Revenge12 min read
"Trust, Poison, and the Sister in White"
ButterPicks14 views
I liked to think I knew how to read people. I had worked five years in administration in Beijing, handled office politics and paperwork, and believed I could tell truth from charm. I thought I married a man who believed in logic and fairness. His name was Alexander Cannon, and I loved him. I loved how he listened, how he consulted me when he bought small things, how he joked with me in that soft, earnest way. I called him my reasoning partner, my little philosopher.
But one month after our wedding, Alexander told me his sister would come live with us for a week.
"She can stay in the study," he said. "There's a fold-out couch."
"Why not a hotel?" I asked.
"She's family," Alexander answered. "It's better this way."
I didn't like being told what to do in my home. I didn't like the thought of anyone intruding into the routines we had set. Still, my parents had taught me to treat family with respect. I agreed, and that decision was the first small crack.
When I met Galilea Briggs at the station, everything I imagined was wrong. Alexander had painted a simple picture: an older sister, a quiet woman. Instead, she stepped off the train in a tight white dress, long lashes, and a look that made me feel measured and small. Alexander's face lit up. He reached for her bag and she put her hand on his arm in a way that made my stomach twist.
"This is Kylie," Alexander said, introducing us.
Galilea’s smile was polite, but the eyes were like a challenge. "So this is the new wife," she said. Her hand was cool when she shook mine.
She stayed in our home. She cleaned obsessively. She cooked big meals every evening and insisted on ironing Alexander's shirts. She claimed to want to be helpful. I told myself I was fortunate to have someone so domestic around. I told myself kindness had won her over.
Then I found her with Alexander's underwear.
"You're washing those?" I said, because I didn't know what else to ask.
Galilea looked at me without the least embarrassment. She rubbed soap into the fabric with both hands, then put the cloth to her nose and inhaled. I couldn't tell if it was affection or madness.
"She always does this," Alexander said when I confronted him later. "When I was sick, she took care of me."
"She smelled them," I said.
"She is just clean," he said. "She cares about us."
"She slept in my bedroom unannounced that night," I said. "She came into our room."
"She came to check," Alexander said. "To make sure you were all right."
He said it like a man saying a weather report. Calm, unswaying. I felt rage and confusion.
The next week, small things grew strange. The housekeeper order was canceled through my phone notifications. "You unsubscribed from the service," a message said. Alexander said it was to save money.
"She only said one week," I reminded him.
"She's family," Alexander repeated.
Galilea fed me exquisite meals and smiled when I praised them. But then my face puffed. My body held water. My energy dropped. I thought it was stress and late nights at the office, but when a coworker joked about "hormone face" at a meeting, I felt cold.
I took samples of everything I used: cups, bottled water, even the kettle. I sent them for testing. The call came like a cold wind.
"There's steroid residue in your kettle," the lab said. "Methylprednisolone traces."
I felt a raw anger. "Only I use the kettle for hot water," I told Alexander when I showed him the lab report.
He touched his face, then his eyes flicked away. He didn't know how to answer. He looked at Galilea like a child caught between sisters.
At first, I wanted to ask him to explain. Then, when I learned the truth about Galilea's past, anger mutated into horror.
Fletcher Garza found a court record buried under a false name. "She served time," he said when I handed him the printout. "This isn't a small offense."
"Why would she come to us?" I asked.
Fletcher looked at the old case file. "There was a traffic death," he said. "She was involved."
I went to the small town where the victim had lived. Knox Hanson met me at the gate of a modest compound and didn't mince words.
"Her name was Melissa Hart," Knox said. "She was pregnant. She died on a quiet day while walking by the road. Galilea claimed it was an accident. Your husband gave a statement that saved her."
"You knew Melissa?" I asked.
"She was my sister," Knox said. He told me about bank transfers, about how the young woman had helped Alexander when he had nothing. He told me about the pressure to accept a dowry and the hush money that had followed.
"Why did Alexander testify?" I asked. "Why would he help her?"
Knox shrugged. "He always wanted out. Melissa helped him. He lied for them."
That night I sat in my living room and stared at the world that had been my life. I had married a man who smiled and quoted principles, but when cornered with evidence, he smiled like a man who had always planned the outcome.
"I told you she was family," Alexander said later when I pressed him.
"You knew she had been in prison," I said.
His face was small in the lamplight. "It's complicated," he said. "She took care of me. When we were children—"
"Children bought a slave for the price of comfort?" I said.
He flinched. "It's not like that."
"Is there anything about our marriage that is real?" I asked. "Are you my husband or my partner in a long con?"
He had no answer. He slid away like a boy on a doorstep.
The next days were a study in survival. I sleepwalked through my office hours, laughed with colleagues, and kept my eyes open at home. I put a small hidden camera in the kitchen. I watched Galilea move like a queen, like someone who owned the house by right. On a rainy Monday, she lit the stove, put a pot of ribs on low flame, and walked out leaving the gas on low.
She came back and blew out the flame. She checked my breathing. When she left me that night, I felt a pressure in my skull and then a dreamless black.
I woke up in hospital to Knox's steady gaze.
"You sent the message late," he said, scolding and relieved at once. "You delay could've cost you everything."
"What did I eat?" I asked.
"Too much sedative in your tea," he answered. "You have mild methane poisoning. You were lucky."
When I confronted Alexander with the camera and the tests, he did not deny the searches on his laptop. "You wanted a child," he started, but I cut him.
"You knew about inheritance laws," I said. "You searched 'what happens if spouse dies' a year ago."
He looked at me as if I had turned into an accusation shaped exactly like him. "I thought—"
"Thought what?" I asked.
"That we would have more time," he said. "That we'd build something and then—"
"Sell me a story and sign a deed," I finished.
There was more: a message from an unknown number. It told me: "You are in danger." I found the man who had sent it—Knox Hanson. He had watched Melissa's case for years. He had been there the night of the collision, had never believed the accident story.
"Your husband didn't protect you," Knox said. "He protected them."
"What do you want me to do?" I asked. "Bring them to prison? Die trying?"
"Bring them into the open," Knox said. "Public truth is what punishes them."
So I planned. I recorded, I logged, I set a trap small and precise. I wanted the truth to show in a place where lies could not hide.
Weeks later, Alexander was called in for questioning. He sat in a bright room with men in plain uniforms. I watched him from a distance as he tried to blink the truth away.
"Why would you poison your wife?" the detective asked.
"I didn't—" Alexander began.
"But you bought sleeping tablets on your card," the detective said. "You searched 'fuel leaks' and 'how to make it look like an accident'."
Alexander's mouth opened, closed. He looked at me as if pleading with a god who had not answered.
"She forced me," he said finally. "She said it had to be done."
"Who?" the detective asked.
"Galilea," he said. "My sister."
Galilea sat in the corner of the station room as if the world was a stage and she the star. When the policeman read the list of evidence, her face moved through stages like the weather. Pride, irritation, then a flutter of something like fear.
"You're sheltered," I said in front of the only two of them and the officer. "You think you can do anything because he's your brother?"
She smiled. "Kylie, why are you so angry? Family does what family must."
"Family doesn't murder," I said.
"My brother needed a woman who would be obedient," she said softly. "Someone who would not threaten his household."
"Who gave you the right to decide life and death?" I shouted.
"You would have taken him," she said. "You would have been comfortable. He belonged to us first."
She leaned forward, and for the first time since this began, I saw who she was: not a sister caring for a sick child but a woman shaped by cruelty and ownership.
They arrested Alexander on the evidence of the purchases and the recorded searches. They took him away with eyes wide like a child who had been found out. He called to me from the station. "Kylie," he said. "Please."
"Believe, believe the power of belief," I told him, echoing his old mantra.
I did not let the police take only him. I had the recordings of Galilea's confessions, the degraded files she thought she had erased, and the threads of deception she had left like crumbs. I had Knox's collected notes about Melissa Hart. The station took it all.
But I did not want a legal process to be the final punishment. People who had manipulated the truth for years needed to be unmasked not only by courts but by the world that they hurt. I arranged a public meeting in the small town where Melissa had been from. Knox organized with the local community center. Fletcher compiled the files and handed copies to the journalist friends who were hungry for the story.
On the appointed day, hundreds came. There were neighbors who had watched Melissa grow up, men and women who had once filled the hall for weddings and funerals. There were reporters who smelled a story and police who had done their duty. I stood on a low stage with a microphone, my heart like a drum.
"Thank you for coming," I said. My voice shook at first. "My name is Kylie Dupont. Some of you know me as Alexander Cannon's wife. I was almost another name on a piece of paper. I was almost a tragedy in a case you all thought closed."
"You know Melissa Hart," Knox said beside me, his voice flat with controlled anger. "She was my sister."
I handed the microphone to Fletcher. He read out the evidence in plain, short sentences. He showed photos of bank transfers, the lab reports showing steroids in my kettle, receipts for sleeping pills purchased with Alexander's insurance, search histories from his computer. He read the recording where Galilea described her reasons for killing Melissa, the jealous, ugly argument where she said Melissa "had to be stopped."
Galilea was in the front row, in a neat coat, her hair immaculate. Her face was white like porcelain. When Fletcher finished, silence fell.
"How could you?" an elderly woman shouted from the crowd. People started to murmur, and then voices rose. Some were incredulous. Some were angry. Someone took out a phone and started filming. A teenager shouted, "Shame!"
Galilea rose slowly. She tried to speak, but the crowd cut her off.
"You killed a girl who was pregnant!" a man yelled.
"You hid behind family to get away with murder!" someone else cried.
I stepped forward. "This is where I must be clear," I said. "This is not only about me. This is about the truth Melissa never had."
Galilea's face changed. There was a flicker of the woman I had first met—the careful smile—and then the mask broke. Her eyes hardened, then glossed over. She looked around at the faces I had brought together—neighbors, reporters, Melissa's old classmates—and she saw not allies but witnesses.
She laughed once, a sound like a snap. "You think this matters?" she said, and suddenly her voice rose to a crazed pitch. "You think you can collect my life in pieces and call it justice?"
"People record what they see," Knox said. "They remember. They keep truth."
Galilea's hands trembled now. She clutched at a small purse as if it were an anchor. "He promised me our life," she spat, pointing at Alexander, who was now handcuffed at the edge of the hall, watched by officers. "He promised me he would never give me up."
"You hurt my family," shouted Melissa's neighbor, an older man whose voice had the grit of someone who had seen too much sorrow. "You took a child from a mother who never had the chance."
The crowd surged. People began to chant Melissa's name. Someone held up a photograph of her in better days. Phone cameras buzzed like flies. Reporters shouted questions, and a television crew shoved microphones to the front.
Galilea's expression went through stages that I will not forget: first fury, then denial, then the sudden trickle of realization, and then a cracking, the kind that sounds like old paint coming off a doorframe.
"No!" she cried, clutching her head. "It wasn't me! I didn't—"
A young woman from Melissa's town walked up and slapped her hard across the face. Gasps filled the air. Galilea stumbled back, then collapsed to her knees.
"Get her out of here," the officer said, voice low.
Galilea looked up with a face wet from tears and something like pleading. "I only wanted him," she said. Her voice went smaller, "I only wanted him to be safe."
A chorus of voices answered her, not one sympathetic. "You killed to keep him," the man shouted. "You killed to keep your toy."
"You're a liar!" someone cried. "You're a killer!"
Galilea's demeanor broke further. She began to sob uncontrollably, then shouted, then tried to blame others.
"He made me do it!" she yelled at Alexander. "He made me think it was right!"
Alexander's response was a look of sudden, raw shame. He looked at her with an expression that was no longer tender. He had been the center of her world, the axis that made her cruelty feel like a sacrament. Now he looked small, exposed. He had become a man who had helped bury a truth for convenience, for property, for the brittle gain of a life not his own.
People pressed closer. The crowd's feelings shifted from moral outrage to a dangerous curiosity. Phones pointed. Voices traded cruel jokes and hard questions. "How can you look so calm?" someone wanted to know. "How can you smile now?"
Galilea's performance dissolved into accusations, then into sobbing pleas for pity. "I didn't mean to," she wailed. "She was in the way. He needed a home. I thought—"
"You thought killing a pregnant woman would solve your problem?" a neighbor asked, disbelief and disgust carved into his features.
She went through a cycle: anger, denial, bargaining, collapse. She demanded attention and then shrank away. The more she tried to justify, the worse the crowd became. People who had once attended Alexander and my wedding now spat words—sharp, public condemnations.
A woman from Melissa's family called for a formal statement. "We will not be silent," she said. "We demand justice and we demand the truth about who else helped them."
As for Alexander, he had no defense to the public stares. He lowered his head. Tears ran down his cheeks. He said nothing as officers led him out. The shame in his face was not the type I had once interpreted as a sensitive man in love. It was the shame of someone who had been found out by the world that mattered.
Galeria's final fall was not cinematic. There was no dramatic confession at the mic. There were things worse than that: the slow unspooling of her image before a thousand small witnesses. People recorded her, they posted, they whispered, they pointed. She tried to justify. They rejected it. She begged. They looked away. She blamed. They cataloged her words like a ledger of guilt.
The crowd reaction was immediate: shock, then outrage, then a relentless fascination with the breakdown. Some cried. Some shouted for blood. Some silently filmed to hold for the future.
Afterwards, when the crowd thinned and the television vans left, Knox stood with me on the curb and handed me a small, folded paper. It was a copy of the formal complaint he had filed. He looked tired.
"You made them see," he said.
"I didn't want this," I said. "But it had to happen."
"You did the right thing," he said. "You saved lives."
"Did I?" I asked. "I saved me. I didn't save Melissa."
He looked away, then back. "You made sure those who were responsible will answer."
In the weeks that followed, the legal machine ground on. Galilea was charged on the weight of her confession and the recorded evidence. Alexander was charged for accessory and for planning. The town that had once nodded politely at our wedding now read the papers with a kind of disgust and relief.
I divorced Alexander. We split the house; I refused the place with rooms that still remembered the warmth of his smile. I refused the half that would tie me to the memory. I wanted a clean start.
Galilea sat in a small cell, and sometimes I went to look at her through glass. She was gaunt, smaller without her makeup and her white dress. Once, in a public hearing, the prosecutor read lines from my kitchen camera: the soft step to blow the flame, the look at my sleeping face. The judge read past bank transfers and the arguments about dowry and the cruel logic that had led to murder.
The punishment I wanted for them was more than prison. I wanted them unravelled in the court of public memory. I wanted people to understand how private cruelty can hide in a smile.
The worst part was how all the small things added up: the deleted messages, the searches for "how to fake a gas leak," the lab reports. The public shaming—when they were stripped of the polite reputations they'd enjoyed—was part of the punishment. On the day Galilea was sentenced, the courtroom was packed. Faces from the town crowded in. Melissa's mother fainted when the judge spoke the sentence.
Galilea stood when given the verdict. Her face had no expression left. She mouthed words I couldn't hear, and once she looked at me like she had just remembered me as an obstacle in her life. People left the courtroom with their heads lifted and their eyes cold.
When the hard, long nights came, I still woke sometimes from nightmares of kitchen flames. But I slept better than I had months ago. The man I loved had been a fabricator, and the woman who claimed to be family had been a predator. The town watched. The law moved. Recompense could not bring back Melissa, but it could name her truth.
On a small bench by a river in Melissa's town, Knox and I put a small stone with her name. "We did right by her," he said.
"No," I answered, "we did what we could."
He took my hand then, briefly, like a human promise. "We will keep watch," he said. "We will not forget her."
We did not play the part of heroes. We were tired people who chose to force a truth into the light. My life after that was smaller, quieter, and finally mine.
I am Kylie Dupont. I learned how to read people the hard way. I learned how easy it is to smile and hide a plan. I also learned that truth has friends: time, witnesses, and a will to look.
The End
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