Face-Slapping11 min read
Two Snowmen at the Gate
ButterPicks12 views
The day I walked out of prison, two men waited in the snow.
One had put me behind bars. One had argued my conviction.
They looked like two snowmen on the icy pavement, black cars idling beside them.
I ignored both.
"I told you, Jess," the guard said as he opened the heavy door. "Get a job. Live straight."
"I will," I said. My voice sounded thin. I hugged my coat tighter, watched the black cars through the iron bars. "Thank you."
Through the gate I saw a silver sedan and a black SUV. Arturo Dumas' sleek car and Calvin Zimmermann's work SUV. Arturo stood under a black umbrella, immaculately dressed. Calvin kept glancing at his watch.
Arturo had been my boyfriend. Calvin had been my childhood friend. Both had wrapped my life in promises—and both had helped send me away.
"I came to see you," Calvin had said in court, that day years ago. "The law is the law, Jessalyn."
"Calvin, please," I had begged then. "My grandfather—"
"You attacked someone," he said. "You hurt Estefania. You knew the risk."
"She called my grandfather 'trash,'" I whispered, and the memory tasted like rust. "She said his life didn't matter."
The woman who had taunted my dying grandfather—Estefania Crouch—had been at the center of everything. Her spoiled dog had knocked my grandfather down. The man who raised me, who folded cardboard and hunted through trash to buy me a tiny glittering hairpin when I was a child, had ended up in the ICU, paralyzed. My grandfather drank pesticide afterward and left me with nothing.
"I didn't mean for it to go that far," I told the courtroom. I wasn't believed.
Later, when the truth wove itself into something uglier, I learned who truly had power: the pretty girl with the expensive dog, and the men who smiled at her. Arturo had been the warm voice at my ear once—he had said forever—but he had smiled toward Estefania when it mattered. Calvin had stood up, exhausted, and argued the law in a way that broke me.
During my first years inside, I was bullied. No cameras where the guards did not go. I learned how to smile and take abuse. A woman named Halle Charles—tough, lipstick sharp—took me in the hard way. She taught me how to make survival part of my body. "You play the part," she said. "You keep your head down and find the one thing they can't take from you."
What they couldn't take was my memory of small kindnesses. My grandfather buying a knockoff hairpin for me. The afternoons when I and Calvin worked on homework in a dim classroom while he hid his embarrassment and I teased him. The way Arturo used to fight for me in the dark, when the campus lost power and he punched Calvin for touching me. How all that warmth could twist.
When I left, I didn't want their pity. I wanted a plan.
"Why follow me?" I asked Calvin the first time he found me on the street, intercepting a crowd where my hands shook from cold.
"You shouldn't be alone," he said. "There are—there are people. I can help."
"Help?" I laughed, and some part of me tasted bile. "You helped from the inside, didn't you? You helped make sure I stayed inside."
He swallowed. "I had pressures. I did what I thought was right. Let me help you now."
Arturo was different. When I saw his face in the crowd—older, hollow-eyed—I thought of the knife in my hand and the way his grip slid when he saw blood.
Calvin stood beside me now, earnest and legal, and offered me a job at his new firm. "I started an office," he said quietly. "A second branch. You can work there. I will watch over you."
"Watch over me?" I mimicked. "Is this compensation or ownership?"
"I will protect you," he said. "Let me make this right."
There was a gray sincerity I wanted to break. I tasted the plan forming like metal in my mouth. Get close. Learn everything. Use their kindness as a tool. Turn their remorse into leverage.
"Okay," I told him. "I will try."
We walked past shop windows, and I watched my reflection. The city glittered but felt cold. I thought about the hairpin, the day my grandfather took off his hat and bowed at a storefront, the way he put his life into my hands.
"I remember," I said finally, and my chest seared. "I remember when you and I would wait at the cafeteria table for food. You said, 'Wait for me.'"
Calvin's mouth twitched. "I never stopped waiting."
I let him believe it.
Time passed like a wound.
Calvin built a careful life. He learned to be patient and cruel in his own polite way. He called me in the middle of the day with scheduling questions. He folded my shirts and fussed over my meals. He said the right things. He signed papers to send money to a trust in my name.
Arturo came and went like a storm. Sometimes he appeared with a soft smile and a bandaged hand. There were nights I let him in and nights I pushed him away. His face was a mirror. His regrets were as slippery as the snow on the driveway. He said he had searched for me every day, that he was haunted by me.
"I never wanted you to go to prison," he whispered, one December night in a kitchen glazed with frost. "I tried to—"
"You tried to what?" I asked. "Hide? Fail me? Protect her?"
He grabbed my shoulders. "Jess, please. I did what I could. Estefania—she turned it into a mess."
"She's the one who slapped my grandfather," I said. "You stood there."
"She asked for money," Arturo said. "She said terrible things. I tried to stop it. I really did."
I believed him in small pieces. But trust had a ledger, and those old entries never balanced.
I wanted revenge. I wanted them to taste public shame. I wanted Calvin to stand with handcuffs on his wrists and Arturo to watch his life fall apart.
So I planned.
"Do you remember the butterfly?" I asked Calvin one night as he drove us to a courthouse I had to visit.
He glanced at me. "The little pin? Your grandfather bought you that?"
"Yes." I pressed my fingers to the ring on my finger. "You always promised we'd wait. You wrote me a note once, with a little butterfly on it."
Calvin's jaw tightened. "I remember."
"You remember everything," I said. "Good. Then help me find the right place to make them see."
The first move was small: I let the rumor seed itself that Estefania's dog had been mistreated by the kennel and that her family opened a shell company. I let a reporter overhear a conversation at a café. I let whispered questions leak into an editor's inbox.
Estefania's public image was delicate. She was a heiress of a brand, posted smiles, and donated to animal charities. The press was curious. A photo here, an anonymous tip there. I watched from the cheap seats as people scratched their heads.
"She used a charity for tax breaks," a columnist wrote. "Dog rescues as polishing brands."
The second move was louder. I found Halle, who still owed me a favor. She introduced me to a woman who knew corporate ledgers. They pulled files and spent long nights with coffee and spreadsheets.
"There's an account," the woman said one rainy evening, handing me a printout. "A shadow fund. The dog is a ledger line. There are transfers to offshores tied to Estefania's name."
I sat very still while words swam. This was a line to pull.
I didn't go after Estefania with shouts. I used the press, the board meetings, the shame of a public portfolio sliding down.
One morning, Estefania stood at a sleek charity brunch. The place was full—photographers, donors, volunteers. The room smelled like flowers and money.
"She's arrived," a host announced, and cameras swung.
I was not in the room. I had left a tip, an anonymous package to the attendees. A journalist opened it and found copies of internal emails. The servers had not covered their tracks well.
When the allegations hit, Estefania's face went white as icing. The microphones found her. Cameras clicked like teeth.
"Ms. Crouch," a reporter said loudly, voice hungry, "why are donations routed through shell companies?"
"That is—" she stammered.
"Do you have anything to say about donations diverted?" another demanded. "About the cost of that dog's surgery that was billed to a corporate expense?"
She flailed. "There must be a mistake."
"Why did the bank transfer indicate your signature?" the host asked, pressing.
She tried to laugh, a brittle sound. "It's a misunderstanding. It was—"
People in the room shifted. The woman who had once allowed herself a casual cruelty now had her cruelty exposed as a transaction.
I watched the news later as the story spread. Comments poured in. "How could she—" "She funded luxuries with charity money." People tagged her brand. Sponsors pulled ads. The board convened emergency meetings.
Estefania's face on the screen was a lesson in public collapse. She was polite, then huffy, then finally furious. She accused a staff member in a trembling voice, "Someone leaked this."
"It wasn't one person," a board member said on camera. "We are auditing everything."
I felt nothing but a cold satisfaction. Estefania cried on live television that week. She said she had been betrayed. People watched the video and saw a woman who loved luxury lose it. Her followers plummeted.
But the real punishment belonged to Calvin.
Calvin had a reputation: official, measured, a man who believed lawbook over heart. He had been the prosecutor in my trial five years ago. He had argued my conviction with the precision of a man who trusted rules more than people. He later said he had been pressured. People accept "pressure" in whispers; it does not fix broken lives.
My plan for him started with whispers too. I found a way to get hold of depositions he had not meant to make public: emails where he had sweetened witnesses, a private message where he said, "This will close the case." Small things that, when stitched together, made a narrative of a man who had gone beyond courtroom ethics.
I worked with a journalist who had a taste for legal dramas. We arranged a public hearing at a town hall—an open inquiry into legal ethics after a high-profile exoneration of a woman known publicly as someone who had clawed her way back from prison.
The room filled. People came from the neighborhood, from the legal community, and the press circled like buzzards. Cameras hung from the rafters. I sat in the third row, my hands folded, my breath steady.
When Calvin walked in, he looked tired. He tried to pin me with an even look and failed. His face carried a new gravity. He had not expected this.
"Mr. Zimmermann," the investigator said, voice clear. "We have evidence of email correspondence and financial routing that suggest undue influence in previous prosecutions."
Calvin's throat bobbed. "Those are professional correspondences," he said, voice rationed to a legal calm.
"Two months ago," the investigator continued, "we received documents implying you coordinated with parties who had a direct stake in your cases. Do you deny discussing the Estefania Crouch case with individuals outside of your office?"
"No," Calvin said. "I consulted."
"Consulted?" the investigator lifted a folder and read aloud. "An email: 'Make sure she doesn't walk.' Sent by Mr. Zimmermann to an associate. Another message: 'We need a narrative.'"
The audience made a sound like breath leaving a held chest.
Calvin's hands trembled. "Those were poorly phrased," he said. "I was under pressure."
A woman in the crowd called out, "Pressure? Whose pressure? The family's money?"
The journalist I had tipped recorded the whole thing. His camera moved in, capturing Calvin's face as his composure frayed.
"This is not just about a phrase," the investigator said, and clicked on a slideshow. "Here are donation records tied to the family, transfers to legal support organizations, and email timestamps aligning with witness interviews."
A murmur became a roar. Someone shouted, "Shame!" Another whispered, "He ruined lives."
Calvin stood with a thin line of sweat at his temple. He opened his mouth and closed it. He tried to explain the nuance of evidence and chain-of-custody, but the words were small and dry against the rising tide of public outrage.
"Look at me," said a woman in the front row—Halle Charles, who had brought a paper bundle to the desk. "Look at the tape where they claim to have asked you for favors. Look at the face of a girl who lost everything because you believed you were right."
Calvin's pupils dilated. He walked to the podium and tried to make one plea. "I believed the law. I thought I served justice."
"Justice?" someone echoed.
"You stood in judgment," said another voice. "You broke a life for your career."
The press cameras flashed. Phones rose. People clapped—some with outrage, some with the sick satisfaction of a long-simmering verdict.
Calvin shrank under it. I saw his hands curl into fists and then relax. He was not accustomed to an audience not on his side. I had watched him argue a courtroom full of anonymous jurors and win. This was different. This was a court of faces he could not govern.
"Mr. Zimmermann," the investigator said, "we will take your statements. But as of today, we recommend a formal referral to the bar association for misconduct. The city council has been copied. We will forward the financial traces to the appropriate prosecutors."
The room erupted.
Calvin did not fall to the floor. He stood and read the air, as if looking for a rescuer. There was none. People filmed him. People who had once nodded to him in neighborhoods he had never seen now shouted, now pushed for accountability.
He tried to raise his voice. "I—" he started.
A woman in the back, a former juror who had read his earlier articles, stepped forward.
"You never looked at the girl," she said. "You looked at your papers, your notes. You spoke with arrogance at the cost of life. Today, you will answer in front of all of us."
Calvin's eyes moved to me. I met his gaze and did not blink.
He folded. "I am—" he began, then stopped as a hundred phones captured his face. Tears tracked down but did not reach the eye of the law. His façade was stripped. The man who had once corrected grammar in legal briefs now trembled when grammar could not save him.
"What do you want from me?" he said to me, voice small.
"To see you accountable," I answered.
He slumped. "I—I'll take the consequences."
"Take them," the crowd said.
The bar association opened an ethics inquiry. Calvin's license was suspended pending investigation. The newspapers wrote his portrait as a man who had let procedure kill a person's life. Former colleagues called to whisper their regret. Some of the old citations he had used against me turned up under new light.
The punishment was not just a professional suspension. It was that he had to stand and be seen as fallible. The public turned on him like frost.
He had a meltdown on TV days later. He sat behind a desk, with cameras and a legal analyst. The anchor's voice was neutral but hungry.
"Mr. Zimmermann," she said, "how do you answer the claim you preyed on a vulnerable woman?"
He looked broken. "I—I am sorry," he said. The apology was a small, raw sound.
News outlets replayed that clip. People posted it. Students of law argued in online forums about ethics. The firm he founded distanced itself. Sponsors who had spoken with him now pulled back.
Calvin lost not only his job but a kind of immunity. He had to sign an agreement acknowledging his errors. He underwent therapy in public view, his sessions summarized by statements. He walked out of hearings with the press snapping pictures of his bowed shoulders.
Watching him, I felt a hollow ache. Justice had a way of arriving like late winter—it tinged and it corrected, but it could not give back what was lost. Yet seeing him diminished, publicly named, made something inside me still.
Arturo's punishment came later. The board of his family company, shaken by the scandals and internal leaks, investigated his ties. Evidence surfaced of his behind-the-scenes favors, of his silence when he could have acted. Contracts were rescinded. He lost promotions. Sponsors pulled out. His friends turned away.
He watched the slow erosion of everything he had built and, finally, looked at me with a rawness I had seen only in the darkest nights. "Jess," he whispered, "I never wanted this."
I slid a ring off my finger. The small butterfly carved inside shimmered in the sun.
"You should have thought of people, not appearances," I said. "You should have been braver for him." I tapped the ring on the pavement.
Arturo knelt, not in apology but in the human version of collapse. He pleaded, then tried to bargain. "I'll give you the money. I'll—"
"I don't want your money," I told him. "I wanted your courage."
He left, and the snow started to melt.
Years later, the papers would revisit the story. People would argue about motive and law and the ethics of revenge. Some would call me cruel. Some would call me brave.
I learned to live with the labels.
Sometimes I went to the shore where my escape had been staged, and I watched the bay and thought of small things: a cheap hairpin, a folded note, a tiny scratched butterfly ring.
Once, a woman sat beside me and said, "Why did you do it that way? Why not tell the truth?"
I smiled without humor. "The truth had been told a thousand times," I said. "It never reached the people who needed to see it. So I made them look."
She shivered. "Doesn't it hurt?"
"Everything hurts," I said. "We pick the hurt we can live with."
The ring stayed in my hand. I wound the metal between my fingers and felt, oddly, like the child who had been given a small glittering hairpin. I pressed it in my palm and whispered to myself, "I survived."
A car passed by—the driver glanced at me, and then, without warning, it began to snow again. Small flakes settled on the butterfly engraving. They melted into lines that looked like tears.
I closed my hand and walked away.
The End
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