Sweet Romance12 min read
I Kept Caring; He Chose a Mirror — Then the Mirror Broke
ButterPicks10 views
I never planned to be anyone's anchor. I only ever wanted to be useful where I could be useful.
"Ian, stop," I said, but my voice was calm, the way I always tried to be calm. "Let's go home."
"No," he slurred, already drowning in the music and cheap lights. "My wife… my wife loves me." He buried his face in the girl's shoulder and called her "wife" until the syllables blurred.
I stood at the edge of the VIP room and breathed like someone learning to breathe again. The gold lights made the room float; the men laughed; the girls in silk sat like swans. I felt the small clutch of my hand around my purse. My knuckles whitened.
"Galina, relax. He drank too much. Leave him," Ezra said from behind me.
"He's fine," I lied. I had lied so many small things for years that the words sounded empty even to me.
"I'll go," I told him. "Please, Ezra."
I left before he noticed me leave.
At home the next night, the city still thrummed outside our thin windows. Ian sat on the couch with a remote, flipping channels as if changing images could change what happened.
"Have you eaten?" I asked, unrolling the pasta dough with a motion I had learned in a thousand small kitchens.
"No," he answered. "Why are you home so late?"
"A crash on Beixin Road. They needed help," I said. "I'll make noodles."
He did not look at me. He shifted and pressed his lips to my neck the way he always had—the sleepy, claiming press of someone who thinks possession equals devotion.
"Don't," I murmured, trying to keep my hands steady as I kneaded. He kept moving closer, and the kitchen felt small and inadequate.
We were like that: comfortable furniture in a borrowed house. We had been friends, then more, then a balm for two hurting people who needed hands. But hands could be careless; hands could leave.
After the mess at the bar, after the nights he called names that belonged to other women, he sat on the bed and said, flat and cold: "Let's end this."
"End?" My voice was small. "End what, Ian?"
"Us. Here. Now."
"Okay," I answered.
He looked toward me like a man who had expected a fight and found a clean room. He handed me a card. "Three million," he said. "For the three years."
I folded the card. "A million a year. Very generous," I said, and the laugh that followed me into the dark felt like glass breaking quietly.
We stopped calling. We stopped checking messages. Our break was tidy in the ways of people who didn't know how to break hearts without bandages. Life began to rearrange itself without him the way a river rearranges stones when the rain stops.
A month later a woman with a sculpted smile came into my clinic.
"Hello, Galina," she said, all pearls and practiced warmth. "I'm Silvia Madsen. I'm a friend of Ian's."
"Sit," I said. She had a face that leaned like a photograph toward mine—similar in angle, not the same. People liked similar faces; I had always known that. Small similarities look like destiny when you already hurt.
"I know who you are," she said, fingers laced. "I've seen you before."
"Then we won't waste time," I answered.
She smiled sharp as a blade. "Ian and I know each other a long time."
"That's possible," I said. "Ian's a person people know."
She perched like a queen on a low stool. "He calls me when he's lonely."
"You should tell him to call his mother instead," I said.
Her smile faltered. "That's rude." She straightened. "I came because I want you to stop contacting Ian. Please."
"Call him yourself," I said. "If you want him, take the effort."
She straightened until she looked ready to pounce. "I don't need lectures," she said. "I won't be kept out."
"Fine," I said. "I'll tell him to come and take you."
I sent Ian a message: Come and take your friend away. He was in a meeting; he came anyway. He came because he had always come when I asked things that mattered.
At the hospital Ian hovered like a man returning to a stage. He smiled at Silvia the way disappointed lovers breathe out: small puffs of fondness and regret. He tried to make the scene small and private but it was a crowded lobby and the couching light turned intimacy into theater.
"Who is she?" Ian asked me later, voice trembling.
"She's someone who wants what she wants," I said.
He was clumsy, and drunk and very human.
Weeks passed. Ian drank and called and missed me. He said soft things that contradict the last statement he'd made. I answered him with the same calm that always steadied the bedside. Then one night he came to my door with a bag of gifts and a stupid grin.
"Open," he said.
"Are you serious?" I asked.
He was. He meant it. Maybe he really did.
"Galina," he said, leaning close. "I love you."
"Why now?" I asked. "After you said 'end'?"
"I was stupid," he whispered. "I—"
"Stop," I said. "Listen. We are not small things you can move in and out of. We are people. You asked to end it. You said so. I'm not a convenience."
He cried. Men do not always cry unless you make them. He begged. He said he could change.
"I can't make you stay," I told him. "You have to want to stay when there is no applause, Ian."
It was that simple, I thought. But people are not math. They are weather.
Benjamin arrived on an afternoon that smelled of oil and wet asphalt. He was smaller than I expected, thinner, with a small scar near his brow and eyes that had seen more hospital lights than planes.
"Galina," he said, bright as a child and as patient as the moon. "Do you remember me?"
"Ben," I answered. My voice softened to what it had been for the boy who had once wrapped himself around my life. "Of course I do."
He lived in the split rooms of my past. He was the boy who fell from mountains because he loved me fiercely and saw me as all his had. He had carried an emptiness like a secret treasure.
"Hi, sister," he said.
"Sit down," I told him. I had no measure for how to hold someone who had been both damaged and brave. I did what I could.
Benjamin and I fit together like two people who shared the same remedy for pain. He laughed softly, and sometimes, in the patient small hours, I imagined a life made of those small laughs.
Ian's behavior grew worse after Benjamin's return. He saw what he feared most: someone who could be steady without him. He wanted to be needed the way a man wants to be the sun. He wanted apologies like fuel.
Once, after a particularly cruel argument, he took to drinking in public. Maxwell Monteiro's bar was wide and loud and full of people who loved a spectacle. Ian found a woman who reminded him of the one he'd loved in another decade, and he stole into her arms like a man who thought resemblance was a right.
I went to the bar because Ezra called me in a panic: "He's drunk, Galina. He's a mess."
I went and found Ian leaning on the shoulder of the woman with the practiced smile, murmuring "wife" like a broken prayer. He clung to her as if she was proof that devotion could be purchased.
I did not speak at first. Ezra tried to mediate, and Maxwell tried to be practical and kind. Staff moved, and glasses clinked. A small crowd watched because people always watch when people break.
Then I said, quietly, "Ian, come on. Let's go home."
He pushed my hand away like a child pushing away wrongness. "Who are you? Don't touch me," he snapped, and leaned back into Silvia.
The room hummed. I felt a hot wash across my face but it was not shame; it was clarity.
"She—" I told Ian later that night at home. "You can't have both the warmth of a person who loves you and the mirror that simply reflects what you wanted."
"I don't want to lose you," he said. His voice sounded childlike.
"You already did."
We parted clearly after that. He left with awkward, guilty absolution.
It should have been the end of our story. It wasn't.
Silvia, for all her artifice, had power in the circles Ian moved. She smiled at cameras and knew how to tilt a chin so people wrote good pieces about her. She worked the social rooms like an expert gardener pruning for appearances. But you could never be so careful that you never tripped.
At a charity gala months later, Ian's company hosted a night that smelled of perfume and expensive desserts. The crowd there was exactly the crowd that loved irony: the kind that gathers when people of the city perform their better selves.
Silvia arrived wearing silk and armor. She smiled and accepted bows. I was there as a guest in a quiet corner; Benjamin had insisted I come. Ezra had come too. Maxwell had insisted, pretending to be casual.
The microphone thrummed with practiced voice. Ian was at the center, newly solemn, newly polished. The room applauded polished apologies. People liked that sort of redemption; it looked like atonement and sold like perfume.
"Congratulations," a reporter called.
"Thank you," Ian said. He looked at Silvia and smiled.
Then a younger reporter—one who looked less interested in business and more interested in truth—walked up to me after the opening speeches and asked for a few words.
"Of course," I said.
He began to ask about disability support and rehabilitation. It was a piece on real recovery. It was what I had always done with my hands: stitch wounds that did not scar the surface; steady the lives that needed steadying.
As I spoke about Ben's work and the quiet hours in the hospital, a screen behind the stage suddenly lit with the live feed. It was a poor production error, maxed microphones mixing with the house feed. The sound delayed while the image ran.
We were on the big screens like people on confession day.
Across the room, the cameras had been fed a queue: images from Ian's private accounts, curated portraits of a man adored, a girl smiling, a couple posed. But in the folder of images, someone had put the wrong file. In a single breathless second, a series of photos from Silvia's own promotional reels flashed by—images that suggested plays, suggested intimacy—and then, in a raw, honest cut, images of messages: payment transfers, short notes of arrangements, a dated message from earlier in the year where Silvia wrote to a friend that "the seat beside Ian is mine."
Silvia's smile flickered like a candle in wind. Her face hardened.
The room did what rooms do: it watched.
"Silvia," someone said. "Is this—"
"Ian!" a voice cried, and then another, until the air tasted like a curtain being ripped.
A woman in a velvet dress leaned over and began to whisper loudly, "How dare she—what a show."
"Scandal," murmured someone else. Phones flashed. People who lived to record could feel themselves let loose. They filmed, they photographed, they texted.
Silvia's eyes went from curated mask to something raw. For a moment she looked like a doll with its strings cut loose. She tried to say a thing—"This is a mistake"—but the live feed had already begun to show a separate folder. Texts, bank transfers, guests' messages—evidence of favors and plans.
She saw the room turning. Faces had shifted. The polite applause thinned into a sharp silence thick as oil. A judge of an audience had decided she was the villain of the novel and leaned in for the ending.
Ian stood, stupidly, because men in good suits do that when rooms turn. "Silvia, it's not what it looks like," he began.
"Not what it looks like?" I heard myself say, very close, because the microphone had been left chewing at me. "You arranged to have women around you who looked like someone you once loved, and then you were surprised you couldn't love them back? That is a strange surprise."
The room laughed, a broken, nervous sound.
Silvia tried to speak. Her voice tightened, practiced, "This is personal. How dare you—"
"She asked me to leave," I said, my voice even. "She asked me to let her have what she wanted and I did what we all do: I stepped aside."
Then the story moved like a wave. Someone read a forwarded note pointing to a recent direct message in which Silvia had scorned a woman for 'stealing' a man's time. Someone else showed a small stream of payments made to accounts where events had been staged. It was not a tidy ledger; it was a laundry basket of things people in power rarely held up. The important thing was the airing—public eyes always reproduce pressure.
Silvia's face shifted though the phases of emotion my notes require: first denial—"No, no, this is—", then sharp composure—"This is invasion of privacy", then fissure—she looked like she might break—a thin tremor, and then a collapse into pleading.
"Please, please," she said. "You don't understand."
"No," the room answered. Some shook their heads. Phones clicked like tiny witnesses. A near-by woman stood and spat, "You used him," and the words landed with the finality of a bell.
A group of people leaned toward one another and made small knots of whisper that swelled into a chorus of polite condemnation.
People who had laughed at the spectacle started to file toward the exits, their faces hard. The charity event had been their stage; it wasn't about causes anymore; it was about who they were seen with.
"Silvia Madsen, will you—" a journalist asked, voice steady now. He had a presence that said: query, then don't run. "Do you accept responsibility for orchestrating these payments?"
She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. "I—"
"Explain this transfer," someone else demanded, voice like a blade folding.
"Those messages are edited," she said, as if a word could shield her. "They are—"
They didn't need to call security. The audience had decided. A handful of people stood and left their tables. A caterer froze. Someone tossed a napkin with a hand that shook.
One of Silvia's supporters—a businesswoman who had been seen with her a dozen times—stared hard, then turned her back. People clucked. A woman took a picture and posted the caption: "Public lesson: don't manufacture love for sale." It trended in minutes.
Silvia sank into a chair at the head table, hands clutched as if to hold herself together. Her face was suddenly honest: the tired skin, the pale under-eye where makeup couldn't reach, the thinness of a human who had learned to carve her desires into things that could be measured and moved. Someone around her whispered that she was crying.
"You're finished," a man said quietly to her, but not cruelly. It was a sentence made of facts. The room had decided who would carry shame.
She rose, hands fumbling for her purse. Her mouth moved; no one heard. Ezra covered his face with a napkin as if to keep from looking. Ian stood frozen, the man at the center of a lesson he had refused to learn.
When she walked away, the corridor swallowed her like a tide. People stood, murmured, stared. Someone called out, "Shame," and the echo became an accusation.
For the first time since the night at the VIP room, Ian looked at me with clear eyes. "Galina," he said, the word small.
I shook my head. "No more," I said.
The public unraveling of Silvia was not cruelly violent. It was worse: it was a turning of every filmed eye so that the story could be recorded. She was not beaten in the street; instead the crowd took her life from her like a photograph, erasing charm and replacing it with a record. Her connections thinned like paper left in rain. Deals she had made quietly were called into question. Invitations stopped coming. Her sponsors squealed and said they valued morality. Her PR team advised damage control that could not breathe.
You could see the stages on her: composure, indignation, denial, then collapse, then bargaining—"Please, forgive me,"—then humiliation in public, then a silence of fingerprints. She begged, and no one rescued her.
It would be wrong to call this justice. It was spectacle. Yet the spectacle served a function: the city teaches its own about honesty in love. People who manufacture affection for gain get seen.
"Not my place to judge the whole world," I said to Benjamin later, who was still pale from seeing that lobby. "But I can decide not to be in the picture."
He nodded and took my hand. "Good," he said. "Let's go home."
"Do you love me, Ben?" I asked later in a small kitchen that smelled of broth and home.
"Yes," he said, simple and brave. "I love you in a way that doesn't need performance. Sit and let me boil something."
"That's enough," I said, laughing despite myself.
Weeks went on. Ian called sometimes, then less. I gave him space because the right thing sometimes is not to be a harbor for a man learning to swim. His apologies arrived like small gifts with unsteady handwriting, and I answered them the way a doctor gives a patient medicine: measured, necessary only to mend.
Benjamin and I grew into small rituals. He learned to stand a little longer each week. We went to the market. He drew, not quite like a boy from before but with enough of the old light that it warmed me.
Ezra kept up his unreasonable loyalty to Ian, though he softened toward Benjamin. "You know," he said once, "I didn't think he could be so full of nonsense."
"Men are like that," I said. "They discover things late."
"Some sooner than others," Ezra said.
One bright afternoon, Benjamin surprised me with a small box wrapped in crude paper. Inside was the butterfly pendant, a copy of a jewel I had admired on a mall poster. I felt colors bloom inside me.
"You shouldn't have," I said.
"I wanted you to have it," he replied. "I can earn things now. I can do much."
He looked at me as if he had decided something irrevocable. "Galina," he said, "let me be the last person who leaves your side."
"I don't want to be kept," I said. "I want to stay with the one who stays when nobody applauds."
He nodded like a man who had been waiting to hear the terms. "Then I'll stay," he said.
Months later, on a day when the city was hot and the air smelled of distant rain, Ian knocked on my door again. He held himself straighter, not because of a suit but because a hard lesson had written itself into his spine. He had been seen, and he had been shaped.
"Galina," he said. "I was wrong in how I used you."
I had been many things: nurse, friend, bandage. "You did what's human," I said. "You were selfish, and you learned. There's a difference between learning and being forgiven."
"I understand," he said.
"Then don't ask for forgiveness as a favor," I said. "Work for it, and then show me with action."
He nodded. "I will," he said.
Time is patient. It asks for proof. Benjamin gave me patience. Ian gave me attempts, later, from a place altered by humility. Silvia had been revealed, and then she sank from the social circles that had once cradled her.
There were days I missed the easy comfort of what had been. But comfort had a price. I wanted something that did not ask for a ledger.
"Do you regret the years?" I asked Benjamin on a night when we sat on the balcony with a bowl of soup cooling in front of us.
"No," he answered. "Not if you are here."
"Then stay," I told him simply, and he laced his fingers through mine like a promise.
After everything, here is the small truth: there are ways to hurt that create a map; there are ways to stay that become a dwelling. I had been a map for Ian; with Benjamin, I found a house.
One morning he ran his fingers along the edge of the pendant and said, tender and small, "I will keep you safe."
"Then keep me," I said, and leaned my head against his shoulder.
We moved slowly. We did not announce our love. We lived it. We mended. We learned. And whenever I thought of the gala, of the cameras and the way people watched, I felt a chill and then gratitude: gratitude that truth shows itself, often loud and imperfect, and then that life gives us a second chance to choose better.
The End
— Thank you for reading —