Face-Slapping11 min read
The White Roses on My Hill
ButterPicks13 views
They told me to think of it as a career, not a calamity. I thought of it as both.
"I don't understand why you're keeping that studio," Joyce said the first time she leaned so close to me the perfume on her hair blurred the edge of my vision. "You could sell, Keegan. Walk away."
"I like it," I answered. "Why would I sell a thing I built?"
"You like her," she said simply, and smiled as if she had just solved a math problem.
"You don't know anything about us," I said.
"Then teach me," she whispered, and pressed her fingers to the thin skin of my wrist.
Emmalynn had been the shape of my mornings since I was fourteen. She wore the same awkward courage for a decade, a stubborn halo of small kindnesses. She could read silence and turn it into patience. She would bring me dinner when I missed my train. She would volunteer to fix my shirt buttons. She would say the sort of things that sounded like prayers: "You don't have to be brave all the time, Keegan."
"She loves you," people said. "She will wait."
"I know," I told them, because I thought I did.
"You don't have to explain," Joyce said that afternoon, as she ordered coffee like she ordered people. "I can be what you want."
"You're not Emmalynn."
"Who says I want to be her?" She laughed and then looked at me like a dare.
I had been foolish in a new, very private way. I did not forgive myself. When she kissed me, it tasted like paper and the spice of someone who had rehearsed happiness for years.
"It was a mistake," I told her after, the words hollow in my throat. "It can't happen again."
"It meant something," she said, and her voice held a vow I did not understand.
"Don't do this," I told her. "Not to her."
"She's also beautiful," Joyce said, "but she is not a chess player. She plays with her heart like a pretty toy. I prefer the game."
You would think a man who had loved one person for ten years would have a stronger spine than I showed.
That night Emmalynn came in with a bouquet that made the hallway glow. She set it on the table, cheeks flushed from the heat, petals falling into her hair.
"You should see it," she said with the small, nervous laugh she used to hide from the world. "They had—oh!—you would have liked the display."
I watched her while a part of me broke like thin glass.
"Is everything all right?" she asked.
I lied. "Fine."
She moved through that apartment like a gentle storm; she opened the window because she thought the kitchen smelled too strong; she hummed and made tea. She did not suspect.
Joyce sat on my sofa and watched the way Emmalynn laughed. "She looks lovely," she said. "But I have plans."
"Don't," I warned, and the warning sounded like someone else.
"I want what you have," she said. "Not because I want to ruin her. Because I want to see you look at me like that."
"I won't," I said.
"Prove it then," she said, and set her chin like a challenge.
I let her in because I thought I controlled the consequences.
"It was a game," Joyce later remarked as if narrating a children's story. "But sometimes games have their prizes."
Weeks later she called from a bathroom with her voice caught on the edge: "I'm pregnant."
I froze so suddenly the coffee I held left a ring on the desk, because timing can be a scald and I burned with it. "Is this some kind of—"
"It's yours," she said softly. "We need to go to the clinic together."
"Don't," I said. "Don't tell Emmalynn."
"Then come with me," she said. "Or I'll tell her."
I thought she would balk. I thought she might be afraid to break the silence. I was wrong.
At the clinic she was composed as a bank teller. "You can tell her you're sorry," she said later, when we sat in the car. "But she will believe me."
"She will never know," I told myself.
"You owe me," she said as if I were already indebted.
I followed the script badly. I sat in waiting rooms and swallowed bile. The day Emmalynn found out—the day she called me with a voice I had not heard break—I had Joyce's arm across my chest.
"She signed her name on the form," Joyce said, smiling at my helpless face, listening to Emmalynn sob in the phone.
"Stop," I whispered. "Stop laughing."
"Why? You look good when you are lost."
I left the clinic in a blur of air and color. Emmalynn's call was a knife. She drove to my building and stood under the porchlight with that bouquet of mine—white roses, the ones she liked—and her eyes held an earth-slowing hurt.
"How could you?" she asked.
"I didn't—" I started.
"You didn't what? You didn't think I would see? You didn't think I would deserve the truth?"
"I made a mistake," I said. "I am so sorry."
She folded like cardboard at the edges, but there was a fold that didn't fold back. "You don't understand," she said. "This isn't about your mistake, Keegan. This is about my choice. I can only watch what I choose to watch."
She left. She blocked my numbers. She closed doors like they were the last pieces of a puzzle.
Weeks turned into a slow abrasion. I watched from the side, because I could not bring myself to show up at her door and be another pleading shadow. I saw a new man bring her flowers at a small café, and watched her receive them like a river accepting sunlight. I told myself it was not fair. I told myself I deserved some understanding.
I sold the studio's rights—some of them—for a stupid, naive sum, and bought a plot of earth on a low, east-facing hill. I planted rows and rows of roses: white ones, because Emmalynn always preferred white. I told myself I was making something beautiful for her.
One autumn day I heard she was getting married. I went to the lawn twenty feet behind the hedge of her reception, where the caterers wheeled in trays and guests laughed like a high tide. I watched in a suit that did not fit right and held a camera because watching is a ceremony for the guilty.
She walked out in a dress with a trailing train, and when I watched her take the ring she smiled like the sun does when it makes room for moonlight. The man—Matteo Perrin—held her hand. He looked steady and real and he was not me.
"It suits her," a voice said at my elbow. It was Aurelie Maeda, older and composed, Joyce's sister, who had always been in the background, a quiet force. "She deserves happiness."
"Yes," I said, because I had nothing to take back.
After the wedding, rumors told me Joyce had married quickly, her sister taking control of the family business; her husband was a polished man who paired with her like two cut stones. Rumor had the luxury of cruelty: the marriage flailed and Joyce could not bear children. People whispered about a life of bright dresses and lonely mornings. I listened because it was a small, distant satisfaction.
It was not enough.
One winter, at a gala for a client I had not known I would be invited to, I found Joyce at the center of a room full of people who clapped like rain on tin. She stood under a chandelier, radiant with a smile that could kill a lantern.
"Joyce," I said when I introduced myself. "Long time."
"Keegan," she smeared her smile wider. "So good to see you."
We danced fragmentarily through polite words. Aurelie watched, her gaze like a ledger.
Then something moved in me that was not grief nor remorse exactly but a fierce need to unmask. I had recordings, messages she had sent in boasting threads, proof of lies about pregnancy, of manipulations. I had thought of never touching them. I had thought of burning them like a private penance. Instead I put them on a tiny device in my pocket.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked.
"Because I need the truth out," I answered.
"About what?"
"About you," I said.
It began like a simple confession. I had a way of starting soft and ending sharp.
"You're a guest," she said, with the practiced cold that had always been her shield. "This is not the time."
"I think it's precisely the time," I said. "This room is full of people who helped you into this position."
She frowned. "Are you drunk?"
"Not at all," I lied, because my voice was steady.
"Then make your point quickly," she said, and cast a look at Aurelie as if to conjure reinforcements.
I did not make a point quickly. I walked to the podium as if it were a stage where I had once learned to speak. People turned. Glasses paused mid-toast. The band faltered. Aurelie's hand tightened on a flute.
"Excuse me," I said, and my words caught like a stone on the water. "I have some things to show you."
"You're out of line," Joyce whispered, a hiss of metal.
"Perhaps," I said. "But so were you."
Then I played the first message out loud. Joyce's voice, bright and casual, bragging about what she had done, the clinic visit, the calculated timing, the taunt about Emmalynn hearing me on the phone. She called it a "move." The clip was three minutes of her voice layered over the murmur of the room.
A dozen people exhaled like a chorus.
"That's not funny," someone said. "Who recorded this?"
"I did," I said. "Because she threatened to send Emmalynn photos of me if I didn't walk her through the lies."
"She lied about being pregnant," someone cried.
Another clip went on, a video file this time: Joyce in my apartment, laughing and then looking at a camera she set up and speaking with a practiced cruelty. "She will look broken," she said. "And we'll be above it."
"Where did you get these?" Aurelie demanded. Her voice had that brittle edge of metal being bent.
"From where honesty hides," I said. "From the same person who thought she could take a life and play with it like a toy."
Joyce's smile hardened into something that could not be called smiling. "You have no right—"
"I have all the right," I interrupted. "You blackmailed me. You told me you were pregnant to steal a life. You told me to tell Emmalynn lies. You put yourself between two people and invited collapse."
"This is—prosecution!" she cried, hands trembling. "This is slander!"
"Is it?" I asked. "Listen to yourself."
She tried to stand taller. People in the crowd reached for their phones. I watched a slow shifting of faces from polite interest to raw curiosity to judgment.
"You set me up to be the villain and she left," I said. "Did it make you happy?"
"It made me win," she said, and the word hung like a blade.
"No," said Aurelie suddenly, with a voice like ice. "It made you desperate."
"Don't you dare—" Joyce started.
"You're mine," Aurelie snapped—no, it was more than a snap; it was a breaking of something. "You always wanted this power and you used it. Do you think I didn't see those messages? Do you think I didn't know who you were?"
A silence fell so complete I could hear a man on the balcony drop a napkin.
"She used us," Aurelie said, turning to the gathered crowd. "She used us to build a ladder and now she wonders why it burns."
"Shut up," Joyce begged.
I played the final file: a recording of Joyce instructing someone on how to make sure Emmalynn never found out the truth. Her voice was softer in the tape, smug and satisfied.
The crowd changed. Phones rose like birds. Someone said, "That's criminal." Another said, "She should be fired." A woman I had never seen hissed, "I saw her in marketing last week acting like an angel."
Joyce's face drained of color. She reached for me and I stepped aside. "Keegan, you can't—" she pleaded.
"Why didn't you tell me the whole truth?" I asked. "Why did you let her fall apart?"
"Because I loved you," she cried suddenly, and the lie was naked and quivering.
"Loved me?" a voice from the crowd scoffed. "That sounded like tactics."
"Please," she begged. She looked smaller than I remembered—like a paper figure left too long in the rain.
"How does it feel," someone called, "to have everyone who trusted you record you on their phone?"
A murmur of laughter started, cruel and bright. Joyce tried to speak but the room had turned its face away from her.
"You're shameless," Aurelie said, but now the anger had a different cut—less of a sister's scorn and more of a judge's measure. "You chose this. You built an empire on small betrayals."
"You're lying," Joyce said, shaking. She began to deny, to blame the people around her, to claim they misunderstood. Her voice moved from indignation to panic to the kind of small, repeated denials people make when they have nowhere left to hide.
"Get out," Aurelie ordered. "Out of my event."
"You're making it worse," Joyce cried, her hands fluttering like trapped birds.
Around us, the crowd leaned close. Someone recorded her face and the video spread like an animal leaving tracks. Phones streamed the sound. A dozen comments bloomed in the space of seconds: "liar", "how could she", "disgusting."
She begged. She gripped the shoulders of a woman who had once praised her strategic mind and turned to stone when the betrayal unfurled. "Please, Aurelie," she said. "Please don't—"
Aurelie's eyes were hard. "You used a child," she said—Emmalynn had been a child to some extent in her constancy—"you weaponized love. I cannot protect you."
"Forgive me," Joyce whispered. "Forgive me, forgive me—"
People began to clap. Not in celebration, but in a complicated rhythm of condemnation, like a jury marking a sentence.
"You're being unfair," Joyce said, the words breaking like brittle glass. "You don't know—"
"Now you know," someone said.
She stumbled into the lobby, a bright dress swallowed by the dark. Cameras followed, not with compassion but with a hunger that left a taste like pennies on the tongue.
Outside, under the cold streetlamps, she collapsed to her knees. She could not make the confession the cameras demanded—her voice had lost the charm, the practiced tone. She sobbed. Taxis drove past. A news outlet would later post a headline with her name and the word "scandal."
It was over before I felt relief. Her fall had been public, brutal, and it left a hollow echo in my chest. I had exposed her, but the glory of the reveal was small—only a momentary pulse of moral satisfaction. It did not bring Emmalynn back.
The days after the gala were loud with gossip. The company she had once been positioned to run raked through her messages. Contracts withdrew like tidewater. Her name became a shorthand for betrayal in the office kitchens and in the feeds. Her husband—who had always been a man of careful temper—divorced her with a press release crafted like a surgeon's incision. People whispered she could not carry a child; some said it was karma, others said it was cruelty to hope for that.
Joyce's reaction changed over the course of weeks. At first she was defiant and blamed others. Then she was furious. Then she was hollowed flat like the inside of an empty shell. Once, in the courtyard of a building she used to command, I saw her standing with her head bowed, the sparkle of her bracelet useless in the sun. A group of young women passed and spat as if at a dog.
"Some victories cost too much," Aurelie told me later, but she was not looking at me. She had become someone who fixed things, not who needed to be loved by a small-time charm.
I expected hatred, or at least a severe gratitude from Emmalynn. Instead I got the silence I deserved. She did not come to me; she did not call to condemn; she simply lived.
I tended my roses like small monuments. White after white, they broke into bloom. People would walk past the hill and say, "Who does he love so much?" I did not answer.
"Why white?" a neighbor asked once.
"Because she liked white," I said.
"Is she going to come?" they asked.
"No," I said, because that was the truth.
Time wore the novelties of the scandal away. People moved on like a tide that has used up its energy. Joyce's name became something older, like an event one reads about in a later chapter.
I did not go to court. I did not get arrested. I had made choices, and the world had chosen its own justice.
Emmalynn and Matteo built a life. They had small ordinary joy. I watched them from the back of a market and felt the heat of something I could not name. Once, while renewing the soil around a new rosebush, I caught sight of her on an early morning run—hair in a messy bun, cheeks pink. She ran like someone who had learned to love carefully.
"Keegan," she said once when a mutual friend introduced us at a small event. My voice stuck like gravel.
"Hello, Emmalynn," I replied.
"You look well," she said, and there was no note of reproach.
"Do you ever come by the hill?" I asked, and my hands smelled of dirt.
"No," she said. "I can't take what hurts me."
"I planted them for you," I said.
"I know," she answered, and it was not a forgiveness. It was a fact.
We had three minutes of conversation like a tape loop in a shop. People smiled at me later, as if we had shared something. I left with only the dust of missed chances.
Years later, the roses were taller than me. They bent and scented the air. I sat on the low bench I had built and watched the petals fall.
"Do you still hope?" a young woman named Svea Archer—one of the few friends who kept contact—asked me, sitting on the bench beside me.
"Sometimes," I admitted. "Sometimes I think I will dig a hole and put every guilty thing in it. But hope, like roses, grows wild."
"She forgave you?" she asked.
"She chose her own life," I said. "I cannot ask more."
At night I would go to the events when companies invited me—small design committees, charity auctions—and I would stand on the edges and remember the way she had smiled at a necklace in a shop years ago, how she had laughed when I pretended my studio was the only thing in the world. Those were not things I could get back.
At the end of the story, people ask for closure. I have no neat ending to hand them. What I do have is a hill and a field of white roses, and sometimes that is the sharpest kind of answer.
I leave the light on the bench for no one. When the wind moves through the roses, they brush like forgiveness or a warning; I never trust the difference.
The End
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