Revenge14 min read
The Two Thousand One Hundred Thirteen Tickets
ButterPicks14 views
I found the secret the night I was supposed to be on a business trip.
"I swear I packed everything you asked for," Franklin said, grinning like we shared a private joke.
"Just get me to the hotel," I said. My voice sounded small in the hotel lobby. My suitcase hit the floor with a polite thud.
Franklin pretended not to notice how my hands shook. He'd been sent by Josiah to pick me up—"a favor between friends," he called it. At the welcome dinner his words slipped out like a loose screw.
"By the way," Franklin said too casually, "does Josiah know you found his old blog? He has that fan account—lots of followers."
The room went quiet for a beat. "What blog?" I asked, pretending I hadn't heard.
Franklin blinked. "You don't—he has a Weibo-like feed. He posts a lot. The handle's... um... 'Moon For Ming.'"
Everyone glanced at me like the punchline was finally revealed. My heart did something odd, like a dropped plate. The nickname stuck in my brain—"Moon For Ming." Josiah had always been casual about his past. He'd said "old classmates," a laugh, a shrug. I let it be. But the look in everyone's eyes made me open my phone when I got to the hotel.
"What are you doing?" Franklin asked, but I didn't answer. I typed the name into the search bar.
"Moon For Ming." The posts flooded up—months of posts, small and steady like a leak. Pictures, short captions, private jokes, at least a hundred comments calling him "Josiah" and "sweetheart." The most recent image was from the day before I left for this trip: a shot of coconut chicken we had eaten together. The caption read, "Hotpot maybe should be spicy."
Josiah had never liked spicy food.
I tapped the comments. "Josiah's taste has been corrupted by Ming!" "Josiah, you remember you can't handle spicy, right?" "Today Ming wore a skirt!" Comments like tiny knives.
I zoomed the photo until the pixels blurred. A corner of a skirt showed. I felt ice in my chest. He wasn't changing for me. He was different for her.
I scrolled until my thumb hurt. Posts from years back. Every time Josiah talked about "missing her," "the trip was worth it," "I would go anywhere for Ming"—the words were there, repeated, patient. The account never argued. It let the comments be the evidence.
"Who is she?" I whispered to myself. The name stitched through the profile like a subtitle: Hayley Michel.
I put the phone down and called him.
"Hello?" His voice on the other end was sleepy, full of an ease that used to soothe me. "What's wrong?"
"Why are you posting pictures…" That should have been simple. Instead I found myself falling into the same trap I'd slipped into for three years: making excuses for him.
"Chiara," he said, "are you missing me?"
The question was a soft thing thrown across a chasm. I answered before I could stop myself: "Yes."
"One week more," he said. "I'll pick you up. We'll have coconut chicken. You'll be back before you know it."
"Josiah, it's two hours by plane to Zhengzhou. You said you hate traveling. You said you won't do long distance."
His silence grew. Then he said, "You picked this job. I told you what I'd do. Be patient. Work is work." He spoke as if he were lecturing a child. "And—Chiara, don't make a scene at night."
I broke.
"You called me childish," I said, the words tasting like bitter medicine. "You said I should be reasonable and responsible. You told me to be practical. Then why, Josiah, do you sit across the country buying hundreds of pieces of proof that you still want her?"
"I—" He started and stopped. Then, lazy and cotton-soft, he asked, "Do you want me to come?"
"Yes." My throat burned. "I want to see you. I'm two hours away."
There was a long, slow inhale on the other end. "Chiara, take care of yourself. We'll talk in the morning."
He hung up. I felt unreal. My breath sounded too loud in my ears.
The next hours were a blur. I packed and repacked, as if suitcases could store answers. At 3:30 a.m. I called again. The phone rang and rang until Josiah answered, half-asleep.
"What's wrong now?" he mumbled.
"I want to split," I said. Saying it out loud made the world tilt. "I can't do this anymore."
"Chiara, don't be dramatic," he said. "You're on a business trip. You're tired. Talk after you calm down."
I closed my eyes and tasted betrayal. I am not a person who raised her voice in public. The three years with Josiah had taught me gentleness as armor. Yet in that hotel bathroom, the mirror reflected a woman I barely recognized—red-eyed, ragged, and suddenly fierce.
"Josiah," I said, "we're done."
He sighed. He said a long, tired string of practical remarks—about wedding plans, about responsibility, about how I should be careful with my choices—and then, incongruously, how his parents were worried about the banquet. And then: "Fine. If you're sure."
I hung up before he finished his sentence. I moved out of the hotel at dawn with the quietness of someone performing an irreversible act. I left behind the toothbrush, the last shared small thing.
That night, Josiah sent messages with wedding logistics. My parents called and scolded. "You can't do this to a family," my father barked. My mother wept on the phone about shame and "sold opportunities." The town murmured. The social streams lit up with friends offering unsolicited advice. I blacklisted everyone who tried to mediate. I had been a victim in my own life for too long; I knew how to stop listening.
And then Fox Cooke began to appear.
He was loud, impossible, alive—everything that had not fit in my relationship with Josiah. He volunteered to drive me to meetings, to drag me to bad movies, to sit beside me between awkward conference calls and make terrible jokes so I could breathe. At first I let him be a noisy companion; later I began to look for his voice in empty rooms.
One night after a group screening, I cried in the dark. Fox didn't ask why. He placed his coat over my shoulders like someone who had learned to care without entreaty.
"Stop being fragile," he said gently. "You're the strongest person in this room and you don't even know it."
"How can anyone be strong when they feel hollow?" I asked.
"Because hollow makes space," he said. "Space for new things."
In the days that followed, I went back to work harder, long hours, travel. I restarted my life like someone replanting a garden. I changed jobs. I let my parents get used to the idea that their daughter's paycheck was high enough to matter.
But the story did not end quietly. Rumors fed on the open wounds between Josiah and me. People picked sides. When the engagement notices had already been delivered, my breaking the engagement made news to acquaintances and colleagues. The world became louder. Josiah, who had once been so calm, began to look unglued.
One evening, three weeks after the hotel, Fox and I walked out of a mall and into the bright, humid air.
"Hey," someone called. It was Josiah.
He looked sharp, angry. His face was that flat blue of someone who had just realized the world had rearranged itself without his permission. "Chiara, come here."
I kept walking. Fox put a hand on my shoulder like a bridge.
"Who is he?" he asked casually.
I didn't answer.
"Chiara." His voice had that precise edge of control. "Walk with me. We need to talk."
"I told you not to follow me," I said.
"You can't just—" He lunged for my arm. I pulled away; he looked shocked as if the world had offered him something unfamiliar.
"Chiara," he said, low and sharp. "We're getting married."
I laughed then—not from humor, but from something hollow and bright at the same time. "What is this, a contest? You couldn't love me enough to cross a hundred miles, but you can stage a marriage like it's a victory lap?"
He didn't answer. Instead he reached out again. I slapped him. It was a clean, precise motion that felt like a verdict. His face reddened where my hand landed. People around us stared.
"You think this is okay?" I said. "You think wearing a ring means you can rewrite who you were all along?"
He tried words: apologies, excuses, the old "I will change," the soft "We will work this out." The faces in the crowd shifted. Some were appalled. Some murmured. Some—worse—looked like they were waiting for the spectacle.
I walked away with Fox at my side. Later, Fox sat me down and said, "You can't keep doing this to yourself."
"Do what?" I asked.
"Let him keep twisting reality," Fox said. "Let him make you small."
The affair of punishment came later, and it was public in a way that made a scar permanent.
They organized an engagement dinner. Or rather, Josiah's parents did. He had called everyone to a small restaurant in the neighborhood where the banquet hall smelled of lilies and old wine. His friends were there. Franklin showed up, smiling in that awkward way of someone who had told the secret in the first place.
I did not intend to go. But the day before, his mother called and said something that sounded like a plea disguised as tradition: "It's not about changing your mind. It is about showing face to the family. We're only inviting close friends. Come. Please."
I had made a list of what I could tolerate and what I could not. I wrote the list with deliberate hands. I told myself I would go and leave quietly. But the truth is that I wanted them to know the truth on their own terms—not the fragments they'd heard fed to them by a loyal friend network.
"You're sure?" Fox asked when we stood outside the restaurant.
"Yes," I said. "This is where they planned it. They wanted the world to see us as a perfect couple."
"Then let's make it very visible," Fox said.
Inside, the room glittered with polite smiles. Josiah was there with a shaved, pale look of someone who had not slept. His friends arranged themselves around him like a shield. Franklin tried to keep eye contact with me, then looked away.
"Chiara," Josiah said when I walked in, voice sharp with a calm he didn't have, "are you sure you want to do this now?"
"Yes," I said. I had rehearsed my voice, the cadence of it, the way to keep anger from becoming a spectacle and instead make clarity shine. "I'm sure."
He opened his mouth in that practiced way of a man who had always expected forgiveness. Instead, I pulled out my phone and set it to the live feed. The room went still.
"I found his account," I said, without theatrics. "Not by chance. Because someone thought you should know. Franklin, you told everyone."
Franklin's face fell into the exact shape of shame. He muttered a defense—no, he had said it by mistake—he meant no harm. "I'm sorry," he whispered.
"Josiah," I said, and the name landed like an accusation. "You bought tickets. Two hundred and thirteen train tickets, according to a jar of receipts she kept."
The table beside him shifted. "Two hundred and thirteen?" someone muttered.
"Yes," I said. "Two hundred and thirteen one-way hard-seat tickets across the country."
Whispers spread like wind through dry grass. Josiah's mouth opened and closed. At first, he tried denial. "That's absurd," he said. "You don't know what you're saying."
"Franklin, show them," I said.
Franklin's hands trembled. He pulled a folded paper from his jacket—an old piece he had been foolish enough to keep. It was a list—names, dates, small cramped notes: the travel ledger he'd once joked about. The room leaned in as forks stopped clinking.
"Those are mine," Josiah said, voice cracking into a thin thread. "They're—those were for a project. They were—"
"Train tickets," I said. "Train tickets he bought to go to Hayley. To go to her monthly. To be there when she cried, to be there when she said she missed him. The receipts are all there."
Faces shifted. A woman at the head of the table whispered, "He'd do that?" A co-worker from Josiah's firm looked stunned. Someone took out a phone and started recording. The restaurant, a small place with low ceilings, suddenly felt like a theater.
Josiah's brain tried a thousand defenses—the tickets were for work, the photos were innocent, the comments were jokes. He began the old performance: "I never stopped caring—" But the room no longer insured him.
"You told my mother you were marrying me," I said, slowly. "You told my family. You told my friends. You let my whole life be arranged around a lie."
He blinked. Denial shifted to rage. "You're making a scene," he hissed. "This is humiliating."
"Good," I replied. "Let humiliation be yours for once."
"Aren't you ashamed?" his mother cried. "You made promises!"
"I'm ashamed of being kept as a prop," I said. "I'm ashamed of the way you turned love into a private hoarding of lies."
People's faces hardened into judgment. Someone said, "We should have known." Another said, "He always seemed distant. Now it makes sense."
Then the real punishment began.
First, it was social: friends retreated. A few stood to leave, their laughter halted as if water had been poured on it. Franklin, who had been guilty of petty complicity, tried to explain. In many smaller ways he was punished first—abashed stares, the quiet freezing of conversations when he entered a room. People stopped inviting him to gatherings he'd been part of. The subtle loneliness of that kind of exile is a slow-burning punishment.
"You're a coward," I told Josiah. The words landed; they did not heal anything, but they were true. He had been a coward toward me, toward Hayley, and toward himself.
Then came the harsher fall. Videos from the restaurant scattered across the internet. They were not savage, but they were clear: a woman calling a man out in front of family; receipts; a friend stumbling through apologies. The kind of content that spelled social death for someone who had lived off cultivated images.
"He's ruined," someone whispered behind me. "Why did he do this to her?"
And Josiah's face, the face of a man used to comfortably curated perception, changed. First there was confusion—how had the world turned?—then fury, then a dawning, terrible panic as he realized that those receipts were proof, that the posts were traceable, that every person in the restaurant could say, with their eyes, "We see you now."
He tried to salvage dignity in the only way he knew—words. "I'll explain. I didn't—" Tears started at the edges of his eyes. He looked like a man wearing someone else's grief.
"Explain what?" I asked. "That you loved someone else while you promised me marriage? That you hoarded travel like proof of feeling and asked me to be quiet?"
The room watched. A neighbor filmed him and posted; colleagues texted screenshots to mutual friends. The public punishment wasn't violent. It didn't have a shaming ritual invented for punishment. It had something worse for him: it stripped the mask he relied on. People who had lined up to ask for favors retreated. The network that had bolstered his persona peeled away.
He moved through a cascade of emotions that I watched with a hard little pity. He began with indignation: "You can't do this!" Then denial, "I didn't mean—" Then pleading, "Please, Chiara, don't make this harder." When none of those worked, he slid into bargaining: "I'll make it up. I'll quit. I'll—" Finally, his voice broke into fragments and the petty costume of him dropped.
"Please," he said at last. "Forgive me. Please. I will change."
A girl from his office, someone who had been nice at parties, said, "He used to talk about how pure his feelings were. I thought—" Her voice trailed into such cold silence that her sentence felt like an indictment.
The crowd's response was not unified applause. Some people shook their heads. Some clapped slowly, resentfully. A few hissed, "Traitor," under their breath. Others, more quietly, began to comfort me. But they also did something to Josiah that felt like punishment: they simply stopped treating him like a man whose word mattered. He discovered that social trust, once eroded, is not easy to reassemble.
He did not march out like some tragic hero. He wilted. His friends who had known and kept quiet were not spared. Franklin, who had laughed off truths and sided with loyalty to a person rather than loyalty to honesty, found himself isolated. At first he defended himself publicly, then he could not. People who had invited him to coffee canceled. Invitations dwindled. His phone grew silent.
"Did you expect anything else?" I asked him in private later, though not in that restaurant. "You chose cowardice. You chose a loyalty that hid pain. Don't be surprised when the world turns its back."
He looked hollow. "We thought we were doing the right thing," he whispered. "I thought it was better to spare you."
"Sparing me by lying to me?" I asked. "That's crueler."
The worst of the punishment, for Josiah, was watching his image unravel in real time. The engagements he had counted on—the future he had rehearsed—became fragile. Calls from prospective clients began to fizzle; people who had been eager to be near him moved away. He tried to rebuild with promises, with displays of contrition. He wrote me messages—pages long, soft and imploring—but I had learned to listen to actions, not pleas.
Fox stayed by my side through the aftermath, awkward and bold in equal measure. He didn't demand anything. He only asked once, quietly, "Do you want me to do something more visible? Something to make them see you better?"
"No," I said. "They already saw."
Time, stubborn and honest, moved me past the raw edges. I moved apartments. I changed my name on a few documents. I rebuilt a calendar that did not secretly include him.
Fox was not a savior. He was a man who kept showing up. I began to want him not out of gratitude but because he made me laugh and let me be small sometimes without thinking it was a test. He called me "Chiara" and sometimes "Chi," and once, almost tenderly, "Chi-Chi," and it felt warm like a sweater.
Our closeness came in small things: he learned the exact way I liked my coffee and brought it to me on mornings when I had three meetings in a row; he messaged me at midnight when he saw a silly meme and asked, "This you?" He gave me a ridiculous nickname—"Morning Star"—that made me roll my eyes, and he showed up at my apartment with a ridiculous, awkward bouquet when my father called to complain about spending.
"You're ridiculous," I told him once as we walked under a drizzle that made the city look like a watercolor. "Why me?"
He grinned. "Because you are stubborn and careful and not very good at noticing you are loved."
Our first real confession was not a movie-scene proclamation. It happened at 2 a.m. outside a convenience store when I had missed my ride home.
"You okay?" he asked.
"I am now," I said.
He hesitated, then touched my hand—lightly, like someone feeling a pulse. "I wanted to tell you before, but I didn't know when the right time would be. I... I like you. I like you a lot."
I laughed, a short, shocked sound. "You tell me now, at 2 a.m. in front of Slush King? Classic Fox."
"I am classic," he said, and the way he said it made me want to test that statement.
We took it slowly. Not because I feared getting hurt again—though I did—but because I had learned a simple, hard lesson: a love that needs proof is not love; a love that shows itself in steady, small actions is.
Months later, Josiah tried to find me again. He wrote long emails. He showed up in places he knew I would be, offering apologies and soft promises. He watched from a distance as I gave a conference speech and as Fox sat in the audience, steady and blushing at his own joy.
One afternoon, as I passed a cafe, I saw Josiah stop across the street. He looked older, tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. He tried to catch my eye. When I didn't, he walked away with the slow, shuffling walk of someone who has expended his charm.
He had been publicly punished, yes. The restaurant scene was only a needle prick on a larger fabric of consequences: social scorn, the crumbling of his cultivated image, the retreat of friends. He had tried to wrench back what he'd lost by pleading and by smooth words, but none of that unmade the months, the receipts, the posts.
As for Franklin, the guilt ate at him. He took to helping people without expecting anything—meals to homeless shelters, volunteering shifts, awkward attempts to make amends. It was small redemption, not the dramatic apologies he had once imagined would clear the slate. He became quieter, kinder, and perhaps better for it. That was a different punishment: being forced to stare at the poorer part of yourself and to do the work.
There is a peculiar kind of satisfaction in seeing the person who used you as furniture learn the shape of that furniture and how it doesn't fit. But I never wanted a spectacle just for spectacle's sake. The punishment here was not my revenge; it was the truth, and the truth, once out in the world, rearranged everything.
Fox and I grew together in the mundane ways—arguments about what to cook, long silences on the couch, a shared allergy to cilantro. I sometimes saw myself in the mirror and felt the old ache, but it had softened into memory.
One night, I found myself at a small rooftop bar. The city twinkled below. Fox was beside me, his coat draped over my shoulders, his hand warm on the small of my back.
"Do you ever regret it?" he asked suddenly.
"Regret what?" I asked.
"Leaving him," he said. "Making it public."
The city seemed to hush.
"I regret the time I wasted," I said honestly. "I regret that three years were built on a house of cards. But not the truth. The truth was lazy salvation. It hurt, yes, but it was also necessary."
He kissed my forehead. "Turned out to be a decent ending then."
"Not ending," I corrected. "A real beginning."
At that moment, the wind carried a small laugh from across the roof—someone else's joy. I thought of the train tickets like a ridiculous relic. I thought of the way Josiah had carefully curated a life that was not honest. I thought of how people can keep secrets like stamps, pressed and collected.
The last time I heard about Hayley was when a mutual friend said she married someone in a coastal town. Rumor tends to tidy up messy stories. I didn't feel anything for her. She had been part of someone else's story, and she had pages of her own.
Fox and I stayed, imperfect and real. He learned to call me "Chi," to leave a mug by the sink, to show up with terrible jokes and better coffee. He learned that love is a series of daily small things. I learned to trust a man who kept his promises in actions and not in archives.
Sometimes, late at night, I opened my phone and scrolled through the old posts Josiah had made. They were still there, a line of small fires that had once lit a stubborn darkness. I didn't reply. I didn't need the proofs anymore.
The city moved on. People who had judged from the outside found new gossip. I found peace in doing the hard things: saying no, moving on, accepting help, and loving again. When people asked me about the scandal, I said simple things.
"He wasn't worth it," I would tell them.
They asked, "Are you okay?"
I smiled. "I'm better than okay. I am free."
And when Fox said, quietly, "You know you're my favorite," I laughed and reached for his hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
The End
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