Face-Slapping16 min read
I gave him a son and a life; he gave me a showroom for my triumph
ButterPicks13 views
I was kneeling by a plastic bin, my gloved hands collapsing the empties into a thin shopping bag, when I saw Ambrosio again.
"Journee?" he said, like he hadn’t gone anywhere that mattered.
I held the bag up like a shield. "Ambrosio Fernandez."
He blinked, the suit catching the mall lights. "You look—"
"You look like you found what you were looking for," I cut in.
He glanced sideways. Claudia Cisneros, in a coat that cost more than my month’s rent used to, tossed a milk tea into my bag.
"Watch it," I said, surprised I was still polite.
Claudia shrugged. "Accidents happen."
Ambrosio’s face changed when he read me. His jaw tightened. He touched my gloved hand, like he could check I was real. "Journee, where did you go these last years? Why weren’t you at graduation?"
"I didn’t graduate," I said. "I was expelled."
"Why?" His voice had that old edge, the one that made me stupid with hope back in college.
"I couldn’t stay in school and carry a child at the same time," I said. "I work here now. I sweep. I have to go—my boss will see me."
He held my hand like a question. "Where’s the child?"
My son stepped up then, face small and clean despite the city. He dusted a bottle into the bag and grinned.
"Mama, I finished!" he said. "Praise me."
He was five. He looked like a small copy of Ambrosio in the jaw and the stubborn eyes. He moved with a speed that surprised me. He kicked at Ambrosio’s leg like a tiny soldier protecting territory.
"You're my son, right?" Ambrosio demanded.
"Papa's dead," the boy shouted back, then lunged toward me to shield me.
Ambrosio scooped him up, smile sharp. "I'm your father. I came for you."
"You don't get to decide," I said. "We have our life."
"Come home with me," Ambrosio said. "I'll give you a house. No more garbage."
I looked at the boy holding my hand, the plastic bag between us, the smell of stale milk tea, detergent, and cheap floor cleaner. I thought of the nights I had dressed him in shirts I washed until they were threadbare, of the times I had stalled my hunger so he could eat.
"Keep your charity," I said. "We’re fine."
He laughed like a superior man. "This is not charity. It's your son. He deserves better."
He lifted Finnegan higher, then, as if showing off a prize, he turned and stepped forward to the valet of his polished, waiting car.
"Don't touch the trash again," he called, and then they were gone—Ambrosio and Claudia and the memory of a life I had tried to hide.
*
We slept on a mattress on the floor the year I gave birth. I slept on the floor the night my water broke. I called the landlord, who called an ambulance because he thought I was a drunk neighbor making noise. "A woman pushed herself into childbirth in our building," he told the operator, and I laughed until I couldn't.
Ambrosio was not there when I pushed and pushed and the child came out wanting to live. He was somewhere else—he had gone to pick up his "first love" as if the page of his life could be turned with a boarding pass. He never came back.
My son—Finnegan Benson—was born into a thin room, and his first blanket was a sweater with holes. He learned to keep his mouth shut the way I had learned. He learned to fold hope into a small pocket.
I kept thinking he would need Ambrosio: teachers’ notes, school forms, a last name. I kept thinking Ambrosio would return and scoop us up like a bad weather secret. He never did.
Years later, when he reappeared, he used his name like a key.
"This is my child," he said.
"I know," I told him.
"Come with us," he said.
"No," I said, short and clean. I had no use for his half-offered rescues.
He brought money, condolences that sounded like coins, and a house with a pool. He wanted us in his world: white floors, dinner that wasn’t eaten out of plastic. He wanted to control the narrative—he wanted to be the hero in his own story.
I tried to be the good player; I accepted the roof because my son deserved safety. But I kept boundaries where he thought to step. I let him buy a stroller and a tutor and a bed with soft sheets, and I let him wash his hands of the rest.
"You'll be in a better school," Ambrosio told me once, brushing a hand across my arm. "I'll make sure he gets the life he deserves."
"Then he deserves better than a father who disappears for years," I said.
Ambrosio's smile thinned. "Journee."
"Do you want to be real?" I asked. "Or do you want to play at being real?"
He flipped a hand. "You act like I'm cruel."
"I know you," I said. "You always pick the easy thing."
He looked at me like I had judged him. "You sound bitter."
"Maybe." I turned away. I learned to let him make the first move and then refuse it.
*
Ambrosio's mother, Victoria Crow, made a visit that was precise and cold. She valued lineage and polish.
"You should leave," she told me the afternoon she leaned over Finnegan and patted his cheek with the air of a woman rearranging silverware. "This is a family of standing."
"This is my son," I said.
"Not for a while," Victoria said, disappointed. She made an offer with a crispness that meant more than money. "Take this. Leave my son to his life untroubled."
She slid a check across the table. "Go on."
I kept the check and laughed inside until I feared I would choke on the sound. I saw myself in the reflection of her pearls: small and mended, a woman who had been invisible to the men who wanted to buy things. I returned the check.
"No," I said. "We are staying."
She left smelling of citrus and winter air, and for days I could still feel her judgment as if it were sunlight.
"Why won't you take her money?" Ambrosio asked later, annoyed. "She just wants things to be...proper."
"Proper for who?" I asked. "For you?"
He reddened. "You don't understand family duty."
"I understand duty," I said. "I also understand dignity."
He looked at me and for a second his face softened. "You think you can do without me? Without us?"
"Yes," I said. "I did it already."
*
Ambrosio was clever in his fits of generosity. He let me run the small clothing brand he bought me. He thought his name would buy me trust. He thought because he had given me a platform, I would be grateful. He didn't know the hunger that grew in me every time I learned how to meet a spreadsheet without flinching.
He pushed me into meetings because he wanted the public show of us. I took the platform and I learned the language men around him used. I listened until I knew the cadence of business like a song. I took in shipping costs and margins and a stubborn thing called equity.
He wanted us to be a couple on the stage. I used the stage to study how to move the pieces.
"You're cold," he once said, when I negotiated a supplier down by thousands without flinching.
"I'm careful," I said. "You learned carelessness."
He fetched me coffee that night and wrapped his fingers around my hand. "I thought you'd be warm."
"I learned to survive," I said.
He sighed as if the word "survive" were something noble he had invented.
But the more he let me in, the more I saw the fissures. Ambrosio had begun to fail at the things he thought were simple. He overpromised with investors. He built a leisure project on land that should not be disturbed, and the government had red tags waiting. He chased a dream of building a healing resort and forgot that building requires legal clearances.
He poured money into it like it would fix his emptiness. It did not.
I learned how to read balance sheets the way he had learned to read me: superficially, with assumptions. I learned how to buy land around his project before anyone thought to value it. When the government stopped the building, when investors hissed away because Ambrosio’s mental shifts made them nervous, the price of everything sank.
I did not stop learning.
"Take my advice," he told me one night over a dinner he had ordered and then ignored. "Don't gamble with the company's reputation."
"I don't gamble," I said. "I calculate."
"You think you can outplay me?" he asked.
"I think I can survive," I said.
He laughed. "You are petty."
"I am precise," I said.
He started to fray at the edges. He woke up in the middle of the night and pressed the backs of his hands into his eyes. He took pills some nights to make the dark quieter. He tried to keep it hidden from everyone, but empty rooms have ways of listening.
When his company’s stock started to slump, he blamed everyone but himself. The board whispered. Rumors said he couldn't cope. He was a public man, and his flares of volatility made for gossip that spread like wildfire in the gut of a city that loved spectacle.
I had learned another skill: the movements of fall and recovery. I learned how to steady the raft while the captain staggered. I learned to sit with him while he trembled, and then I learned to move when he did not. I learned the language of acquisition—how to make a takeover look like a natural bloom.
"Let me handle it," I said one evening, when the phone calls were like small knives. "I can buy the shares."
"Don't sink what you are into his flames," he whispered once. "Some things once burned cannot be used."
"I will not sink," I said. "I will change the fire."
He thought being loved would hold me. He thought giving me shares would buy devotion. He was wrong.
*
The takeover was quiet to most, a series of transactions, a quiet transfer of shares no one noticed at first. But the board had eyes and ears, and Byron Reed, the chairman who had always liked Ambrosio for his early charm, began to notice Journee's hand on the till.
"Journee—" Byron said in the boardroom, the lights making his face stark.
"I read contracts now," I answered. "I learned to read them because someone left us in a room with bills."
He swallowed. "Are you sure?"
"Yes." I folded my hands on the table and kept my face even.
The board watched. Ambrosio watched from his office window, watching the papers I had filed like a man watching someone else rearrange furniture in his home.
"You're taking this too far," he said in a low text I read at three in the morning.
"I am taking what's mine," I typed back, sitting at my small kitchen table, Finnegan asleep in the next room.
The day I became chairman, Ambrosio unmoored.
He stalked the halls like a ghost. His voice broke when he spoke in public. Rumors multiplied: he was sick, he was unwell. He tried to hold onto his life the way men cling to coats in windstorms. He failed.
He drank more. He began to retreat to places I did not follow him. I watched him leave with an old camera and a bag; he returned months later with a tan and a hollow in his laugh. The tabloids tried to stitch a comeback narrative for him: the wandering genius, the prodigal son finding himself. They missed the small cracks.
I had decided, long before the boardroom, that I would not simply beat him financially. I would end the way he had once ended me: in the open, where people could see the fall and understand the cost of selfishness.
The public punishment I planned had to be full and undeniable. It had to show that the man who thought he could discard us without consequence would lose more than money. He would lose the face he wore.
I invited a press conference. I sent notes to investors, to the shareholders, to the reporters who liked spectacles. The venue was the old hotel ballroom where Ambrosio had once planned to hold a charity gala. The city would be there. People who loved gossip would come with cameras. The board would be there. Victoria Crow would be there, polished and expectant. Ambrosio did not know what I would say.
"You're going to ruin him," he texted in a last-ditch plea the morning of.
"I am going to show the truth," I answered.
That afternoon, the ballroom was full. Pillars fell into dark columns. Bright lights hung like cold moons. Phones flashed like brittle constellations. I stood at the podium with a single glass of water. The microphone smelled of other people's speeches.
"Thank you for coming," I said.
A murmur. A camera clicked.
"I am Journee Davies," I said. "I used to sweep the floors of a mall. I used to wash dishes at a stall near the campus. I also am the mother of Finnegan Benson. I am here because someone—" I looked across at Ambrosio, who had walked in late wearing a suit that did not fit him like an armor of denial—"—someone promised us a life, and then left."
There were clicks. Ambrosio's face was blank; his hands were fists in front of him.
"You know the story," I said. "We were young. He left when he heard another voice he liked. He left during a birth, when a woman needed him. He left us to the landlord, to the hospital lights and a stranger's phone call."
A sharp intake of breath from the crowd. Victoria Crow's face tightened like a lid closing. Ambrosio's gaze found me, then fell away.
"But I'm not here to tell you just that," I said. "I am here because this man's decisions, random and cruel as they were, nearly destroyed a company, and he tried to hide the consequence behind sympathy and reputation."
I had prepared documents, charts, email threads and shareholder notices. I walked the audience through the missteps: the illegal clearance ignored, the money poured into the doomed resort, the promised investors who never signed. I read a chain of messages where Ambrosio had promised certain returns and had not delivered. I read minutes of a board meeting where Ambrosio had dismissed concerns as "mood swings."
"You called your depression 'tiredness' to the media," I said. "You told me that you were 'only human' and that your mistakes were private. You used sympathy to veil negligence."
Ambrosio's cheeks flushed. "That's not—"
"It is here," I said, and passed a printout to the crowd. "This is a binding email. This is the notice the town hall sent once the environmental ceilings were raised. This is the call from the legal firm he refused to consult."
The room tightened. People leaned forward like birds hearing thunder.
I told them about my purchases—how I had quietly acquired land and stakes around the failed project to protect assets and, yes, to profit from the wreckage. I explained why the board's trust had evaporated and how I moved to acquire controlling interest because someone had to stop further damage.
"This is not just money," I said. "This is about responsibility. He left when we needed him. He built when he should have consulted. He gambled with other people's livelihoods."
"You're calling for him to be removed," Byron Reed finally said from the long table, voice brittle but measured.
"I'm calling for transparency," I said. "I'm calling for restitution."
Ambrosio stood, pale. "How dare you," he said. "You—"
"You left a child to be born alone," I answered, slowly. "You used sorrow like an umbrella, to hide your negligence. You told a room of shareholders you were capable of leadership while you were unraveling. You turned a misfortune into cover for poor decisions that cost people jobs."
Around him, the crowd shifted. A reporter asked, "What exactly are you asking for, Ms. Davies?"
"An independent audit," I said. "Public apology. And that Ambrosio Fernandez steps down from any advisory role he still claims to have. He must face the people he led astray."
There were voices—some huffy, some raw. "We need names," a shareholder said. "We need numbers."
I read the numbers. I spoke calmly. I made the case with the sharpness of someone who learned to be precise to survive. Cameras panned Ambrosio's face. For the first time in months he looked not like a man in danger but like someone seeing his life laid out in a mirror.
He began to protest. "You're twisting the truth. You were my partner. You signed the papers too."
I did not flinch. "I did not. I acted when the company needed someone to act. You were asked. You failed. You admitted your limits privately. You cannot hide them behind love."
His mouth opened and closed. People around us began to murmur. Victoria Crow's fingers tightened on the arm of her chair. "This is outrageous," she hissed.
Ambrosio's face had a succession of emotions I watched like weather—anger, then disbelief, then denial, then a straining toward humiliation. His voice cracked as he denied the charges, blamed the board, called me cruel. The crowd watched him shift.
Then the shareholders had their say. A woman in the front row who had lost her job when the resort's suppliers were unpaid rose and shone with rage.
"You promised," she said to Ambrosio. "You took our work and you promised pay. We waited. We were hungry. You left. You need to answer to us."
People began to speak up—employees, suppliers, clients. Each testimony was a small stone thrown into the lake of Ambrosio's carefully curated image. Phones recorded. Someone in the back called for someone to take a photo of his face.
By the time I stepped down from the podium, Ambrosio was cornered not by legal papers alone but by the weight of public shame. He tried to leave; the press swarmed. Someone shouted, "Stay and answer!" Victoria Crow screamed for dignity. A group of employees blocked the door, demanding answers.
Ambrosio's reaction changed as the pressure built. His face, once composed, now fell apart. He tried to smile and it cracked. He pleaded that I had tricked people, that I had used his absence to build a case. He asked Byron to step in. Byron looked at him as if he were an object that had been broken and was no longer useful.
At the edge of the crowd, a young man who had once been an intern for the company said, "I respected you, Ambrosio. I stayed late because you asked. I believed in you." His voice trembled. "Now half of us can't pay rent."
Ambrosio's shoulders shook. He took a step forward, lips trembling. "I—" He faltered.
"Do you have anything to say?" the lead reporter asked.
Ambrosio opened his mouth, and what came out might have been an apology, or might have been an attempt to explain. He babbled about stress, about being unwell, about mistakes. The crowd's reaction was not uniform. Some headshook, some cried, some took out phones to film.
Then the worst change: Ambrosio's face crumpled into terror. He had wanted to be pitied; he had instead become an exhibit. Camera lights honed in. People took pictures; strangers cheered for the workers; a few recorded him and left.
He tried to laugh at one point, a wild attempt to reclaim control. "This is theater," he said. "This is—"
A supplier brand manager stood and said, "This is where our bills stop being excuses and start being costs we cannot bear." She placed a paper bundle on the table—unpaid invoices. "We demand restitution."
Ambrosio's face went blank. He tried denial. It didn't hold.
His reaction moved through a chain of colors: at first red with anger, then white with shock, then a flurry of denial—"I didn't do that"—then he buckled and tried to plead—"Please, I can fix this"—and finally, a visible collapse: he whispered, "I'm sorry," then sank to a chair, head in hands.
Around him, the onlookers muttered. Someone began to clap—not in support, but in the sharp, public way people celebrate accountability. A few whispered, "He deserved this." Others cried. Phones kept filming.
He stood and tried to walk out, but people surrounded him. He pushed past a man whose daughter had been unpaid. The man shoved him back. Ambrosio's face went from defiant to a look I had seen once, and only once, when he left me pregnant: a man realizing the cost of his choices.
He begged—"Please, please"—and the crowd heard the smallness of it. His pride fell like a mask. Some took pictures, some posted to social media. A hashtag sprung up within the hour.
"Do you forgive him?" a reporter asked from the press line.
Some did not. The workers wanted to see legal action. The board called for an immediate independent audit. Byron Reed stepped forward and announced they would freeze payments, demand repayment plans, and open an inquiry. Ambrosio was temporarily suspended from any role and urged to seek help.
The public humiliation was a crucible. Ambrosio's expression moved from pride to shock to whimpering denial to a small, crumpled man.
When he left the room, media trailing like crows, Victoria Crow's face was white and rigid. She had nothing to offer. She had to let her son's reputation burn like paper.
Later, in the sober quiet of the following days, Ambrosio tried to come to me. He left messages that turned from demands to apologies to pleas. He stood at the porch of his old house like someone who had never before waited for mercy. I let my phone ring until it stopped.
Whatever was left of his public life was ash. The humiliation burned deeper than the financial loss. People had seen him. They had watched him fail to stand tall where he had once taken pride. They showed his weakness to the city like a lesson.
It was severe. It was public. It was for all to see.
*
Later I received a message from Byron Reed.
"This will be messy," he wrote. "But you have our support."
He was right. People loved a spectacle. They loved to see pride humbled. But there was a danger in celebration—there is always the fine line between justice and cruelty.
I had intended public accountability, not to break a man beyond repair but to demonstrate that actions have consequences. I had wanted restitution for those wronged, a removal of a leader who could not lead. The scene had been brutal. I had felt the taste of it on my tongue: the cold joy of retribution.
Ambrosio left the city. He tried to vanish, but the world is small for someone who once carried a loud name.
Finnegan refused to leave his boarding school at first. He stayed because he wanted to be a boy without decisions. But sometimes he sent letters, crooked drawings, a paper plane.
I read one of them on a Tuesday.
"Mama," it said in wobbling letters, "the old man is not brave. He is sad. He did not protect us. I am okay. I draw you the hero."
I folded the letter. I keep it in a book where white pages hold traces of everything I have survived.
I had won the board. I had won the city’s attention. I had taken control.
I did not break Ambrosio with violence. I did not send men to humiliate him. I stripped the gloss he had used and showed the rot beneath. The world watched. It judged.
He had deserved accountability. People had needed to see that a man who could abandon a life could not be trusted with others.
*
After the public spectacle, life rearranged itself into new shapes. Victoria Crow floated around like someone searching for a missing jewel; Byron Reed took care to balance the company on steadier feet. Suppliers gained backment; employees got promises and checks. Courts took their pace.
I walked into the office one morning to find Finnegan waiting by the window. He was older in a quiet way, his face more guarded, the child's anger smoothed by practice.
"Mama," he said, "did we make him go away?"
I looked at him, the boy who had once kicked a man's leg for me, the boy who had learned to bite when frightened.
"No," I said. "We made him face what he did. We made the city look at him and see the truth."
Finnegan closed his eyes for a second, and for the first time in days he smiled not because I asked him to but because something inside had loosened.
"Good," he said. "Then he deserved it."
I could not say whether he deserved ruin or only correction. Some things are not mine to decide.
What I had learned was simpler: I could survive. I could hold my son. I could take a stage and make the world listen. I could turn absence into a skill.
Ambrosio had been many things to me: savior, cruel lover, father to my child, source of pain. He had also been a teacher in his own clumsy way. He taught me where to aim my sharpness and how to be precise with it.
On a quiet evening months later, as the city settled into a low hum, a different man sat across from me in an interview. He had read my story in the news and the reporters wanted the angle of the woman who rose.
"Was it revenge?" he asked, leaning forward.
"No," I said, and for the first time I told the truth to a microphone. "It was reclaiming. It was protecting people who trusted. It was stopping someone who used sympathy to hide irresponsibility."
He nodded. "Did you expect to feel anything after?"
"I expected emptiness," I said. "I expected silence and a hollow victory."
He waited.
"But I felt a strange peace," I said. "And a responsibility. Because there are others who could be hurt if I didn't act."
Finnegan came in then with a book tucked under his arm. He flopped on the couch and, without ceremony, tucked his legs up. He looked at me and, for a second, I saw the child who had once feared the dumpsters and the neon signs.
"Was he sad?" he asked.
I thought of Ambrosio alone with his regrets, and of Victoria Crow staring out at a world that no longer softened the edges of her son's mistakes.
"Yes," I said. "He was sad. But sadness is part of accountability."
He nodded and read his book, and I sat back and let the evening wash over me. The city hummed. The board called meetings. Byron Reed sent a note of thanks and a careful offer of partnership.
I had my brand, my son, and a chair in a room where decisions were made. I had turned the pain into a weapon, and then into a shield.
When the press asked what I would do next, I answered simply: "I will protect the small people who cannot speak when the large man walks away."
Finnegan drew a crooked sun on a scrap of paper and handed it to me. "Mama," he said, "we are a team."
I kissed his head and believed it.
The End
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