Sweet Romance10 min read
Can We Swap the Script?
ButterPicks19 views
Midnight rain stitched the city into silver threads.
I stepped out of the night and into the bar where the light smelled like perfume and regret.
My phone buzzed. Stella had sent me a message.
“Galilea, thank you again. Just a heads-up.” A photo attached.
I looked at the photo. A woman with a loud smile sat on Nico’s lap, their eyes bright with an easy hunger.
I texted back one word: “Why?”
Stella answered with a laughing emoji and two words: “Entertainment value.”
I didn’t wait for drama to arrive. I drove through rain that smelled of cold glass and pulled the coat tighter.
The private room was a pocket of heat and noise. Nico’s laugh cut through the music when I pushed through the curtains.
I didn’t whisper. I ripped the woman off his knee and slapped him so hard the room froze.
“Are you insane?” someone mouthed.
Nico looked stunned for one beat, then grinned like a boy caught stealing a candy.
“Galilea—” he said.
“You want me to drag you out or I should bruise you properly?” I asked.
Nico’s hand went to my palm like a lifeline. He dropped to his knees before the whole room.
“Please, don’t—” he said, surprisingly small.
“Pick yourself up,” I told him coldly. “And explain, now.”
“You saw a photo,” he said when he finally stood. “It was a mess, a misunderstanding.”
“A woman on your lap is a misunderstanding now?”
“She’s loud, she wanted attention. I didn’t—”
“You always didn’t,” I snapped.
He tried to make a joke out of it. “Baby, are you going to nurse this hand or kiss it better?”
“You’re ridiculous,” I said and left him with his smug grin.
I drove home to the duplex we share—two floors of careful distance.
We had signed a contract five years ago. He had protection and I had breathing room. He had businesses that needed a polished wife. I had bills that needed paying.
We slept under the same roof but on separate floors most nights, and for years, the arrangement fit both of us like a good glove.
That night the glove thinned.
Two days later dawned on a thinner world. I went to the prison in rain that had lost its curiosity.
“Why are you here?” the guard asked when I handed over my ID.
“To pick up Gabriel,” I said softly.
He opened the gate for one man and one old debt.
Gabriel Dominguez stepped out into the rain seven years shorter and seven years thicker.
“Galilea?” He blinked at the umbrella shielding us both.
“It’s me,” I said.
He studied my face like it had changed into a stranger’s map.
“You knew?” he asked.
“I always knew,” I answered. “Come. Mom will kill me if she finds you wandering.”
He was taller than I remembered. He smelled of a prison sleep and clean water.
“You okay?” I asked.
“No,” he said simply.
He kept his hands out of pockets and his jaw clenched, like a man learning his limbs again.
At home, my mother—Inger Madsen—held the kitchen like a ship’s command deck.
“You brought him back early?” she asked when Gabriel walked in.
“Yes,” I said.
“You could have let me get ready,” she scolded and then softened. “Sit. Eat.”
Gabriel weighed every mouthful and made no claim to gratitude. He was used to the idea that the world owed him nothing now.
Later that afternoon, Nico called.
“Busy?” he asked.
“I’m burying three days of peace,” I said.
“Come home after. I’ll bring you something hot.”
“You said the same when you were in that bar.”
“What? That was different.”
“It never is,” I muttered.
“Baby,” he said, softer this time. “We can talk.”
We did not have a wedding anyone expected, and we weren’t married in love—only in legal signatures and mutual convenience.
I had once believed I could be something other than the girl people looked past.
Father dying had left us with a debt and a promise. He whispered: “Take care of your brother. Keep the family.”
So I did what I could. I married Nico for the money, so I could keep the promise.
That weekend Nico’s family threw a dinner.
“Tonight is important,” Stella said, her smile bright and rehearsed.
“Why?” I asked, folding my napkin.
“My father is celebrating,” she said. “There might be news.”
Vaughn Garnier, their patriarch, arrived with a young woman on his arm.
“This is Imani Bentley,” Vaughn announced, like dropping a fountain of perfume in the room. “My wife.”
A baby bump showed through Imani’s silk dress. Someone clapped politely. Stella glowed like a lamp for show.
Nico leaned toward me and whispered, “Looks like father’s registering new accounts.”
I bit back a retort.
People spat polite congratulations; I kept a clear face.
“You married someone who looks like she’s twenty-five,” I said low later.
“She’s thirty,” Nico laughed. “And she’s very impressive at certain parties.”
“I saw her before,” I said. “She used to belong to Gabriel.”
Nico’s face dipped into something like recognition, then anger.
“She’s—?”
“She was not good for him,” I said shortly.
Nico’s hand closed around his wine glass until his knuckles were white.
A week later I took Gabriel to the cemetery.
“Dad wanted me to look after you,” I said as we stood at the small stone.
“You shouldn’t have carried the coffin,” Gabriel managed.
“I carried everything I could,” I said. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
He surprised me by trying to apologize.
“For what?” I asked.
“For not being here,” he said. “For being weak.”
“You were hurt, Gabriel.”
“I was stupid.”
“You can be both,” I said.
A month passed with small, precise days: the bakery where I sometimes worked behind the counter, the little shop I kept afloat. I managed Nico’s modest investments in restaurants and a film project I believed in. I made spreadsheets in the nights when the house slept.
And then a call came—“Premiere tonight,” Nico said. “You go. I’ll be elsewhere.”
At the premiere I sat with Gabriel in the first row. Directors nodded. People smiled and left their shoes on polite pedestals.
I saw Henry Fisher across the stage, and then a boy I recognized from magazine pages—someone who had been too pretty for his talent and too loud for his own good.
I also noticed Imani standing with Vaughn, the bump unmistakable.
Between acts a murmuring voice hissed from behind a pillar.
“Nico?” Someone whispered.
“It’s me,” a young voice purred. “You haven’t come by in a while...”
The voice was on the phone, and the flippant nickname that followed made my stomach drop.
Nico had called the boy earlier that week to ask about a small favor. Now the boy’s wish was being paid back in whispers.
After the show there was food and cheap clinked silver; a few moments alone with the producers, a good wine and a list of possibilities.
Then word spread.
“Imani?” a reporter shouted. “Are you expecting Vaughn’s child?”
Imani smiled, breath perfect, and Vaughn laughed with a man’s relief.
Someone in the crowd laughed too—a brittle noise.
I felt a cold, slow tide of fury rise inside me.
“Do you think—” Gabriel began.
“That she used you?” I said.
“No,” he said. “That you tried to save me.”
“I didn’t try to save you,” I answered. “I paid bills. I worked.”
The days became a tight wire.
Stella sent more photos—staged, always staged—and someone at the bar had recorded a flirtation. The internet lit up like a wounded bird.
One night Stella’s messages came with a new photo: Nico, half smiling, hand on another woman’s shoulder.
My phone vibrated. It was Graham Guo calling.
“You okay?” he asked.
“No.” I snapped. “Stella just sent me another one.”
“Come by. Let’s talk.”
A good friend is someone who will listen and then make a plan.
Plans are messy. I agreed to one without thinking.
“Expose them,” Graham said.
“Expose who?” I asked.
“Imani. Vaughn. Show the world the woman who sent Gabriel away. Make them face it.”
“You can’t prove that—”
“We have witnesses,” Graham said. “There are messages.”
We set the table at the gala.
“Why here?” Gabriel asked suspiciously.
“We need them all under one roof,” I said. “People, cameras, the press.”
He nodded slowly.
“You sure?” he asked.
“No,” I replied. “But I’m tired of being small.”
The evening I chose had the hall full of family, friends, and a thousand polite smiles. Vaughn sat at the head, glass beaded with age.
I walked onto the stage with a single envelope in my hand.
“Why are you up there?” Stella hissed.
“Wait,” I said quietly into the microphone. “I have something to show.”
“Galilea—” Nico’s whisper came like a gust.
“Just let me,” I said.
I opened the envelope and placed evidence on the lectern: photos, dated messages, a scanned letter Gabriel had never been shown. The hall hummed.
“Imani Bentley,” I started, “you are going to remember the name Gabriel Dominguez. You are going to remember what happened seven years ago.”
Heads turned. Phones lifted like a wave.
“You can’t—” Imani began, voice syruped with false shock.
“Don’t interrupt,” I said. “Listen to this.”
I read aloud the messages Imani had sent to Gabriel before he hit that night and the message she later sent to people bragging she’d found new company once he was gone.
Her face first went tight with annoyance.
“She did not—” she said, loudly.
“You said you would not stand by him in court,” I read. “You told a friend you’d moved on.”
Her expression changed: smug → shocked → fury → scramble.
“It’s a lie!” she shouted.
“The messages are here,” I said. “The dates, the time stamps—everything. You told him to fight for you. You told him to confront someone. Instead he lost seven years. That is not love. That is not loyalty.”
Gasps rose.
Vaughn’s face blanched into a map of lines.
“You will apologize,” Imani said, voice wobbling.
“To whom?” I asked. “To the man who served seven years because he tried to defend your honor? To the family you tore?”
Cameras clicked. People shifted.
“You are being cruel,” Stella spat from her seat.
“Am I?” I said. “Or am I finally telling the truth?”
Imani’s reactions went through the stages the rulebook teaches: first anger, then panic, then denial, then pleading.
She started to cry the practiced tears of an actress. “It was not like that,” she wailed.
“You called him jealous and told him to pick a fight,” I said. “You sent the messages to make him act. You arranged it.”
The crowd’s whisper swelled into accusation.
“Shame!” someone shouted.
Journalists circled. A camera pressed into Imani’s face.
“What do you have to say to Gabriel?” a reporter asked.
Imani breathed like a woman drowning. “I—” she faltered, “I am sorry if—”
“You don’t get to be sorry now,” Gabriel said, standing as a quiet force. “You get to answer for what you did.”
“Please!” she cried, and the pleading sounded small and weak.
“Did you want me to fall?” Gabriel asked, voice low. “Did you want me to lose everything for a lie you fed?”
Imani stared at him and finally crumpled. Her collapse into a flood of words and blame was slow—she begged people for forgiveness, for chance, then pointed fingers, then wept in a way that hardly sounded real.
People around us chewed the scene like meat.
Some applauded me quietly. Others recorded on their phones.
Vaughn sat stunned; his authority looked fragile.
Stella, who had enjoyed the public tease, watched with a weird, thin face that colored when everyone’s eyes measured her complicity.
That night the microphones recorded her denial, and her denial turned vicious then hollower.
Her public fall was not a single blow. It was a drip, a peel of lacquer. She lost endorsements within days. Agents texted to say they were “reassessing.” Her manager called. Sponsors pulled away.
At the family board dinner two nights later, Vaughn’s company’s board subtly excused him from tomorrow’s meeting.
Humiliation has its professional language: removal from a board agenda, a press note about “personal matters,” an abrupt, cold efficiency that eats pride.
Imani begged for public mercy; the merciless thing about public scandals is how quickly they become commodity.
Stella’s punishment followed a different script.
Her little act of forwarding pictures and making drama came to light when one of her behind-the-scenes friends leaked the set logs. The press, ruthless as a pack, turned their finger to the moments of her orchestrations.
Her agent insisted on a public apology script; a director she revered declined to work with her.
That night she sat alone while callers dropped off.
She had been a queen of light and now she was only reflected, dimmer.
Vaughn’s shame translated into business caution.
“The board needs stability,” a statement read. “Personal matters must not interfere.” The company’s stock trembled, and his lunches with investors lost their weight.
It is funny how a man can be both terrifying and fragile when cameras point at his choices.
For Gabriel, there was no revenge in my act—only a long, tired justice.
He did not leap to gloat. He made a statement later: “I lost seven years. I will not return them. Only this: I will rebuild my life.”
People watched how he walked across the stage: upright, no longer an animal in a cage.
After the exposure there were consequences that were private and public.
Imani’s voice broke in the online interviews as cameras circled her like vultures.
She moved from confident to imploring and then to a small, needy figure. People turned away. Sponsors that once chased her called lawyers and accountants.
Stella found herself uninvited from a movie set.
Vaughn had to face shareholders, explain his choices, and accept the polite burial of his pride.
I stood in the center of the crowd with my hands in my coat pockets, and someone said to me, softly, “That was merciless.”
“It was overdue,” I said.
In the weeks that followed, life reknit itself.
Nico came to me with coffee and a quiet face.
“You were brutal,” he said.
“You were in the picture,” I replied.
“You hurt him,” he said.
“He was hurt long before I showed anyone,” I said.
We argued until the words had nothing left to cut with.
“I’ll make promises,” he said. “One month. Let me fix things. I don’t want the divorce.”
I looked at him. “You think a month erases seven years for him? For me? For everything you’ve given everyone permission to believe?”
He reached for my hand.
“Let me be your man for one month. Let me handle the things you can’t. Let me be the husband on paper and off the record.”
“You’re offering to be a fiction for hire,” I said.
“No.” He smiled, ridiculous and tender. “I’m offering to try.”
So we did not sign papers. We set no date for a divorce.
Nico asked me to stay on as his manager of small portfolios and personal investments for another month, and I agreed.
I worked on the accounts. I double-checked spreadsheets. I made deals.
Gabriel found a job through an old friend; a workplace where people were hungry and hands-on. He started small, and his shoulders unrolled like someone learning to breathe.
A month passed with incubated tenderness. Small moments gathered: Nico taking off his coat to warm me; Graham bringing tea and daring jokes; Gabriel learning to quiet his rage into polite power.
Cake warmed on my tongue at night; the jade bracelet the stone-workers gifted me glinted at my wrist. The bracelet came from a tiny stone Gabriel had found—insignificant in price, immense in luck. It was his out-of-jail gift and my talisman.
One night, after a board meeting and an argument about a bad investment I vetoed, Nico came home late.
“Are you hurt?” he asked. “Not just the face—the part that forgets to laugh.”
“I am tired,” I said.
He pulled me close and kissed my forehead like a promise without words.
“I will not let them hurt you,” he murmured.
“You said that before,” I said.
“This time I mean it,” he said.
We are still learning scripts.
Sometimes he is the man who jokes in public and the man who kneels in private.
Sometimes I am the woman who prepares spreadsheets and the woman who read a letter on a stage.
We both stumbled.
But when he wrapped my old green jade bracelet in tissue and handed it back to me, I felt a small, honest warmth.
“You kept it,” he said.
“You’re not the only one who remembers,” I answered.
He laughed like a foolish child and like a man trying to catch himself.
There are debts that never leave.
There are people who will always try to pull the best lines from each other.
There is a photo that started a fight and a stone that started a life.
I do not know the next chapter’s exact words.
But right now the bracelet rests against my wrist like a memory made of luck.
The End
— Thank you for reading —