Sweet Romance15 min read
The Tree I Planted Bloomed for Someone Else — Then I Replanted It
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I was scrolling through a feed full of noise when the headline hit like a stone.
"Ethan Leone and Esme Kobayashi—Spotted Holding Hands."
"New CP Sparks Fans: Ethan x Esme!"
"Was Kamryn Left Behind?"
I froze. My thumb hovered. The photo showed Ethan smiling, his fingers curled around Esme's hand. The two of them looked like they had stepped out of someone else's dream—intimate and deliberate. I looked at the time. I had been on a late train returning from a short trip to see my father when the first viral post landed. Ethan had messaged me the day before: "Baby, when are you coming back? I miss you." I had answered with a time and a grin in my head. Half an hour before the photo, I had been standing in the stairwell of my building, waiting for the elevator, thinking about their next press tour. Now my world had shifted.
My phone buzzed with a private account puffing up the story. The small account posted an old image—one of Ethan and me, close on the couch, arms wrapped. The caption was a whisper meant to become a shout: "You don't know the whole story."
I had never officially announced our relationship. Ethan's team treated me with careful friendliness, a secret folded into a public life. Fans knew, in their own way. They loved him; they loved the idea of him. And when that little account posted, they exploded. Some accused me of trying to push my way into a career. Others stitched together our photos and wrote me into a villainous role I'd never auditioned for.
Ethan's studio responded quickly. "This photo was taken during a work meeting. They are just friends. Please stop spreading rumors."
"Friends," I mouthed.
Everything that followed felt like drowning while people threw me words instead of life rings.
I called him. He texted: "Ranran, don't read Weibo these days. I and Esme were photographed together, but it's nothing. My manager is handling it. Don't worry."
"Who posted the photos?" I typed and deleted. "Why did they get my photos?"
"I'll find out. I'm sorry. Please don't go online."
When he arrived that night at my apartment, he looked tired and real—like a man who had been pulled in a dozen directions and had just been handed one more. He took off his cap and mask, and for a moment he looked like the boy from the small courtyard where we'd grown up. He kneeled by the couch like someone about to beg for forgiveness.
"You're back earlier than you said," he said softly.
"Why did you let that photo come out?"
"It's complicated. The team said—"
"This was supposed to be private, Ethan."
He sighed and made the calm, practiced voice he always used when smoothing storms. "We can't control the paparazzi. The team thought it might be better to let things ride. I can get them to cut ties with Esme's project if you want."
"Then why did it feel like you didn't care enough to clarify?" I asked.
He leaned in and pressed his forehead to my collarbone. "I'm looking for the one who posted that picture. You know I would never—"
"Would never what?" I snapped. "Would never let it go public if it cost you nothing? Would never risk your career for me?"
His fingers brushed my cheek. "You don't have to believe me."
I remembered the early days: the late-night rides to my apartment, the midnight confessions, the promise of more. He used to be the kind of man who would wait on a doorstep until dawn. Fame had made him polite and practiced and careful.
He smelled of cologne and an ocean of other nights. When he left to shower, and I heard his phone ring, I made the mistake of answering. The voice on the other end was soft, confident. "Ethan, you left your keys." It was Esme.
"She's who?" I asked later, holding his phone.
"An actress I'm collaborating with," he said. "She called about keys. She'll return them tomorrow."
He promised, then slept like the world still made sense.
The next morning, the headline had upgraded to an accusation. "Ethan Leone and Esme Kobayashi Confirm Relationship over Dinner." A small account sent me two motion photos: Ethan walking into a restaurant hand-in-hand with Esme; Ethan draping his jacket over her shoulders. The caption said: "You don't know everything."
I called him constantly. At first, it was "My phone was with the manager." Then "I don't know what happened." Then silence.
My friends were a kind of lifeline. Jemma Perry took me to a bar that night.
"This should cheer you up," Jemma said, waving over a group. "We got a few good-looking guys. Maybe you need a rebound."
"I don't want a rebound," I said. "I want the person I chose to choose me back."
Jemma laughed too loudly. "Babe, it'll sting. But you'll survive."
Somewhere in the bar, someone dropped a name that felt like an old injury. "Shen—" My mouth caught and I told myself to ignore the memory. High school was full of half-remembered dramas and a boy who never smiled. For a moment, among strangers, I felt a strange tether pull at me: Garrett Bauer, a classmate who'd been quiet and sharp in the margins of my life. That night, he walked in as if he'd always been part of the room. I recognized him immediately.
He moved through the bar like someone who belonged to himself. He had changed in a way that was familiar and kind. When he crossed the room and said, "Sorry I'm late," the world seemed to slow.
"Garrett?" I said.
"You look like you could use a friend," he said. "Are you okay?"
I blinked. "I—it's complicated."
"I can listen."
We talked like two people reconnecting after an interval long enough to make both of us curious. He was quiet, but his calm made look like sanity. After that night, he would reappear like someone who had always meant to be part of my life.
Ethan, meanwhile, drifted farther. The studio's posts called our pictures "work-related," but a week later the two of them were photographed leaving the same high-rise. The images were vivid, clean, indisputable. I posted one short note on my account: I was not the girl people made me out to be. The note flared across the fandom like a match in dry grass. Fans swarmed; some believed me, some did not. The studio retracted its earlier statement.
When Ethan came to the hospital because my mother had fainted, I thought—briefly—that whatever we had might be salvageable. My mother, Muriel Black, chided me and then softened when Ethan spoke gently and offered to help. He asked me to come back with him afterward. I let him hold my hand, because I needed a human anchor. But later, when Esme appeared on my building's stoop with my keys and a smile that smelled like victory, I stopped pretending the lines between work and intimacy were sufficient fences.
"Did you forget you have keys?" Esme said sweetly when she saw me.
"That's my apartment," I said.
She looked at me with the kind of smile practiced in front of mirrors. "I returned them. Ethan thought you left them with me. Work, you know how it is."
"Why come here?" I asked. "Why here, in my building?"
Ethan's face tightened. He tried to pull Esme away. I said what I'd been holding in my chest for months: "You aren't sorry. You're careful. You let things happen until they stop being your fault."
Esme's smile cracked. "You—" she began, then faltered. "Ethan, stop."
"Don't," Ethan said. "This isn't her place to—"
"You chose," I said. "You chose to leave things ambiguous. You chose to let her be seen with you in public. You chose work over me."
He tried to say something that would fix it. I asked him to give me back the key. He must have thought I would relent in front of his apology. He handed it over in silence. I changed the lock that night.
I clicked "block" and "delete" like tiny scalpel cuts, severing more and more. He sent a string of messages that made my stomach hurt: "Six years—" "Please." "We can fix this." I read them once, then deleted the app.
I left the city for a while. I took the business trip to Dali I'd been avoiding. Garrett was on the same flight. He had reserved the same guesthouse. Coincidence or fate, our paths overlapped and found a softer cadence. Garrett surprised me with small domesticities. He cooked. He joked about high school memories in a way that felt gentle rather than mocking. When I woke up hungover one morning and couldn't find the shampoo, he laughed and handed me a bottle. "You left your brain at the bar," he said.
"Shut up," I murmured. "Thanks."
That trip was the first stretch of time that didn't feel like waiting for Ethan to decide how he wanted me labeled. I eased into a comfort so simple it felt like discovering a room I'd always had but had forgotten existed. Garrett's laughter settled into the house like sunlight.
When I returned, the gossip about Ethan and Esme had reached a fever pitch again: photos of them leaving the same building, photos of hand-in-hand dinners that resembled a script. My own social feed was quieter now. The small account that had set everything off vanished. Relief and uncertainty tangled in my ribs.
One night, as I was falling asleep, Garrett confessed things that had been caught and folded in his chest for years.
"I liked you back then," he said, simple and startling.
"You did?" I asked, half laughing to make the world lighter.
"I never said anything because you had decided on him. You were always his."
"And now?"
"Now I'd like a chance at what could be ours, if you want it."
I stared at him. My chest felt odd, like someone had opened the window and let air in. I wanted to say yes and also be scared. I wanted to be brave in a new way.
As autumn cooled into that strange, honest season of endings and small beginnings, Ethan came back through the door of my life. He stood under the streetlight outside my apartment. Rain caught the light and made halos. He called my name.
"Why did you leave?" he said.
"I changed the locks," I said.
"Six years," he said, "that's what we've had. Please, come back. I can stop everything. I'll break everything off. Just—" He sounded furious with himself and pleading at the same time.
"Do you think you can say sorry and return a promise you didn't keep?" I asked.
He lowered his voice. "I was thinking about how to make us work, how to keep both my life and you."
"And you decided to share me with someone else." I couldn't keep the hurt out of it. "You left my picture to be used when you needed storylines. You let others decide what I was to you."
He tried again. "I love you."
"I loved you once," I said. "It isn't the same thing as belonging."
He staggered back and looked like someone with a bruise on their pride. He begged. He blamed. He cried.
When I closed the door on him, my heart split and healed a little. I called Garrett and he came with an umbrella and an unspoken steadiness that felt like a promise made of ordinary acts. We began a slow knitting together of everyday life: grocery shopping, late-night editing, quiet conversations about work, about things that didn't need to be publicized.
But Ethan and Esme were not done. The fandom had split into factions. There were those who still loved Ethan and excused him, and there were those who wanted to see truth. One afternoon, something shifted.
"Kamryn," Jemma wrote, frantic. "There’s going to be a fan meeting for Ethan. They announced a surprise. Fans are gathering. You should go."
"Why would I go?" I typed.
"You should," she said. "You should see."
I went because I couldn't bear to remain in the static between waiting and action. I went because there was a large screen at the square, and because people had been asked to gather. When I arrived, hundreds had already filled the plaza. Cameras were set. Phones were out. The air smelled of excitement and the metallic tang of rain from earlier.
A stage had been set for what they called a "public apology and announcement." Ethan's manager was supposed to speak. My name had been whispered into the microphone before anyone stood up: "We have special guests."
I stood at the edge, heart a drum behind my ribs. Garrett's hand found mine through the crowd. He squeezed.
"You sure?" he asked.
"I'm sure."
They started with lights and video reels of Ethan's career. Fans cheered and swayed. Then his manager stepped up, and the air tightened. "Ethan has asked to speak," the manager said. "He will answer questions about recent photos."
Then the screen went black. For a breathless second, everything paused, like the world had held its intake.
I stepped forward because the truth had been simmering long enough inside me. I walked until I was on the stage. I didn't have a speech planned. I had only a chest full of truth and a handful of evidence.
"Ethan," I said, into the microphone. My voice wobbled but was heard. "This whole thing started with a photo from months ago. Someone posted a private photo from our friendship and said things that aren't true. I want everyone here to know—"
There was a murmur and the camera zoomed in. His manager looked like something that had been startled awake.
"Ethan," I said, "did you or did you not authorize a leak? Did you let a staged image be used to create buzz?"
A silence followed that felt like the tipping point of a bridge. Ethan's face went pale. He made that practiced face—the one for cameras. He opened his mouth to say something dull and rehearsed, like "Everyone make no assumptions" but the crowd would not let him flatten the moment.
"Answer," someone shouted.
He looked at me like I had posed a puzzle he did not want to solve. "I—" he started.
Then I did what no one had seen me do before. I placed a small stack of messages, photos, and a recording of a conversation on the podium. I said, "I did not post my private photos. I was told that if I made noise, it would hurt Ethan's image. I later found receipts and conversations that show what was orchestrated. The account that started the rumor? These records show it tied back to Ethan's team and to a campaign to boost Esme's exposure. They used my image as bait."
Gasps ricocheted through the plaza.
Ethan's hands curled. He looked smaller on stage than he did on screens. His manager's face was a color I had never seen before—brown, then green, then white.
Esme, who had been sitting in the front row, smiled like a cat until the smile dissolved. She stood and snapped her phone across the crowd to show a thread. "That's not true," she said. "This—this is mudslinging."
A fan vomited the word "liar" and then "expose" and then "shame." Cameras around the square swung toward Esme and Ethan like bees toward spilled sugar.
"Ethan," I said, firm now, "did you sign off on a campaign that painted me as conniving so that you could have plausible deniability while getting closer to Esme? Did you let people use me?"
He watched me as if I were both a fragile glass and a threat. For a beat he looked like himself: the boy from the small courtyard who had given me warmth without publicity. Then the publicness of his life shut down the childlike corners of him.
"No," he said. "I didn't—"
"You did," I said. "I have messages from your assistant, a schedule that aligns with Esme's PR, and a recording where someone from your team says 'this will raise his data and it's better than a flat statement.'"
My voice had the flatness of ice. The crowd thickened. People took out phones to record everything. The crowd formed a living jury. I had done no stunts; I had simply put facts on a table.
Ethan's reaction shifted like weather. First there was surprise. Then a flaring of anger. He turned to the manager. "Is this true?" he demanded. The manager stammered. "We were trying—" he began.
Esme's face crumbled. She was no longer the smooth, practiced performer. She turned red and then pale. "I didn't know they would use Kamryn like this," she said, voice shaking. "They told me—"
"Tell the truth," I said. "Tell everyone what you know."
She tried to twist at the edges, then admitted, "We were told it was a collaboration. A work reveal."
A murmur swelled into conversation and then into accusations. Fans who had adored Ethan looked at him with new eyes. People who had once cheered his hand touched their phones with trembling fingers, posting the new audio, the new screenshots. The crowd split into chorus and whisper.
"Ethan," I said, "I don't want to break you. I just want the truth to be out where people can see it. If you used me in a marketing move, you owe me an apology in public. If you didn't, you'll be cleared."
Ethan's face shifted through a dozen colors: fury, shock, denial, then collapse. He tried to say something about love, about mistakes, about pressures. His words fell like stones into a well. They echoed, but did not soar.
At that moment, the crowd's mood changed from curiosity to judgment. A longtime fan—someone who had driven hours to be there—stepped forward and asked, "Did you ever think about how she feels?"
Some people began to chant. Others recorded. A woman sobbed quietly and then called her friends to say "He lied." Someone else laughed in disbelief. Cameras panned across Ethan's face and found it unreadable.
Esme's response unfolded differently. She clenched her fists and tried to hold dignity. But the public saw a woman whose PR had helped her along and had hurt another human to get there. Fans turned their phones and fingers into instruments of exposure. Clips of Esme's past interviews were replayed, and people began to dissect them for hints of calculated moves.
The manager tried to step between them. "Please," he said, "this isn't the place—"
"This is exactly the place," I said. "This is where people come when they want answers."
Someone in the crowd shouted, "Kick them out! Refund the show!"
That was when the most decisive punishment began, not administered by officials, but by the public. Ethan's endorsements were already listed on a big LED behind him; the logos pulsed. Within minutes, fans used their phones to flood company email and social feeds, asking for clarification, asking why a brand would be tied to someone who manipulated a private life. A massage of outrage, targeted and immediate, began to bruise the scaffolding of Ethan's public life.
Esme received a different public verdict. Her upcoming premiere had been scheduled for the following week with a press line full of touted partnerships. Now, invitations were rescinded online, fashion houses privately texted to distance themselves, and a chorus of stylists announced they wouldn't work the red carpet with her. Influencers who had praised her roles uploaded statements: "We can't support a career built on harming others."
Ethan stood on stage while the world rearranged itself around the facts. The manager tried to salvage something. "We apologize," he said, stumbling. "This was a miscommunication—"
"—No," the crowd interrupted. "This was manipulation."
The fans' reaction had the sharpness of a blade and the inevitability of a storm. People who had once waved banners now turned their backs or leaned on microphones to ask for change. The crowd that had come to see a confession transformed into an audience that demanded accountability.
Ethan's face went slack. Then he began to plead. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry to Kamryn. I never meant—" His voice broke.
Esme dropped to her knees on the pavement as photographers circled, but instead of the humiliation of groveling, the public saw a woman sobbing with the dawning horror of being the center of a ruin she had helped build. Cameras captured the moment: the starlet's mascara running, a PR script ripped into shreds by truth. Fans filmed, posted, compared, and judged in real time.
For the manager, the company's headquarters began to receive calls from sponsors. One major sponsor publicly announced an immediate review of their contract. Another said they would "pause all association pending investigation." Music executives who had scheduled collaborations called to say they'd reschedule or cancel. The structure of the campaign that had been built on manipulation started to creak.
The punishment was not one designed by me. It was a public falling away: contracts withdrawn, public scorn, endorsements paused, and the quiet vanishing of opportunities. Ethan watched it happen and folded inward, his celebrity armor cracking. He seemed suddenly very small beneath the stage lights.
But the punishment had social facets, too. People in the plaza—fans, journalists, strangers—turned their backs. Some applauded me for speaking up. Some recorded Esme's apologies, and some shouted at the manager for lying. Someone who had been a longtime follower of Ethan cried openly. The crowd's reactions were many: shock, satisfaction, hurt, and a realization that the image they had been fed could be false.
Esme, who had been the eager center of the campaign, found that doors closed progressively and publicly. She went from being booked to being questioned. She stood at the center of a circle that had been friendly and suddenly felt alone.
Ethan tried to salvage what he could, but his voice kept cracking. The people who had adored him now had new eyes. The manager was forceful in his final statement, then shrank as sponsors announced investigations. The public watched, recorded, and decided.
After hours, the press released a detailed write-up that included the messages I had produced, the recordings, and the manager's reluctant acknowledgment that the PR team had considered "using a softer controversy to boost data." The legal representatives began to talk quietly. The campaigns were frozen. The festival schedules were in flux. Time had sharp teeth.
When it all settled that night, Ethan had fewer followers and fewer brand deals. He sat alone in a car outside the plaza and called my name. He asked me for an apology. He begged for forgiveness.
I answered simply: "You used me."
He tried to say "I didn't mean it" and "I loved you," and when the words failed to heal the hollow he'd created, he said, "I didn't do it alone."
I walked away.
The aftermath was merciless but just in a public way. My own reputation, once paraded through rumor, began to reconstruct itself. People who had judged me without knowledge began to read the facts. Jemma hugged me and said, "You did the right thing." Garrett sat with me through calls from press, and when we finally had time, he reached for my hand and asked again, gently, "Do you want to try—truly try—this with me?"
We did. It was quiet, gradual, and full of ordinary tenderness. Garrett's love was the kind that built itself from actions: making soup when I had a fever, sharing the credit for work, driving me to my mother's house when they needed help. He did not upload our photos for an audience. He did not stage moments. He lived them.
Esme's career stumbled in the weeks that followed. She made public statements, gave interviews in which she looked exhausted and contrite, and tried to rebuild in quieter circles. Her punishment was a slow, public unraveling: commitments canceled, whispers on the internet, and the weight of having been complicit. The manager was dismissed. Ethan's agent announced a leave of absence. Sponsors removed images, and a few fans accused themselves for not seeing earlier. The PR world performed a small purging.
Sometimes punishment from the public is messy. It is not always fully satisfying to watch a person fall. It can be complicated and cruel. But in that plaza, the crowd's justice was the mirror I needed to hold up to the truth.
Afterward, Garrett and I traveled, not to run away but to press the reset button. We went to the sea, to the mountains. We planted a small sapling behind my father's house—my tree. "You planted it for six years," Garrett said, cheeky. "Who knew it would bloom for someone else first?"
"That tree is mine," I said. "It will bloom for me."
He smiled and planted his hand in the soil beside mine.
We took time to grow. We let things be ordinary: grocery shopping, small fights about dishes, midnight conversations at city overlooks. I found that love could be quiet and certain and didn't need a PR machine to be true. Garrett's confession of years past had been honest; his commitment in the present was steady.
Months later, Ethan's world had shifted. He walked through the cold consequence of his choices. He tried to patch things publicly and privately, but fans had moved on. Esme continued to seek work, now screening scripts more carefully. People who had been willing accomplices were gone. The punishment had stripped a lot of gilding away.
One autumn evening, as I stood in my father's yard watching the small tree I'd planted with Garrett reach its first true blossom, I remembered the nights I had stayed loyal to a dream that had turned into someone else's project. The petals trembled in the wind like tiny flags.
Garrett squeezed my hand. "It bloomed for you," he said.
"I planted it for six years," I answered, voice steady. "This time, it's mine."
He smiled, and when he kissed me, it was not for cameras or for content. It was for the tiny tree, for a woman who had learned to take back her story, and for a quiet life that would be ours.
The End
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