Face-Slapping18 min read
“You look like my wife.” He laughed. I pointed a needle.
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“I need you to stay very still.” I pushed the thin silver needle between Sterling’s shoulder blades.
He made a small sound, half complaint, half surprise.
“You don’t have to tell me you hate needles,” I said, my hand steady. “Just don’t move.”
He blinked at me. “Zoya, you sure you’re not doing this to flirt?”
“I don’t flirt with rich men who try to buy hospitals,” I said.
Sterling Barrett’s breath hitched. He had the look of a man who was used to getting his own way and then being surprised when the world pushed back. He was fancy and quiet and dangerous like a polished knife.
“Jonas?” I asked, because the little boy at his feet kept watching my hands like they were magic.
Jonas Walker looked up, solemn as a judge.
“He says don’t stick the big one,” Jonas said in a small boy voice. “Stick the tiny one. I don’t want Daddy to cry.”
“I’ll be careful.” I smiled down at him.
I remember the day that name, Jonas Walker, first hit my life like a hard wind. I remember the smell of hospital antiseptic and the first time I saw Sterling’s face at a funeral and thought I had seen a ghost. I remember thinking the scar on his jaw would never soften.
I had come back to the city because a woman in a helipad photo had smiled the same way my dead sister used to smile. The same lips, the same million-dollar cheekbones. People who had loved my sister had stood, mouths open, and asked questions that only a man could be made to answer badly.
That man was Sterling Barrett.
He sat up on the exam bed and watched me finish cleaning his last needling point. He made a soft exhale that was either pain or relief.
“All done,” I said. “Half an hour, then you’ll be able to test your ankle. Don’t drink; don’t bend your knee if it hurts.”
He forced himself to smile. “So you’re a miracle worker and a babysitter?”
“Only if the babysitting includes giving strict orders,” Jonas said.
Sterling laughed once and then his eyes hardened.
“You’re the woman from the hospital the old lady praised,” he said. “The one my grandmother begged us to call.”
I felt something cold and steady tighten inside me. “Yes.”
“You’re the one who saved her?” Jonas asked.
“She did,” Sterling agreed without looking at me. “She saved Nana. She also—” He swallowed. “She worked on my leg. You are Zoya Oliveira. You treated my leg.”
I thought of the tiny silver pin I had left lodged near his throat a week earlier. It had been a necessary lie. The truth still sat heavy in my chest.
“Sterling,” I said. “We need to talk. Not now. Not in a hospital corner. Come to the fundraiser at the Hartley tonight. Tell your people it’s for research.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You want me to parade into an evening where my presence will be noticed? Why?”
“Because people who hurt children like to parade, too,” I said.
He watched me, then gave a single, curt nod. “Fine.”
———
Two months back, a small boy with a face like cut clay and no last name had marched into my life with an outrage I did not deserve and a courage I did not expect.
Dale Fox had appeared on my doorstep muttering about sugar and heroes. He called the little girl Marta Baird “sis” and, with a grin, said the world would be fixed if only he could get the tall, cold man who had taken his life to notice him.
Dale was my boy. Marta was my song. We had survived without a father by leaning across nights, sharing a pillow, making pancakes that tasted like courage instead of sugar.
Then the other boy came.
Jonas Walker had walked into the hospital atrium, face blank behind a boy’s mask, and everyone stopped breathing. He was Sterling’s boy, the child who slept in a house with marble and guards, the child whose name was spoken like a tiny church bell in Sterling’s house.
They looked the same.
“Can we swap?” Dale had asked me quietly, eyes bright.
“Swap what?” I had said, because sometimes life looks like a broken puzzle and the only way to handle it is to slide pieces next to each other.
“Our faces.” Dale had chewed his lower lip. “I can go see how rich people live. Jonas can come eat my pancakes. My Marta misses me.”
It was a foolish idea. It was an idea only a child could believe in because children still think switching corkscrew lives is the same as borrowing a cape.
But I agreed, because I wanted Dale to know he was more than a copy, because I wanted him to see the man he had dreamed of.
We swapped for an afternoon.
Jonas came to my kitchen and refused pancakes until I added cinnamon. Dale walked into Sterling’s house with the same small courage he used to steal fruit from the market. He sat at a table that was bigger than our whole apartment, put his lower lip out like a serious person, and asked for the mashed potatoes in a tone that baffled the house staff into obedience.
“Are you sure you want this?” I asked Dale before they left.
He nodded. “Yes. I will be brave for Marta.”
Faces can change a life.
What I didn’t know was how a swapped face would start a chain that would push me back toward a man I had sworn never to forgive.
———
“You look like my wife.” Sterling had said the first night I walked into Hartley’s fundraiser.
His voice was flat, the kind of flat that had been practiced for years.
I had not expected him to attack. I had expected cold curiosity.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I’m not Felicity.”
He smiled in a way that held a broken joke. “Felicity? She was dead.”
“So I heard,” I said.
Jonas had watched me from his perch at Sterling’s side, small and grave like a pinecone. For a moment, Sterling’s eyes softened like he might melt.
“You saved my grandmother at the airport,” he said. “Nana never forgets a debt.”
“I don’t collect debts,” I said. “I collect breathing.”
Sterling’s laugh was quiet but real.
“Why did you come back?” he asked afterward, when the candles were down and the cameras had moved to the next speech.
“To find out if the person who died really did die,” I said. “And to find the boys who need mothers.”
He looked at me like you look at a complicated clock and try to hear the tick. “You really think Felicity was—? You think she’s alive?”
“No,” I said. “I know she’s dead. I just needed to find out who buried her.”
He said nothing.
Later, he would discover that the man who had run from Felicity’s pregnancy had done more than walk away. He had packed ambition and named it reason. He had placed a child in a house and called it a reward. He had told himself he had nothing to do with a second heart stopping.
He had been wrong.
———
Jonas and Dale played their small part like little actors in a world that had too few real people.
“Are you scared?” Jonas asked Dale when they swapped.
“Very,” Dale said. “But mostly excited.”
“Promise not to hurt himself?” Jonas said.
Promise, they did.
At the hospital, I treated Sterling three times a week. Each session peeled a little more of his armor away. He became less an emperor and more a man who could be angry and afraid at the same time.
“I woke up to the sound of a little boy saying my name,” he told me one time after acupuncture. “It woke me up inside.”
“Jonas?” I asked.
“Yes.” He touched my hand as if the touch could make him more human. “He said I had his face.”
Sterling looked at his hands. “I thought I’d mourn her properly. I thought a grave would fix it. It didn’t. But sometimes—” He stopped, as if finding the right word were a knife.
“Sometimes?” I asked.
“Sometimes I dream that someone else is in the bed when I get up. That someone else is wearing her face and laughing. It’s insane.”
“You married a ghost,” I said. “You loved a ghost. You aren’t the only one who thought they were living with the dead.”
He chewed his lip and then, very quietly, “You’re not her.”
I had never wanted to be someone else. I wanted to be a woman who could keep her children fed and warm without a hero in a suit to do it. But the world uses faces like currency, and Sterling kept offering me mine in glances I couldn’t trade for anything.
———
The charity auction night was supposed to be a test. The old Hartley ballroom would be full of press and generous men who preferred speeches to action. It would be a stage where one could step forward and say things that burn, and then leave while others clapped.
Sofia Espinoza came wearing white silk and a smile as sharp as glass. She was Sterling’s ex-flame and now his steady fiancée—she wanted the marriage that could buy her a position and buy her silence from more clever tongues.
She had a habit of laughing when a person fell, and clapping when they bled. When I saw her weave through the crowd, planting her smile on every face like a coin, I thought of wolves taught to wear gloves.
“You look alive,” she said when she saw me by the entrance. “Funny—someone told me last month you were dead.”
The room stopped breathing.
“No,” I said. “I don’t die easily.”
She smirked. “You know how these things go. A woman’s story is worth what people will pay for it.”
“Tonight,” I said, “you will bid on a house.”
She tilted her head. “A house? How charming.”
“It’s the South Ridge property everyone loves,” I said. “You can buy it.”
“And?” She blinked.
Tonight the auction would include a portrait. The house and the portrait were the bait. The real world would see the pieces fall, and some people would not be gentle about how they clapped.
“Bid all you like,” I said. “But remember—people who buy houses often hope the ghosts stay dead.”
Sofia laughed so bright I felt the sound like broken crystal.
“You plan to haunt me?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I plan to prove you were always the one with nothing but a smile.”
———
The auction was a thread pulled tight.
I handed a sealed envelope to Carver West, the hospital’s director. He is a man who balances his conscience on a ledger and calls the equilibrium efficient. He asked me if I was sure.
“Yes,” I said. “Be certain of the timing.”
He went pale and then red and then pale again.
“You’re risking a lawsuit,” he whispered.
“You’re risking your heart,” I said back. “Pick a side.”
Sterling came to my table that night. He wore a tux and looked like a king tired of his crown.
“You sure about this?” he asked.
I turned to him and said, “Either the truth comes out tonight on a stage, or it comes out in whispers for years. Which do you prefer?”
He smiled in a way that almost looked like forgiveness. “Then we burn the whispers.”
Jonas sat at his feet, calm as a small sun. Dale and Marta held on to my hand in the back row, small and brave with a popcorn bag.
Sofia walked up to the stage with the house on the block. She announced the starting bid, dressed in expensive certainty.
The gavel went down. The bidding climbed. Cameras whipped flash like bees.
I had Carver on the signal—he would stand when the price hit the number and then I would do what the old city likes best: pull a cord and let the curtain fall.
When the price hit sixty thousand and then ninety thousand, people called numbers. The room started sweating money. The house belonged to someone with a taste for big windows and no guilt.
At the top of the bid I stood up and walked on stage.
Sofia turned when she saw me and her smile frame dropped.
“Ladies and gentlemen.” I took the microphone in my hand like it was a blade and not a toy. “Thank you for coming to Hartley. I have a small truth to share tonight.”
Sterling’s presence was a pressure at my back.
“Five years ago,” I said, “Felicity Gutierrez—star and sister—died in this very city. People said it was a medical error. People said her story was finished. Tonight I have a confession to make about that history.”
Sofia’s laugh was clipped.
“What is this?” she demanded, voice loud enough for everyone to turn.
“You told lies to bury a woman,” I said. “You told a man to stand away. You pushed a baby out of your path and then called him unseen.”
The room reeled. Journalists started murmuring into their phones like a line of ants.
Sofia pursed her mouth.
“You have no proof,” she told me.
I smiled. “That’s why I brought evidence.”
I handed the microphone to Carver. He opened a laptop and the projector lifted an image.
The audience saw photographs, timestamped messages, an audio recording. The camera in the corner captured a white silk dress on the tile, a wineglass tipped, and then—louder than any whisper—the recording of Sofia’s voice telling someone downstairs to ‘make sure she never wakes’ and then a phone call where Sofia laughed and said, ‘the maternity ward will only keep the one child, get rid of the rest, Sterling needs no trouble.’
Silence fell, the heavy silence that wants to be loud.
Sterling’s face went white like a held breath. Sofia laughed once, and then her mouth dried.
“You’re lying,” Sofia said. “Those recordings are fake. You forged them.”
Carver stood forward. “I verified them. The hospital logs match. The timestamps are real.”
A man in a suit near the back had his phone up. “I’m recording this,” he said.
Sofia’s perfect composure fell.
“You’re a liar,” she spat at me. “You want my life. You want who I have.”
“You wanted a house,” I said. “You wanted a name. You shoved a dying woman into a corner and called it destiny.”
Her smile cracked like old paint.
“You will pay for this,” she screamed. “You are dead to me.”
At that moment someone rose in the crowd: Donna Hale, an investor who had once lost a son to a misdiagnosed hospital error and had watched her own life shrink. She walked to the stage and slapped Sofia across the face.
The sound rang like a bell.
Sofia stood, stunned. Cameras panned. People gasped.
“You told me to bury my son in silence!” Donna shouted. “You told me money would fix grief. You are a murderer in silk!”
Sofia staggered. Her face was red and she clutched at her cheek.
Around us, people pulled out their phones. The video started to live on the internet in a way that made houses of cards collapse.
Sofia tried to run but security surrounded her. She grabbed for her phone and shouted threats; someone slapped it out of her hand.
People began to speak—voices of other women, other mothers, all the small noises that had been tucked under carpets were brought out to the stage.
“You took what wasn’t yours!” a voice called.
“You couldn't have done that!” another said.
Sofia moved like a trapped animal. Her eyes searched for Sterling; Sterling had already gotten up and walked to the edge of the stage. He looked at her, not like a man about to forgive but like a man who had stillness left to him when a storm roared.
“You gave me a choice,” he said to her, voice low. “You gave me a life that felt convenient. You told me to choose comfort over blood. You said I could buy my way out.”
The room leaned in.
“You are arrested,” Carver said into his phone. “We will hold you for questioning. You have to account for the recordings and the manipulations.”
Sofia went pale, and then fierce as a trapped fox.
“You’ll regret this,” she snarled. “You’ll ruin everything.”
“You already ruined lives,” I said.
And then—because the world loves a show—the phones recorded everything. People streamed. Words like kidnapping, blackmail, and fraud were typed into the ether. Within twenty minutes, an attorney called the press secretary; within an hour, a statement leaked. The Hartley thrummed like an angry hive.
Sofia dropped to her knees in front of the stage, then crawled up, buried her face in her hands and cried not for the truth but for the stage she had lost.
Around her, people turned away. A few men who had once bowed to her now crossed their arms. Her social pages filled with conversations that called her empire into question. Her sponsors withdrew.
“This is the power of people,” Donna told me. “When you bring light to what was told small, it grows loud.”
I looked at Sterling then. He did not smile.
“You made me choose a narrative,” he said. “You rewrote my past.”
“You made your own choices,” I said. “You greeted ghosts as if they were friends. You abandoned a child. You left a woman to die. That isn’t romantic. It’s selfish.”
The cameras kept clicking. Sofia was taken to the corridors, watched, recorded. The room moved after her like a swarm. A hundred people whispered the same rumor.
Outside, the news vans pulled up and the story slept in TVs and phones for a night that spread into the morning.
Sofia lost sponsors. Her career lost sponsors. Her recruiter resigned. Sterling’s grandmother—always practical—sent a note to the press, strewn with facts about family and fortune. The board at Sterling’s company called a meeting.
Sofia’s public collapse was not poetic. It was messy. It was one woman losing a house built on secrets. She screamed in the elevator, she ripped up flowers, she begged a lawyer to help, and then the cameras found every one of her desperate moves. People in forums drafted long threads of archived messages and private calls. The world had teeth. It bit.
That night in the back room, a man I had once hated came up to me, hands trembling.
“You were right,” he said.
“Who?”
“Sterling.”
He pressed a paper into my hands: an apology for a job done to silence, a personal admission of what his money could not fix.
“You don’t have to accept this,” he said. “But you deserve to hear it.”
I looked at his hand. It was steady in a way I had not expected.
“You can pick up your boys tomorrow,” he said. “I will see you at the hospital. We need to talk about Jonas and Dale.”
I let myself be light-headed for a moment.
“Do you mean it?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, standing there like a man on a thin line. “I mean everything.”
———
Sofia’s trial was not short. There were days when she swore and then days when she pleaded. People recorded each hearing. She lost more things than an image. She lost the safety of friends who only liked her when their hands were clean.
When she finally stood in the courthouse, red-faced and small, she begged a camera to show mercy.
But her pleas were not enough. The judge read an order. She was fined heavily, stripped of her contracts, and the professional boards recommended disbarment from positions of influence.
When the press finally trailed off and the world stopped shining a white light on her, she sat in a small apartment, alone, with a court order in one hand and a cancelled contract in the other.
The people who had once been her entourage called and left voicemails that played like pond water.
The downfall was not dramatic in a movie way. It was a slow evaporation that left her with the rawness of a human who had learned nothing about grief except how to bury it.
She called Sterling one last time.
“Sterling, why did you let her— let me—” she whispered.
“You lied,” he said. “I let her get away with a lie because it made the house quieter. The truth will always make noise. I am learning that now.”
“You will pay,” she said before he hung up. But she had no currency left except threats and threats, it turned out, are a poor coin.
———
The morning after the auction I found Dale on the stoop, munching toast.
“Did you like the big house?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said. “Too many flies.”
Jonas was sitting on Sterling’s lap in the garden, small hands wrapped around a toy plane.
Sterling watched both boys and then said, “Zoya, would you come to dinner tonight?”
I almost said no. I almost said it was complicated. I had already been complicated for too long.
“Yes,” I said.
He looked relieved in the way a man looks who has done a thing he never thought he would: asked for something.
That night, we all sat. Jonas and Dale traded stories like they were switches. Marta ate leftovers and smiled like the light.
Sterling watched me across the table and then stood.
“I was stupid,” he said, and the words came out like an apology and a confession and a plea. “I was arrogant. I thought I could buy people’s histories with apologies and dresses. I let brotherhood die at the edge of convenience. I abandoned a woman who was carrying my child, and I gave a child to something that was not home. I am so sorry.”
I sat perfectly still.
Jonas, with the honesty only a child holds like a weapon, said, “You hurt our moms. That’s not okay.”
Sterling went very still.
“I know,” he said. “So if you even let me, I want to try to be better. Not for me. For you. For Jonas. For Dale. For the women who trusted me.”
“You don’t get a medal for saying it,” I said.
“I don’t want a medal,” he said. “I want a chance.”
After a long silence, I nodded.
“It will take work,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I will start tonight with the small things. The boys’ school shoes, the appointments. I will show up.”
“You will—” I started.
“I will show up,” he repeated.
———
Weeks passed. Sofia’s name trailed down like a burnt ribbon. The press moved on. Sterling closed his boardroom doors and opened them to different faces. He visited the hospital, not to take pictures but to sit in waiting rooms and learn things.
“You cook?” Sterling asked one afternoon, watching me at the stove.
“I burn sometimes,” I said. “Do you want to learn?”
He leaned in. “Teach me.”
We started with small things: how to hold a knife without looking dangerous, how to stir without splashing, how to coax a pancake into softness.
Jonas taught Dale how to whistle with his hands. Marta taught herself how to fold napkins. The house Sterling found lined up with the way-cool white tiles, but it smelled like soup by the end of week. We laughed when the soup burned and cursed the radio when it played old songs that felt like traps.
One night, the two boys fell asleep on the couch, heads like small moons, and Sterling pushed his finger in the space between us so the children could share warmth.
“You made me see how hard this was,” he told me quietly. “Not just the dying. Not the grief. The ways I tried to hide it. I want to fix the things I can.”
“You can’t fix the dead,” I said. “You can’t pull a woman back to life. But you can choose to be present.”
“I will try,” he said.
The truth was: we were not meant to be simple. I had my sister under my skin like an old scar. Sterling had his failures like a math problem with no solution. The boys had their memory of being swapped and felt oddly whole with the newness.
But the world—bright, cruel, and honest—had shown us its teeth. We had to choose what to do with them.
———
Months later the world stopped asking questions about Sofia and started reading press about hospital donations. People applauded the founders who could read a ledger and call it charity.
At the hospital, I set up a small clinic program for mothers who had lost children, who had been gaslit into silence. Sterling donated a wing, with a modest plaque and more funds than I had ever thought I would take. He wanted to make things right on paper.
“It’s not money,” I told him when we cut the ribbon. “It’s safety. It means someone else can stand up and be believed.”
He looked at me as if the words had made a map for him. “Then we will build it the right way.”
That evening, when the hospital’s lights dimmed, Sterling brought me an envelope.
“I had a DNA check run,” he said, small smile. “Not because I wanted to own anything. Because I wanted the truth for Jonas and Dale. Because the truth belongs to the boys.”
I took the envelope with my fingers not entirely steady.
“There was only one thing I wanted,” he said. “No tricks, no more hiding.”
I opened it.
The report said: Felicity Gutierrez and Zoya Oliveira—twins.
I sat down.
“So she was my sister,” I said. “She told me about this place in secrets and songs.”
Sterling sat across from me, hands clenched loosely. “I knew about Felicity,” he said. “I knew her as an actress with a grin. I thought she was dead. I thought the grief was private. I thought it was—”
He didn’t finish. No one knew how to finish old crimes.
“You could have asked,” I said. It was a small reproach wrapped in a soft knife.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
I thought of my sister’s laugh like a small door closing and opening and closing again. I thought of the child she lost. I thought of men who had made decisions for the sake of comfort.
“You will tell the boys?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Everything. They have a right. They deserve a home where they know the whole story.”
“And what about us?” I asked later when the nights were small and the sofa held three small hearts and two adults who had not yet learned to sleep in the same bed.
He kissed my forehead like a patient man. “We will find a way.”
That was the truth: we were going to try.
———
Years later, when the small clinic had a sign that read “Gutierrez-Oliveira Family Center” and the boys had learned how to tie ties and make pancakes, people would ask us if we were married.
Sterling would smile, Jonas would slug Dale under the table, and Marta would giggle.
One afternoon, a woman I did not know came to the door. She had a shrunken look and a voice that knew how to ask for things without shame.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “But I used to know Felicity. I wanted to thank you.”
“You knew her?” I asked.
She smiled, small and warm. “She saved me too. She told me to keep living.”
We hugged on the stoop, and for a moment the world felt like a safe place where true things could be said aloud again.
Later, when Sterling and I stood at the center's newest wing and watched the children running in the courtyard, I felt a small pull inside my chest—no grief, no revenge, but a steady, quiet warmth.
“You could have been nicer sooner,” I told him.
“I could have,” he agreed. “But I chose to be present now.”
“Good choice,” I said.
Jonas raced past, his laughter a bell. Dale chased him, no one smarter about courage than a boy who had once swapped faces.
I felt hands slip into mine—Sterling’s, warm and work-marked—and for the first time in years, the future looked like a blank page.
He leaned down and whispered, “You’re fierce.”
“I make good needles,” I said.
He laughed.
Outside, the children played like they had the whole world ahead of them. The truth had been loud, messy, and costly. The bad had been made public and paid for what it did. The house had been auctioned and bought by ghosts and by people who liked windows.
Sofia’s ruin had been big enough for people to witness. She had lost everything she cared about, publicly. Sponsors dropped her. Her marriage prospects dried up. People recorded her pleas and posted them where they could not be turned into comfort.
A woman who had made other people’s stories into props had now a very small, very exposed life.
That, too, was part of the bargain of truth.
I looked at Sterling and then at the boys and thought: there were choices. We had made better ones.
Jonas leaned up on his toes and said, “Can we get ice cream?”
“Yes,” I said.
We walked toward the ice cream truck, the children chattering, Sterling’s hand steady on my back.
“You didn’t have to drag me into this,” he said quietly.
“You did,” I said. “You could have stayed away.”
He squeezed my hand. “I’m glad I didn’t.”
We bought three cones and one small tub for Marta. The warm night smelled like sugar and new things. The world had not forgiven us for being imperfect, and we were not innocent of the past. We were, however, present. We had discovered the slow, stubborn work of making amends.
When the boys fought over the last lick of chocolate, we laughed.
The house had been sold and re-sold and eventually restooled into a place that would not ask too much of its occupants. The auction had been loud. People still watched the old footage sometimes and shook their heads.
I told the boys the story the way only a mother could: with facts, with tenderness, and a heavy dose of truth.
“You have to tell your story,” I told them. “You have to call things by their names.”
Jonas and Dale looked at me as if instructions had been given and completed.
“We will,” they promised.
“Good,” I said.
We were not a family fixed by magic. We were a family built from small, stubborn acts: a dinner, a needle, a truth spoken into a microphone, a child’s handshake, a man who finally learned to be present.
When Sofia’s videos were still occasionally shared by clumsy people who thought cruelty was entertainment, new videos came out of the center—children learning to knit, a man learning to cook, a woman with quick hands teaching a small group to make soup.
People watched both and decided, in their hearts, what they wanted to be.
I chose to be a woman who kept her children fed and taught by her mistakes but not owned by them. Sterling learned to ask for the quiet work. The boys learned to keep faith even when faces change.
At the edge of the courtyard, a stone bench held a small plaque. It read:
“For Felicity Gutierrez and those who remember. For Zoya Oliveira who turned grief into help.”
Sterling touched the plaque with fingers that trembled a little.
“You did good,” he said.
“We did,” I corrected.
He nodded, and for the first time I saw a man who could be both strong and soft. The world kept churning and people still made mistakes, but we had done something loud and right enough to be seen.
Jonas slid his hand into mine, and Dale did too, and Marta brought me her sticky ice cream face and kissed my cheek.
“Mom,” Dale said.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Thank you,” he said.
I laughed, because it was ridiculous they could be so polite given what they had seen. I kissed them, sticky and loud and alive.
The night closed around us like a blanket, and I thought of my sister’s laugh again and how some echoes are better used than buried. We had kept the boys; we had kept ourselves.
We had knocked down a monster in a white dress and sewn up the torn places with truth.
And that, in the end, was enough.
The End
— Thank you for reading —