Sweet Romance12 min read
I Pretended to Be Someone Else — Then Everything Exploded
ButterPicks15 views
I always thought my life would be quiet: a big house, careful smiles, the sort of wealth that keeps people polite. Instead, I woke up inside a story where I was the villain. My name here is Ivy Hartmann; to everyone in that house, I was the girl who had been raised as a daughter of the Shen family. To myself I was a fraud who had taken someone else’s life and life story.
The first day Eden Morales came back, I stayed in bed and pretended not to care. Eden was calm and small in all the ways that mattered—like a steady light. When she walked into the dining room, the way Levi Eriksson’s face softened made me feel like a thief inside my own skin.
“Eden,” Levi said like a prayer. “Come sit.”
Eden sat, picked up her chopsticks, and ate like she belonged. The house was full of silence after that. Mr. and Mrs. Shen were colder toward Eden than toward me at first. They had a reason to hold me like a secret, even if I was not their real child.
I watched from the other side of the table. I wanted to say, “I’ll give it all back.” Part of me wanted that, honestly. Part of me wanted to watch and see if Eden would hate me. Part of me wanted to sink into the bed and be left to rot.
Two days later we were both enrolled in school again—seventeen, seniors, the same grade. I learned quickly there too. Christopher Brown, who had been engaged to me in the old script, found Eden and me confusing.
“Who is she?” he asked me in the stairwell, voice low. “She got out of your car today.”
“She’s my biological sister,” I said like it was nothing. “We were switched. My parents are going to announce it soon.”
Christopher squinted, then touched my head like I was a child. “It’s fine. I like you.”
I heard the words and laughed on the inside. “Thank you. I need to study,” I said. “Let’s stop here.”
After that I buried myself in textbooks. It was the safest thing I knew how to do: study, memorize, keep my head down. I pretended I didn’t hear the whispers. I pretended the hallways didn’t twist like knives. I pretended Eden’s quiet strength made me small and harmless.
Katrina Cain still sidled up during lunch. “Ivy, you didn’t come find me,” she hissed. “You didn’t even text.”
“I was trying to catch up on stuff,” I answered. “Come on, I’m hungry.”
Katrina smiled like a practiced liar. “Okay.”
At school, Clancy Gibson—my desk buddy, shy and bright—kept helping me with physics. I said I was grateful, but I also kept an eye on Eden. She was different from the original Eden I remembered from the book inside my head: kinder, but full of sharp things that could cut me.
Two weeks passed and the rumor engine ran. I admitted Eden’s identity publicly in class once—just a small, casual thing to stop the whispers—and the world shifted. People who had loved me suddenly disappeared. Others came forward with pity and attention. The empty pockets of my life filled with heads turned toward me and then away.
One weekend, Levi came home late and asked me to meet him at the airport. I looked a mess—baseball cap, mask, too many layers. Gage White, my oldest brother, walked out, looking like a king who had learned to hide his anger. He glanced at me and said, “You’re here.”
“Yes. Your mother asked me to bring you home,” I said, trying to sound steady.
Gage paused. “Do you drive?” he asked.
“I’m seventeen,” I snapped. “No, I don’t.”
He sighed and then, with a subtle click of decision, said, “Come to the office with me. I have a meeting—stay for a while.”
I followed him into his world: glass, tastefully minimal art, men with tailored suits. He left me by a window and went in to meet his guests. I scrolled quietly and then a woman arrived—Molly Bolton. I did not like her perfume from the doorway. She smiled like money, practiced and expensive.
“Good afternoon,” Molly said. “I’m Molly.”
Gage did not crow—he had no time for that—but he was clean and sharp.
“We haven’t been meeting about personal matters,” Gage said, removing his coat and setting it aside.
Molly pouted a little. “I thought you’d want to—spend time.”
“Ms. Bolton, I told you—I don’t think we’re a match,” Gage said. “Please don’t come uninvited again.”
She left looking wounded and angry. I thought that would be the end of it. But it was not. Molly began to appear in too many corners of our lives, like a stain. She was the kind of small third person who thought she could buy her way into everything.
“Don’t bother,” I told myself. I was trying hard to stay honest—“I will be good. I will hand things back.”
When Gage and I finally went out to eat with Levi and Eden, I tried to be useful—flip meat, pass plates, be small. The world was kinder when I took care of others. Eden ate. Levi stole glances at her like a man who could not believe his luck.
“Eat,” I told Gage twice, with more force than necessary. “You’ll be hungry.”
He glanced at me. “You like this?” he asked, as if he had not asked at all.
“Yes,” I lied. I loved the smell and the greasy joy of it.
Later that night, my fear of Gage was a quiet roar. Levi said something to me in the hall.
“You don’t mess with Eden,” Levi said.
“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”
That promise was small and true. I wanted to be invisible for Eden’s sake.
But the world has a habit of refusing invisibility.
Molly Bolton, who had been kept out of Gage’s life, decided to become louder. She slid into press lists, she smiled at parties, and she sent messages that said sweet things with very large offers. One day in the lobby of Gage’s company, she marched up and spoke like she owned the place.
“Gage,” Molly sang, loud and bright. “Why won’t you just be reasonable?”
He looked at her like she was a trivial piece of trash. “Ms. Bolton, I’ve made my choice.”
“What choice?” she snapped. “You haven’t offered proof. People deserve to know what we are.”
Gage’s face cooled. He said, low and hard, “You need to stop.”
That night I saw how powerful a man could be. Gage arranged a small press gathering under the guise of charity. He invited Molly, and he invited all the socialites who liked a little scandal. He pulled me aside and told me to stay seated, to be gentle in the corner.
When Molly walked to the microphone, the room smelled like perfume and gossip. “I want the world to know,” she said into the mic. “Gage and I—there’s been a connection—”
Gage raised a hand. “Ms. Bolton, that is enough.” He was a quiet owner of everything. “Before you continue, we told your assistant to bring those images of 'our' private dinners. You remember? The ones you said were legitimate.”
Molly laughed, sharp. “I have nothing to hide. We shared—”
“I have a better memory,” Gage said. “And we have receipts.”
He clicked a remote. On the large screen behind him, images flooded the room: private messages that showed Molly promising favors to a journalist, invoices from a hire-for-story agency, voice clips in which Molly coached a minor influencer to fabricate a romance angle for money. Then—he played a video. In it, Molly was whispering to a staffer, “Make it look like I’m with him. Pay the photographer off.”
The room went so still I could hear the chandeliers. Molly’s face changed in three breaths: from confident to fierce to terrified. She tried to speak, but the microphone cut her off automatically.
“Ms. Bolton,” Gage said quietly, but the quiet pressed like iron. “You attempted to create a false narrative. You offered gifts to press and paid people to build a lie.”
Someone in the room pulled out a phone. “Are you serious?” a woman whispered.
“I’m not here to ruin anyone,” Gage said. “I could take this further. But I’ll do something else first.” He gestured toward the security guard at the back. “Please escort Ms. Bolton to the front. She will make—if she wishes—a public statement under oath, for which we have the full record.”
Molly tried to move past the person blocking her, and the crowd parted like a sea. A snarl escaped her throat. “You—this is private.”
“It became public when you bought it into production,” Gage answered. “Now tell them the truth. Tell them why you tried to make me a story.”
I watched Molly’s fingers tremble on the microphone. She looked at the house, at the friends who had smiled at her in private rooms, and she saw them looking back with a coldness she had never expected. Her voice came out small, then louder, then hoarse.
“I… I thought if I could be seen with him, I could—” She paused. “I could be someone. I paid people. I told them to say we were close. I— I wanted the status. I wanted him to notice me.”
The crowd met that with silence like a blade. Someone laughed—it sounded like a thrown stone. Cameras flashed. People took notes. A nearby woman said, “She bought a life. How cheap.”
Molly’s denial dissolved into a mutter. She began to cry and then to plead. “Please—this was for my future. I didn’t mean to—”
“Your future bought itself,” Gage said coolly. “You used money to make lies. You tried to sell yourself as true.”
He leaned forward. “If you wish to salvage anything, you will apologize right here, and you will donate double the amount you spent to an independent press fund for ethical reporting.”
Molly staggered like he’d hit her. The press shoved microphones in her direction. A journalist asked, “Did you pay for stories, Ms. Bolton?”
“Yes,” she said finally, as if the sound left settled dust. “I did.”
They called it a confession. Cameras zoomed in on every tear that fell. The crowd shifted from curiosity to contempt. People started to whisper about the moral price of power. “I always said she was the kind to buy friendship with a credit card,” someone said. Another woman turned her back. A man scoffed and filmed silently.
Molly’s face unmade itself in front of everyone. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her apologies sounded like coins thrown into a well. “I’m sorry.”
“You should be,” one socialite hissed. “You should be.”
The rest of the night followed like a verdict. Molly’s allies evaporated. Invitations were rescinded by text. Photos of her with other men were quietly deleted from sites where she’d paid for impressions. Her name became a note of caution. People mimicked her fall for weeks. There were whispers about the kind of life that buys itself and what it costs to be known as a buyer of affection.
That public humiliation was not a legal punishment, but it was more brutal. People watched. They recorded. They shared. They turned their faces away. Molly’s bravado collapsed into something brittle and small.
I watched and learned: power comes in many shapes. Public shame can be a punishment as fierce as chains. For me it was a lesson—humility I had to learn and use carefully.
The sequence made the rest of the house breathe easier. For a while people believed Gage had handled it. For a while the household seemed to settle into a fragile peace. But the book was not done with its surprises.
One dark morning, a bus I was on became a nightmare. I had left the city to escape the pressure, to test myself. I had a small stash of cash and a tired heart. The bus stopped on a lonely stretch of road and three men stood up and moved between seats. They had knives. They were quick and greedy and ugly.
“Money! All of you!” one of them barked. I kept my head down. They moved through the bus; they killed the driver with a single knife. I watched the blood and felt my chest press tight.
They took what they could, and then they turned to me. I was small and shaking. The biggest of them—Edsel Bond—smelled like old sweat and new teeth. He looked me up and down like prey.
“You, money,” Edsel said.
“I have some,” I said.
They wanted everything. Edsel moved closer. He licked his lips. There was a kind of hunger I had never seen.
I made a choice then. Not out of heroism—out of raw, thin survival. I let them come close and then, when the leader’s mouth was open in a greedy grin, I lunged for the knife I had hidden. I fought like someone who had nothing to lose. The bus screamed.
I cut three men. I was not a hero in any grand way; I was just a person with knives and the will to survive. When the men fell and the driver’s blood had stopped shining, I realized I was bleeding too.
Someone outside started to run—small feet, a voice begging. A boy ran toward a car. He pounded on the window of a black SUV until someone stopped.
Gage was that someone. He had been heading to a meeting, had been stopped by a child who told him where the bus was. He arrived seeing the wreck of our fight: the dead, the injured, and me on the ground.
“Late,” he whispered as he crouched down, and then he lifted me like I was the most fragile thing in the world.
They took me to the hospital. I remember very little: the cold of the gurney, the bright strips of fluorescent, the smell of antiseptic and the particular way worry sounds when it is a person’s voice held close.
“Stay with me,” Gage said. He held my hand like a life-raft.
Days blurred. Wounds were stitched. I woke up to his face a few times. “You are reckless,” he told me. “You are not allowed to run away.”
“I was trying to find Eden,” I whispered once.
“You are not allowed to go alone,” he said. “You cannot.”
In the hospital, Eden came by with her boyfriend—his name was Julio Lombardi, a steady man who kept his hands to himself and watched Eden like a promise. She did not smile at me at first. She did not need to. She simply said, “You were brave.”
That word hit oddly. “I was trying not to die.”
We had time in the hospital to talk, to breathe. I told Eden the truth: that I had been stealing her life; that I had been scared to give it back. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t slap me. She simply said, “You helped me. That matters.”
Gage sat with us, impatient and quiet. Finally, in a low voice, he told me, “I wanted you to sign the papers for that share. I wanted the world to be tidy. But last week you almost died. That changed things.”
“Changed how?” I asked.
“How can I run a business that lets the people I care about die on a bus?” he asked. “You are mine in more ways than one. Don’t leave.”
I was stunned. “You’re saying I belong to you?”
He smiled in a way that was almost cruel with softness. “Yes,” he said. “You belong to me.”
I laughed then, because the sound of him claiming me was nothing like the book. The book had men who came and left like seasons. Gage’s voice was something else entirely: possessive, true, and terrifying.
Time passed. I recovered. Eden found footing in her life and married Julio. He was careful and kind to her. I went back to school eventually, though Gage forbade me from anything near danger. He had a way of telling people what to do and having them do it.
People in the city whispered again about me. About how I had saved myself, about how Gage had taken me in. Levi seemed to have softened toward me in private. Case Erickson, our middle brother, offered a terse apology one afternoon. “You weren’t like them,” he told me. “We were wrong.”
I shrugged and said nothing. Words were cheap; people’s choices mattered more.
At one big party—Eden’s wedding—we sat under lights by the sea. Eden looked happy. I looked at Gage and whispered, “Thank you for the island.”
Gage kissed my temple. “Thank you for staying.”
Then something else happened that the book did not tell me to expect: the real Eden came back around sometimes, but the old Eden—the one whose life I had taken—appeared in small flashes. She returned to claim what was hers and to judge me. We had to live with that kind of complicated guilt. Eden and I—the girl and the original—learned to live inside the same air. She forgave in her own slow way.
The years folded. I stopped doodling the future and started living it. Gage and I made real choices. He bought me an island and later a life. People gossiped. People applauded. The ones who had tormented me found their own small misfortunes. The very last time someone tried to humiliate me publicly, I remembered Molly’s fall and the way the room turned away from her. Power is not only about money; it is about story.
Once, at a public shareholders’ meeting where people came to judge Gage’s decisions, a small group—some old critics of our family—tried to make a scene. They wanted to talk about the “fraud” that I had been when I first came into the house. Gage stood up and said, “You will not insult her.” He walked to the podium, took my hand in the crowd, and said, “She saved herself. She saved others. If you have a complaint about that, look at your hands. Are they clean?”
A man shouted that I had once been a thief. Gage lifted two very quiet fingers and asked the guards to bring the records. They were there: court files of charity donations I had set up secretly, receipts of scholarships, testimonies from people I had helped. The crowd saw the truth: I had been messy, but I had not been cruel. People shifted and looked inward.
The story that had seemed to belong to someone else became mine by action, not by theft. I had a long list of wrongs to answer for—genuinely—and I paid them as I could. But I also found people who believed in me: Eden, Julio, Levi, Case sometimes, and in time, even my parents on their own slow terms. Gage stopped being a stranger who threatened me. He became a man who waited by the bed with a bowl of soup and a ridiculous tenderness that made me melt every time.
“You are mine,” he repeated once more on a winter night, when snow fell like a soft promise outside our window. I tucked myself under the rough comforter and reached for his hand.
“Yes,” I said. “You’re mine too.”
The book had given me the role of villain, but I had rewritten my own scenes. I gave Eden back as much as I could. I stood in a courtroom of whispers and reversed the hearing with work and honesty.
When the last of the men who had tried to buy fame in our circle fell that year—Molly’s small empire crumbling under the weight of truth—I did not dance on her ruin. I had once begged for a scrap of someone else’s life. In public, I said only, “Everyone pays for what they do.”
People cheered because they wanted to; they cared because they had choice. Gage squeezed my fingers. Eden took my arm. Levi raised a glass. Case clapped like a man trying to be human.
The ending that finally made sense to me was not dramatic or triumphant in a novelistic way. It was slow and messy, stitched together with apologies and exams and hospital visits and little lunches where we did not speak of the past. We built a life that was ours.
At night, when I pick up a textbook or flip through an old photograph of a small city alley where a woman with a bat once fed a runaway boy, I remember how complicated kindness can be.
“You made everything messy,” Eden said once, smiling a little.
“I know,” I answered truthfully.
Levi laughed. “And yet here we are.”
Gage pulled me close and said softly, “You are my house.”
That, more than any grand ending, was the one line I recognized as mine.
The End
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