
A young man near the stage yelled, “She traded her dignity for a contract!”
Sofia’s face went white. She began to protest, then sobbing began—affecting at first, then real as the crowd watched. Easton leaned on a column like a man who had been stripped of armor.
“What have I done?” he whispered, a child asking a grown-up for absolution.
Sofia stumbled backwards, and someone in the crowd pointed their phone like a judge’s gavel. A woman in the front stood and hurled a pamphlet at her feet, a small paper volley of contempt.
Sofia’s reactions were a performance unravelling. At first, she tried to claw back control. “You don’t know—” she said.
“No,” I said. “You don’t get to rewrite what you wrote. You don’t get to pretend it wasn’t real.”
She looked like a woman who had practiced cruelty until the script betrayed her.
“You promised favors?” a reporter called, by now hungry.
Sofia’s face lost blood. “I—no.”
People started whispering, then talking loudly, then laughing. Some recorded, some took photos, some just stared. A tall man stepped forward and shouted, “Shame!”
Sofia’s hands clenched. Her confidence broke into stages: first she tried to maintain the act of innocence, then she looked at the cameras and realized the entire city was watching, then she began to beg. Not elegantly. Not on cue. She dropped to her knees in front of us, in the center of the hall, where the echo would carry. Her heels scraped the floor. Her mascara streaked down her face.
“Please!” she cried. “Please—I didn’t mean—don’t ruin me!”
A dozen cameras leaned in. Phones flashed. A woman in the front whispered, “Get her on video.” Someone laughed. Someone recorded her begging.
Sofia’s voice went from hearty to high to cracked. She turned to Easton. “You—please—tell them you—”
Easton’s jaw quivered. For a second he looked like the Easton who proposed beside a fountain two years before, the one who said a ring and a lifetime. Then he looked at me. The crowd was heavy with curiosity.
The room responded the old way crowds respond to spectacle: with noise. There were questions, whispers, the clack of heels. Some people cheered like a pack of wolves savoring the fall of a wolf with a limp. Others recorded, calling friends, uploading clips. Someone stood and started an ironic applause, and it swelled until it was almost obscene.
Sofia crawled forward on her knees, took Easton’s hand and pressed it to her forehead like a supplicant. “I’m sorry!” she said. “I’m sorry for everything!”
Easton’s expression failed him. He had planned—if that word applies—to protect himself. He had not planned for shame. He had not planned for the hunger of a public watching with cameras. He had not planned to be the villain on the screen.
He crumpled. He tried to speak. “Please—Kaede—this isn’t—” His voice broke.
Sofia tried to make drama into an apology. “I did this for the company,” she gasped. “I did it to save us!”
Except the hall did not buy it. The investors looked at their watches. Edgar Lemaire closed his folder and raised his hand. “We will discuss the contract in private.” He turned and left, his entourage following like a set of shutters closing.
Sofia reached for me in a final, reckless theater. “Please,” she begged again. “Forgive me.”
I looked at her knees, at the way she had written the future in someone else’s favor. I thought of my belly. I thought of every midnight I had waited for a warm hand. “No,” I said.
Sofia’s face dissolved. She tried to plead. She tried to deny. Then she started sobbing like a child whose toy had been taken away. The crowd’s reaction changed from curiosity to a cold kind of satisfaction. People whispered, and someone shouted, “Kneel!” and Sofia did as if invited to a ritual.
Easton slid to his knees beside her without thinking. “Please,” he said. “Please don’t—”
The man who’d once promised to build a life with me was now reduced to an implore. He was all the tragic grandeur of a failed hero on the stage. The cameras recorded his descent. He looked up at me with a look that had nothing left to hide: shock, then shame, then a raw plea.
“Don’t do this,” he begged. “Forgive me. I’ll fix it. I’ll—”
There was a silence long enough to be meaningful. Then someone in the back began to clap slowly. Others joined, first unsure, then louder. The sound was not praise. It was verdict. Phones multiplied. People took pictures. One woman stood and shouted, “Kneel!” as if she were judging.
Easton’s face changed in the way the condemned change: from angry and sure, to stunned, to pleading, to the last brittle surrender. He tried to deny, then he tried to explain, then he found himself out of words. Sofia bowed her head, ugly and human.
“They will remember you,” someone said near the stage. “And they will remember how you treated her.”
He fell apart. He begged. At last he crawled across the floor and prostrated himself, not gracefully but finally honestly, before the cameras, before the world. He begged. His voice trembled until it became nothing but a small sound. “Please, Kaede, don’t leave me.”
I stood there with my arms folded. The crowd watched the spectacle of two adults laid bare.
“You used a woman’s life as a prop,” I told him. “You abandoned me when I was carrying your child.”
People around us murmured. A camera zoomed in. Someone in the crowd said, “Good. Let him feel it.” Another voice said, “He deserves it.”
He scrabbled at the carpet. His suit creased at his knees. His pride, that expensive thing he had wrapped around himself like shelter, had been torn into rags.
Sofia’s change in expression was a study in stages: first shock, then fear, then denial, then mania, then begging. She tried to bargain with journalists. She tried to bargain with the investors. She tried to bargain with us. It did not work.
For more than five minutes the scene developed: Easton’s demeanor sliding, his denials losing power, the crowd’s reaction rising from curiosity to condemnation, the cameras capturing each breath. People recorded and uploaded within seconds. Phones flashed like a constellation, and the hall buzzed with a new current: this was a lesson someone would retell.
Sofia’s collapse was audible. She begged, she blamed, she denied, she offered money and apologies. No one took them seriously. A man near us scoffed and said, “Now she cries. Too late.” Someone else snapped a photo and uploaded it.
Easton’s last stage was disbelief to desperation to pleading. He begged on the hall floor like a man who had suddenly found himself out of narrative. He tried, in the end, to claw back dignity and failed. People recorded his kneeling; they filmed his tearing up. He asked for forgiveness that would not be paid because the cost was not in money but in trust.
When it was over, a woman near the exit tossed a paper napkin at Easton and a man shouted, “Get out!” The crowd parted and Easton left the hall like someone expelled.
We had a victory that was not sweet. I felt hollow and cold. I had watched a man beg, and I had watched a woman unravel. I had wanted Easton to feel remorse. I had wanted a confession. What I had gotten was a spectacle.
After the scene, Nicolas stayed with me. He offered me a quiet coffee and a place to be unremarked. Leah texted kindnesses and a plan for the baby and for the restaurant we were going to start — the one I would fund so Leah could cook. We spoke about small things: wallpaper, names, and how to hold a newborn’s hand.
“You were brave today,” Nicolas said quietly, as if it was something to be measured.
“It didn’t feel brave,” I answered. “It felt like surviving.”
We later learned that Edgar Lemaire withdrew immediately. He would not associate with schemes. Investors are, in the end, people who fear scandal.
In the weeks that followed, I learned to carry my life lightly. I sold nothing. I kept the silver ring and the photograph in a box. They were small evidence of what had been; I could not burn memory like paper. I kept them because memory is a map to warn you where not to go again.
Easton tried to come back. He knocked on doors. He left messages stuffed with regret and promises. At first I was tempted to answer because he had once been a harbor, and the baby needed a father’s name written on a form. But I looked at the photograph and then the silver ring, and I remembered the day he told me to leave. I remembered him kneeling in front of reporters like an actor auditioning for pity. I turned each plea into a small pebble and let it sink.
“You should at least accept the house,” Ellis suggested once, as if compensation could erase what he had done.
“No,” I said. “I want my life. I don’t want his pity.”
Nicolas became steady, a kind of quiet person who sat with me in the kitchen while I practiced recipes, who asked nothing except whether I wanted more tea. Leah and I opened a small café called Greenlight — a place with warm lamps and green plants. We started small; her dumplings were a hit. People came with baby pictures and tried our soup and smiled.
Easton’s company rose and fell again in a different quarter. Sofia moved away. The videos we recorded at the hall lived online, a bitter document that followed them. Easton repented on camera, but the truth had already been captured in a hundred phones and a thousand conversations.
One day he found me on a corner where I was buying bread. He looked better in the cheap way people look better after public ruin: a little thinner, softer around the edges.
“Kaede,” he said.
“You have no right,” I answered.
He put his hand out like a child asking for a toy back. “Please. I was wrong. I was—”
“You told me to leave when I needed you most,” I said. “Do you think kneeling once makes up for raising a girl on pretenses?”
His eyes filled. “I can’t ask you to forgive me.”
“Then don’t.” I folded the bread and walked away.
He called after me. “I will wait.”
I did not look back. Instead I took the silver ring I had kept and slipped it into a drawer. The photograph I tucked into my wallet for a long while, then finally mailed it with a short note: “Remember what you were. I will remember what I will be.”
Years later I opened the drawer and found the ring under a small pile of recipe cards. I held it for a moment and then placed it in the café’s display case by the window. It sat beside a polaroid Leah had taken of our first day open and a jar of green succulents.
If anyone asked why it was there, Leah would say, with hands on hips, “So no one forgets that people can be reckless with hearts and still learn to tend them.”
I learned to smile again. I learned to cook more than burnt fish. I learned that children are not reasons to stay; they are reasons to build something honest from the ground up.
The last time I saw Easton he was leaving town. He looked at me through the café window as if he wanted an answered prayer. I lifted my hand with the small wave of acquaintance, nothing more. He bowed his head and walked away.
I turned back to the counter. A customer asked for soup. I ladled it out. The cup spilled a little on my wrist. A smell of lemongrass and bruised green leaves filled the air. In the window, the silver ring reflected a little sunbeam.
I said softly, “Good morning,” to the room. The baby inside me kicked, small and sure.
At the counter, Leah winked. “You okay?”
I looked at the ring and at the polaroid of our first customers, and I answered with something I meant this time.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m okay.”
The End
— Thank you for reading —