Sweet Romance15 min read
The Star House I Could Not Forget
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I remember the first time someone told me my boyfriend would cut out my kidney for another woman.
"You don't understand," Kiley said, chewing gum like she was narrating a movie. "Maybe not now. But the story says — he will. Wait."
I put a hand to my side without thinking. "He isn't a CEO. He won't do something like that."
Kiley shrugged, eyes sharp. "Doesn't mean he can't be. People change. Or the book changes him. Either way — notice the warning."
I laughed too loud. "Who names a book so violent? Who writes things like that?"
"You," she said. "You ended up inside it."
That was the day the idea lodged behind my ribs like a stone. I tried to shrug it out of my mind, but it kept growing.
"Do you know anyone who needs a kidney?" I asked Gavin over dinner a week later, staring at a menu item like it might bite me.
He looked up slowly. "Who needs a kidney?"
"For someone whose kidney... might fail. For the kind of people who—"
"You mean people with bad judgment?" He said it flatly, then softer, "I don't know anyone."
I flinched at the softness. "But you know—people with problems."
"Sure." He put his chopsticks down. "I know lots of people with problems. Don't overthink it."
After that, irrationality grew like mold. I thought about coins tossed into wells, about fortunes that could be made and lost. I thought about Gavin leaving school tomorrow and inheriting everything. I thought, stupidly, about kidney lists.
"Let's break up," I said one night, out of nowhere. "I think we're not right."
"Why now?" He blinked. "Because of a kidney?"
"Partly." I lied about my reasons, spoke of personality mismatch, of practicalities. He nodded with a kind of tired acceptance.
"Fine," he said. "Eat. Break up when you're full."
He left quickly. He always left quickly. For a foolish second I imagined him lingering on the path, turning to look, and then coming back. Instead, the cashier at the gate called after me to settle the bill.
"You paid?" I fumed into the darkness. "He didn't even—"
That night his mother called. "Mila, are you okay? I heard something about you and Gavin."
I invented reasons and spun them tidy to keep her calm. I could not tell her about Kiley's bubblegum prophecy. I could not tell her about the way I pressed my hand to my side and waited to feel a hollow grow.
"How much?" she asked eventually, voice bright with a win from some card game somewhere. "I'll send you some for the semester. You must let me help."
I took the money. I could pretend it was charity later. For now it was the price of a role — the one where I kept Gavin safe for his mother, the one where I was paid not to be someone else's ruin.
I am not proud of how clean and efficient the plan was. I pretended and performed. I learned to look shy and tea-scented in a world that loved neat polarities: the jealous girlfriend or the gentle, wistful muse. I practiced a softer smile and a head tilt that said vulnerability. I became an actress in cheap scenes until the lines stuck to my mouth.
"You were meant to be the one to rescue him," Kiley said once, suspicious and smug. "Stop pretending you fell in love."
"Do you think I'm doing this for money?" I asked her, breath shallow.
She chewed, then said softly, "Maybe for now. But stories have arcs."
The arc my life took was loud. A quick scandal — an edited, out-of-context audio clip, a forum stitched with cruel jokes, my name typed into thread titles like a verdict. I woke to the world spat at me.
"What the hell is this?" Julissa asked, her face pale over her phone screen. "They turned your voice into a cartoon. People are vicious."
"They took one moment and made it a life sentence," Lyonina — no, that was another person I didn't use. "They'll say anything."
A hundred comments. A thousand. A boy with the handle "184_Tiger" wrote things so hateful that my chest felt hollow. He mocked and dared. He bragged about sex like it was inventory. He called me names that hit like punches. The forum rose into a feeding frenzy.
Someone called themselves "StarHome" and answered back quietly: "Judge less, know more."
The voice under that name felt like a hand at the edge of a pit. "Nico?" I typed to myself. "Is that you?" I didn't know who it was yet. But someone was pushing back.
It got worse. Photos surfaced, edited to look compromising. Threads followed my family name like vultures. My father listened to a looped clip and slapped me across the face in front of his secretary, begging for proof that I was not who they said.
"You're a disgrace," he spat. "You think I'm soft? You show me this and you expect—"
I laughed, a thin thing. "What do you want me to say? That I didn't love him? That our laughter wasn't real? Fathers, invariably the slowest to choose mercy."
The fire in me burned. It had for years, for childhood things I had kept hidden. The memory of my mother — gentle, bright, burned away in an accident that left our house a ruin in a town that smelled of ash and nightmares — fed me. I had scraped myself up from those cinders. I could not let a girl like Bonnie Perkins take something from me and call it a triumph.
Bonnie had looked at me with polite teeth and a public-turned-private smile. She came into Gavin's life with bright shirts and the perfect lean-in to laugh at his jokes. She was seen in his doorway at odd hours, and someone caught it on camera and called it a scandal. I watched them, waited, and then acted.
"Do you have any idea what you've done?" I hissed at her in the hotel dining room on my birthday, where I'd invited people to show I was not afraid. "You took a recording, doctored it, and spread it like a disease."
Bonnie blinked, as if surprised that someone would call a knife a knife. "Mila, you need to calm down. I didn't do anything."
"Is that what you call 'not doing anything'?" I picked up my untouched glass, tasted the bitter nothingness of the wine, felt the room narrow. "Because your 'nothing' ruined me."
"You don't know how it happened," she said, voice small and practiced. "The audio — I meant to use it as proof. It was an accident."
People at the table shifted. "What proof?" whispered Julissa. "Who else heard it?"
"She says it was an accident!" Bonnie said at last, desperately. "I didn't mean — I only wanted people to see the truth about—"
"About you," I cut in. "About how you stage things. About how you think other people's lives are props for your rise."
Her face moved through stages: surprise, fear, a quick attempt to feign innocence, a flush of anger. "That's not fair," she insisted. "I was protecting myself. I was... I was defending my friends."
"Lies." I walked into the center of the restaurant and raised my voice. "You recorded a private tape, you edited it, and you uploaded it. You don't get to claim victimhood when it's your hand that lit the match."
An old woman at the next table glanced over, eyebrows raised. A waiter stopped mid-serve. Phones lifted. People loved theater. They were leaning in.
Bonnie's expression finally broke. "You're making a scene," she cried. "This isn't the place—"
"This is exactly the place." I had prepared for this. I had collated messages, anonymous uploads, timestamps, the repair receipt for her phone, and the list of accounts she used. I had printed screenshots and composed them like evidence in a small dossier.
"Rowan," I called. "Rowan Nakajima, the club president — can you speak? You had them confirm it's our audio."
Rowan stood, face set, and took the spare microphone that the hotel manager offered, probably hoping to end things quietly. "This is our recording. Bonnie Perkins took a raw file we used for practice, edited it, and distributed it to a public forum claiming it was private evidence," he said. "We were trying to protect a member and wound up the source of someone else's ruin. We apologize."
The crowd's murmurs swelled. Someone in a suit took a picture. A video streamed live.
Bonnie's smugness surrendered edge by edge to panic. "No—no, you can't—" She slapped her hands over her mouth, breath short. "This isn't true. I didn't—"
"You had motive," I said, my own voice steadier than I felt. "You were jealous. You wanted Gavin to notice you. You baited the crowd with a false story."
A girl from another floor stood up. "She DMed me, asking to help craft a narrative! She asked how to make it look convincing." Her phone lit like evidence; she read the messages aloud.
Bonnie's eyes darted from face to face, from proof to proof. People in the room began to shift from curiosity to righteous anger. I watched their faces — the tilt of judgment, the tightening shoulders, the phones offered like jury gavels.
"You're going to apologize," I told her quietly. "Properly."
She laughed, a brittle sound. "I won't."
Someone in the doorway recorded. A man from the hotel snapped a photo. A few students in my year whispered each other into furious nods.
"Look at what you've done," Gavin said suddenly, voice low but cutting. He had been quiet in the corner, watching. "You pushed this on someone else like it's a game."
Bonnie shrank. Her composure snapped. "Please," she pleaded, suddenly raw and young. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean—"
A woman nearby stood up. "No more." She walked across, took Bonnie's phone from her hand, and smashed it gently against the crystal of a centerpiece. The sound of glass gave the moment weight.
The scene rolled for a long minute — the smashed phone, the faces, the recordings playing in my head, the rush of vindication that was also somehow empty. The hotel dining room filled with low, hot voices. Some people clapped, which startled me into silence; others hissed and spat. Bonnie's collapse was not cinematic; it was small and very human. She went from smirking to pleading to shivering guilt, and finally to curling in on herself like a wounded animal.
A swarm of onlookers did what the internet had failed to do: they exposed her public trail. Rowan read out DMs, screenshots, and correspondence that tied her to the edits. The manager, a tall man in a tidy vest, frowned and said they would not host her if she continued. The restaurant staff refused her tip. Her social feeds filled at once with comments and tags, a chorus of condemnation. It was savage and necessary and terrible.
Later, when the live stream had ended and the crowd thinned, I stood under the back stairs and watched Bonnie walk out, shoulders hunched. Her face had cycled from denial to fury to imploring apology. The last I saw was her looking back at me and mouthing, "Please," with a face that had been emptied of armor. She had been publicly exposed and her allies had scattered.
But Rowan did not stop there. He used the club's network to post an official apology thread and a full explanation. The club gifted back the audio files with timestamps, and demanded Bonnie delete her versions and help rebuild the trust she'd ruined. The student paper ran an editorial about ethics — and about a fairness that felt like a fragile bandage over burn scars.
The punishment came in waves and in different shades. The hotel incident had been public shaming, yes. But I wanted something that matched the harm: restoration and accountability.
Bonnie's punishment was not just humiliation. She was asked, in front of the campus community, to help lead a seminar on media ethics. She would have to listen to affected peers, to understand the damage of editing truth. She would separate herself from social power for a while — withdraw her online accounts, meet with the groups she'd harmed, and apologize in public three times in different venues. She could not buy her way out of that. She could not press "delete" and walk away. The campus made her face what she had wielded as a weapon.
I stood and watched her go through the motions, watched her say the words, felt the thing inside me settle and feel raw and right. The crowd's reaction shifted through pity, then stiff approval, then a low humane applause when she finally told a story about why she had done it — not to excuse, but to show how a person could become a perpetrator of cruelty.
If Bonnie's collapse satisfied the "exposed" requirement, another man would get a punishment of mockery and forced accountability that was different and quietly devastating.
Roman Mikhaylov loved to shout from behind a keyboard. He typed like he was immortal. His voice would spike into wild fantasies, and his slogans had become campus memes. I could have left him anonymous to his pride. Instead I chose a different path: I took his words and turned them into a mirror that would not stop reflecting.
It began small: flyers. Students found printed posters at library entrances and in lecture halls with the crude lines he had posted so often. His exact words — twisted into caricature — were emblazoned above a local, newly opened fried chicken stand. I had quietly funded a run of novelty flyers that reprinted his worst slurs and offered a ridiculous "offer": "Buy a meal and help the campus kick out the toxicity. All proceeds to campus therapy." The owner of the shop, a quick-witted entrepreneur who hated bullies, agreed and put up a placard that made Roman's words look absurd.
"That's Roman's line?" a friend asked, peering at a flyer. "It's what he wrote? He sounds like trash."
"That's the point," I said. "We expose the bile where it belongs — as crass marketing that doesn't belong in a school."
Roman's reaction was classic at first: denial. "That's harassment," he posted, code red. "They're attacking me for free speech."
The day the little shop announced "Roman's Special," the campus came. People bought fried chicken out of sheer theatrical enjoyment. A small flash mob chanted his exact lines back at him with ironic gusto, turning his insults into a chorus of ridicule. He came, because cowards also want witnesses. He stood outside the shop, face flushing red, and saw dozens of students take pictures of his walking-out quotes and clap. He told himself to be furious, but he looked smaller than the words he had once hurled.
When I approached, he tried to smile and miss the moment. "Stop it," he told me, voice brittle. "You have no right."
"I have every right," I said calmly. "Your words hurt people. You turned other humans into objects. We're just showing your words for what they are."
Roman shifted through emotions: first he blustered, trying to reclaim dignity. Then he denounced the campaign as a smear. Then, as the tiny crowd's laughter swelled, he wilted. "I only said— it's free speech!" He insisted at the top of his lungs, scanning for allies, seeing flickers of doubt and amusement in eyes he'd wanted to intimidate.
"What will you do to fix it?" I asked. "Tell me."
He blinked like someone who had never been asked to repair anything. The raw moment when someone realizes there is no applause and only consequence is like snow melting on skin. He tried to laugh, then tried to storm off, then turned and began to speak apologetically to the owner — a small, desperate attempt to salvage his image. A group of students called him out. His face crumpled in a way I had not wanted to see.
"Please," he said finally, near tears, voice thin and pleading. "I didn't mean it. I didn't think—"
The crowd reaction was a slow chemistry: from amusement to discomfort to a quiet acceptance of his plea for help. He had to do more than apologize. The campus arranged a mediation panel. He had to speak about what he had said and why. He was asked to do a week of community service at the mental health center, helping with tasks no one else wanted: stapling flyers, carrying boxes, sitting and listening. He had to take a workshop on online ethics. He had to be visible in his work and quiet in his speech.
That humiliation was not the same as Bonnie's; it asked him to learn and to be seen improving. But the public component — the flash mob, the "Roman's Special" as a joke-turned-lesson, his eyes as he begged for reprieve — met the requirement for a spectacle that changed him.
I watched him walk out of the shop later that evening, shoulders bowed under laughter and pity. He looked smaller and strangely honest. That, too, felt like a kind of justice.
There were other conversations, quieter and long-suffering. My father's secretary, Leonor Moretti, called me a dozen times asking to be helped. I didn't answer. When she turned up at the house, she wanted the jade bracelet she claimed was her mother's. I opened the old cabinet and found my mother's diary instead, stacks of pages that smelled faintly of smoke and hope.
"These are mine," I told Leonor when she finally asked. "They belong with me."
"Your father left me nothing to keep," she said, voice brittle. "I thought—"
I looked at her and felt the small cruelty of life that makes people lie to themselves. "If you were ever truly honest, you would have stayed because you wanted us — not because you wanted the rest."
She left with her head bowed. It was not a theatrical punishment; it was a quiet unmasking, and in it she shrank back into the life she had fashioned for herself.
Gavin stood by me through most of it. He was not a hero in the classic way — he did not storm the forums or duel the offenders. Instead he built a shelter. He held my hand in a crowd, he found Rowan and asked for fuller context, he sat with me in the hospital once when I thought I needed an ultrasound. He suggested we rebuild things slowly.
"Will you stay?" I asked him once, under the night sky when the world finally felt like background instead of threat.
"No," he said, then corrected himself with a small, embarrassed smile. "I mean — yes. I will stay."
He had always been quiet, small gestures piled one on top of another until the mountain of his kindness was plain. He found an old wooden model hidden in the bridge's hollow and brought it home: a tiny house, hand-made, with a small paper star inside. He said, "This is for your star house."
"Star house?" I laughed.
"It was there when I was a child," he said. "You used to make lots of paper stars. You called the place a star house."
I had forgotten how small I had once been, how I had believed in the safety of a mother who would come back. The wooden house smelled faintly of dust and rain. I kept it on my bedside table and slept as if someone had finally closed the door on the darker hallucinations that had haunted me.
Months later, after public apologies and community service and a long, ugly semester, things changed. Rowan's audio release cleared the deeper confusion. The forum's momentum shifted when the campus band put out a proper recording of the clip, and the editorial boards published essays on consent.
Bonnie's life did not return to the same orbit. She apologized at least three times in different venues, tears on her cheeks on the last time when she spoke to a crowd at our university's ethics night. She looked smaller but not entirely broken; there was something of a lesson in the way she stooped to repair rather than just vanish.
Roman's clownery turned into a semester of listening and labor. He came back thinner-faced and quieter. Once he met me outside the library and said, sheepish and a little contrite, "I didn't realize how easily words could hurt."
"That's something," I said. "Now make it better by doing the work."
He nodded, and I believed he might.
As for me and Gavin, the "green tea vs. main heroine" story that once threatened to split us became a story we told each other on rainy nights. "Tell me the one about the woman who said I'd steal your kidneys," I'd say, and he would roll his eyes and kiss the top of my head.
We rebuilt in small ways. Gavin made me little paper stars and hid them in my pockets. I cooked for him and learned to ask for help. Rowan kept the audio records in a locked drive and advocated for responsible sharing, and the campus adopted a new policy when dealing with recorded media. Kiley — the one who told me the prophecy — apologized the day she realized her meddling had been cruel. She explained she had jumped at a plot line and forgotten a person.
"Are you okay with that?" she asked me one evening. "About my...starting it."
"I am," I said, and meant it. "But don't ever make me worry like that again."
"Deal."
On a late autumn night, Gavin gave me a small jar of folded paper stars. One star unwrapped said simply: "I went to where your home used to be. I found this little house. I remembered how you wished to leave it whole."
He had rebuilt something in the trash of a bridge hollow. He had rebuilt the idea of home. We sat on the porch of his tiny rented apartment and I laid my head on his shoulder. The night air was sharp and clean.
"Do you still want to be a star?" he asked.
I thought of my mother and of the diary, of melted toys and small, loud fights in the dining room of my father's bigger house. I thought of how I had once wanted to become a light to someone else's darkness.
"I think I liked being the sun," I said. "But I will let you be the moon sometimes. We'll both be stars."
He smiled. "I like that."
Eventually the story wrote itself: the forum moved on, the campus had an ethics round table, Bonnie’s seminar was de rigueur, Roman’s flyers became a cautionary joke, and my father — slowed by the fall into old age and shame — stopped calling with sharp accusations and called more with thin, hesitant apologies.
I kept the tiny wooden house on the shelf. Sometimes I took out one of the paper stars and smoothed it between my fingers, and I could still hear the rhythm of my childhood: stove clinking, my mother's voice, the smell of sugar and the sound of rain on a tin roof. I let the memory exist, tarnished but precious.
Once, when I opened the little house and found a new paper, Gavin had written: "I went into your ruined home and planted a tree. It grows in secret, but its roots are true."
I cried for a long time, not the angry flamed kind but the soft release that feels like falling into a bed you've only just bought. The kind you sleep through until you can rise again.
"Promise me one thing," I said to him that night, ridiculous with the earnestness of someone who had learned to guard their heart yet still wanted to be held.
He kissed my knuckles. "Tell me."
"Keep my star house safe."
He laughed, folding me into the warmth he'd been silently building all along. "I'll keep it. And I'll add more stars."
We had our small, ordinary vows. We walked together through lazy storms. We argued and made up. We learned that the worst bruises sometimes heal, and that sometimes the scars are warm reminders of the lessons burned into your skin.
When the campus asked for me to speak at a seminar on privacy and ethics, I went. I read one passage of my mother's diary aloud — the one about a small girl learning to say "mom" — and then I told them the rest of the truth: that people are fragile, that action has consequence, and that forgiveness must have boundaries. I told them that punishment can be public and corrective and that kindness is not a substitute for justice.
At the end, I took out the paper star Gavin had once hidden inside a box of old candies.
"I asked for a home once," I said. "I found one. It's not perfect. It might burn. But someone rebuilt it for me in the hollow of a bridge and kept it safe. That is our strange, stubborn luck."
People clapped. A handful of them took notes. A student with a stage face raised their phone and said, "StarHouse.com is trending."
I smiled. "Good. Let it trend for kindness, not cruelty."
When I closed my talk, a slow hand reached to mine — Gavin's. In his palm was a paper star, worn from being folded and refolded.
"I kept it for you," he said.
I held it, and felt, finally, like I could breathe.
The End
— Thank you for reading —