Face-Slapping11 min read
A Little White Cake, a Wooden Hairpin, and the Wrong Kind of Justice
ButterPicks11 views
I am Emmaline Newton. I study art and I owe myself a lifetime of small, honest obsessions: painted pines, stubborn bamboos, and the smell of a bakery at noon. I tell this story because once, a girl in a yellow dress became dust, and I could not let her vanish like a forgotten brushstroke.
"It's October," my friend Daria Reynolds said after class. "The whole city is doing autumn right."
"High school feels like a race," I answered. "But some lines need time. They shouldn't be rushed."
Daria laughed. "You're talking about people like they're paintings."
"People are paintings," I said.
We went to the little bakery on the street by the university. The place makes only two hundred cakes a day and every time the bell rings I feel like I am watching a miracle.
"Two for me, please," I told Jana Hartmann at the counter.
"Which ones?" Jana asked, smiling like she had stored that smile for months and finally had space to show it.
"The kind that looks like a secret," I said. "Two."
"That'll be—" Jana reached and Matteo Gauthier, the guy who took money, called numbers in a voice that was steady as a pen.
"013!"
A woman walked away holding a cake and for a moment the whole store smelled of orange peels. I looked at the hands that passed the boxes. They were the kind of hands art students notice—hands that had worked, that had maps of years on them.
"Look," Daria whispered, "he's not classic handsome. He's...balanced."
"He'd make a good model," I said.
"Ask him," Daria teased.
"No."
"You're not even going to ask?"
"No," I repeated. "I have homework."
We left with our cakes and a little lit sun on my face. I love the way sunlight makes the edges of things honest.
A month later Matteo was working the noon shift. He wore a simple apron and had a scar at the base of his thumb. When he smiled, something in me stilled and took notes.
"You okay?" he asked one afternoon when the line was short and I stood staring at a wrapped cake.
"Yes," I lied, and then I did something braver. "Could you keep it for me? It's for a friend."
"Sure." He wrapped it carefully, as if it were a small sculpture.
Days later, the city turned its head at a single bad moment. A girl named Celeste Clay—thin, quick, who watched the sky and talked about counting birds—was gone. She worked part-time as a local guide and did odd jobs to help her grandmother pay for medicine. She wore a yellow dress that shone like a promise. The promise broke.
"She went out at night," someone told me. "With a wealthy woman called Gina Box."
"What?" I asked. "Why would she...?"
"Money," they said. "Gina found someone to take her where she wanted, apparently. This was how Celeste earned a lot of her spare cash."
I could not accept the ending the world would hand Celeste—a small sentence and a quiet burial. I could not let the story be only rumor and cold file names. I began to breathe this case the way I breathe oil paint.
"I want justice," I told Tristan Ogawa one night at home. Tristan is my brother. He smiled, the kind of smile my father, Harrison Kraemer, and mother, Virginia Flores, had taught him to carry for the world.
"Let lawyers do the law," Tristan said.
"Lawyers can be careful with truth," I said. "I want them to do more than that."
Tristan didn't argue. He took my look for what it was: a small fire. He made a small gift of patience and left me to it.
I went to hire a lawyer. I found Mikhail Voigt.
"I know how to make the court speak," Mikhail said when we first met at a café while rain smeared the windows. "But lawyers like me measure what can be proven."
"Prove that Gina Box paid people to silence things," I said.
Mikhail looked at me. "Money can be evidence. But money can also be an eraser."
"Then don't let it erase," I said.
"You are noble," Mikhail answered. "And stubborn. I like that. But be careful."
"Be careful?" I asked.
"Justice is not a fairytale," he replied.
The trial for the man who killed Celeste—Yuri Guzman—ended with a heavy number of years behind bars. He confessed and the court gave a sentence so long I could barely measure its weight. He was the dragon who had claws and a cold mouth. The city shouted, and many nights I slept with the record of the ruling open on my tablet just to feel the lines of the law landing like a second coat of paint.
But Gina Box was different. Gina was like a princess in a clean, expensive story: well-known in the right cafes, wearing the right shade of rage when needed, offering money like a cure. Her people said she had paid Celeste for a night and a canceling price that made her family—Celeste's grandmother—buy years of care and rest. The police whispered. The papers printed what money bought.
"So she will pay and the case will end," someone in the city said over lunch.
"No," I said.
"Why not?" they asked.
"Because paying money is not the whole of guilt," I said.
"It is legal closure," they told me. "Accept it. Life moves on."
I could not let it. I had seen Celeste in life: stubborn and tender, counting birds as if counting wishes. I had painted her in my sketchbook. I would not let her become a small, light thing to be smoothed over with a check.
Mikhail was patient. "Show me what you want," he said.
"I want people to see her choice," I said. "Not just the check, but the way she treated the poor because they were poor. I want public truth."
Mikhail tilted his head. "You want a public exposure?"
"Yes."
He warned me it could be ugly. I said I had prepared for ugliness. I wanted everyone to know how a princess had sold a life and then smiled away the consequences.
We prepared like painters preparing a big piece. We collected receipts, messages, hotel bookings, credit card slips, and a list of people who had seen Gina with Celeste. We found a bartender who had seen Gina give a wad of cash to a man who was not her husband. We found a driver. We found a hotel clerk whose handwriting matched a slip that appeared in a bank transfer.
"People think money is private," Mikhail said. "It's not. Watch how private it looks under lights."
We did not act in court. We planned a place where image matters: a gala hosted by an elite foundation, where Gina would be present. She loved such stages; she loved the applause. We would use the applause to suffocate her.
The gala was a sea of silk and low laughter. The city had come dressed in apology and ambition. I walked in, plain in a black dress, carrying a small envelope. Mikhail walked with me, a slick paper in his hand.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
"Ready," I said.
We walked to the microphone when the host offered the floor for a charity presentation. Cameras found me like hungry eyes.
"May I?" I said, and the microphone shivered at my voice.
"My name is Emmaline Newton," I announced. "I am here for the memory of a girl who loved birds and who counted them before midnight."
There was a murmur.
"I want to show you something," I said. I slid the envelope to Mikhail. He opened it and fed the contents to the host while full attention turned my way.
On the huge screen behind us, a ledger bloomed. A string of transactions, a hotel receipt with Gina Box's signature, a photograph of Gina in the hotel's lobby with a girl in a yellow dress, the girl's arm leaning on a shoulder.
Gina's face when she saw the screen moved like a clock breaking.
"How dare you!" she said at first, sharp with provenance. Her voice was the kind that had been polished for crime and for care. People near her gasped: "Gina?"
"Stop this," a man in the front row whispered. "This is irrelevant."
"Shut up," someone snapped back.
I kept talking. "This is the truth. These items show payment, messages, receipts, and witnesses. We have offered the proof to the police. They found the payment. We are showing you what money bought: a girl's ticket to a place she did not return from, a girl's promise to her grandmother sold."
Gina stood up slowly. Her jewelry flashed.
"It is slander," she said. "This is lies. My lawyers will—"
"What did the grandmother say?" I asked, and a video played of Celeste's grandmother with shaky hands accepting an envelope and telling a reporter she had been told to accept it.
Someone in the room took a phone and started to film. One person held it high and the camera found Gina like a shark finds blood.
"Take it down," Gina demanded. She was still small in the face of hundreds of eyes. She was used to paying off inconvenience with a brisk word or a bigger check. She had never met a microphone that mattered.
"Is it true you sent a transfer to that hotel?" I asked. "Is it true you wrote a check for the caretaker? Is it true you asked people to step aside?"
Gina's smile hardened.
"This is private," she said.
"Private?" I repeated. "When private uses money to mask a death, it's public."
Cameras flashed. Someone in the crowd clapped—sharp, not kind.
Gina's expression changed. The poise she wore like armor began to crack.
"How could you do this?" she said, suddenly not the woman in the glossy ads but a human with hands shaking just enough to betray it.
She paced the stage like a caged thing. "You have no evidence," she hissed.
"You're right," Mikhail said. "You were careful. You bought silence. You made an offer to the family. But you forgot a tiny thing: people who carry checks forget they leave fingerprints."
A phone recorded the list of transfers. An assistant in her team tried to grab the phone. Others in her circle urged her to call the police. She dialed with fingers that trembled.
"Shut up!" she screamed at a reporter who tried to ask a question.
Her voice broke. For a moment it was like watching porcelain fracture.
"She is trying to buy a pity performance," someone in the audience called.
"What's she going to buy now?" another voice said.
Gina's face shifted from heat to pale. She searched the room with frantic eyes. The cameras framed every motion: her jewelry, the tremor in her hand, the lipstick smudged at the corner of her mouth; each frame collected shame like rain.
"This is slander!" she shouted. "I will sue you for defamation!"
"File away," Mikhail said softly. "You can try all you like. The public now has bank records. Public opinion is not a cash box."
She laughed, a thin hyena sound. Then denial fell away like a stage dress; fear rose in its place.
"You're ruining me!" she cried.
"Do you think any donation tonight will erase what you did?" someone in the first rows shouted.
Gina's breath came quick. Her allies were few. Her PR team made a tight ring, but each camera had its angle. Her staff whispered and someone in the crowd began to chant the victim's name: "Celeste! Celeste! Celeste!"
That chant spread like a slow wind. People turned their heads. Phones rose. A woman in the third row stood up and said, "If you had paid, what did you expect? That would be all? Can money replace a girl?"
Gina's color left. She went from anger to disbelief to frantic denial.
"This is not fair," she whimpered.
"Fair?" another voice said. "You wrote checks and walked away. The money cannot rewrite a corpse."
People started recording. Someone laughed with a bitterness that sounded like applause. Another person shouted, "Tell us how many times you offered money to silence other things!"
Gina's face finally collapsed. Her eyes watered and she grabbed at the podium like it was the only thing steady in the world. "Please," she said, and the sound of the single syllable made an audible drop in the room. "Please, you can't do this to me. I didn't mean—"
"Meaning does not matter now," I said. "The life matters."
No one moved to physically stop her. But the public space—an ocean of onlookers, reporters, and cameras—did what law sometimes cannot do: it made the private unfold into the light and let witnesses be witnesses.
Gina went from being a tall rumor to a broken woman pleading under hundred sets of eyes. Her people began to step back. Some filmed. Some turned away. Her denial became a cycle: assert innocence, grow silent, begin to beg, then crumble.
"Please," she begged again. "Please—"
"You're not a fragile person," Mikhail said. "You're a choice-maker. You chose to try to buy life. You chose to think money could replace truth. You must stand where you chose."
For a full quarter hour the room watched her break: first shock, then anger, then denial, then pleading, then collapse. Cameras recorded every change. Phones buzzed with live footage. The crowd's reaction moved from curiosity to contempt to a kind of righteous applause when she finally, at last, had no more armor.
People who had watched Celeste's life wrote messages. Reporters read out bank transfer details. A woman from Celeste's town stood up and said, "My cousin would have been Florist if she could. She could have painted. She could have talked, but what she could not do is take back what happened."
When the police later took a formal statement, at least three people in that room agreed to give recorded accounts. The grandmother said, again and again, "I took money for the medicine. I thought that was enough."
Gina's public fall set off a chain. Her corporate sponsors announced reviews. A charity severed ties. The press kept the video up for days. In private her legal teams argued strategy; in public the name "Gina Box" became a test case: can money buy silence, and should it buy a conscience?
When the crowd left, it left changed. Voices that would have been quiet became louder. Some cheered. Some filmed. Some whispered. Most left with the sight of a woman who had been unreachably rich and then seen in a state we reserve for people we pretend are above consequences.
That day, justice did not end in a courtroom. It began in a room where people had to listen, where the rich could not slip a note into a file and buy away a life.
Afterward, I walked through the rain and into the little bakery where Matteo stood dusting a tray.
"You did it," Matteo said softly when he saw me.
"I did what I had to," I answered.
"You didn't look like a lawyer on the stage," he said, smiling the way the afternoon does when it knows a storm has passed.
"There are different kinds of law," I said. "There is the law of papers and signatures. And there is the law that lives in people. I chose the latter."
Matteo pushed a small box toward me across the counter.
"For Celeste," he said.
Inside was a small white cake shaped like a peacock, her feathers worked in creamy white. He had made it for a private order and then kept it for me.
"Thank you," I said, and I thought of the wooden hairpin that had belonged to a woman who wore flagrant kindness like a bright color. I thought of how small things could carry memory.
Weeks passed. People wrote, discussed, and slowly the city kept turning. Yuri Guzman was jailed. Gina faced civil proceedings and reputational collapse. The grandmother received help from a charity started in Celeste's name. But none of that brought back a girl who used to count the birds.
One evening, months later, I went back to the bakery.
"How is the shop?" I asked.
"Busy," Matteo said.
"Is the peacock still a thing?"
"Always," Matteo said. "People like stories in their desserts."
I sat across from him and looked at his hands, the blue veins under the skin like a map of work. He laughed when I asked if he'd model for my painting of a baker.
"I can't stand still," he said.
"You can try," I told him.
He looked at me, and for a long moment I could not tell if it was the light or him making my sketchbook seem more honest.
"Do you ever count birds?" he asked suddenly.
"Sometimes," I said. "They remind me how many directions life can go."
He nodded as if agreeing with a statement about weather.
On a small shelf in the bakery, between a jar of cookies and a stack of paper bags, sat a wooden hairpin. It was carved simply, like a little bird, and someone had left it there by mistake. I picked it up.
"It's beautiful," I said.
"It belonged to someone who used to come here," Matteo answered. "She liked the sunlight and left things behind."
I looped the hairpin into my hair and when I left I told myself I would keep counting birds so that the name of one girl would not be the only thing I remembered of her.
"Promise?" Matteo asked.
"No promises," I said, and then I did something I had never done in all my life.
"I'll bring you a sketch of a baker who keeps the sky in his hands," I said.
He smiled. "Don't sell it to the gallery."
"I won't," I said.
When I walked out into the street, the night smelled like wet paper and fresh pastry. The city's lights shimmered like icing. The wooden hairpin caught the lamplight and flashed. I thought of the peacock cake, of the trial, of the room's hard light. I thought of Celeste's small hands and the ledger that would not be hidden anymore.
I set my sketchbook on my lap and began to draw, and the pencil moved like a small bird finding the next branch.
The End
— Thank you for reading —