Face-Slapping15 min read
They Say I Killed My Brother
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December came like a verdict.
"Ivy, your brother's plane—" the stranger's voice on the phone sounded like a thing I had never met before. It was hollow and polite and cruel.
I ran. I ran because there was nowhere else to run.
When I pushed open the front door, the house smelled like boiled cabbage and old grief. Dad sat at the dining table with his back to me, shoulders hunched like he had been carved that way. Mom’s hands were pressed into her face, the kind of face I had never seen when I was small and sick and needed her. Karin was on the sofa, staring at me like I'd stepped out of a story that had no right to belong to me.
"You're the reason he died," Karin spit. "Get out."
"That isn't..." My voice broke into pieces. "Lucas—"
"Don't you, Ivy," Mom said, without turning. Her voice was calm in a way that made me want to hide. "If he hadn’t tried to rush back to marry you—"
"I didn't make him change a flight," I said. My hand found the little box on the table that they had left like a trap.
Inside, a ring. Small. Silver, with a tiny diamond. Scratched on the inside: IVY.
"You sent him that message, didn’t you?" Dad's voice had cracked open. "You're a liar. You made him come home."
I remember the exact words I had typed and sent two days before the crash: "Bro, I miss you. Can you come back soon?" It was a silly, clumsy text. It was the last thing I ever said to him.
"I'm sorry," I whispered. "I didn't mean—"
"Sorry?" Mom looked up then, and I learned hatred can look like quiet calculation. "Sorry won't bring him back."
They took the ring from me as if it were evidence from a crime scene, and they passed it around like a coin. The house turned into a courtroom.
"You don't get to be his fiancée," Karin said. "You don't get this house. You don't get his things."
"I lived here," I said. "This is my home, too."
"No," Dad said, and there was a tiredness in him that wasn't pity. "Go."
So I went.
I remember how we met. That memory was the only light that never dimmed: me, scraped and smaller than the world, shoved into a mud puddle at a park, crying, coughing. Lucas came and scooped me up like I was warmer than the winter sun. "Do you want to be my sister?" he asked, with a seriousness that made me feel safe.
After that, everything grew softer. He shared his pocket money with me. He bought me toys no one else bought me. He wrapped his scarf around my neck when I shivered. "You're mine," he used to say, and I believed him.
Karin was born later, and everything tilted. I remember the first time Mom slapped me because Karin fell and scraped her knee—"Why didn't you stop her?" Mom had shouted. I remember the first time Dad's hand lingered over Karin's shoulder like a benediction and barely brushed mine. I remember Lucas protecting me with a fury I had never seen him show anyone else.
He was the shield between the house and me. When he was gone, something that had been steady in my chest disappeared.
At the cemetery I couldn't go to the funeral. They saw the text messages and sent our private chat into the family group. The messages went everywhere — copied, forwarded, turned into screenshotted proof of something monstrous. Relatives who had once said hello now typed venom. "Leave," they wrote. "How could you?"
I hid behind a tree outside the service and watched my family bury the man who loved me like oxygen. Mom was broken, or so she said to other people; her grief sharpened into accusation for me. "If you hadn't made him change his flight—"
"I told him to come home for my birthday," I said once, the words coming out like a confession I couldn't stop. "He wanted to. He said he would. I didn't force him."
"Stop defending her!" Karin screamed at me once in the kitchen and then threw a bowl at the trash. "She deserves everyone's hate."
They took everything that had belonged to Lucas and fenced it into the house like a shrine that had barbed wires. His photographs cover the wall above the bed I used to sleep in. "Keep apologizing," Mom told me while sealing the door behind me. "You must live with your guilt."
Days passed like seasons in a single mind. I went to the doctor because my heart felt like it shook electricity into my bones. "Moderate depression," he said. "Sleep. Pills. Leave this house."
I tried. I found a listing, I saved pennies, I called an old friend, Susanne. She answered on the second ring. "Ivy? Are you okay?"
"Susanne," I said. "Can I... stay with you?"
"I have a boyfriend now," she said quickly. "But I can help you find a place. I can't—" Her voice dropped. "I can't help like I used to."
"I'll be okay," I lied.
When I arrived back in the apartment where Lucas and I had shared meals, the door was frozen shut with spite. Karin stood on the landing like a gatekeeper, and she smiled. "You shouldn't have kept his things. Why did you keep his scarf?"
"It's ours," I said.
"It's mine," she said.
She pushed me and I hit my head. It knocked the world sideways. "Stop, Karin."
"You don't belong here." She laughed and got a water basin. "You didn't belong at his funeral either."
She threw the water over me while the neighbors watched.
That night, I sat with my head pressed to the window and listened to the city breathe. I thought of every small kindness Lucas had given me. I played every message we ever wrote to each other like a loop, trying to find the moment I could undo.
"Why did you ask him to come back?" my mom asked one night. "When he told you he was changing—why didn't you stop it?"
"Because he wanted to," I said. "He was going to do it because he loved me. That wasn't my choice."
"But it was your text," she said. "You could have been kinder."
"Kindness doesn't change fate," I told her. I thought of our green couch, of the dumplings he wrapped and left in the freezer for me so I would always have one I liked. I thought of the scarf he gave me on my birthday, pulled over my neck like a promise.
The world turned ugly after that. The company's messages turned cold. At work, people would stop talking if I walked into a room. "Have you seen the messages?" one woman muttered. "She killed him."
"That's not how it works," I said. "People die in accidents."
"Not if you ask him to change his flight," she answered.
I found out later that my private messages had been forwarded from someone who had been angry. Karin had taken screenshots and sent them to the family chat. One of those messages, innocent and small, became evidence in the court of public opinion.
I tried to be small. I tried to exist. I tried to sleep. The pills made me clumsy. My hair fell out like a confession.
Susanne came around once. "We can rent a place," she said. "I can put down the deposit."
"Thank you," I said. I thought she meant it. She left her coat on the chair and took my hand.
Then she saw the old photo of Lucas and me, us laughing, my face turned toward his shoulder. Her hand pulled away like she'd burned herself. "I—I'm sorry, Ivy," she said. "I didn't know."
"I didn't know what to tell you," I said. "I'm still here."
"You don't... I can't—" She left with her phone ringing.
Later, I found out Susanne had told someone, "It was weird." She stopped coming around. I left messages. She would answer in clipped sentences.
One night, after a day of whispers and cold faces and a boss's brief email that was more pity than support, I heard Mom shouting downstairs. "Read them! Show her the letters!"
She took out Lucas's letters—handwritten, smelling faintly of coffee and winter. She made me read them aloud. I did because I had no strength left to resist.
"Read them," she ordered. "Say you deserved this love."
"I didn't deserve to—" My voice was thin. "Lucas loved me. He loved me."
"You owe him," she said. "You owe him every breath."
I read until my voice was sand. She put a lock on the bedroom and told me to apologize to his portrait every night. She told me not to leave. She told me that leaving would be betrayal.
"You're destroying our family," she said. "You owe him for what you've done."
I tried to explain to her that how could guilt be something I carried for someone who had loved me? But her eyes were glass and angry, and it was hard to look at them without feeling small.
"You grew spoiled," she whispered. "A stray who didn't know gratitude."
I went to the window and thought about the roof. I thought about the night sky. I thought about how cold the balcony would feel and how far down the lights would fall and whether they would wake anyone.
"Don't," a voice said behind me. It was Lucas, but it wasn't. It was a memory folded into sound.
"I can't keep living like this," I told him in my head. "I can't stand their faces."
"Then come with me," he said in the night like an echo. "Come. Let's go see the yellow flowers. We will do the list. Don't leave."
I thought of his final smile when he'd put the ring in his pocket. He'd been so proud. He'd wanted me to be safe and warm and loved. He'd said, "We will make our own family."
I woke the morning I decided, and my hands trembled not with fear but with a strange, solemn clarity. I left a note on the bed. It wasn't long. "I'm sorry. I couldn't live with this. I'm sorry I hurt you."
I climbed the stairs to the roof as snow came down the way fresh secrets fall. I stood at the edge and looked at the city. I thought about how Lucas used to hold my hands and tell me not to be afraid.
"I'm coming, Lucas," I said aloud, to the empty air. "I'm coming."
Then I stepped.
When the world folded, I hoped for soft landings and warmth. I saw his face. "Ivy!" he breathed like a name I had always belonged to.
Then—
Later, they said I threw myself from the eighteenth floor. They said I left no note. They said my last search history was about trains and flowers. They said a friend had called the police and they came too late.
Susanne cried at my grave. "Ivy, I—" she said without finishing. She told reporters that she had been busy, that she had seen my message and didn't understand it. She said, "I thought she was being dramatic. I'm so sorry."
Mom ran to the hospital and then to the news. The world turned a wheel that didn't care. The family that had pushed me away found themselves in a different light. People who had once whispered behind closed doors now had metal microphones and bright cameras.
That is when the punishment began.
At first, it came through the internet. The leaked chats returned the favor. People recognized a cruelty when they saw it. A video of Karin laughing at me when I returned from the funeral had been filmed by a neighbor; it surfaced on a local site and then fed the social media storm. The comments shifted tone. Sympathy for the family withered and was replaced by cold calculation.
"Why didn't she stop her?" a reporter asked on camera, pointing at a photo of Mom smiling with a teacup.
"Where were the parents?" an anchor asked. "Why lock a child up?"
Then one morning, a crowd showed up in front of our house. It started with ten people, then fifty, then hundreds. They stood with signs: "Justice for Ivy," "Stop Family Violence," "Don't Blame the Victim." They chanted. They held cardboard photos of me that had my scarf, the one Lucas had given me. They held up his letters. They read them, one by one, loud enough for the neighbors to hear.
Mom came to the window in her robe. She looked small and shocked to be seen. The crowd's chant swelled. Some held cameras, some held signs, and some just stood with faces like blocks of stone.
"Leila!" one woman shouted. "How could you?"
Mom's face moved through stages right in front of everyone. First, there was a brief flash of indignation, like a shield going up. "They're intruding on our privacy," she said from the balcony, voice too calm. "This is private grief."
Then someone read aloud from Lucas's messages and the words stripped that shield. The crowd's laughter was not kind. A man handed a printed copy of the chat logs to a reporter, who thrust it under Mom's nose. "You told people she stole his love, that she seduced him," the reporter said. "Your own texts say you blamed her the night he left."
Mom's mouth opened, closed. She shook her head. "That's not—" she began.
Karin came out then, makeup gone rough and raw-eyed. She stood beside her mother like an armor made of shame. "We were protecting our son's memory," she said. "She—"
"You humiliated her for years," someone called. "You locked her in. You made her say sorry every night."
At first Mom denied. "We were grieving," she said. "We did what any family would do."
"Any family would not lock a child and force her to read love letters," someone replied.
A young woman in a coat stepped forward with a voice like a bell. "You broke her." She held up a photograph of me, smiling in a place that had been warm. "You left her alone."
Mom's face crumpled. For a breath she looked like the woman who had once cradled a small child with tenderness. Then anger flamed in her eyes like someone finding a new weapon. "How dare you!" she cried. She moved toward the balcony, shouting. "You people don't understand! She ruined my son—"
"She didn't!" people shouted back.
It changed when a neighbor, Hugh Teixeira, stepped up with a phone. He played a recording he'd made months before, when he'd overheard Mom yelling at me for the dumplings left in the trash. "She called her an ingrate," Hugh said. The sound came out glitchy and clear: Mom's voice, sharp as a knife. "You don't deserve him."
That was the first crack. The crowd's mood turned from curiosity to righteous fury. People began to chant the names of things families hold dear—dignity, safety, love—things they said we had taken for granted. They marched down the street to the police station. They demanded the records of who had called the ambulance the night I fell.
A reporter from a city paper interviewed my coworkers and a teacher who remembered me as the child who had been left behind. "They said she was the good one," an old teacher said. "They said she was polite and brave. Why did you let this happen?"
I could have imagined the rest, but I watched it unfold on screens and in the faces of strangers who had no reason to care except that cruelty wound them. Mom tried denial, then bargaining, then anger. Each stage was public and immediate.
"She had a diagnosis," Mom pleaded in front of live cameras. "She was depressed. I was protecting my family."
"Protecting by locking her in?" asked a woman in the back, voice flat.
When the crowd followed them to town hall, they found themselves met by a different kind of audience: people who had been through the same. A young man spoke and told a story of a childhood where love had been conditional. An elderly woman spoke of being shamed by a relative. People nodded. They held up signs. They demanded accountability.
Karin's punishment was not a single moment but a slow, public collapse. The company where she worked received messages about her behavior. Clients canceled her contracts. The man she had been planning to marry found messages from her that revealed cruelty and small humiliations. He left a week later and told friends he couldn't marry into that family.
Karin stood on the pavement one afternoon and watched as her friends unfollowed her on social media in real-time. She went to a meeting where potential clients refused to shake her hand. Someone recorded her sobbing into her palm while the cameras rolled. Her reaction changed from defiance—"She was always the outsider"—to denial, to finally the hollow pleading of someone finding all doors closed. She sent messages asking for forgiveness. People posted the screenshots with captions like "Too late."
The mother—Leila—suffered in a way fitting the cruelty she'd dished out. Doors closed. The church where she'd been a regular refused her at the next service. Her neighbors walked by without greeting. The PTA asked her not to attend meetings. A woman she had once lent a casserole to confronted her in front of a grocery store. "You left that child to die inside your home," she said. "Do you feel anything?"
Mom's reaction was a show of lost power. First she raged—"They don't know!"—then she tried to bargain with everyone she had pushed away. She went on television trying to tell the same story she had told for months: "I was grieving. I couldn't bear it. She made him change his flight—" The internet tore her apart. Someone found a post from years ago where she wrote, "Keep the family first," and used it like a verdict.
When people demanded she be held accountable, it wasn't a courtroom they meant. They wanted consequences that matched the harm. The council where Dad had once been a small sponsor of summer camps revoked his honors. He lost credibility; he lost clients who had trusted him. People called the landlord who owned the building where our family home sat and pressed for measures. The bank that had once given them a mortgage got calls. Sponsors pulled support for events the family was involved in. A letter signed by hundreds demanded that the institution that awarded Mom her community award revoke it.
There was one day when everything finally collapsed into a single scene. A town square meeting had been called by survivors and victims. They organized it like a public reckoning. A line formed of people who had been hurt by families who hid behind grief. Each had a name. They read their lists. Many of them held me in their palms like a memory.
Mom arrived with papers and a face that had been scrubbed in the hope of finding pity. She stood at the microphone and tried to tell her story again. "I didn't know," she said. "I couldn't help—"
"They tried to force her to apologize to a dead man every night," someone interrupted. "They kept her locked. They made her read love letters she had no right to read."
"Where's the mother who once tucked a child into bed?" an old woman asked, voice unafraid. "If you loved him, where was that love for the living child?"
Mom's face changed in a way that made the entire room quiet. At first she looked like someone ready to defend herself, then like a person slipping on ice. Her eyes opened wide and she said, "I...I did what I thought was right."
A line of witnesses stepped forward. My teachers, a neighbor who had recorded the shouting, a nurse, a friend from work, Susanne too, who had finally come clean about the call she ignored. They each read small pieces of the life I had lived. The crowd was quiet but not kind. It was solemn in the way crowds are when they see the nature of harm with new clarity. No one cheered. There was no revelry. People wept. They placed my scarf and Lucas's letters on a table.
Mom's composure shattered in a slow, visible way. She tried to hold on to dignity, but the first bucket of truth poured in. "We thought we were protecting our son," she said, and then—without warning—she screamed. Her voice tore like fabric. She looked around at the faces, and then at the table. She chose a person in the front row and said, "Everyone is lying. She was a bad child. She deserved punishment."
A woman who had once brought Mom soup stepped forward and slapped her. The clap echoed. The crowd gasped, and then started to murmur. The slap was not the punishment they wanted, but it showed how deep their disgust had become.
Mom's reaction moved through stages: shock at contact, denial—"How dare you!"—and then collapse. She doubled over, hands on her knees. Her lips moved. Then she understood being watched, being judged, being recorded.
As cameras rolled, Mom fell to her knees. Her voice turned into something small. "I did it for my son," she whispered. "I couldn't—not after he—"
"You tried to make her suffer," a woman said. "You tried to kill her soul."
"Please," Mom begged suddenly, eyes wet with something that might have been remorse. "Please forgive me."
The crowd's reaction split. Some shouted back, "No." Some cried. Some people folded their hands and shook their heads. "Forgive?" someone asked. "She begged for that while he was alive?"
It was not the only punishment. People posted lists of organizations that had supported the family, and calls rang to withdraw support. Karin felt doors closing professionally and socially. Dad faced the slow erosion of respect in his circles. Mom was not arrested there on the square; that would have been a different system. What happened was more merciless for them: social collapse, the slow withering of reputation, the public knowledge of what they had done.
The punishment scene lasted more than an hour. It lingered not with shouts but with the steady reading of names and the bare telling of facts. Mom changed from denial to collapse to begging. Karin changed from defiance to shame. They both suffered, but differently. Karin lost friendships and a future partnership. Mom lost her community and any pretense of control.
Later, the couple of days after the square, Dad left. He took a pile of little things and a suitcase and walked out into a life without their status. He pulled out the old photographs and inventoried them like someone trying to find clarity.
The town talked for months. The paper ran editorials about family cruelty and mental health. Support groups sprang up.
They called Mom's punishment the beginning of justice; others said it was crowd justice. Some said it didn't fix anything—nothing could ever bring me back—but it made the family face the truth that isolation and accusation produce catastrophe.
At my grave, people came with candles and scarves. They read Lucas's letters and my last text that had been shared and misinterpreted. They read the small, honest things that had been ours and said them in the sunlight.
Susanne wrote a long piece for a local site about how she had failed to answer a message. She wrote about the small choices that become avalanches. "I didn't see the whole thing," she said. "I couldn't hold her when she needed me. For that I am sorry."
In the weeks that followed, there were small gestures. Someone fixed the green couch we had sat on. A little seed fund was set up to give to survivors of family abuse. People took up the work of notice and care.
At night, sometimes, when the neighborhood is quiet and the wind moves the pages on the fence, I think about the ring. I think about how Lucas wanted to make a life for us. I think about how a single text became a weapon.
If I could tell my story again ten thousand different ways, I would.
"Did you ever feel loved?" someone once asked me when I was a child. It was unexpected and I blinked. Lucas sat with me and wrapped his scarf around both of our necks.
"Yes," he said. "But not forever."
I don't know what to wish for now. Maybe I wish people would have looked closer. Maybe I wish someone would have opened the door.
At the end, the unique thing everyone kept talking about was the ring. Not because it was valuable, but because it had my name carved inside. Lucas had planned a life. He had written a list of things for us to do. We never finished it.
I don't know how to make this right. I only know that the people who watched me fall finally looked up, and when they did, the house that we had called "family" crumbled around them.
I would like to say my last moment was peaceful, that I saw a field of yellow flowers and Lucas smiling. I will say this: his last smile was for me, and whatever punishment came to those who pushed me, it came under sunlight and witnesses and the most human of things—people saying that cruelty should not be easy.
The End
— Thank you for reading —