Revenge14 min read
I Tried to Give You Back Your Eyes
ButterPicks15 views
I woke up to the smell of disinfectant and the dull ache beneath my ribs. Someone was breathing close—steady, careful.
"Minerva," a voice said, soft and reined in. "Don't move."
"I can't see," I answered. My voice scraped like old paper.
"That's okay," the voice whispered. "I'm here."
"I thought he would come," I said, because I had thought it for four years and for the months before that. "I thought Raymond would come."
"He did come," the voice said. "He came and he—"
"I know," I cut in. "He thought I did it."
"You didn't."
The hand on my shoulder was warm. The face above it belonged to Patrick Green. He had the calm voice of a doctor and the quiet that fit him like a coat. He had been there since the first day I opened my eyes after the worst things happened.
"Tell me again," I said. "Tell me the truth."
Patrick sighed. "He came late, Minerva. He came and he ripped open three boxes of your letters. He read them until his hands shook. He saw what you wrote. He cried."
"He cried?"
"He cried." He smiled without reaching me. "He hasn't left the hospital for days."
I let the word sink. A dry laugh escaped me. "What use are tears now?"
"You won't believe this," Patrick said. "But Raymond is a man who will spend whatever it takes to make a wrong right. He will spend his life, if he must."
"You think I want him to spend his life on me?" I asked. "I have no right."
"You have every right," Patrick said. "You were wronged."
I lay there as the sun moved a pale bar across the hospital curtain. My skin felt thin. I had been thin for a long time—thin because they had starved me, thin because hatred had eaten me. I remembered the warehouse, the warehouse that smelled of oil and old boxes and men's sweat. I remembered a face I thought was the one face that had always understood me and how that face had turned a new kind of cold when it needed to seem justified.
"You lied to him," Patrick said quietly.
"I had to," I said. "I had to keep my brother alive."
"You'd do it again," Patrick concluded.
"Maybe," I said.
"You're carrying a life," he said suddenly. "Do you want to keep it?"
My fingers tightened on the blanket. I felt that life like a small stone. "I do," I whispered.
"Then you will keep it," Patrick said. "No one will make that choice for you."
They told me later how the city shifted when the truth was pulled out like a rotten tooth. I do not like how I was famous for a while. I do not like how people poked and pointed. But fame was a dress I did not have to wear. The one person who mattered was Raymond Ash. He had been both my shelter and my executioner in one swift set of choices.
I want to tell everything in order because I have to say it in my voice, the voice that lived through hunger and hands that did not stop. It started with a wedding invitation and ended with a hospital ward. It started with a kiss and ended with a blade.
Four years earlier, I had trusted Raymond. He was kind when kindness required courage, and he was ruthless when business demanded it. He had kept me safe with a care that felt like worship. My letters to him—pages of silly notes and dreams of being a doctor, promises of coffee at midnight—were found in a locked office drawer when he finally listened.
"Did you write that many letters?" Raymond asked the first time he held the stack in the empty kitchen at our old apartment.
"I wrote every night for two years," I said. "I thought they were for you. I thought they'd be proof that I loved you even when I had nothing."
He laughed and kissed my temple with the gentleness of someone afraid of breaking glass. "You are ridiculous," he said. "I love you."
He could not have known then, not in the way the world can rearrange itself and make monsters out of people. The one who could have known was Maja Soto, my sister. She was prettier in a way that was practiced, her smile polished like lacquer. She used me as a ladder.
"Minerva," Maja whispered once, when the rain made the windows fog. "You should be grateful. I let you live in my home."
"Your home had bars," I said. "Your home had men in suits who made everything small."
"I saved you from worse," she said. "You should remember who warms your bread."
Maja was the one who planted the seed in Raymond's mind, or perhaps she watered a seed already there. She had reasons to hate me—jealousy I did not want to parse until it had cut too deep. She arranged a collision, an accident that robbed a woman of sight and put me in a cell. She handed out money the way other people pass around napkins at a party.
One night in the hospital, when my brother's coins clinked in an empty tin and Patrick had hurried off for supplies, Raymond came to my bed with a paper bag.
"Eat," he said. "Don't make me force it."
"I wouldn't let you," I said.
He sat. "I owe you apologies," he began. "I knew nothing that mattered. I let myself believe a story that made me comfortable."
"Comfortable?" I echoed. "You made me comfortable in a cage."
"I gave you power," he said, clumsy. "I took from you what I thought was weakness and turned it into my right to judge. I—"
"Stop," I said. "Apologies are cheap."
Raymond's hand slid and struck the scar on my temple. "They are bloody expensive," he muttered.
We made a bargain then—he would find the truth and make the truth public. I did not believe it would change the way my brother looked at me or the way the city whispered. I only wanted to know.
"Will you forgive me?" he asked.
"No," I answered, because the truth had weight and I had no place to keep another disappointment.
He nodded. "Then let me be punished by you."
He grew a fury that was turned outward. He hunted lawyers and records and the thin filament of a phone call that would prove Maja's meaning and presence. "We will drag her out," he told his assistant. "We will expose her."
I sat on the bed and listened to how he planned to punish the woman who had stolen my life. Punishments do not heal. But they are sometimes the first clean cut after infection.
When the night came for confrontation, rumors moved faster than light. The hospital's public room was full; reporters were on folding chairs, cameras like cold insects. I was wheeled in behind a curtain in a chair that smelled faintly of starch and bleach. Raymond walked in first, in his black coat, looking like a man who had lost his appetite for any ornament but truth.
"Maja," he said when she was brought in—escorted, trembling in a gray coat that did not hide the expensive shoes. "Stand."
The room fell into a tinnitus hum. "You," Maja said. Her voice had a brittle machine quality. "You have no right."
"I do," Raymond answered. "You set our minds on fire. You hired men to hurt the people we loved. You watched and you smiled."
"That's a lie," Maja said. "You're making it a lie."
Raymond pulled a thin folder from his coat. "You told me what to do." He opened the folder. "You told me how to make her look guilty. Here are your messages." He read them aloud.
"'Make the mother—sickly. He will believe it. Make the sister look like she is loose.'"
"'If they must lose everything, they deserve this life.'"
Maja's face shifted through a dozen masks. At first: denial. Then adrenaline, then panic.
"No," she said. "Those messages aren't mine. Someone doctored them."
"Do you expect me to trust you?" Raymond asked.
She laughed, the sound thin as paper. "He would never believe you now."
"There are witnesses," Raymond said. "There are bank transfers. There are men who took your orders."
At the back of the hall, a camera flashed. A nurse whispered. I heard the press ask for reaction and the room smell of coffee and fear. People who had once pointed at me now shuffled closer, eyes hungry. A woman who had cried when my father fell once pressed her face to the glass and watched.
"You gave money," Raymond said. He spread out bank receipts and photos. "You paid for anonymous calls. You paid to make a mother sick." He said each thing like laying out bones.
Maja's mouth trembled. She began to whisper names, to throw blame at a floor, at a driver, but the evidence kept snapping back like steel. She was forced to account. The public leaned in.
"How do you sleep?" someone shouted.
"I sleep well," she said. "I have everything I need."
"Do you have a conscience?" asked a reporter.
"No," she snapped. Her composure cracked. The first drop of sweat slid down her temple.
Raymond's voice was different now—less controlled, more raw. "You told them to rape a girl. You told them to hit an old woman until she could not let them judge anything. You took two lives from that car alone. You thought you'd never be found out."
"You have no proof," Maja said, then her eyes flicked to the courthouse binder on the table—every document Raymond had found.
"Do you want the footage?" Raymond asked. "Do you want the men you hired to speak?"
They called them up. One by one, men came forward: one man who had been paid to push a woman into traffic, another who had delivered pills, another who had rented a silent van. They stood before the crowd, the cameras tugging at their coats.
"This one's name is on the bank transfer," Raymond said, and it was Maja's name.
She slumped down. For a moment she clutched her head as if someone else had already struck her. The crowd's whisper became a chorus. Phones rose. A woman near me sobbed quietly, clutching a handkerchief.
"You wanted her dead," Raymond said to Maja. "You wanted to own my life by destroying hers. You made a bargain with cruelty."
Maja's eyes darted to the side and found my face. For the first time she looked small. "You—" she started.
"Save it for the judge," Raymond said. "You will have a judge."
There is a peculiar kind of silence when a person realizes the stage has shifted from private to public. Maja's color left her face and the world narrowed to the distance between her and the glass walls of that hospital room. People whispered. Someone took a video and uploaded it. A hundred different platforms replayed her hand as it shook.
She tried to speak again, but her voice caught. "I—" then "He lied to me."
Murmurs rose—some of sympathy, but most of sorrow for me. They had always loved spectacle.
"Look at her," someone murmured, "she is unmoored."
Maja's defense shifted from fury to bargaining. "If I pay you—" she started.
Raymond sat forward, and his face was a shadow of the man I had once kissed under a streetlight. "You can pay for nothing," he said. "Money is the only thing you know. What you cannot buy is the last thing you took."
"What is that?" she asked, tiny and feral.
"You took her sight," he answered. "You took a child's chance. You took a mother's mind. And you thought you could hide."
I had never wanted to be the centerpiece of a punishment. The thought of standing at the front and pointing made bile rise in my throat. But the room was full and the air tasted metallic. People leaned like birds on a wire.
"Confess," demanded a man in the front row. "We want the truth."
Maja began to scream: old accusations flung back at herself. She tried to twist it—"I was with Raymond—" "It was not me—" but the files in the folder told a different story. I watched her perform her life, manipulating the truth with fingers that had never known not to take.
"And what of the men you sent?" a reporter asked. "Will they be punished?"
"They will be," Raymond said. "They have testified. They helped me find you."
Maja's breath hitched. A nurse felt faint near the door. A teenager with a camera had tears on his cheeks. The crowd began to chant, a low sound that swelled like an ocean, "Shame, shame, shame."
Maja's face cracked. She looked like a mask that had been carved wrong. Her voice went thin. "I loved him," she whispered.
"Love doesn't kill," Raymond said. "It doesn't bargain with lives."
Then the public phase shifted. The prosecutor had been called. There would be charges. Maja was hauled away by hospital security and police. Her hands were cuffed. The cameras followed every step like vultures. She tried to meet my eyes; for a second, something like regret passed over her mouth. Then she vanished into the back of a police van.
The crowd outside the hospital did what crowds do—they recorded and reported, they shared and they judged. People who had once smiled at me now nodded at Raymond as if he had always known. The world is strange: justice can look tidy in a clip and still feel guttered in the chest.
Across town, another punishment took shape in a smaller circle. Gerard Dodson, the man who had been hired to clear the way for a lie, was brought to an impromptu hearing at a public memorial for victims. He had the sheen of someone who would pay and then disappear. But two men he betrayed showed up—men who had been used as muscle and were tired of being disposable.
"Do you want money?" one of them asked Gerard in the crowd. "We will take your life though you refuse to give it back."
Gerard tried to bluster, but the crowd booed and someone spattered red paint across his jacket, symbolic and ridiculous. For Gerard the punishment was exposure—his clients left him, his payments were retracted, his number scrubbed from databases. He lost the only currency he thought mattered: usability.
The public had decided: villains would be stripped of alibis, of money, of invitations. The city tasted like a cold lemon.
Back in the hospital, when the curtain fell in that crowded room, Raymond found me and curled his hand into mine. "I am sorry," he said, a small man in a big suit trying to be brave.
"For what?" I asked.
"For not believing you," he said. "For letting her be the one who could hurt you."
I turned my head and let the bandage cool my cheek. The scar where I had once made a mark on my own eyes throbbed like a pulse. The scar would not heal right away. It was an ugly proof. People could dance around it and call it dramatic, but the truth of it was like a live wire.
"You should be angry," I told him. "You should be angry and do something useful with it."
He looked at me like a man seeing a map with a missing city. "I will be," he said. "From now on, I will be useful."
"Useful," I repeated. "Begin with your sister." He flinched.
"No," he said. "Not only that. Begin with how we treat people. Begin with apologies that are more than words."
We argued in short sentences, the way people make up after storms. He was awkward and earnest. He asked for things that I could not grant and promised things he could not keep. Sometimes, when the air was thin, he would fall apart and then gather himself like an embarrassment.
I did not forgive him. I forgave him gestures. I made room in my life for him to work.
The months stitched themselves with appointments, therapy, and the small kindnesses that became the scaffolding of a new life. Patrick found a surgeon who specialized in eye grafts. Frida Wood, Raymond's sister, who had been blind and near to broken, volunteered her cornea. She said she had dreamt of seeing again and that this was the way to both sacrifice and gift. Frida was soft in ways I had not expected; she lived with a quiet regret and a stronger desire to right wrongs.
"Will it hurt?" I asked the day before the operation.
"It will," Frida answered. "It's worth the hurt."
"Am I worth it?" I asked.
Frida just smiled. "You have been worth something for a long time. You are worth the fight."
I went into the operating room with a smallness like a shell. The world went white and then gray. They sewed and grafted and stitched. I woke up with bandages over my face and a man whose hand would not leave mine—Raymond's. For the first time in a long time, he did not look like a judge but like a frightened child.
"Open them when the doctor says," he murmured.
Hours later, the bandages came away. I blinked as if to shake out dust.
"Do you see?" Raymond asked.
"I see light," I said. The world was a raw watercolor. "Everything is dim and beautiful."
The surgeon smiled. "Give it time."
I learned to use a cane for a while, then to trust my steps. People apologized, and I learned the difference between an apology and a restitution. Some things could be rebuilt. Some things could not. My brother, Zaid Mendez, got the treatment he needed. He had been small and angry at me at first, but he grew to be mellow as he healed. Our mother—Ellen Crowley—learned to smile with a memory that didn't always come. She sat in patchwork sun and hummed.
Patrick never stopped being with me. He argued with Raymond when the old impulses surged, but he also let Raymond work. The three of us—Raymond, Patrick, and I—learned a rhythm of quiet days and louder mending.
Maja's trial was public and long. The court read a thousand things about greed and envy; she pleaded. The judge noted the cruelty. She was found guilty. Her sentence was made into a social lesson for those who believed beauty could be a shield. She was sent away. The public did not feel vindicated. They felt exhausted.
Gerard Dodson lost his paying clients. The men he had hired as muscle turned state's witnesses. He cried once in an alley like a dog and then vanished. Small punishments, but to him they were total.
On a golden afternoon while I sat in a garden that Patrick had coaxed me into visiting, a small boy tripped and fell. He scraped his knee; his wail hit me and something tender opened in my chest.
"Let me," I said out loud.
His mother looked at me with a quick panic, then recognition. "You are Minerva Omar," she said. "The one they wrote about."
"Yes," I said, and knelt. My fingers were clumsy with new sight, but they were guiding. The boy calmed.
The mother exhaled. "Thank you," she said. "Your story—it's everywhere. People say such cruel things."
"They should not," I said.
"Would you sign his shirt?" she asked. "He loved the part where you—what you did."
I hesitated. The boy looked at me like I might be a story hero. I smiled the sort of smile I did not recognize and took a pen.
"You don't owe us anything," the mother said.
"I owe myself a life," I answered.
Later that month, Raymond and I went to a quiet room in the courthouse to give testimony. Maja watched from the dock, her face a map of regret and calculation. I read my statement aloud. People listened. The judge listened. The world recorded everything.
When we left, the cameras were hungrier than before, but we refused the frenzy. We walked under a narrow lane of elm trees and neither of us tried to make excuses. Raymond slipped his hand into mine.
"If you ever decide to hate me," he said, "I will let you. But please—don't let hatred be the only house you live in."
"I don't know if I can trust you yet," I told him honestly.
"You don't have to now," he answered. "Let me show you."
He showed me with the small things: the nights he would read aloud letters I had written to myself in that cold prison, the way he took care of our son when I was weak, the clarity with which he apologized and repaired. He did not expect fireworks. He wanted patience.
The day my son was born, I held a man who looked like both of us, and I understood the fragile miracle. He had my eyes—wild and dark—and Raymond's jaw. He screamed with a vigor I had not expected. Raymond cried like a man finding the shore.
"I will keep him safe," Raymond promised. He had scars on his hands from when he had fought for me; the near-death had cut him. At night, when the house was breathing, he would touch the line at my temple and whisper, "Forgive me."
I did not forgive him like the world forgives with a snap. I forgave him the long way—by letting him be the man who did the work.
Maja's punishment continued. Her verdict was pronounced in a packed room. She went to prison. The public hated and then forgot because the news cycle is a river that forgets everything but its own flow.
At her sentencing, the judge spoke my name and then stood for the law. "Cruelty is a crime," he said. "Deception for profit is also a crime. You will make reparations."
Maja's face crumpled. She cried, and I do not think it was for the pain she had caused. It was for the cost she had paid to herself.
Outside, people gathered. Some spat, which I did not see because I had learned to look away. One woman offered me a ribbon; a child gave me a stone. It was small, these human offerings, but they were honest.
Months later, at a small table in our sunlit kitchen, Raymond set down a bowl of porridge and watched me with a look that was steadier than storms. "Eat," he said.
"I don't deserve it," I told him.
"You deserve shelter from storms," he said. "You deserve hands that do not pull away."
I dipped the spoon to my mouth. The porridge was bland and safe. "This is our life now," I said. "It is not some fairy tale with a gilded thread."
"No," he replied. "It is messy. It has bruises."
We sat like that, two people who had once chosen wrong and were learning to choose right.
One autumn day, when the light on the street was thin and gold, I found the last letter I had written in prison—the one I had never mailed. I folded it and slid it into Raymond's pocket like a small bargaining chip.
"What's that?" he asked later, fingers fumbling the paper.
"It is the thing I promised to give back," I said.
Raymond looked at me as if he had just been shown something sacred. "You don't owe me anything."
"No," I said. "But I wanted to make one clean thing. I had cut out the darkness when I could not bear it. I wanted to return the rest."
Raymond smiled and kissed my forehead. "Then we keep it with us," he said.
We kept the letter. We kept our son. We kept the quiet mornings. There were scars we could not scrub out, and there were memories like lit coals that sometimes flared. But there were also dinners cooked badly and folded laundry and laughter at the wrong times. They were not the gilded life I had imagined when I was twenty, but they were solid, and real.
If you ask me now whether I forgive everyone who did me wrong, I will tell you this: some people asked for sympathy and did not deserve it; some asked for justice and got it; some pretended to be sorry and were not. But the world kept going. I kept breathing. My child learned to clap.
Once, when the hospital news vans were far, a woman on the street asked me, "Do you feel safe?"
I looked at my son playing at my feet—this small person who could not yet say "mama" properly—and then at Raymond's hands, callused and kind.
"I do," I said.
We walked home under an elm tree. I held Raymond's hand, and he did not let go.
The End
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