Face-Slapping15 min read
The White Pill, the USB, and How I Took Back My Life
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I never thought childbirth would turn my life inside out. I also never thought that one wooden scent, one white pill, and one dusty USB stick could decide everything.
"It’s time," I told Cillian Murray when my stomach tightened that morning. He was already pale by the bed, rubbing his temples like something hurt him inside.
"Cillian, help—" I tried to stand and the pain took me. Blood wet my thighs. "Cillian!"
He stared for three seconds, then his face fell. "Ah—" He dropped to his knees and then, impossibly, passed out. He fainted at the sight of blood.
"What do you mean you faint? Get up, Cillian!" I shouted, fingers clenching the doorframe.
Then a bell. I remember the neighbor opening the door. He looked younger than me thought I’d remember, tall, with a woodsy, cedar-like smell about him. "Kylie? Are you okay?" he asked.
"Yes—no!" I tried to catch my breath and staggered forward. He caught me like he had all the time in the world. He lifted me into his arms and ran.
"Who are you?" I croaked as the ambulance lights flashed.
"Fionn Zimmerman. The neighbor." His voice was steady, nothing like Cillian’s hands-in-his-hair panic.
At the hospital, nurses assumed he was my husband. He never corrected them. He stayed. He held my hand when contractions hit again. He put a straw to my lips when I asked for water. He hummed quietly and did not let the world rush me.
"We have a daughter," I said when I saw her, all pink and small and angry about the world.
"She's perfect," Fionn said, smiling in a way I’d never seen Cillian smile.
Later, Dorothy Larsson—my mother-in-law—called him "the missing son" and said, "Fionn has been away so much. He missed the wedding, Kylie, but we’re family." She said this like an announcement. Like I was supposed to nod and like it.
When I first saw Amy Sanchez, my daughter, the relief in my chest was enormous. But when I held her up, someone murmured, "She looks like Fionn," and the world tilted.
"Don't say that," Cillian snapped. "Kylie, don't say that about our child."
"Why not?" I asked. "She does look like him."
"Don't."
I swallowed that exchange and tried to be the new mother everyone expected. Dorothy took over my laundry, my shirts. She had kept meticulous notes before I married into the family—my cycles, my habits, dates that used to be mine. It felt as if my life had been under someone else's pen for years.
"She needs nursing," Dorothy told me when milk barely came in. "No formula. No babysitter."
"I need help," I whispered. "I cannot do this alone."
"No," she said like a verdict. "The baby needs you."
So I drank her weird soups and took her weird tonics. I washed my face of grease after the lactation consultant prodded and twisted my breasts like a machine. Dorothy brought bowls of greasy pork fat brew and dried loofah threads from the countryside that made my stomach revolt. "Natural," she said. "Good for milk."
"Anything for Amy," I told myself.
Weeks passed and something else gnawed at me—the distance between Cillian and me. We shared a bed, a roof, and a daughter, but not his skin. He refused to be intimate. He refused even to undress in front of me. Doors slammed. Locks turned hard. The closest I got to him was when our daughter fell asleep and I was left watching him from across the room like a stranger.
One afternoon Amy picked up Cillian’s phone and pressed a voice message.
"Si Ming ge—good brother, can you transfer thirty thousand for me? I need—" A female voice named "micro" buzzed through the speaker.
I grabbed the phone. The contact said "微微" on the screen. I saw an immediate transfer record. Cash, sent quickly.
"Cillian," I asked when he came home. "Who is this?"
"Don't go through my phone, Kylie," he snapped and his face went tight.
"Who is she? Why are you sending money to her?"
"What business is that of yours?" he roared and my cheeks burned at his anger.
"You fainted at blood but you can send money to her? You choose a voice over your wife?" I cried. "You gave me six months being a widow with you in the same house—you went numb to me."
"She's my childhood—" He snatched the phone back and refused to let me see more.
Dorothy heard enough. "Micro is my goddaughter," she said later in a low tone. "She is like a daughter to me." Her face closed like a bank vault.
That night, in the dark, nostalgia and anger pitched together inside my chest. I slept, but not deep. When I woke, I found I had been touched. There was the faint smell of cedar on the pillow, like Fionn’s smell. Memory blurred—some dream of a hand that wasn’t Cillian’s. The next morning when I looked at Cillian he was different—empty like a photograph someone had taken edges off of.
Then something else happened. My cup of milk. Dorothy handed it to me like bedside ritual. "For sleep," she said. I watched as the cat drank from a cup I had poured mine into. The cat ate and slept and then woke, nothing wrong. But at night, there had been a fog over my mind. I slept and slept and woke with the memory of something like being drugged.
I started testing. I poured my milk to plants, poured the same into the cat's bowl. The cat slept, I poked it—it twitched awake. But my sleep that night had been thick and hard to fight, and I found blankness in my memory.
One night I heard downstairs: "She'll suspect if we keep doing this."
"Don't worry. We'll manage. She’ll play along."
I froze. Voices—Dorothy and someone else. I pressed my ear to the door. "Who is this?" I whispered.
"Fionn? Did you do it again?" That voice, low and controlled.
"No, it's necessary." Dorothy's words were a knife. "She'll be quiet. We have to keep her. The baby needs to be safe. And we… need a grandson perhaps."
My mind spun. I understood then ugly things that should have been impossible. I replayed the line about "if we keep doing this" and the way Dorothy always smiled like a woman with plans. "A grandson." The room blurred.
At 2 a.m., Fionn came into my room and said in a broken voice, "I'm sorry, Kylie. I didn't mean—"
I kept my eyes closed. "Do not touch me," I said and meant it.
He sat on the edge of a chair like a man wrestling with his own bones. "You should know the truth about Cillian. There are things I did not tell anyone. I didn't choose any of this."
"What truth?" I whispered.
He left without explanation. The questions lined up and marched into my head. I needed proof. I would find proof.
I found a USB stick in a drawer in Cillian's study. It had a folder named "micro_special." Inside were pictures—tender photos between Cillian and Lauren Kuznetsov, snapshots from long ago with the two of them laughing, and at the end, a file titled "For My Girl"—a PowerPoint with childhood memories and a confession: "Lauren, my girl, I will wait. I will not make you suffer with me. You deserve better. If I cannot be whole, I will let you go, but I will protect you always."
Another file showed transfers and messages. Another file, worse, had a short video—Lauren trying to kiss Cillian in a drunken living room. He gently moves away. The last clip had Cillian stumbling, face flushed, and his trousers loose at the knees—he was as drunk as a man can be.
I pressed play and felt the world tilt.
I copied the files. I hid the original USB. I started to shape a plan the way a mason shapes bricks—one by one.
"You can't go to war with a whole family," my mother said on the phone when I told her I wanted to leave. "You have a home here. Think of your daughter. Think of your brother's child—"
"I have to take Amy with me," I said. "I cannot live with people who see my daughter as a tool."
She sighed. "You have not been taught how to hold ground, Kylie. You are soft."
That word "soft" turned to steel in me. I decided to be anything but soft.
I became the perfect wife in public. I laughed at parties. I warmed my mother-in-law's tea. I pretended to be the doting, grateful daughter-in-law. The truth is, when you are preparing a coup, the time to strike is when everyone is relaxed.
I made friends with Lauren. I bought her little gifts. I let her unburden her heart. "I miss him," she said one afternoon, mascara running. "He loved me once."
"People change," I said and handed her a box of earrings. I put a tiny microphone in the earring box. "Keep them. Call me if you need anything, Lauren."
She clung to me like a woman with no other anchor. She was hungry for kindness and money. She wanted Cillian back. She wanted to be loved publicly. She wanted the life Dorothy promised. I gave it.
The more I fed Lauren—my money, my attention—the more she came to me. I learned from her the places Cillian had properties, the times he had been out, the weddings he'd missed. She told me about movers and boxes. She let drop that she had been over at Cillian's other apartment on the weekend, alone with him, and she had begged. He had been tender, and she had misread that.
I used the recordings, I used the USB, and I used my neighbor, Raffaella Warren, a local woman who loved nothing more than a secret. At parties she would do my dirty work—spread a whisper here, a picture there. A rumor is a seed that grows fast in a small courtyard.
The day I chose to act was Dorothy’s birthday. I invited the family to a restaurant with a small private room and told them I wanted to celebrate, to show I was the grateful wife. Dorothy loved the idea. She preened in a dress and left a bowl of milk on my nightstand. Amy came along and ate with her small hands.
The heavy meal was at 8 p.m. At ten, the program in the private room was over and Dorothy wanted to show off the presents. I excused myself—"I need a little air," I said—and walked out into the corridor where the restaurant smelled of hot lamps and fried oil.
I found Fionn at the opposite door. He looked twelve feet tall and twelve years younger than his own age. "Everything ready?" he asked quietly.
"Yes," I whispered.
I had done three things in the afternoon. I had removed the pill-like white tablet Dorothy always put into our milk and replaced it with a harmless sugar substitute for my glass. I had placed the copied USB into a small speaker-ready laptop in the back of the private room. And I had set up a small camera in my living room a week ago that streamed to a private cloud. Tonight, I had arranged for both—images and video—to be visible.
I walked back in as the final song ended. People applauded. Dorothy beamed. Lauren sat beside Cillian and gave him a look full of hope and possession—like a young woman placing a flag.
"Cillian, this is for you," Lauren cooed, fingers tucked under his chin. He smiled a little, embarrassed, and then—exactly when I'd timed it—the laptop screen flashed up at the front of the room.
"What's that?" Dorothy asked.
"Just a slideshow I made for you," I said, like a gift. "I thought we could look at photos of the family."
A playlist started: childhood pictures, holidays, smiling faces. The room quieted. Then a video clip played. It showed Lauren and Cillian in a living room looped—laughing, leaning close, touching. The last second of the clip glitched and showed Cillian in a state I had recorded—drunk, trousers slack, half-asleep on a couch, Lauren leaning toward him, lips nearly touching his. The music stopped.
There was a hush. Then people started to murmur. Dorothy's hand flew to her mouth. "What is this?" she demanded.
"It's the truth," I said, voice steady. "It's in this folder. In this USB."
"How dare you—" Cillian lunged up and snatched the laptop. "You have no right!"
The room smelled of spilled red wine and astonishment. Raffaella snapped photos with her phone and sent them in two seconds flat to her group. "They're lovers!" people whispered.
"Stop it," Lauren cried. "That's not—" Her face turned white as the screen showed transfers logged between Lauren and Cillian, and messages from Lauren begging for money. Her eyes flickered from the screen to Dorothy to Cillian.
"This is private!" Cillian shouted. He looked like a man unmasked, young and terrible.
"Private?" I asked, raising my voice. "You fainted at a speck of blood but can send money in secret. You can hide children in places but not me. You can hide houses that you didn't tell your wife about—"
The room's air thickened. Dorothy had been red-faced for minutes and now she turned on me like a tigress. "You vile woman! How dare you bring shame to my family on my birthday?"
"Is your birthday the day you put pills into your daughter-in-law's milk?" I said softly. "Is tonight the night you drug a woman so you can make her quiet and give you what you want?"
Dorothy laughed, a cracked laugh. "What are you—"
"Stop!" Cillian screamed. "You're lying! This is—this is blackmail!" He held the laptop over his head like a shield.
I had planned for denial. I had planned for the face-change from smug to pale to angry. I had planned for Cillian to call the scene a setup. I had planned for Dorothy to go into protective-mode and for Lauren to beg. I had also planned for witnesses.
I had already given copies of the USB to three people who could not help but spread the truth: Raffaella, the restaurant manager, and a chat group of neighbors who loved scandal more than their grandchildren. I had them on my side because everyone knew secrets.
"Play the audio," Fionn said from the edge of the room. He had come forward now, the cedar scent like war paint. He touched my hand gently. "Play the audio too."
I clicked. A recording of Dorothy’s voice, months old, filled the room. It was her, explaining quietly to someone else: "She will be quiet. We'll give her milk. She won't suspect. Look, it's for the baby's sake, for our family. We must keep the outward appearance."
The room burst like a bubble.
Faces split into shock, then anger, then betrayal. "You did what?!" someone shouted.
"Mom!" Cillian's voice had gone thin. "Mom, is that true?"
Dorothy's shoulders sagged. She blinked and spun toward him. "No—no—you don't understand—Kylie is making things up!"
"Make things up?" I said. "You kept a record of my cycles, you served me potions that made me sick, you put drugs into my milk, you planned to keep me silent while you used my body and my baby to secure your son's future. You used me as a tool!"
Dorothy's composure cracked. "That's a lie. I have raised this family. You ungrateful—"
The crowd's reaction intensified. Some people pointed and pulled out their phones. Some sneered. Some whispered, "How could she?" Some patted my hand in sympathy. A woman near the buffet said, "I always thought she was too nice to be true." Another man said, "That laptop—who gave her the evidence?"
Lauren sobbed loudly. She ran at the screen and tried to swat the images away. "No! Stop! This is not what he wanted!"
Cillian, who had been trying to salvage dignity, now looked like a man seeing the floor fall beneath him. His face turned raw. sweat beaded at his hairline.
"Was this the plan?" Fionn asked him quietly, but loud enough for the group. "To have her give you a child while you hid who you were?"
"I—No," Cillian whispered. He was shrinking. "I never—"
"You lied to me," I said. "We married under pretenses. You said you loved me. You took my trust and used it like a shield."
He tried to speak, then shook his head. "Kylie, please—" He offered that tiny pleading voice, "Please don't do this in front of them."
"Why not?" I said. "They should know. They should choose."
Dorothy tried to rally people. "This is private. You don't judge families on—"
"On what?" a neighbor demanded. "On who can fake sincerity best? On who can hide pills in milk?"
At that point, it got worse—publicly worse. Raffaella had already started a live stream. Within minutes, the private room was public. People outside were watching. Comments poured in. Some cursed. Some said I should be ashamed for exposing family. Others cheered. The restaurant manager, trying to contain the disaster, called the police to report a disturbance—unaware his call would only bring more attention.
Dorothy's face finally collapsed like a paper bag. She reached for Cillian and sobbed. "I did what any mother would do," she wailed. "He needed to be right in the world. He is my son."
"By making me a lab rat?" I asked. "By making my nights drugged and my days tired?"
"You don't understand the cost," Dorothy cried. "You don't understand."
Then came the arc I had waited for. Dorothy's supporters thinned. The room warmed to me. Hands touched mine. A neighbor said, "I never liked the way she looked at Kylie." Another said, "I smelled cedar on her husband's pillow months ago." People started recounting oddities. "He never undressed in front of her," someone said. "He had a second address!" another added.
"I want to press charges," I said, and this was the roar that made the room tilt again. "Drugging someone is a crime. Recording someone without consent is a crime, but it's my life. I will not let this family act like victims when they treated me like a tool."
"You can't take Amy," Cillian said suddenly, raw fear cutting through him. "She's my daughter too."
"Not if the father is not who he claims he is," I said. "Not if your family conspired to use me as a vessel."
Voices rose. People shouted. The restaurant was packed with neighbors who had come to watch a show and found themselves watching a miracle. Some cheered me. Some hissed. A mother clutched her child and looked at Dorothy as if she might melt her with scorn.
Then the worst fall: Dorothy lunged and snatched my phone from Raffaella's hand. "You can't do this!" She tried to tear the laptop away. Three men held her back. She fell to her knees in the corridor, pleading for Cillian to forgive her.
"Mom, stop!" Cillian wept, the strongest image of him in weeks: the man whose life had been built on lies, now confronting the ruin. "We will sort this. Kylie, please, let's talk."
I had asked for drama. I had asked for crowd. I had asked for witnesses who wouldn't let them bury it in a back room. The punishment was not some judge slamming a gavel—it was worse for them: it was truth becoming a public stain. That was the real punishment I wanted. And I wanted them to feel it.
The crowd pressed in. "Shame on them," someone said. "Shame." Phones flashed. A few people filmed Dorothy's crying, Lauren's collapsing sobs, Cillian's silent face. There was no courtroom, no legal formality. There was instant social judgment. That felt like a sentence.
Dorothy's smugness dissolved into shock, denial, bargaining, anger, and then wailing. I watched every stage. She went from fingers curled in rage—"You are a liar!"—to stunned disbelief—"How could this be?"—to pleading—"Please don't ruin my life,"—to collapse—sobbing into her hands. She begged neighbors, "Do you believe me? I raised this family!" The neighbors exchanged looks. Some shook their heads; others, busy with phones, turned their backs.
Lauren stumbled toward me, clutching Cillian's arm. "I'm pregnant," she sobbed. "He told me—"
"Cillian," I said, "tell them now. Who is the father of Lauren's child?"
He could not. He could not speak. He shook his head. For the first time, he looked smaller than the room. The crowd watched his silence like a verdict.
That night spread like wildfire. People shared videos. The small community uprooted itself to gossip and judgement. Dorothy tried to salvage dignity by calling old friends, but most of them texted back, "Are you serious? We are so sorry, Kylie." They did not come to her rescue.
The punishment lasted weeks. Dorothy's phone calls were fewer. She lost standing in her bridge group and the church committee. People whispered in markets. Lauren's marriage prospects crumbled; who would want a woman who had been seen as part of a family scandal? Cillian lost clients—who wanted a stylist entangled in such a mess? He found his bookings canceled, his sources more wary.
But public shaming was not the end. I needed formal justice. I filed a police report the following week and handed them the pill samples, the recordings, and the USB. They opened a case. The lab confirmed traces in milk samples. The police served Dorothy a short restraining order that night. The news cameras came, and I watched as the mother who had weaponized motherhood stood with the reporter, looking thin and beaten by something she had never expected—public contempt.
"Why did you do it?" the reporter asked in the live feed.
Dorothy's voice was small. "For my son," she said. "For the family's face."
"And at what cost?" the reporter asked.
Her silence was a kind of answer.
Cillian tried to apologize. "Kylie, I—" He offered attempts at remorse: "I'm sorry," "I didn't know," "I thought I was protecting us." But his words were thin. My mind had already pivoted. "It's too late," I said, and packed our things.
Fionn came to my door the night police took Dorothy for questioning. His face was pale but composed. "I never wanted this for you," he said.
"I know," I answered. "But you were complicit by silence too."
"I will help you," he said.
The following months were strange. Dorothy was ostracized in town. Lauren left in a flurry of shame and promises to get help. Cillian moved out of the house that had been our prison into a smaller apartment, where no one visited. He lost clients and the community's trust. The things that had made the family proud—the house, the festival smiles—fell apart like old wallpaper. The people who had applauded me in the private room now greeted me in markets and on sidewalks, sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with curiosity.
I used the opportunity to build a quieter life. I moved into a small apartment with Amy and Fionn's help. I changed my phone number. I found a part-time job that let me sleep. I requested custody through lawyers and argued in court for what I had always known: the child must be safe from those who would use her as a pawn.
"You're brave," Fionn said once, when Amy was asleep and the evening pressed against the window with distant traffic sounds.
"Brave?" I laughed, soft and hollow. "Brave people get burned. I just knew what would hurt them where it mattered."
He smiled. "You set it on fire."
"I only lit a match," I said. "They had all the gasoline."
The legal process moved slowly. I had to be patient in a language of forms and subpoenas. When the DNA report finally returned—clear and devastating—it showed what I had suspected: Cillian was not, biologically, Amy's father. The lab report named the father as unknown, but what mattered was the pattern of deceit. Dorothy had orchestrated events around a family truth none of us had wanted to speak about.
At the end of all this, I had things I wished for and losses that sat heavy. The house they'd treasured was sold. Dorothy's social circles shrank. Cillian's pride had been stripped bare. Lauren, ironically, found herself alone in a city where gossip preceded a new acquaintance like a notice. She left town quietly, a rumor trailing like smoke.
Justice had many faces. The most satisfying one for me was not courtroom vindication but the way Dorothy had to sit in public and answer questions, the way neighbors who once nodded at her now turned away, the way people who had never liked me called to say, "If you ever need anything, tell me." That was a strange new world.
And there were softer moments too: the nights when Amy curled her small fingers around mine, the mornings when Fionn brought coffee and didn't expect anything in return, the times I could walk through the market without feeling choked by other people's opinions.
One afternoon, as I went through drawers in the small apartment, I found the original USB I had stashed months ago. I turned it in my hand and remembered Dorothy's laugh, Cillian's denial, Lauren's tearful clutch of my arm. The cedar scent of Fionn’s coat passed through my memory like an old song.
"Keep it," Fionn said when I told him I had it. "Just in case."
"I will," I said.
Sometimes I think revenge is a lesson, not an ending. I received apologies in the months that followed—some hollow, some real. Cillian texted once: "I didn't mean to hurt you," and I typed, "You did." I never burned bridges simply to watch them smoke; I burned them because I needed light.
And the white pill? It sits in an evidence bag in the police file, labelled and dull. The USB? In a safe deposit box until I decide whether the archive needs to stay. The wooden scent of Fionn's jacket still rises sometimes when I open the wardrobe, and the sound of Amy's laugh drowns out memory.
"Do you regret it?" Fionn asked, one evening, as we watched Amy sleep.
"I regret that I trusted," I said. "I regret that I thought family meant safety."
He took my hand. "And now?"
"Now," I said, "we are free to be our kind of family."
I am Kylie Flores. I kept my daughter. I exposed the white pills and the lies. I learned that truth, once spoken plainly and shown publicly, is a punishment worse than any judge could hand down—because it makes liars face their neighbors, their past, and themselves. And sometimes that is enough.
The End
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