Face-Slapping9 min read
You Want the Divorce? Fine—But I Want the Machine First
ButterPicks13 views
I signed a marriage contract I never meant to keep.
"Sign here," Coleman Meyer said, pushing a folder across the small café table like it was routine paperwork.
"I thought Mr. Durham promised thirty million when the marriage ends," I said, lifting an eyebrow. "Not seven hundred thousand."
Coleman touched the edge of the paper gently. "Colton Durham raised it. Thirty million. But there's a condition."
"What condition?" I set the pen down slowly. The city afternoon outside the glass felt suddenly too loud.
"Mr. Durham wants you to change where you live," Coleman said, careful. "And he'd prefer you never mention the marriage again."
"I won't be silenced for money." My voice was steady. "Tell him if he wants a divorce, he can come say it himself."
Coleman hesitated. He had the office look of a man used to following orders. "He—he wanted you to agree."
"Then tell him to say it himself." I stood, smoothed my coat, and left, forgetting my little notebook on the table.
My phone rang two minutes later. Fletcher Coffey on the line. "Lennox, can you come now? It's urgent."
"On my way." I hung up, grabbed my bag, and ran. I didn't realize until I was halfway down the corridor that my notebook had fallen out. Coleman kept it.
At the top floor of Durham Tower, Colton Durham held a photo between his fingers and traced the woman's cheek like he could remember the warmth.
"How did she respond?" Coleman asked finally.
"She refused," Colton said. "She told me to come myself."
I did not expect him to come. I expected men like him to buy things with a card and a nod, to delegate.
A black car waited outside the restaurant. "Lennox?" Coleman sounded surprised to see me step forward and meet Colton face to face.
"Colton Durham," I said. "You have a minute?"
"No." He was all contained cold. "Talk to my assistant."
"Tell him not to use me as a pawn."
He gave an almost imperceptible frown and stepped into the car. A woman slid from the front seat—Alaina Santiago. She smiled at me like she felt entitled to every warmth in the room.
"One thing," Colton said from the car window as if he couldn't resist. "We let you drive today. You bring me something, I'll keep my promise."
"What?" I blinked. "You want me to drive you?"
"Drive. To the hospital. Ten-thirty." He slid the window shut.
"Fine." I got in. He sat behind me. He refused to look at me. I drove like someone who had nothing to lose.
"Why are you so interested in medical devices?" I asked at a red light. "If Durham is so rich, why not use his own?"
"He likes control," I muttered under my breath.
He heard. "I'm not interested in your charity."
"You promised me the use of that device," I said. "Not charity. My nephew needs it."
"Who?" He finally looked up. "Tell me his name."
"His name is Nianbao," I said. "He's four."
"Show me proof." He blinked, like the word proof was a challenge.
"You're asking for proof? I'm asking for a machine." I laughed. "We are terrible negotiators."
He did not laugh.
When the news broke about Durham Hospital’s new equipment failing in a trial, I slept in my car outside the building to wait. Dreams ran like bad film—gunshots, people running, the smell of wet metal. I woke when Colton tapped the window with a cigarette.
"Wake up," he said.
"I'm not your driver anymore," I snapped, but my voice shook.
He named a device—an older model that could still stabilize congenital heart defects. "MI2850," he said. "It works. It can help."
"You promise?" I asked, because promises are cheap and my nephew isn't.
"I promise," Colton said, with the light of someone who always keeps his word.
He gave me a one-day trial. I drove the test with him sitting cold and watchful behind me, hands knotted. We fought about nothing and everything between stoplights.
"Focus on the road," he ordered.
"You focus on keeping your word," I countered.
When he said the old machine's early results were acceptable, I felt a pressure lift. "One day," I told him. "If it helps Nianbao, I will sign the divorce papers."
"Then come with me tomorrow," he said. "But I want the marriage rights until then."
"You want what?" My voice was a small alarm bell.
He leaned forward. "Whether you keep the title or not—during the valid period of the contract—marriage rights exist. You sure you want to sign on the basis of a test?"
I looked at him, and for the first time I saw something that wasn’t all cold: curiosity. "Do whatever you like. My nephew's life isn't your leverage."
He smiled thinly. "You're very clever."
"You flatter me," I snapped.
The next days blurred: repair shop mornings with Jayden Fisher, late-night visits to the hospital with Fletcher and a dozen forms, and constant checkpoints from Colton. My half-sister Alice Cantu kept popping up like a fly—sweet-voiced, mascara perfect, and always ready to bring me trouble.
"You're back," she said one night at a street stall, eyes watery, voice honeyed. "Why won't you come home?"
"Because home belongs to the people who run it," I said. "Not me."
She staged things. Boys, bruises, an orchestrated scene of me being the violent older sister. Her friends swore she was attacked; a yellow-haired man claimed I broke his arm. I remember the twist of bones and the glare from his face; I remember the sharp shock of my own hand moving in reflex.
"She did it!" they accused in the smoky night, crowd swelling.
"That's impossible," I told them.
The next morning, my father, Garrett Franklin, showed up at my yard like a judge with no patience. "You took the girl down?" he demanded. "There are witnesses."
"Witnesses are unreliable," I said. "You taught me better than to rely on who shouts the loudest."
"Get home," he barked. "Make it right."
"I won't apologize for something I didn't do."
He stormed away, red with rage, threatening police names and reputations. Alice lay in a hospital bed with a face as fragile as a storybook heroine.
I did not panic. The law had been muddled by money and influence before. But I did one thing I had never done: I gathered evidence.
"Where did the men go after the stall?" I asked Jayden.
"They split," she said. "One went to the bar. One went home."
We traced cameras, we traced messages, and we traced one ugly truth: Alice had rehearsed the entire scene with her boys. They had lied.
The day of the punishment was bright. I asked Garrett to come to the community center—his pride would never admit he was being lured, but he came. Alice was there in her prettiest dress, expecting applause and sympathy. The hall filled: neighbors, doctors from the clinic, a few Durham associates, and people with phones ready.
I had a laptop. I had recordings. I had the bar's CCTV footage and the group's chat logs—one after another, a chain of evidence.
"Why did you do this?" I asked Alice, voice small but clear.
"For father," she said, playing the injured angel. "For our standing."
I hit play.
"She called me 'sis' before she left," one voice said in the clip. Another said, "Remember, don't let her fight back."
The room shifted. Alice's pretty mouth closed.
"That's what you rehearsed," I said. "That's you on the recording scheduling the lie."
Faces moved, whispers lit like fire. People who once clapped for Alice now looked at her hands. Garrett's jaw tightened. He had spent decades pretending to be a pillar of the community. The truth was a pest that crawled under the wood and made him twitch.
"How could you?" a neighbor whispered.
"I... it's not what it looks like!" Alice wailed, but the practiced sob was thin.
"Tell them," I said, and I did. "Listen to this."
I played the bar's footage. There she was, her glossy dress and her hand on the yellow-haired man's shoulder. The man's arm snapped and writhed—he yelped and called her name. "Call me, call me," he said in the footage. "Get off me."
Then Jayden stepped forward and played another clip: a transfer of money to Alice's account, the timestamp neat as a needle.
Alice's expression abandoned its act. It passed: from the slow grace of a scared girl to the blink of a predator.
"No," Garrett tried to say. "She would never—"
"Watch," I said.
The largest and most damning file was the voice memo Alice recorded when she rehearsed the story. Her voice was crisp, the words rehearsed like a speech. "Say I was attacked," she practiced. "Say Lennox hit me. Say everyone will believe you."
She had been rehearsing the lie.
The air in the community hall went white with the sound of people recording with their phones, murmuring, fingers flying. Someone shouted, "Call the police!" Someone else hissed, "Shame."
Alice's composure cracked. "You can't—" she tried. "You can't show that."
Her hand flew to her mouth, then she laughed at something only she could see and then, horrified, remembered she had to be distraught.
"Get her out of here," Garrett gasped, but his anger had gone brittle.
"Stop!" Alice tried to run out, but the doors were now a bank of witnesses. People closed in. A woman in the front row stood and pointed. "You lied," she said. "You brought the police here with phony stories. You used us."
Phones flashed. Someone filmed Alice backing toward the exit. A neighbor—once friendly—rounded up the security guard.
Alice dropped to her knees when she realized the cameras were on her. "You don't understand," she cried. "He—he made me do it."
"Who?" someone demanded.
"You," she hissed at Garrett. "You told me to do it."
Garrett's face finally slid from red to gray. He hadn't expected his daughter to fall and point.
"Please," Alice moaned, crawling, "please don't—"
A dozen phones captured the scene. Voices rose, some in triumph, some in disgust. "How could you?" people demanded. "How dare you use a child to lie?"
Alice's face dimmed from practiced innocence to genuine panic: the pattern the rules require—arrogant to stunned, denial, collapse, pleading.
"Please," she mouthed, wringing her hands. "I didn't mean—"
"No one buys it," a neighbor said. "We saw the recordings."
"You're done," someone else said, and the sound of that verdict was heavier than any legal order.
Police arrived because the recordings proved intent. They took statements in public. Alice wept, which might have been an act, and then it wasn't. Her voice shook between "I didn't" and "Please."
Garrett stood, unable to meet my eyes. He had to listen to his daughter beg for forgiveness under fluorescent lights, while neighbors recorded the fall of his reputation.
When the police led Alice out, she stumbled to the exit, pulling at her dress. A young man shoved a phone into her face and asked, "Isn't your father proud?"
"Please," Alice begged the cameras. "Please, I'm sorry."
The crowd recorded everything: the shame, the denial, the collapse. People clapped—not in mockery, but in vindication. Some took selfies. Others cried. A woman who had been my fierce neighbor since childhood slapped Alice across the face in a public gesture that belonged to an older world. Security restrained her, but the slap echoed.
Alice collapsed on the community steps, sobbing and begging. Garrett stood by the car, hands in his pockets, looking at his ruined image.
"That's your family," someone said to Garrett, and he had no answer.
Later, the local news ran the story. The clip from my laptop went viral; the video showed Alice's rehearse, the bar footage, and the moment she begged the crowd. For three days, she could not move in public. People took photos of her leaving the hospital and posted them. Her friends un-followed. The faces she relied on for sympathy turned their backs.
When justice arrived, it was not a courtroom verdict. It was the public unraveling: evidence, confession, watched by everyone. And it fit: triumph, shock, denial, collapse, pleading.
I had not wanted this. I had only wanted the truth.
"Are you satisfied?" Garrett asked once the crowd thinned and I stood on the steps of the center with Coleman beside me.
"Justice doesn't always taste sweet," I said. "But Nianbao will get his chance. That's what I wanted."
Coleman handed me a folder. "Colton agreed. The trial will start today. He put the MI2850 unit at the hospital's disposal for the trial."
Colton's name on the practised paper felt heavy.
I did not want to rely on Colton Durham for anything. But I had called him a liar, and he had kept his word.
"Thank you," I said very quietly.
He was not there. The machine began in a sterile ward, and for the first time in months I felt the dangerous, fragile hope of people who have run out of options.
"They'll start today," Fletcher said. "If it stabilizes him, we have a plan."
"Then do it," I told him. I signed the consent forms. I let the hospital strap Nianbao into the machine. I stood like a holder of breath.
"He's responding," Fletcher whispered.
Nianbao's heartbeat steadied on the monitor. I wept without sound, my knees weak. The machine hummed like something that had finally decided to hold.
When the test ended, Colton called. "You kept your word," he said.
"I didn't sign yet," I said. "I promised I would hand you the papers if it worked."
"You can keep a river," he said. "I prefer signatures."
It was the smallest of jokes, the smallest of compromises.
I walked to the hospital parking lot and sat in my old car. The envelope of the divorce papers was in my bag, crisp and waiting. The sound of the hospital hum took over. I looked out the window and thought: contracts can be broken, bought, and signed. But the lives we hold are not currency.
I drove home with a pocket full of new defeat and a trunk of fragile hope. Nianbao would live. Alice's fall had cleansed a village of its rumor, if not of its wounds. Colton Durham had kept his word, and for reasons of curiosity I did not yet understand, stayed interested in the woman who refused to be bought.
"Why did you help?" I asked later when he offered to sign the papers himself, meeting me in the blink-lamp foyer of Durham Tower.
He watched me for a long moment. "Curiosity," he said. "And because you are foolish enough to call me a liar to my face. I wanted to see if you'd risk the truth."
I did not know whether to be relieved or furious. "Then sign," I urged. "You wanted the papers."
He smoothed the page. "I'll sign when I'm sure you won't disappear."
"That's not my style," I said. "I don't run from my life."
He smiled. "Good."
I took the pen and slid it across the line. My world did not rearrange itself into neat squares, but the machine had hummed and a child slept easier. Outside, the city did not pause for my little victory. Inside, a small heart beat steady and slow.
We walked out of the tower like two people who had struck a bargain and were already tired of discussing the clauses. The papers were signed. The world moved on.
"Keep the machine working," I told him.
"I will," he replied.
I kept my word. He kept his. The rest—reputations, families, the hot chatter of the city—would mend or splinter in its own time.
The End
— Thank you for reading —