Revenge12 min read
I killed myself on New Year’s Eve — and watched him burn everyone who hurt me
ButterPicks13 views
I killed myself.
On New Year’s Eve, when families were together and the city glittered with fake warmth.
I thought death would be silence and relief. Instead, I stood beside my own body and a thin man in white and paper asked my name.
"What’s your name?" he asked, flipping a long book like a bored librarian.
"Gillian Bird," I said. I wanted him to take me away, to file my name and let me be done. I wanted to sleep forever.
He looked at the book. He frowned. "You have years left. And there’s a child in you. Why would you do this?"
I looked at myself in the tub—pale, wrists carefully cut, wine bottle half empty on the sink—and said flatly, "I wanted to stop living."
The white man—White Warden? Fate clerk?—scowled until his whiskers went crooked. "You can’t... you can’t leave with years left. It’s like calling the ambulance for no reason. There are rules. The child—” He tapped the book. "A child deserves life."
"I didn’t know," I said. The truth landed on him like a cold glass. "If I’d known, I might not have."
He sighed in a way that made my skin itch. "You have one month. Stay in the world as a ghost. Find something that makes you want to keep living. If you can’t, I’ll help you process reincarnation papers."
I laughed. "A month? Fine. I’ll be a ghost. What could go wrong?"
The white man stamped his book and left. He smelled like dust and long paperwork.
That first night I sat on the windowsill and watched the city bloom with lights. My phone near the tub blinked with mass greetings. A hundred names, not one real friend. At the stroke of midnight, it buzzed again.
Ludwig Fontana.
He sent a photo: a cardboard box with some clothes shoved inside, cosmetics spilled, a careless note.
"Your junk. Take it in a day. Don’t dirty my house," read his message.
He was as cold as his name. Ludwig—successful, handsome, icy, the kind of man who inherited an empire and learned to rule it like frost. He had my marriage because his mother once asked my parents to return a lifesaving favor. He never loved me. He had an old love that lived on in his chest like an unhealed wound.
I watched his messages like a dumb animal at a trap. My body in the bath could not answer. I floated above it, feeling useless.
On the second morning my mother texted: "Come home. Beg Ludwig to take you back and we’ll let you in for New Year."
They had never supported me unless I sat under Ludwig’s shadow. When I filed for divorce, my parents screamed that we had put all our hopes on that marriage. They wanted the company money, the rescue. So when I left Ludwig, I also walked out of their chance at a lifeline. They punished me by closing their door.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked the empty apartment. "Why is everything like this?"
Then the knock came.
I peeked through the peephole. Ludwig stood with annoyance on his face, impatient hands. "Gillian," he called through the door. "Don’t think this will win me back."
He rattled the doorbell until the neighbors stared. He threw the box on the floor, kicked something, left. He was nothing if not efficient when he wanted to be cruel.
I wanted to push that box into the tub, to let the water swallow it. My hand passed through.
By the third day I learned I could move through some things. I could not touch yet, but I could haunt a little. I learned to breathe the air and float and read messages on screens I hovered over. I learned Ludwig's house like a book.
One night I drifted into his study at one in the morning. He wasn’t at his bed. He sat at his desk, a shadow carved by his lamp. He looked more human by lamplight, less like a statue.
On his laptop, a chat window was open. Emelia Persson. "I arrive on the eighth," she typed. Ludwig replied: "What time? I'll pick you up."
My chest tightened. Emelia—his old love, the woman who had been his sun before my gray winter—showed up in a blur on the screen. Everything I had known about him was rooted in that name.
I leaned close and tried the old ghost trick I’d read in stories: a breath on the ear. He jolted, turned, and for a heartbeat our eyes met.
He looked at me like he had seen a ghost.
"Who’s there?" he murmured. Then he closed the chat, rubbed his eyes, and sank back. I wanted to be petty. I wanted to rattle a window, lift a cup. I tapped a book with my shoulder. It fell; photos spilled out.
There I was—old snapshots of me and Ludwig, gifts from his mother maybe. He had hidden them in a book. When he went to retrieve them, I pushed. A glass fell and shattered.
He looked around, pale. For a second he looked like a man who had been startled into remembering something.
He sat, breathed, then typed a message I couldn’t read. Then, exhausted, he left the room and I, buoyed by small victory, floated home to my tub.
The neighborhood had all the minor gossip of neighbors. I met Kaylee Cuevas—the ghost who lived in the building after a fall many months ago. She taught me to be a ghost: you cannot make people see you on purpose at first, but you can sit on rafters and make the front row of gossip. "We got the best seats," she said, smirking. "We see everything."
On the seventh day my sister, Kennedi Bergmann, texted. "Ludwig came with goods this morning. He asked after you." She sent a string of pleading emojis. "Please, Gillian. Come back. It's better for everyone."
My sister—my brilliant, polished sister who had never once taken my side when I was younger—suddenly transformed into a stage actress at the sight of a camera. Her love always had a price. She wanted to be safe.
I wanted to yell through the phone. "You let him do that to me."
But my words only rippled the shower curtain.
Ludwig visited the apartment that day. He called the management company and said he was "the spouse," pressed, and forced his way into my door. The lock clicked like something final. They found me in the tub and screamed. Then the world moved fast: police, a small team, the neighbors gathered.
He fell to his knees in front of me. He touched my face and said, "Why didn't you stay? Why did you leave me?"
I sat on the vanity and watched the theater of grief. He cried—a real enough cry—and the people around him softened. My parents, who had refused me shelter two nights ago, suddenly wanted to climb onto his lap and blame him. The room filled with the warmth of performance.
At the hospital morgue, Ludwig insisted on staying. He slept beside me. The assistant—Cason Espinoza—handled things. He read my diary later and then interpretations came like rain. My diary was private truth. It contained everything—the slow poison of a family that prioritized other children, the abuse I’d endured, the night when Kennedi's boyfriend had tried to touch me and their defense of him over me, the pregnancy that failed, the constant belittlement.
He read, and he wept. "Gillian," Ludwig whispered over and over, "why didn't you tell me?"
He began to act. The press painted him a grieving husband. He signed statements. He gave interviews that felt like small confessions. "She left," he said, voice shaking. "I should have seen."
I could have let him have it—my bitterness would have been delicious. Instead I felt small. He food for both anger and pity.
Then everything shifted.
Ludwig started to do things that were not for me. They were for himself. He found and punished the people who had hurt me—quietly, efficiently, and publicly enough that it would hurt.
"Someone attacked my wife’s reputation," he told his board. "We’re closing deals, but we’re also closing accounts for people who colluded against her."
He cut funding to my father's company. He called the investor who had been cozy with Kennedi’s husband and withdrew a line of credit. He found the man who had tried to assault me at nineteen and quietly ruined his business. He pulled strings until they fell apart. When neighbors and gossipers spoke, he answered with cold legal letters.
The first public punishment came two weeks in.
Ludwig invited my family to one of his foundation dinners. It was to be a gala—soft lights, string quartet, the kind of thing people attended for optics. My parents thought it would be a chance to plead, to ask for money. Kennedi came in a slinky dress, practiced smile, and a man from her husband's business on her arm. Dario Flores—my younger brother—came too, eyes bright with hope.
I hovered on the balcony, ghostly, watching the scene like a hawk.
Inside, speeches were rehearsed. Ludwig took the stage, expression hidden. He greeted guests with such calm that the room believed his grief. He asked for a moment to honor my "memory." Cameras clicked. People leaned forward.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Ludwig said, voice like a blade wrapped in velvet. "We gather tonight to celebrate charity. We also gather to reveal truth."
A hush fell. "My wife—Gillian Bird—was not merely a private person. She was a person who trusted people around her, who wrote honestly into a diary that some of us read. Tonight I’m going to show what that diary has to say about how we fail our loved ones."
The screen behind him lit up. There were images—photographs of the younger me, scanned pages. Faces in the room changed. "I want to invite some guests to the stage," Ludwig continued. "To say a few words in front of everyone about how they treated the person they claimed to care for."
My father, Stan Booth, reddened. My mother, Marina Becker, smiled like a woman who believed she was still young and safe. Kennedi’s smugness did not leave her face until he called her name.
"Kennedi Bergmann," Ludwig said, and she froze. "Would you come up?"
She was forced onto the stage. The cameras were live. People who had been at the table closest to them watched with a kind of morbid curiosity. "You—" she opened her mouth, but Ludwig held out a small binder.
"These are messages," he said, sliding the binder toward her. "Text messages between you and your friends where you speak of Gillian as a joke. Quotes, mocking. You were present when family chose not to help. You watched."
She scanned, her face twisting. For an instant she tried to laugh it off. "This is private," she said. "You can't—"
Ludwig cut her off. "If you cannot feel shame being exposed for your cruelty, then maybe the public can help correct your heart." He was not shouting. He never shouted. His voice was low and precise.
Then he did something else. He pulled out an audio file and pressed play.
It was the recording of a voicemail—my father conspiring to pressure me into a marriage for money. My mother’s voice overlayed, asking me to "behave" and warning that if I ruined things they would be ruined. The hall filled with the cold clarity of their voices. People murmured. Some stood, others stepped back.
My parents went white. My mother’s carefully painted face cracked. My father, always the loud one at business dinners, didn't find his voice. The man who had always pointed fingers suddenly had no fingers to point.
"How dare you," my mother tried. Tears came out in practiced rivers. "We did what was necessary."
An investor near the stage, a former friend of theirs, opened his mouth. "This is... unacceptable. If you have acted in collusion," he glanced at Stanley Booth, "we must reconsider our ties."
Phones began to flash. Some guests recorded. A few posted live streams. People in the back took photos. The sound of low disapproval grew into a chorus.
Kennedi tried denial. "I never—"
But Ludwig had more. He called out a name: the man who had once cornered me at nineteen—someone whose business relied on my sister’s husband’s patronage. "Mr. Calder," Ludwig said into the mic.
The man in the crowd stood. "This is slander," he barked.
"Then answer this: why did you suddenly lose three major accounts this week? Why did banks pull funding? Because we did the math." Ludwig gestured toward the screens where financial graphs descended like a spiral. "You bear the consequences of choices you made."
Mr. Calder’s face went from red to ashy. He stammered, then left the stage in a huff. Cameras followed.
The crowd reacted like a wave. Some clapped, but most were silent, the way a small storm quiets a room. People pointed. "She said that? She wrote that?" "I thought she was fine." "So this is why..."
My parents swayed as if struck. Marina clutched her pearls and the audience could plainly see them shake. My father collapsed into his chair, shell shocked. Kennedi found herself surrounded by old acquaintances who suddenly had the thin, polite distance of people removing themselves from scandal.
They tried the old defenses: "We were trying to protect the family," "We had no choice," "It’s complicated." But in the glow of the projector, their words sounded tiny and selfish.
Then Ludwig did something cold and surgical. He announced that he had withdrawn a line of credit and that certain business relationships would be terminated. He read names of boards and companies that would lose support, not as vengeful fury but as correction.
The reaction was immediate. Phones rang, staff whispered frantically. My brother's face—Dario Flores—went pale as men in suits who had come as his partners whispered that the funds were gone.
Denial broke into panic. My father stood, looked around, and tried to plead with the wrong people. "You cannot—" he spluttered.
"Watch me," Ludwig said, voice soft. Then louder: "We will not enable abuse by ignoring it."
There was a sound like thousands of needles as people pivoted away. Old friends who had smiled with them earlier now pretended no one important sat beside them. A journalist at the front clicked his recorder on. "Do you have a comment?" he asked my mother, who had nothing left to say.
She began to cry. It was not the composed, performative crying she had tried on for cameras before. This was raw and ragged and it betrayed a kind of fear more fearsome than grief.
Kennedi tried to run, but somebody grabbed her arm. "Answer for this," a neighbor hissed. "How could you—"
She crumbled under the light, embarrassed, then furious, then pleading. She mouthed, "It wasn’t like that." Then she snapped, "You had it coming!" and the room recoiled as if she’d slapped them.
The worst part was watching their faces change: pretense fell away. Smugness became shock; pride collapsed into shame; denial warped into pleading. They had to face their town, their partners, the people who had once admired them. People whispered, cameras recorded, and social media, like a hungry animal, started to chew.
The punishment went on for hours. Ludwig walked the room like a surgeon closing a case. He didn’t shout. He showed receipts. He showed messages. He showed how favors had been sold and how my dignity had been traded for business advantage. He made it public, with facts and with a voice that sounded like judgment.
Watching them crumble from a balcony was a cold satisfaction that made my ghost heart beat in a new rhythm. I had written my own life into private pages and he had turned those pages into public light.
But he didn’t revel. He came home to the empty apartment where my body had been and slept on the bed I had vacated. Each night he relived the diary and apologized, even to me.
"Why didn’t you tell me?" he asked a hundred times into the pillow. "Why didn’t you say?"
"I wrote it all down," I said once in his dream, to test him. He woke, tears hot on his cheeks, and pressed his face into the comforter.
He tried to die for me. He stockpiled pills, and for a breathless afternoon someone found him and dragged him to hospital before his chest gave up. He sat in a gray hospital room and, waking, he told me—through the dream—that he had realized how much he'd built his emotions into a shape he could never touch. "I thought I loved another. I was a coward," he whispered. "I was cruel without meaning to be."
I did not take him back in words. I was a dead woman on the other side of a bathtub. He was alive, and that was enough that he could still do wrong or right. He chose right with a speed that shocked me. He used an empire to punish me, then used the same reach to reorder his life.
There were smaller punishments that were private—my brother’s companies losing their investors, Kennedi losing social standing, my parents’ acquaintances avoiding them like rotten fruit. There were public ones—the gala, the investor calls, the phone lines and the social feeds. For the worst of them, the ones who had enjoyed my pain, the public unraveling was the sharpest.
They cycled through reactions. At first they were proud. Then they were exposed. Then they denied and blamed. Finally, they begged and then broke. The crowd’s reaction felt like a tide: at first curious, then indignant, then satisfied. People posted videos with captions. "The truth came out tonight," read one headline. "The heiress’s family exposed in emotional public showdown," read another.
I watched all this like a slow-burning ledger of dues paid.
"You did this for me?" I asked Ludwig once, appearing in his sleep.
"No," he said. "I did this for the truth. For the chance to be honest about what we did not face. Maybe for you, too."
"You should have told me when I was still alive," I said, cold.
"I know," he said, voice breaking. "I’m sorry."
My month thinned. The white man came back, impatient. "One decision," he said. "Make it."
I sat on his desk, looking at the ledger of my own life. "I want to go," I told him. "I want another start."
He smiled with the warmness of paper and law. "Good. There’s a place for you. Live better."
I left Gambit: the public punishment had stripped them down, but it didn't fix me. The month did not turn my memories off. Ludwig begged. Friends said things that could have been promises. My diary had been read aloud and my private heartbeat had become a public lesson.
I watched Ludwig flounder and then build, and that was comfort enough. He had been a man who avoided feeling; now he felt like an open wound. He promised to live with the memory, to change the small things. He got better about the small things. He brought food to solo workers, he left notes for staff, he closed blinds sometimes at bedside when he thought of nights he hadn’t kept.
On the last day the white man appeared.
"You’re sure?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "I made my choice. There’s no going back to their eyes, anyway."
He nodded, and in a slow wind I felt myself pulled along a lane I had not known. Kaylee gave me a one-armed wave from the rooftop and said, "Don’t forget to be kinder to yourself."
I smiled the bitter smile of one who had lived through too much.
As I walked toward whatever came next, the white man blessed me, and I thought of the bathtub, of the diary, of a public dinner under chandelier light where my family's lies were turned into evidence. I carried that memory with me as if it were a small white stone.
"Tell the next me," I whispered, "to eat dinner before midnight. To speak up in time."
"Will you?" the white man asked.
"I will try," I said.
We stepped through the threshold, and the last thing I saw was Ludwig sitting at my kitchen table—empty cup in front of him, the photograph frame I once loved now facing the wall. He whispered my name and then shut his eyes.
If ever you see a gala where a man reads private pages and the room quiets, you'll know which story we're in. The truth does not always set you free, but sometimes it makes other people pay the cost of being cruel.
The End
— Thank you for reading —