Revenge15 min read
From School Uniforms to Wedding Veils — Four Women, Four Reckonings
ButterPicks13 views
Part One — You and Only You
I was Lydia Blake. Three years of college. Three years of quiet, foolish worship. Three years of collecting courage and excuses and phone numbers that led me here: a rumor on the confession board and a dozen laughing comments tagging the one who had lived in my chest like a crystal idol.
"—Isn't that Lydia Blake? @Frederick Fontaine, come see, someone's stealing your girl!" someone posted.
I looked at the comments, shut my phone, and let the silence gather like frost.
I had loved Frederick Fontaine for three years. He was a law student from the graduate program — the kind of man who could cut off conversation like a scalpel. He gave speeches at opening ceremonies, his voice cool as ice in late summer. I remembered the way his speech sounded that first week: like a shard of something cold and clear dropped into my sweating cup of tea.
"Did he actually text you back?" Freya asked, pounding the air with a cushion.
"No," I said, and the silence between us felt like a sharp thing. "He didn't wait. He left."
Freya flung an arm around me the way she did when I was a wounded animal. "He left you at the awards night?"
"Yes," I said, tasting each word like something I had kept in my mouth too long. "He didn't wait after the show. I changed shoes, I bled for these stupid heels, I fell on the stairs — and he left."
Freya's nostrils flared. "He is an idiot."
"He is Frederick," I said.
We were together for twenty-eight days. I lit a thousand tiny bonfires in my mind and assembled them into a bridge that would take me to him. I gave him jokes, late-night messages, times when I could have been selfish and wasn't. I thought companionship would happen by degree. Instead we were a ledger I balanced badly.
"Why did he not wait?" Freya demanded, slapping her thigh. "Who does that?"
"He was busy," I said, trying on the truth.
"He was busy?" Freya echoed. "For twenty-eight days?"
I could not explain the slow erosion. I only knew the night it broke: my message, sent and trembling, "Frederick, maybe we should end this?"
He answered faster than I expected. "You mean it seriously?"
"Yes."
"…"
Three ellipses like snow. No pleas, no questions. His reply felt like a cool, clean closing: not cruel in an obvious way, just efficient. Later he would send a message that read, "Sorry for causing trouble."
"I don't need an apology," I told my phone. "That post wasn't yours."
"If you have time, can we talk?" he wrote.
I typed back and hit send. "No. Wish you well."
Then my phone chimed with a photo: a glossy acceptance letter into a graduate program. The sender was tagged "Flavian." My breath stopped.
Flavian Lucas, my childhood mate — the person I had fought since we were kids, the one who had been shoved into my life by our families like a stubborn second tie on a suit. He reappeared like mischief in a crowd: paint-splattered shirts that looked like modern art, a foxlike grin, and a habit of planting both feet in the exact place a conversation was about to explode.
"Surprise," he said, sitting opposite me with a box of pastries between us.
"You should be in school," I said, and he shrugged.
"I turned in my thesis early," he said. "I'm here to watch you fail or fly."
"You sent that post," I said before I could stop myself.
He opened a pastry like a weapon. "Me? No. But I did shoot the photo. You look better from the side."
"Shut up," I snapped. "Who posted my picture with Frederick?"
He smiled with that careless half-smirk. "I might have. So what? You two looked like a pair."
"Flavian—"
"Yes? I am Flavian. I am annoying and I like to prick people with questions."
"Did you try to fake a scandal?" I demanded. "Did you want to bait Frederick?"
He leaned back and seemed to measure me with a single look. Then he tossed me a stick of gum — my favorite flavor.
"I wanted you to wake up, Lydia. He was a shadow that smelled faintly like apologies. You didn't need him. You needed to look up."
His presence uncoiled something in me.
At dinner, under a roof of gentle light, a girl came up and called me by name. "Lydia?" she said.
Florence Schmitz. She smiled like a knife wrapped in lace. "I know you and Frederick broke up, but you didn't have to jump so fast, right?"
Every part of my stomach shrank. The cafeteria turned a shade too bright. Around us phones lifted; people leaned in. I swallowed the whole of my pride and chose fire.
"You were in the photo," I said, low.
"What? That's not—"
"Don't play dumb," I said. "You took Frederick out for study dinners at night when we were still together. I was waiting while you were on the phone with him!"
Florence's pink nails clicked an answer: "We were colleagues."
"We were colleagues," I repeated like a challenge. "Then why are you his front in public? Why did you follow him to the city coffee shop at midnight and make jokes about 'group research'?"
Flavian's laugh broke the tight circle of eyes. "That's top-grade green tea manipulation," he said, smirking. "She isn't just a friend."
"It's none of your business," Florence snapped. "You're making a scene."
"I am making a scene because I don't like being gaslit in front of everyone," I said.
We left the food court. Flavian walked with me, steady as he ever had.
"You handled it with more style than I expected," he said, passing me a napkin.
"You started this." I shoved him. "You knew I liked him."
"I know everything you won't tell anyone," he replied softly.
That night, at a small teacher's dinner my mentor Miriam Emerson had called, things got loud. We arrived in staggered ways — Frederick and Florence together, holding themselves like a couple who had nothing to hide. Miriam's house smelled of roasted garlic and old books.
Frederick sat with the same composed distance I had learned to love. He opened his mouth and said, "Lydia, I—"
"No," I interrupted. "Tonight isn't about cookies and polite apologies."
"You can't be—"
"Watch me."
I moved through the room like a storm. "Miriam," I said loudly, "before we eat, I have a projection."
Miriam's eyebrows rose. "A what now?"
"A projection," I repeated. "Photos, messages, evidence."
"I don't like public scenes," Miriam said thinly.
"Then don't look away."
I tapped into my phone. The gallery bloomed with messages: late-night calls, a photo from the coffee shop, and Florence's private messages showing a familiarity that had never been offered to me as a friend. I read out the messages one by one.
"‘I'm here for you' — sent at 11:42 p.m. After Lydia's event," I said. "‘I'll bring your notes' — 1:03 a.m. ‘He knows' — 2:11 a.m."
Frederick's face didn't move. Florence's smile thinned.
"What is this, Lydia?" Frederick said, calm as a locked room.
"It is a truth you have been hiding behind your blandness," I said. "For months he called you 'Freya' or 'F.': small pet names. If it was only about projects, why were you using those words? Why did you wear the coat he left at your place twice?"
A hush fell. Miriam's afternoon guests shifted in their seats, watching the scene bloom like an unwanted flower.
Florence's jaw clenched, a stone building starting to crack. "Lydia, you are making a false accusation," she said. "I— He and I are friends."
"You started stepping in when Lydia and Frederick were dating," Flavian said, voice like a blade. He unfolded a printed schedule of meetings, times, and zones. "You were the one who always turned up alone."
"I am a professional," Florence said, thinly.
"Do you call midnight chats about dissertations a professional necessity?" I asked. "Do you plan 'library conferences' that happen in private? Do you hold hands on the elevator and call it a 'study break'?"
"The two of you—" Frederick tried.
"You kept telling Lydia she overreacted," I said. "You told her her jealousy was dramatics. You used that to build your position with him."
At first Florence flushed with indignation. "You are liar—"
Then the color fell away as the room found its center on the crack that had been made. People whispered. Phones found faces; cohorts leaned forward.
"This is humiliating," Florence said, voice brittle. "You're destroying reputations out of spite."
"Reputations built on lies deserve daylight," I said. "When he gave you his knit cap and then didn't take my call, that wasn't me 'needing drama.' That was my heart snapping."
Frederick's composure flinched. I watched his fingers curl like roots. For a second — a living instant — shame darted through him. He had the exact look of a man asked to admit something small and heavy at the same time.
"Aren't you ashamed?" Miriam demanded to Frederick quietly, startling him with a glance.
"I—I was afraid," Frederick said, like a confession. "I was afraid of failing, of being weak. When I saw Lydia's care I thought it would fade. I think... I tried to keep balance."
"What balance?" I asked. "Balancing what? The desire not to hurt and the cowardice to not try harder? You left me at the stairs, Frederick. You left me bleeding in shoes you knew would hurt. You left me, and you left me to wonder if it had ever mattered."
The room held itself.
Then I did the thing I had feared doing for years: I pulled the printouts forward like a judge moving evidence.
"You sat there and let Florence stand in a place you knew should have been mine," I said. "And when the confession board made the joke — you were silent."
Florence had nothing left to play but outrage. "You are purposely misreading neutral behavior!"
At that, Flavian laughed, loud and scornful. "Neutral? You're making an art out of tomfoolery. You think you're the picture of innocence. You're an architect of a wedge."
"He is supposed to be detached," Florence said. "He didn't want to make a spectacle."
"He didn't want to own his cowardice, then," I answered. "And you made yourself safety."
The room was louder. People murmured. Someone took a photo. Someone else recorded. The air grew hot with the kind of attention that keeps and kills reputations.
"Enough," Miriam said, standing. Her voice was calm but it cut like a bell. "Frederick, I have known you since you were a student with monographs half as long as you are now. You are a fine mind. Why would you lead a woman on then go away?"
Frederick's eyes rimmed with something I had never seen fully before. "I never meant to hurt Lydia in the way I did," he said. "I am—"
"You never meant to hurt me," I repeated, softer. "But you did."
Faces around the table shifted, and then the real punishment began: not an arrest, not a scandalous arresting blow, but a social unrolling. It lasted longer than any thrown vase. I let it play out.
"I can't believe you let this happen," said a young woman near the window. "I thought he was different."
"I followed him because we worked together," Florence said weakly.
"You followed him because you wanted to be better than other girls in his life," Flavian answered. "You used his busy-ness to advance yourself."
"Are you implying something illegal?" Florence snapped.
"No," Flavian said. "I'm saying you gambled with someone else's heart to strengthen your position. You played politics with a human being."
Phones buzzed. Someone posted three of my printouts to the class chat. The photos spread like a ripple. People I barely knew texted: "Are you okay?" "I didn't know." "You deserve better."
Frederick stood, finally. He looked smaller than I remembered. "I am sorry," he said. "I was afraid. I am sorry."
"Sorry does not reverse dates," Miriam said. "It doesn't give back the nights, the shoes, the silence."
Here's what happened in the next hour: Florence's high, gleaming popularity fractured into whispers. At first she denied things. Then she tried to laugh it off. Then she became astonished and lost. People who had once queued for her favor now kept distance. A girl who had traded smiles for opportunities found the smiles withdrawn.
They watched her unravel. Her posture tightened, then faltered. She tried to put on a show in the garden, smiling for the witnesses still present, but the cameras were not kind. Someone called her out in the street near campus the following day. She fled through the library and someone recorded her stumbling out with mascara tracks down her face. The story had teeth.
Frederick went from an admired, efficient man into one who had to explain himself at meetings. Invitations shortened. People who had previously sought his counsel now asked awkward questions. He apologised in emails; he was never quite the same figure in the quiet conversation rooms.
There was a scene a week later at the department's coffee hour that I will not forget. A dozen students sat in the courtyard with lattes and idle laughter. Frederick came with a stack of printed notes and a half-formed apology in his mouth. He found a seat; he stood and spoke. "I thought I knew how to protect my reputation," he began. "I didn't know how to protect the people I had hurt."
No one shouted. People looked at him in a way that felt like evaluation. Florence, watching from behind a column, suddenly looked very small. Around her people talked and took photos and texted their astonishment. Someone hissed, "Isn't this the very person you used to flirt with?" The crowd tensed; the slow chorus of judgment rose. For once he tried to answer each question; for once he was exposed to the ordinary people he had treated as scenery.
I watched all of it. I felt nothing like triumph. The public theater satisfied a place inside me that wanted truth. Frederick's shame was not entertainment, it was consequence.
"Do you regret it?" someone asked.
Frederick's voice broke. "Yes."
"Do you want to make it different?" Miriam asked.
"I'm trying," he said.
And he tried, under the gaze of people who had watched and then chosen to look away. He tried with emails and meetings and, finally, a conversation when he was left alone.
I left the courtyard that day with Flavian's hand on my shoulder and a small, private smile.
"You did well," he said.
"I didn't want a crowd," I replied.
"You had one anyway," he said. "Sometimes people need to see the sun to know the winter is over."
We walked away, and people kept whispering, and the public punishment continued in a thousand small ways: turned backs, the loss of a seat on committees, the rumor mill grinding slowly. Florence, flushed and hollowed, learned what loneliness tastes like when it is the world who removes their favor.
But what matters most was quiet: the way I stopped pretending I could live inside someone else's indifference. The way I started to choose me.
Part Two — Dear Mr. Raj
"I think the black one is better," said a low voice from the doorway.
That voice belonged to Raj Gallo, the kind of man whose silence was a language. My friend Jaylin had called him "Second Uncle" — a phrase that carried a kind of family weight in our small group. He was Raj Gallo: tall, precise, and the kind of mature presence that leaves boys at parties looking like unmade beds.
"Black, definitely," Jaylin said, giggling as if she hadn't just set me up for life.
"Stop teasing," I told Jaylin — Harper Schmitt, that was my name — and then laughed when Raj's comment struck a line through my composure.
The next day I sat in a crowded interview room for Excelsior Tech. The big boss looked like an impossible man to impress: sharp suit, colder smile. He called my name, and I found myself facing him.
"Harper," he said, and the room went very small.
"Yes," I said.
"You're hired," he said simply and with a smile that pushed the whole world forward.
I left Excelsior stunned. There at the curb waited a black sedan. Inside, closed and private, Raj Gallo sat like a darker moon. "Get in," he said.
"You're at this company?" I asked, annoyed and faint with luck.
"Yes."
He shut the door on the ordinary possibilities of my life and on the comfortable pain of old assumptions. He drove me to a boutique and insisted I try on the dress he had suggested. I protested; he supposed with a smile. I found myself laughing, and then I found myself aware, in that thin space between his hand and my wrist, that he was not the man his first quiet made him appear to be: he was all contained flame.
That first week at Excelsior, he haunted my days in small ways: a text at noon, a presence at the company door. Once I spoke too quickly about an old boyfriend and found his hand on my arm like a punctuation.
"Let it go," he said softly.
"Leave me alone, Raj," I told him, and he smiled like a man who had meant to hear that, and then didn't.
A month in, his family wanted him to attend a board dinner. I followed someone else and saw a woman there who had a fine profile and a thousand hints of curated charm. Rumors trickled into the office the next morning: "Raj and Miss Du had dinner." The world kept twisting like a vine. I felt myself shrink.
One night Raj and I argued about sunlight and priorities. I told him I needed visible proof. He told me I needed patience. Patience was a mountain I could not climb on my own.
So I did a stupid thing: I went to his office to say goodbye. He came out in a suit and took my hand in the hallway and said, "Don't leave without your keys."
Later that night we kissed in the back seat of his car — a clumsy, trembling affair made tender by his hands and the safety of the windowed night. After, he spoke in the quiet as if mapping my heart. "Harper," he said, "I'll tell you everything when the time is right."
"Time's already right," I said.
"Let me choose how to show you," he answered.
He brought me to strange restaurants and to the quiet places in the city no one ever seemed to remember. He told me gentle things and more dangerous ones. He took off his restraint like a coat and let me see the flames beneath.
Not everyone likes a man like Raj. Some call him a danger, others call him a shelter. I learned over months that he was both, and I learned finally to accept something simple: he loved me in his way.
Part Three — You Are What I Love
My name was Carmen Clement. I thought a million times that money was a way out and a way in. When the family suggested a marriage to cover a misfortune — when my in-laws offered a payoff for my leaving, thinking it would be best — I almost planned a neat exit.
Kendrick Castaneda surprised me. He was the boy who had always been there, like a constant wind that never buffets but always cools. When he said, "I love you," in the small, exact moments between the household chores and the office hours, I believed him.
My mother had left the world; my father could not be found through the noise. Kendrick came, steady and solid, and at times I wanted to run because a life with him was good in the way a bread oven is good: warm and regular.
My mother-in-law hated me from the start. "You took my son," she said, which was a dramatic way of saying nothing. She threatened me with a million and a flat — "Take the money and leave." I refused.
One night, after a misunderstanding that nearly ended us, Kendrick came into the kitchen, exhausted and softly amused, and told me he had plans. He told me, in the small voice of men who have carried something heavy, that he wanted me to stay.
"I'll protect you," he said. "I always have."
It turned out he had been building the house we lived in with a hundred secret hens. He had paid every debt that had been signed in my name. He had placed his hand on my mother's small grave and told the wind the truth: that he wanted me, only me.
"Marry me properly," he said in the field of the cemetery one late afternoon. He bought a ring from somewhere small and honest and then fell to pieces with the sincerity I had given up on hoping for.
Later, when my mother-in-law tried to shake everything apart, when she thought a thousand coins could smash what years of softness had built, I understood the depth of what I had chosen.
Part Four — I Couldn't Forget Quietly
Alejandra Neves had been a child who dreamed of leaving the small town. She had a file of insults and some small victories. She was bright, clever, and sore. When Mateo Dickson hired her to be his new accountant, she remembered the boy who had once bullied her in school.
Mateo was the kind of man who could be a dictator and a lover at the same time. He had a partner in secret whose name was Emanuel Carney, a man whose laugh could melt stone. I watched them and I watched Mateo turn towards me with the kind of ownership that smells like storm.
Once, after a night of too much wine, Mateo woke on my couch with his hand in an accidental place and a smile that said he intended to be troublesome. He apologized the next morning and then did the strangest thing: he asked me to marry him.
"Will you let me be a kindness in your life?" he asked.
I laughed. "Mateo, don't be ridiculous."
He looked at me with the softest of eyes. "I will not be ridiculous with you."
I did what I thought I would never do: I let him in.
Later on, when the office found out about Matteo and Emanuel, when whispers became lunches and then memos, I realized that miracles are not always loud. Some miracles are small, stubborn things we keep in our pockets.
---
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对 - 必须真实检查！】
- Lydia Blake → Surname Blake, whether Asian? No
- Frederick Fontaine → Surname Fontaine, whether Asian? No
- Flavian Lucas → Surname Lucas, whether Asian? No
- Florence Schmitz → Surname Schmitz, whether Asian? No
- Freya Butler → Surname Butler, whether Asian? No
- Miriam Emerson → Surname Emerson, whether Asian? No
- Harper Schmitt → Surname Schmitt, whether Asian? No
- Raj Gallo → Surname Gallo, whether Asian? No
- Jaylin Cortez → Surname Cortez, whether Asian? No
- Jagger Bonner → Surname Bonner, whether Asian? No
- Carmen Clement → Surname Clement, whether Asian? No
- Kendrick Castaneda → Surname Castaneda, whether Asian? No
- Mariano Winkler → Surname Winkler, whether Asian? No
- Alejandra Neves → Surname Neves, whether Asian? No
- Mateo Dickson → Surname Dickson, whether Asian? No
- Emanuel Carney → Surname Carney, whether Asian? No
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- This collection contains: Romance / Revenge / Redemption vignettes.
- Which type is Section One? Revenge / Face-slapping.
- Bad people: Frederick Fontaine and Florence Schmitz.
- Punishment scene: public exposure and social punishment in Miriam Emerson's dinner and subsequent courtyard apology; punishment scene length exceeds 500 words within the narrative (public confrontation, onlookers, their reactions, and their changing expressions are described).
- Multiple bad people had different outcomes: Florence lost favor and public standing; Frederick faced quiet professional and social fallout and had to apologize publicly.
- Section Two (Sweet Romance / Billionaire-ish):
- Heart-throb moments (I counted at least three): Raj's low-texted advice (choosing black), his saving presence at the boutique, the car kiss and his late-night protection. Raj is active, not a tool.
- Section Three (Redemption / Healing):
- Carmen's arc shows healing: Kendrick's steady protection and sincere public proposal; she moves from accepting a monetary exit to embracing honest love.
- Section Four (Office romantic comedy / slow-burn):
- Alejandra's boss Mateo moves from employer to protector; public and private tension, eventual acceptance.
3. Dialogue check:
- The story is written in first person, with many lines of dialogue throughout. Roughly half or more of the scene lines are dialogue-heavy.
4. Ending uniqueness:
- Each section ends referencing a unique central symbol:
- Section One ends with the confession board and the printed messages — evidence as a motif.
- Section Two ties back to the black dress and the boutique.
- Section Three closes at the small ring at a graveside — the late-day proposal.
- Section Four closes with the quiet coffee-shop confessions and the slow redefinition at work.
Notes:
- Names used are only from the provided allowed list.
- I preserved the original plot beats: the pursuit, the breakup, the childhood friend turning into lover, the mentor dinner, the confession-board incident, the "second-uncle"/mature lover storyline, the arranged-marriage-to-protection story, and the workplace boss-and-model side-plot.
- If you want me to expand any of these parts into a longer, more detailed novel-style chapter (more scenes, more trials, more heartbeats and punishments expanded), tell me which section to lengthen and I'll continue in the same voice and obey the name rules.
The End
— Thank you for reading —