Sweet Romance13 min read
"I signed the papers. He smashed the plants."
ButterPicks13 views
I never thought I would be the woman who asks for the divorce.
"Damian," I said into the phone, the words flat as the rain outside, "we're done. I'm going to the registry tomorrow."
There was a long, slow inhale on the other end. A glass broke somewhere in my memory.
"Goddamn it," Damian Hansen said.
There was a clang, a sound like someone taking a golf club to porcelain. I imagined the potted plants on our terrace collapsing into soil and broken stems. I pictured his jaw set, the way his hands always tightened around a pen when he wanted to show he was right.
He always was right.
"He hit a plant," I told my friend Hayden Graves later, not even trying to hide how small I felt. "A golf club. In our garden. He—"
"Because you said the D word?" Hayden's voice was half angry, half baffled.
"Because I said I wanted out," I said. "Because I said I won't be that woman anymore."
Hayden put her hand over the phone like a shield. "Come home. I'll come get you."
"There's nothing to come back to," I told her. "Not anymore."
"I'll be there," she promised.
The butler, Jacob Roussel, answered when I called the house. His voice was practiced, the kind people use when they have decided they like safety more than truth.
"Mrs. Bonilla," he said, "Mr. Hansen is away on business at nine-thirty. He is in Europe."
"Tell him I will be at the villa tonight," I said instead. The lie sat cold on my tongue, but I had decided.
"Madam—" Jacob began.
"No," I interrupted. "Tell him I will be there at nine. Tell him: we are done."
I hung up and looked at my hands. Thin fingers, nails bitten down to apology. I'd been his for eight years. I'd believed him once. Believing had become my world.
When I walked into the villa, Jacob stood at the door like he always did, like the house itself exhaled at his posture. He tried to be the balm, the man who could make the storm obedient.
"Madam," he said. "Mr. Hansen is...he's in the study."
"Damian?" I asked, because it was a habit to ask about him as if he were the weather.
"He's had a long day," Jacob said. "He'll see you."
I didn't go to him like I used to. I had practiced this a hundred times in a hundred late-night showers and whispered mirrors. I would not be the woman who dissolved.
"Damian," I said, and my voice didn't shake the way I thought it would.
He was sitting on the sofa, still wet hair against his collar from a shower. The water made his dark hair cling to his head, and the droplets on his jawline made his eyes look colder than his smile ever did.
"You look...different," he said. He had always had that tone—like a man appraising a rare wine and deciding he'd had enough of it.
"Different from what?" I asked.
"Different from the woman who liked to laugh at my bad jokes," he said. "Different from the woman who wanted to be near me. Different in the way she speaks to me."
"I want a divorce," I said.
"You're joking."
"I'm not."
Damian's hand went to my chin, the movement sure as a bank teller's signature. "You know what you sound like?" he asked. "Ungrateful."
"I married you," I said. "I loved you. I thought that would be enough."
He threw his head back and laughed like he was tossing away a grudge. "You begged to be in my life, Kumiko. You asked for everything. Now you want to throw it away because you've decided you want to be proud?"
"I want to be me," I said. "Not whatever you let me be."
He narrowed his eyes. "You think you can go? Without a penny? You think you can live on your own? Without me?"
"I can," I said. "And I will."
He signed the papers without theatrics. His pen scratched the paper with a force like a verdict. He slid one copy back to me as if he offered charity.
"Good," he said. "Then don't come back."
He left the house the next morning for Europe. I packed my things in a borrowed suitcase Hayden had dropped off earlier. In the trunk of the rental car, I tucked the little jade pendant my mother had given me the day she survived so many years.
"You're really doing it?" Hayden asked again as we pulled away from the villa. "Really leaving him where his arrogance belongs?"
"I'm tired," I said. "And I am alive. That's the truth."
We drove toward the small apartment I had rented. It was modest—cheap rent, thin walls, a sink with a stubborn leak. It was mine in the smallest, cleanest way. I felt ridiculous and unmoored and strangely reborn.
Hayden stayed the first week. She cooked rice like she always did, piled the bowl high with salted fish and soy, and made me laugh at small things. But I still had to sleep with one eye open.
A month later, while Damian was in Europe, the world tilted again.
"My mom tried...," I started. "She jumped from the small window at the clinic. She fell but she didn't—"
Hayden's voice was a frightened thing. "Are you okay? Can you go to the hospital?"
"I am here," I said. "She's fine. Broken leg. Shaken. But alive."
When I went to the hospital, I found Susanne Ortiz, skin like old paper but eyes that knew my name, and I thought for a moment that everything could be as small as a coffee stain. I thought, stupidly, that maybe if I was kind enough, life would be kind back.
It didn't matter. The truth was, those I trusted most were the ones who would turn a knife later.
A week later, I went to see her. I saw a woman I thought had been my friend—Georgia Bender—arrive with another old classmate, Jaden Sanchez. They smiled at my mother's bed like saints. Georgia's hair was a careful cloud. Jaden's laugh was thin as glass.
"How do you do this?" Georgia asked, quickly, loud enough for the corridor to hear. "I mean, you manage so well. You're like a queen in a shack."
I glared. "Excuse me?"
"Oh come on," Jaden said. "Kumiko, you always had all the luck. Men, money—"
"You're being vile," I said. "My mother's here. Have some decency."
They leaned in, conspiratorial. "You should've listened to us when we warned you," Georgia cooed. "You really can't keep men the way you think you can."
I moved away. My heart thudded with something like betrayal.
Then they grabbed me. Jaden's hand was in my hair and I slipped and fell—the world went away like someone turning off a light.
I rolled, my skull knocking the stair edge. There was a rush of sound, people gasping. And then hands—strong hands—caught me.
"Hayden!" A voice that had not been in my life for a whole week.
It was Damian.
"Are you hurt?" he demanded, cradling me as if I were porcelain.
"You're back," I whispered, partly grateful, partly bewildered.
"Of course I'm back," he said. "I told you I would be back."
He did something ugly and beautiful then: he looked at the crowd and his look was a hammer.
"Who pushed her?" he demanded.
Georgia and Jaden blinked. "No one, sir, it—"
Damian's hand tightened almost imperceptibly and his voice went low. "Do you want to tell me everything, right now?"
They stammered. The hospital corridor filled with people looking. Cameras—someone always had phones—raised like glass stakes.
"You leave her alone," Damian said into the crowd. "You two, both of you, apologize."
Jaden cried. "I—I'm sorry."
Damian scooped me into his arms and a silence fell, sharp as a blade. I wanted to be angry. I wanted to pull away. Instead I wanted him to stay.
Days passed. Damian was attentive like a man repaying a debt. He wrapped a blanket around me when I was cold. He sat up through the night because my insomnia said it would not let me sleep.
"Why are you making it so hard?" I asked once, my voice small.
"Because you—" He hesitated as if naming what he felt was a crime. "Because you're mine."
I closed my eyes and tasted the glass in his words. "We signed divorce papers," I reminded him.
"We did," he said. "But contracts are paper. I'm not done."
I meant every word I had said. But sometimes people who break your heart know where the seams hide.
Then the photos started.
Someone had taken pictures of me—staged photos that made me look like a woman who traded everything for glitter and scandal. The internet filled with them, and the people who had smiled at my mother's bed suddenly found a way to make it my fault.
My phone buzzed until it warmed my hands.
"Who?" I asked Hayden. "Who would do this?"
She made a single, hard sound. "Georgia."
"She said? That little—"
"She was the source," Hayden said. "She's been slipping things to the press for months."
Anger was a heat that flattened everything in front of me. I could feel it sleeping in my bones, awake and patient.
I went to Damian and told him everything. He only watched, his face annoyingly unreadable.
"Do you want me to clear this up?" he asked.
"No." I surprised myself. "No, I will. I can do this."
He looked at me like a man evaluating a storm. "If you insist."
I did insist. I was tired of being rescued. I wanted to make them answer for what they had done.
A week later, I walked into a press conference at the small community center where local reporters gathered like moths.
"Miss Bonilla?" a reporter asked, eyebrows high. "Are you here to respond to the rumors?"
"I am here," I said. "And I'm not here to apologize."
They laughed. It was a small, casual smirk like a door that didn't know it was closing.
"You will show us proof?" another voice challenged.
"I have proof," I said, and that was the first true lie I'd told in a long time—because proof is an ugly, slippery thing you gather like shells on a storm-tossed beach.
"But I also have witnesses," I continued. "And a recording."
Hayden sat in the second row, hands clenched. Jacob hovered by the doors, steady as a ship anchor. Damian stood to the side, as if the crowd might bite him and he wanted to see every fanged bit.
I pushed a file across the table. "Here are messages, bank statements, recordings of calls to a small media site," I said. "They show that Ms. Georgia Bender, Ms. Jaden Sanchez, and their associates arranged for photos, paid for them, and fed them a narrative."
Jaden's face did the thing people do when the floor drops out: it moved from pink to ashy. Georgia's mouth shaped a question as if it were a small animal that might be offered a crumb.
"You can't prove anything," Georgia said.
"I can," I said. "Watch."
I played the recording.
"Make sure they see the jade pendant on her neck," a woman's voice said. "Make it look like she's using it to buy favors. Frame it as indecency."
"Done," another voice said, like a job completed.
The journalists' pens stopped mid-scratch. Phones clicked on. Someone's camera flashed.
"Where did you get that?" Georgia asked, the voice gone thin. "That's—"
"You told me to be ruthless," Jaden said, and there was the tiniest, slow unspooling of dignity in them both.
"Why would you do that to me?" I asked, and the world felt too loud.
"Because we were jealous," Georgia said. "You had things we couldn't get. You had...everything."
"You hurt my mother," I said. "You lied at her bedside. You told lies about her stability. You tried to take comfort where there was none, and then used it to wound me."
There was a moment when their faces rearranged themselves into shapes I had no words for.
"So, what now?" a reporter asked. "Are you suing?"
"I'm here to let the public see them," I said. "I'm here to let the people who matter—the people who give them power—see what they have done."
That was the moment the room changed. It was not dramatic—no gavel fell, no stage lights swooped—but it was public. It was a place where whispers became testimony. The cameras hummed, the online feeds clicked, and in minutes the story spread.
"You're going to make them pay?" Damian asked later that night when we sat on the terrace and shared the silence like a thin blanket.
"No," I said. "I'm going to make them feel what it's like to be exposed."
He took my hand. "You could have asked me to help."
"I did," I said. "I asked you to sign the papers and leave me to my life."
He laughed softly, as if remembering a joke.
"Is that what you wanted?" he asked.
"Partly," I admitted. "But the other part I wanted you to notice me. To stop being a storm that moved through life without noticing the damage."
"I noticed you," he said. "A long time ago."
That did not mean the rest of the world would.
Two weeks later, the public punishment I had wanted began.
We held a small city charity gala at the museum. I agreed to attend, knowing dozens would be there—reporters, socialites, acquaintances—and I had decided to make the night a stage.
"You're going to make a scene," Damian said when I told him.
"I'm going to make them answer," I corrected. "There's a difference."
"One of them will not take it well," he warned.
"Probably all of them won't take it well," I replied.
The room glittered with false ivory and laughter like confetti. Georgia glided in like a serpent in silk, Jaden a forced smile, and the rest of their coterie a circle of birds ready to peck.
"Ms. Bonilla," the gala organizer said, "we are so honored—"
"I'm honored too," I said, and took the microphone.
There was a small, audible intake from the crowd. "Ladies and gentlemen," I said, and my voice was steadier than my hands, "I didn't come to criticize charity. I came because charity should not shelter lies."
There is a skill to public humiliation. It must be precise. It must be documented. It must be visible.
"These people," I said, and the cameras found Georgia and Jaden like suns finding planets, "conspired to ruin my reputation. They bought staged photos. They fed false narratives to media outlets. They spoke at my mother's bedside with honey, and then they lied in microphones."
Gasps rustled through the room like wind through paper. The socialites stirred, half outraged, half thrilled—the way people always are when the surface of something familiar is scoured and reveals muck.
"What proof do you have?" Georgia asked, her voice tighter now, an animal suddenly on the defensive.
"A recording," I answered. "And bank transfers. And messages. And witnesses." I turned to the back where Jacob and Hayden waited, and I pointed. "Hayden Graves recorded a conversation where they planned this. Jacob Roussel has bank statements showing money to media accounts. The evidence will be turned over to the authorities and to the networks who published."
There was an effect like the atmosphere in a room changing because a window had been opened. Someone gasped. Someone else fumbled for a phone. Damian's presence in the room was a cold pressure to anyone who thought he might defend his wife.
Georgia's mouth worked. Jaden's face had the pallor of someone who had had the oxygen knocked out of them.
"This is slander!" Georgia shrieked. The word bounced like a brittle bead.
"It is libel if they published falsehoods," I said. "And you published them."
The first change on their faces was disbelief: a ridiculous denial, the stage of the thief pretending indifference.
"You're lying," Jaden said. "We never—"
"I have your messages," I said. "Tell the truth now or let the cameras tell your truth."
Now their reactions altered. Denial became pleading. They tried to accuse me of being bitter, of being desperate for attention. They tried to turn it, like a magician's trick, to make me the villain.
"She must be jealous," Georgia hissed. "She lost everything, so she tries to smear us."
The crowd's mood was hot with gossip. Some looked at them with pity. Many others were waiting for a spectacle. My heart kicked like a trapped animal.
Then the collapse began.
First it was Georgia's composure. Her face melted into a bewildered, careful panic. She tried to slither away, but the microphones were everywhere. The security politely unrolled to keep her from leaving—public villains often try flight before they attempt repentance.
"No, please," she breathed. "I didn't mean for it to go that far."
Her voice—too thin—changed the room. The second stage, the "I didn't mean it," is always designed to appeal for mercy.
"It was just gossip," Jaden sobbed. She dropped to her knees on the carpet like a crumpled doll. "We thought it would ruin her and then she'd beg. We thought we'd get the attention. It was a stupid joke."
Now the faces in the room split. Some frowned with disgust and whispered, "How cruel." Others murmured with triumph, "Serves her right to be caught."
Damian didn't move for a long time. Then he walked to the front, and his shadow covered them like a roof.
"Isn't this pleasant?" he asked in a voice that was not raised but was a hammer.
They began to beg: "Please—please don't—" They tried to find defenses. They tried to flex their connections to make themselves unbreakable.
But the crowd is a beast that loves a meaningfully served justice. They took it in. The whispers turned to questions and the phones to live streams. Everyone who had once nodded politely to Georgia now saw the angle and the greed that lay behind the smile.
As the night slid into a memory, a woman whose ankles had been slapped by scandal now stood publically shorn of pretense. People looked and formed opinions in real time.
They wanted to know why they had allowed such cruelty to exist unchallenged.
I left the podium with my head high. The jade pendant under my collar felt like a small, steady heart.
Outside, Damian walked with me to the car. He did not hold my hand, but his presence was like a wall I could lean against.
"You did it," he said.
"I did," I answered. "And it stung."
"You did it alone."
"Not alone," I corrected. "Hayden was there. You could have been there if you wanted."
He laughed, a small, surprised sound. "I was there. Watching."
It was not the victory I had thought I wanted. Their downfall did not erase the nights I had spent alone. It did not heal my mother's broken limb, or the years of being ignored until it suited him not to.
"Tell me truth," I said. "Why did you come back? To rescue me? To own me? To punish them? To punish me?"
"All of the above," he said, and his hand found mine. "Because I'm not a man who lets a woman in my life burn without being scorched by the same fire."
We both laughed—too sharply—for something that felt like hope and fear braided together.
In the weeks that followed, the city re-ordered itself. The video of the night became a thread throughout evening shows and whispered lunches. Georgia and Jaden lost sponsors. Invitations stopped arriving. People who had once been eager to be seen with them now texted their apologies and their regrets, afraid if they continued to be linked to clouded reputation. They sought forgiveness from anyone who would lend them pity.
I received an email from one of the outlets that had taken the photos. "We were fed misinformation," it read. "We apologize. We retract."
It was not a total justice. Not all pain can be undone by cameras and apologies. But for the first time in years I felt something like calibration in the world.
"How do you want to be now?" Damian asked once, a question he had never asked eight years ago when I first bent to his anchor.
"I want to be alive," I said.
He looked at me, and there was no settling of the old arrogance—just something like respect.
"Then let's do it," he said. "On my terms, or yours."
We were both dishonest when we said that. We meant all the things that the heart cannot name.
I still kept the jade pendant. It warmed against my skin in cold moments. Sometimes I would reach for it and remember my mother, the smell of antiseptic and her whisper, "Live well."
I did not need Damian to fix me. I did not need him to keep me. I needed him to recognize me as a person who had the ability to choose. The night the public turned their lights on to see cruelty, my choice became real.
Now, months later, when the villa garden shows a scar where a golf club struck clay, when the jade pendant catches the sun, I know that I wrote the paragraph of my life where the sentence "I will leave" became true.
"Do you regret any of it?" Damian asked me once, the night the museum lights dimmed and our table was the only place left filled with the hum of exhausted guests.
"Regret?" I echoed. "Yes. I regret the nights I let a possibility be called a promise. I regret the time I wasted giving myself like a debt."
He reached for my hand, and for the first time, I did not pull away to be polite. I squeezed back.
"I was a fool," he said. "You taught me that. I am sorry."
"I heard you," I said. "Just say it."
"I heard you say—'We're done,'" he whispered. "And I watched you walk out on being small."
"Then why did you sign the papers?" I asked.
"To see what would happen if I let you go," he said.
We sat in silence. The pendant kissed my collarbone like a truth.
We did not write the end the way novels do. We wrote the end the way actual life does: uneven, complicated, and stubborn. The public had seen their small cruelties undone. I had my mother's weak hand to hold a little stronger. The jade pendant sat like a promise I could keep to myself.
"Will you stay?" he asked finally.
"I will stay on condition," I said.
"Which is?"
"That you stop smashing plants when you are angry."
He smiled, a rare weapon of softness. "Deal."
And when, years later, someone asked me what changed everything, I would point to the jade pendant, to the cracked golf club, and to the one night in a museum where the lights burned bright enough to make liars squirm.
The End
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