Regret19 min read
"I Signed the Paper. Then I Faked My Death."
ButterPicks13 views
"I’m at the hospital," I said, my hand pressed to the roundness of my belly.
There was a long, thin silence on the other end. Then Luciano’s voice came back, cool and small, like a shard. "Did you get it done?"
"No," I whispered. "They say it's dangerous. The doctor wants me to wait."
"Then we are divorced," he said. The words dropped like ice.
I stared at the ultrasound printout in my fist. The curve of it was proof and proofless at once.
"Why must it be divorce?" I asked. My voice came out softer than I meant it to.
He didn’t answer. He let the line click.
I laughed once, bitter and short. I almost forgot that he’d always done things like that—swing shut a door with one sentence.
"Okay," I told the empty room. "Okay, Luciano."
I sat in a taxi and watched the city river by, hands in my lap. My phone buzzed. A message from Galen—Luciano’s grandfather, who had, in his way, tried to be kind to me since the day he met the thin, dirty girl the city had once been kind enough to toss at him. He wanted us to dinner. I had to go.
I waited at the corner where he always said he would find me. He liked order. So did my life until that afternoon when everything decided to tilt.
A black Maybach pulled up. Luciano stepped out of the back and never looked up from his phone until Fabien—his assistant—tapped the horn and the world remembered I existed.
"Don't stand on the heat," Fabien said with a false softness. "You should be in the shade."
"I’m fine," I lied.
Luciano looked at me with eyes that could have been kind. He chose not to let softness live there. "You don’t need to act like I'm blind."
"I know you're not blind," I said. My chest tightened and for a second I let the old private wish rise—maybe he did love me. Maybe he would stop this. He didn’t.
At the villa gate my head spun. Galen greeted us warmly, pinching my hand like I was still a child. Luciano bowed and said the right things. He took my hand and then the air changed—the show began.
"Why did you call us all?" I asked, thinking there might be a soft plan to talk things through.
Galen looked at Luciano like the small alarm clock of his heart. "I called you because you are my grandson. If you hurt her, I will not have it."
Luciano smiled a practiced smile. "Grandfather, we are fine."
"You signed a contract before you married." Galen's voice was rough with old worry. "What did it say?"
"It was—" I swallowed. "It was my idea. I was jealous and stupid. I made him sign it."
The room watched me. Watching had weight. Watching had power. I felt it leave me.
Luciano's face tightened. "You are playing for sympathy," he said later, while the soup cooled in front of me. He let go of my hand as if it were a hot thing.
That night I fainted in front of everyone. When I came to, Luciano sat facing me like a man given a problem to fix.
"You put the child before me as bait," he said. "You used the pregnancy."
"No!" My voice broke. "I didn't—"
"Tonight you will stay. We will make it final."
"If I stay, will you be more humane?" I asked, ridiculous and desperate.
He took my hand when my feet bled silently from a cut glass I had not noticed. His fingers were cool. The baby inside me moved like a small secret.
"Touch," I breathed.
He flinched, pulled away. "I don't want the baby, Anastasia," he said. "Remember the contract."
How could the simple, strong warmth of his skin make the words hurt so much? He had the right name for me—he called me a thousand small names over the years—but never the one that had started as mine. Still, I asked the question I had rehearsed in the nights alone.
"Did you ever love me?"
"Never," he said.
It was the one answer I had always feared and always needed to hear cleanly.
The next morning, when I could not sleep, I wrote the date on the divorce papers with a careful hand and left them on the coffee table. I knew Luciano would sign. He was, always, a man who wore certainty as a suit.
And then Juliet came back.
She was his bright one—Juliet Benjamin—warm perfume and white teeth. She walked into his office and took the space rightfully left empty for me and something small inside my chest slipped and cracked into pieces that would, later, be joined.
"I won't leave you," she told him one day in a video I saw later. "I won't leave your side."
He wrote her back the kind of letters men don't always write; he gave her jokes I had never heard him allow me. I had been his ordinary, his daily, his bed. Juliet was his exception.
But I had the child.
The week before the scheduled date, I put my name beside Luciano's on the papers again. He agreed to stay with me a week longer at our small house—an odd bargain. He would come home, sit in the corner like a ruler, and watch television like a man waiting for a verdict.
I made a condition.
"Three days," he said, folding his long hands. "Three days is enough."
"One week," I said. "A full week."
"Fine," he said. "One week."
That week was a study in small cruelties and tiny gifts. He would sometimes, when he thought no one watched, lay a hand on my shoulder when I slept. Fabien would buy me flowers and ask for the way the sheets smelled. Juliet left messages in his phone I could find like poisoning notes. He always picked up.
I went into the hospital on the morning I had decided I wanted to end it my way. Reed Hunter was supposed to be elsewhere, but he returned for me. Reed had been gone five years—gone because of a wound he refused to speak of. He had the years of a man who studied other people's blood and still kept his own heart under lock.
"Anastasia," he said, but I said, "Call me Ana."
He looked like he had not slept but still had all the patient steadiness of a surgeon who had saved people for breakfast. "You sure?"
"Yes."
Reed's voice had something like a hand over my head. "It’s too dangerous," he said. "Seven months. We can try to remove the baby, but there's a risk."
Luciano was calm when he signed the consent forms. He was the kind of man who could sign for the end of a thing and walk away as if nothing inside had been crushed.
"Do what you want," he said when the nurses shuffled us to the room. "It’s your choice."
The theater was a bright rectangle. Lights had a way of making everything more precise—sterile and necessary. I remember looking at Reed's hands and thinking about how small promises feel between wrists tied in surgery tape.
When the alarm sound split the room and a nurse ran out, breathless, Reed came back with something on his face I couldn't read—no, I could. He was a man who had cared for me once before and had decided to come back because my name lay in his throat like a secret.
"He had the bone marrow problem," he told the nurse. "Prepare the OR."
The room turned into a place of surgical sounds and the word "stat." They worked like a precise orchestra. Then Reed walked out, eyes hollow.
"Family?" he asked.
Luciano's pupils sharpened. "Yes."
He walked by and heard the word the nurse had said in the small corridor. "Cardiac arrest."
"No," I thought. "Not me."
They dimmed the light. Nurse voices rose and fell. Fabien stood by the door, a little green and made of disciplined calm.
"She's gone," Reed said finally. "Mother failed to come round."
"It can't be," I whispered, but that was a voice from a place that had months ago decided the worst.
Then—another sound: not a voice. A cry like an animal.
"Baby alive," Reed said. "Pseudo death. The baby is alive."
I heard nothing and everything at once. I saw Luciano's face, white and then like some funeral drum, pulsing.
He almost ran into the theater. He could not enter. He pressed his shoulder against the window and watched the surgeons move like men trimming sails, and then a nurse put a life in his hands. It was a small thing. It breathed. It was the size of a fist and the blur of future.
He collapsed onto the corridor floor and knelt, hands in his hair. He looked every color at once: anger, grief, a small oddness like a man lost in fog.
That night Juliet came to the hospital, smiling, a martyr disguised in silk. Galen saw red then. He walked straight to her and—in front of all of them—the old man swung his cane and struck her.
The corridor went very quiet.
"How dare you," Galen hissed with a fierceness that had been mothered for years. "How dare you smile like that here."
Juliet faltered, stunned. She clutched at her dress, teary and furious. "I'm—" she began.
Galen's hand hit her again, not hard, but hard enough to make the world notice. Security hovered. People stepped back. Fabien filmed it with his phone more out of reflex than malice—everything becomes proof now.
"Don't come here again," Galen said. "Not to this ward. Not to my house."
Juliet left with a white face. The staff looked around like people at the end of an orchestra piece. Reed sat in the break room like someone who had read a bad book and wanted another.
"You did the right thing," he said when he found me later. "You did not let them see you weak."
"Did I do the right thing?" I asked. The words tasted like someone else's coin.
He shrugged. "You need a plan."
That night in the empty villa, Luciano held something that might have been remorse but looked more like panic. He had signed the forms for the abortion like a man who signs off on a house, forgetting the people inside. He had watched the small life leave and then crawl back. He had not thought of funeral arrangements—only of the way his life had been unrolled by someone else.
"You could have said no," I told him.
"I did not think," he said. "I was weak."
There are men who are weak in the ways of violence and men who are weak in the ways of leaving. Luciano had been both.
The day the hospital announced the child had "pseudo death" and had been moved to thermal care, the world out on the corridor doubled itself. Fabien sent a message to Galen. Reed kept the small child’s chart like a holy thing.
Galen came to the ward. He was frail and fierce and taller than everyone when his anger walked like a horse. He sat with me and pressed my hand until the knuckles white.
"No funeral," I said. "Please. No service."
"We'll bury someone," he agreed. "If that will keep you safe."
They tried to talk to Luciano. He refused to hear them. His father and mother arrived—the mother a soft woman called Holly Vasiliev and the father, Vaughn Daniels—both ornamented in ways that fit a life of silence and authority.
Luciano looked at me and wanted something he could not say. He walked away from the ward for a while and returned as if returned from the edge of a cliff.
"She is gone," he told them. He said it so lucidly that Holly began to weep. Vaughn asked for the name of the funeral home.
I watched him and thought of the hospital bed, the quiet machines. I thought of Reed's calm eyes and Gabriela—my friend—who had flown in at Reed's call.
"It will be okay," Gabriela said. "We will take care of the baby."
"Take care?" I asked. "Take care how? You are not her father."
"I will," Reed said quietly. "If you need me."
A man cannot be the father of a child he never held, I thought. Maybe sometimes he can be.
Galen and Fabien arranged the arrangements with the patience of people who know families like maps—they can cross a place with one look and know the quickest route. They arranged a little funeral meaning nothing to the living and everything to the watching world.
Luciano went to the crematorium and came back. He had the small, tidy box—my name had been written badly on it, as if one had written another language. He planted a small mound of earth with his hands and helped a worker lower it.
The lie sat between us then: that I was dead. I didn't go to the grave. I watched from my hospital bed through windows, small and real and alive, while they closed the ground over the box.
Luciano came home and held his hands like they were brittle things. He told stories to the family about what a good wife I had been and how he had failed me. He spoke like a man absolved because words can blanket a wound; he felt, I think, the great heavy claw of regret start.
"It was my fault," he told Galen through nights. "I did not protect her."
Galen only sighed and stroked the table.
Days passed like wet paper. They believed I was gone. They did not know I was in a quiet room in a small wing that kept children warm, because I had asked Reed to make it so.
He told the staff that I was a donor, an anonymous woman who would be tested and need rest. They moved me out of sight. Dr. Hunter had skill and he had friends. He had, more importantly, a green stubbornness that looked like affection.
"You have to let them grieve," Reed told me one night. "Let them think so. Let them find their way with a ghost. They will be quieter."
"Will he suffer?" I asked.
"He will," Reed said. He looked my way then, and there was something like a promise in it. "People like Luciano always do. They will find new versions of themselves and they will chase them like a fever."
I did not plan revenge. I only planned survival, for him inside me, for the small one who had not had a vote in the world.
Luciano signed the divorce papers the morning I left the hospital for my own staged funeral. He was a man who could sign and then find his clean shoes.
"Anastasia," he said as he left. He spoke my old name like a key. "I am sorry."
"I know," I told him. "That's enough for now."
He dropped a bouquet on the pillow I had never slept on that night. Galen fussed like an old gardener at a ruined plant. Reed told me to be ready to travel. Gabriela packed my bag and was furious on my behalf in a way that turned everything into a small, fierce movie.
The funeral was the kind of thing you see in movies—quiet sobs, a soft hymn, a tray of biscuits passed in silver. I watched it from a room with a one-way window. I wore a hospital gown and felt like a ghost with the strongest heartbeat in the world.
"Say goodbye," Reed told me.
I nodded and walked to the window.
Luciano stood by the grave we had prepared and spoke into the grey air.
"I failed you," he told the ground. "I failed."
Galen watched him, his hands little fists. Holly wept into her husband's shoulder. Vaughn's face was grey.
After the service, a small woman from the funeral home approached the pile of flowers and fumbled with the token.
"I'm sorry for your loss," she said to the group. "Is there anything else—"
Juliet appeared at the edge of the crowd then like a hurt star trying to come close. She came with soft smiles and a frown that thought itself proper.
Luciano's face crumpled into something that looked almost real.
"How dare you?" Galen barked and struck his cane against the stone again.
Juliet ran. People recorded it on their phones. The internet is a hungry thing—already a small scandal: "fiancée accused at funeral." Fabien watched the notifications grow like a child watching a pot boil.
Outside, Luciano sank beside the plot and wept like a man who'd swallowed a stone he could never cough up.
"He would have been mine," I thought, and the thought felt both primal and pointless.
Then Gabriela and Reed planned the next move. "We will make sure the baby is safe," Gabriela said. "We will file paperwork under another name. You will go abroad with the child. No one will find you there."
"How?" I asked. I had very little of the world left to me now.
Reed had a system. Reed had been the kind of man who could make a child’s breathing a small symphony when it was close to silence. He had friends who would say "yes" simply because loyalty exists.
We put the baby into a small incubator and watched its tiny lungs work like fragile engines. The nurses had kept charts and whispered to me like midwives of god. "She is a fighter," one of them said. "We named her after a bravery we don't understand."
"An-An," I murmured once, the name I had whispered on the operating table like a wish. Gabriela had kept the old baby-name list folded in her pocket and carried it like contraband.
Reed signed legal papers on my behalf. He moved mountains with small signatures. Fabien looked after the legal work like a man who kept things tidy. Galen, in his quiet way, argued with every official who would think himself stubborn.
We made the world call me "dead." Gazes turned away. The cameras lost interest. Death moves like a fog that eats insistence.
Luciano came to the ward once, hopeful and broke, to see the child's records.
"They say the mother is dead," he said with the dullness of someone reading pages without meaning to. "They buried a box with her name on it."
"People make mistakes," Reed said. "Records sometimes do odd things. But you need to be logical."
"Logical?" Luciano snapped. He clutched at himself like a man who had been divided in two. "I signed the papers. I want what is mine."
"You walked away," Reed said. "You left."
That line kept its small weight when he lived later in the house that had once contained two people. Eve and money, a bed and a divided life. A man sometimes needs an absence to remember how to be full.
We left the country with the child in a small bag of heat and hope. Reed called her An-An because it felt like a lullaby. Gabriela drove with us to the plane and cried when she hugged us goodbye.
"Take her far," she told me, squeezing my shoulders like a command. "Make sure he never finds her."
I promised her I would.
Weeks later I opened my private account and made a note: I had chosen a life for myself and for the girl who had made me less alone than the silence.
Luciano heard the rumor about an anonymous girl in the cloud. He started to search. He hired detectives and paid for little armies of facts. Fabien lied when asked, "No, I haven't heard of her." Galen shook his head like someone who carries umbrellas for storms that never come.
But one thing human beings are good at is not letting go. Luciano did not let go.
One evening months later, while I was teaching An-An how to reach for fruit on a tray, there was a knock at the small house's gate. I froze, my hand on the child's hair.
Gabriela went to the gate and came back white-faced.
"It's him," she said. "He's here."
I went to the door.
Luciano stood with a paper in his hand and eyes heavy with a man who had been learning grief like a new language.
"Anastasia," he said.
"Don't," I said.
"Can I see her?" His voice was a rope being pulled.
"No." Then a small thought: why not? What did I want from this? Revenge? A slap? His life was already turning brittle.
"I just want to apologize," he said. "I want to be a fool who can say that he is sorry."
He looked at An-An in the window. The child was safe with Gabriela in the kitchen, playing with a wooden horse. She had not seen him and would not until I chose.
"You took everything," he said suddenly. "I took everything back."
"You signed," I said.
He stared at me, as if seeing me for the first time since the dress I had worn when we were young. "I was a coward. I was certain of how I wanted things and I forgot that promises are not paper. I forgot you were a person."
"You made me a ghost," I said. "You wanted divorce. You wanted to be free."
He put the paper on the table. It was his divorce decree—final and thin. "Sign," he told me. "Sign and be finally free. I am tired."
"I signed already," I said. "That was the point."
He knelt down then like a man who had found his knees after a long walk. "Please. Forgive me."
I looked at him for a long time, at the man who had learned regret in the wrong place: in the quiet of his own house instead of at my bedside when the day was dangerous.
"I don't forgive you for what you did," I said. "I forgive you because I don't want to be a jailer."
His face wet, he nodded, like a child promised a new shirt.
"I will not keep her from you," I added. "But you will not find her. She will have a life with air and kindness. You can be sorry, and sorry will hurt you, and that will be enough."
He looked at the incisions in my hands—old scars from a life of surviving—and then he looked at the child and then at me. He said, "I will be here if she ever needs me. Even if I have to beg."
"You bargained with a paper," I said. "You broke what you were supposed to keep. Your regret is not miraculous."
He dropped his face into his hands. "I know."
We let him go home that night like a man with pockets full of stones. Galen met him at the door and patted his shoulder like a father who had given up the idea of fighting against the current.
In the months that followed, Luciano married Juliet. The wedding was a small, tidy thing that smelled faintly of cement and fresh curtains. He smiled in pictures and pressed a kiss to Juliet's hand. He tried to be a man who had turned his error into a life. Regret will do that; it will shape itself into vows.
But grief does not disappear. It sets up camp like a parasite and waits. He would sneak to the places we had sat together. He would look at pictures of me and remember the warmth in the socket of my laugh. He would go to An-An's school asking questions. Gabriela would send him letters with pages cut out. Reed would watch from afar like a lighthouse.
Once, when An-An was small and not yet a person with clear words, she crawled to Luciano at a distance and reached out her tiny hand. He froze. Then he whispered like a man waking up, "I am sorry."
The child blinked and took his finger and then laughed—the kind of laugh that belongs to babies and saints and things that do not keep accounts. It was a moment of grace that tore Luciano and sewed him with grief and joy.
I watched from the kitchen with tea that grew cold. Reed sat beside me, his hand on my arm the way steady men do when you have been the weather for too long.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"I am," I said.
He kissed my forehead, something soft and sure. "Good."
Time has a way of making people smaller in some ways and larger in others. An-An grew into a child with scratches and confidence. She learned to ride a tiny bike and to speak loudly when scandal came into our quiet.
Luciano came around sometimes—softly at first, like a man learning to move after a break. He would offer gifts that were useful and not gaudy; money for a school trip, a book that smelled like rain. He learned how to apologize in small, useful ways.
Once, in a crowded playground, he said, "I deserve nothing."
"You deserve to be better," I answered.
He nodded.
And then one afternoon, years later, when the girl we had made together had learned to draw better than both of us, she wrote him a letter and folded it with star edges and put it in his hand with a look that said she knew nothing of blame.
"She is alive," he said to me once, the words like an offer. "I will not ask for more."
That was enough to let me rest.
We did not have a neat revenge. Juliet had her own decline—her business collapsed with a small scandal about misreported taxes. Videos of her struck down by a fall from grace trended for days. People spat and recorded. Her parents fled to a smaller town. Galen smiled once and said, "Karma," like someone who had read the weather and found it fair. I felt nothing at all.
Luciano lost status but not everything. He kept his company, kept his house, learned that being sorry is less dramatic than being steady. People said he had been humbled. He said nothing to them.
My life with Reed was not a story of passion at first. It was a quiet collection of small, fierce acts: Reed rearranged his life to include mine, learned to fold laundry without eye-rolling, built An-An a treehouse that would stay straight in storms. He did not rescue me because I had not wanted saving. He joined me on the side of survival.
"You were always brave," he said once, smoothing a braid from An-An's neck.
"Not brave," I said. "Stubborn."
"Same thing," he answered.
On the day An-An left for school with a backpack too large for her small frame, I stood at the gate with the smell of toast and the ring of keys in my pocket. Reed kissed my cheek, the way men do in mornings that feel like they own the simple world. I watched An-An run like a small rocket and thought of the long road. I thought of Luciano kneeling by that grave like a man who had been surprised into regret.
"Do you regret how you did this?" Gabriela asked me one night over wine in a kitchen that had a window that always needed cleaning.
"I regret that I was forced into it," I said. "I regret the way things were taken from me. But I don't regret the decision to keep my child. That was a decision that had to be made."
"You are angry sometimes," Gabriela said. "Does it ever leave?"
"Anger is a thread," I said. "It thins as you do other things. It becomes less bright."
Months turned into years. An-An grew like a joke told over and over, more full every telling. Reed and I married in a small, human way—no vows that promised forever, just promises to show up. Luciano attended once, standing at the edge like a man invited and forgiven but not invited into the center. He brought a small bouquet and left it at the foot of the garden.
"Forgiveness is not weakness," Reed said later, half to me and half to the sunlight that found the backyard.
"Forgiveness is a tool," I said. "Use it as you must."
Luciano left more than regret at the gates of our lives. He learned to be kinder, a word heavy with light. He made mistakes; he mended them. He watched An-An from afar until one day she handed him a painted stone and said, "Here. For you."
He kept the stone on his desk for years like a petition.
One night when An-An was older and our house had the comfortable clutter of lives that had been well-lived, Luciano came to visit and did not ask to see me. He watched the child who had once been a phantom and now was a brilliant person who preferred math to make-believe and had an artist's smudge on her cheek.
"She is growing into someone amazing," he said.
"Yes," I answered. "She is."
"Do you hate me?" he asked.
"I don't," I said. "Hatred uses too much life. I choose not to spend my life that way."
He let out a breath like someone who had been by the edge of a cliff and stepped back. "Thank you," he said. "For letting her be."
I touched the paper he had once used to sign our end and kept it in my drawer like a relic. It had taught me something: people change when they have to carry what they once wanted to throw away.
At the end, when the city had turned softer with the winter light, Reed and I walked with An-An and Gabriela to a small shore that smelled like the world had forgiven itself for a little while.
"Do you ever imagine what would have happened if you had stayed?" An-An asked me, her small voice clear like glass.
"I do," I said. "I think of the life I would have had, and I am thankful for the life I got instead."
She looked at me with the fierce curiosity of someone who will not be told easy things. "Is Luciano sad?"
"Sometimes," I said. "But sadness can be useful. It makes people careful."
"Good," she said. "Then he will be careful."
I smiled. She took my hand and fit into the fit it had been made for. Reed fit on the other side like a warm coat.
The shore was loud with gulls and our laughter. In my pocket, I kept a note I had once written for a child: "Only ask what you need, not what you do not."
Luciano's regret had been a bell and it had rung. It had broken and reformed itself into something quieter and stranger. He did not get everything he wanted. He became a man who would know the weight of a wrong deed and the slow work of repair.
I learned to be not only alive but also free—the two are not identical. Free is the choice you make every morning, warm coffee in the hand, and a child who knows your voice and thinks your laugh is the best sound in the world.
Years later at a small dinner, Luciano raised his glass to us without speaking, and I raised mine back. I had my daughter, my life, and a man at my shoulder who cleaned the kitchen with affection.
"To what matters," I said.
"To what matters," Reed echoed.
An-An laughed and clinked her glass of juice.
Galen sat back and smiled like someone who had staked his life on giving things away and watched the world be better for it.
As the night cooled, Luciano left with some worn dignity that could still be polished into gentleness. Juliet's scandals had faded into memory and now she lived in a quieter place. She called once to ask if she might apologize; we accepted the apology with the bluntness of people who realize apologies are useful only when work follows.
In the end, the woman who had once been signed away and buried like a story came to own her life. I had not wanted spectacle or vengeance—I had wanted my child safe and a life for us both in which regret taught rather than destroyed.
An-An grew up with both the bright and the plain; with Reed’s quiet steadiness and with a father who, when he met her, knelt kindly and said, "I am sorry." The small thing she offered him—painted stones and volume of made-up stories—was enough.
Every morning I wake and choose. That is the only brave thing I have to do, and I do it. I drink my coffee and fold laundry and make sure the child who once kicked inside me knows the world early: it will be hard, but it will be full of hands ready to hold her.
And when the news tells me sometimes of worse things and small cruelties, I remember the way Reed steadied me, the way Gabriela screamed into stars for me when I had none, and the way Galen held a cane like justice.
"Do not let him make you small," Gabriela told me once.
"I won't," I said.
The child at my side looked up and said, "Mama, will you promise me something?"
"Anything."
"Promise me we will always say sorry when we need to."
I fixed her hair and smiled. "I promise."
"Good," she said. "Because I will too."
Luciano learned that apologies cannot return time. But they can teach how to hold small things gently.
Sometimes I think of that hospital corridor, and the scream of the white light, and how near death felt like an old neighbor waiting for his tea. That woman I was then made new rules for the one I am now.
When darkness comes, I pick my hands up and I make a life.
The rest, I let be.
The End
— Thank you for reading —