Sweet Romance12 min read
I Want My Son — and I Want Truth Served Hot
ButterPicks13 views
I woke with someone shouting in my ear and a small, warm hand tangled in my fingers.
"Get out of my house with that baby," a woman's voice screamed. "You and your little freeloader — get out!"
My head hurt like I'd been hit, like someone had shaken a jar full of broken glass behind my skull. I blinked. A small face looked up at me, round as a moon, eyes like polished onyx. The child squeezed my fingers and said, in a voice that made my heart stop,
"Mama, let's go home."
I sat up slowly and held him. He was five, light as a feather, somehow both stranger and the most familiar thing in the world. I had no memory of how I got there. The woman across from us — older, sharp as the crease in a suit — stepped forward, hand lifted like she would slap me.
"How dare you," she spat. "You are poison to the Alexander house. Out!"
I moved on instinct. I had learned hand-to-hand in college. I blocked and folded. Her shriek echoed in the marble hall.
"You're the reason the Alexanders are cursed!" she cried. "Get out!"
The word lodged like a stone: Alexander. My pulse thudded. My head fuzzed, but some cold, sarcastic knowledge slid into place. This was a story I had read last night — a dodgy, melodramatic novel I'd fallen asleep to. In the book I was a supporting villain. I had seduced a man, trapped him with a baby, blackmailed him into marriage. In the end I'd been discarded, driven to ruin or worse.
I swallowed and did the only thing that felt sane: I picked up the child and walked.
"Mommy," he murmured, and the nickname — a fragment of another life in someone else's book — warmed me like sunlight. He fit in my arms like a missing puzzle piece.
We found a red sports car waiting like a talisman. I buckled him into the child seat.
"What's your name?" I asked, low.
"Dylan," he said, surprising me. "But my grandparents call me Sal."
Dylan. Sal. My brain did a slow flip. Sal. Salvador. The name was a small, perfect knot of truth.
I took him home. The house smelled like stale coffee and the faint ghost of corporate power. I put him down on the sofa, smoothed his hair. He was asleep in minutes, the kind of sleep small children get when they trust someone for the first time.
I tried to call one number. Blocked. The next was a text that went through, just three cold words: "Nine a.m., North Street Café."
The words sizzled on my screen like a dare.
At nine the next morning he was already there — him, Fraser Alexander, carved from marble and midnight. He made a man look like a flawless sculpture had come alive and started running a company.
"Fraser," I said, the simple sound of his name heavy and wrong on my tongue.
He glanced up, dark eyes narrowing. "You sent me one line. I came."
"I'm not asking for much," I said, steady. I had thought it through in the dark hours, when the world felt brittle and money sounded like a ladder. "My bridal dowry, the house, and one million for the divorce. And custody of Sal."
He smiled, almost kindly. "One million?"
I met his gaze. "And the child."
He sat back, hands steepled like some judge. "No."
"No?" I could taste the old story — the hateful, inevitable rejection.
"He's my son," he said. "I won't let you raise him poorly."
I laughed, soft and breathless. "Will you, Fraser? Will you raise him? Have you helped at all the five years he's been alive? Or is being 'my son' just words printed on a certificate?"
He blinked. It was almost funny to watch that precise man without his armor of indifference. "So you want custody."
"Yes," I said. "And a proper settlement."
We spoke for an hour. The café faded around us. He asked, in the way rich men do that makes it sound like everything is a negotiation, "Why now?"
"Because I'm done playing the poor, scheming wife," I said, and the lie — the truth I had borrowed from other people's suffering — tasted like freedom. "Because I'm going to build something that is mine, and I need the capital."
He reached into his pocket and placed a black card in front of me. "Two million. Take it. But I never said I would divorce."
"Do you mean to keep me?" I asked. The old version of me — the one who used to worship him — would have melted. The new me, the woman with a plan, kept her face blank.
"I never said I would divorce," he repeated.
The words were a small, clear hammer. I left with two million on the card and a something like a plan forming at my back. If he would not divorce me, I would take the money and build an independence that no cold gaze could purchase.
I bought clothes. I dressed Sal like a prince. We shopped until the bags in my arms were heavy and ridiculous. At night I tucked him in, read stories, felt the soft weight of this strange, fierce little person on my chest. He asked about his father, and I told versions of truth that suited the moment. "He's working to give us a better life," I said. He believed me. How could he not?
A week passed in that odd dream of feeding, drawing, and sewing the first outlines of a shop. I found a space on a commercial street and a kind man — a coffee shop owner named Dylan Nguyen — who offered inventory tips and, more dangerously, genuine friendship.
"You're serious, aren't you?" Dylan said, watching my sketches.
"Completely," I said. "I need materials called moon-blue silk. Do you know anyone?"
He chewed his lip. "There's a trade company. It's... part of the Fraser group."
I stopped breathing for a second. Every path seemed to loop back to him.
"Do you want me to ask?" he offered.
"No," I said. "I'll go myself."
On the day I went to the market, Fraser appeared again — once at a café window, once in the background of a shop. When I met Dylan for lunch, Fraser drove past. I watched him watching me, and the old thing inside my chest clenched.
"You look happy," he said one afternoon, out of nowhere.
"Mostly," I lied. "I'm tired. But happy."
"You're going to open a store?" He sounded... honestly curious.
"Yes," I said. "Because I'm done playing a role that isn't mine."
He listened like someone trying to measure something he had once underestimated. I liked that he listened. I also knew his listening came with maps — who he was, how he moved people's lives. He wasn't a monolith of cruelty. He was nuanced in ways I had never allowed myself to see.
And yet — there was Katherine Lawson. Katherine had the kind of smile that kept knives hidden behind teeth. She arrived like a delicate spear, all sharp tailoring and practiced sympathy.
"Fraser tells me you've been... busy," she said, all light and soft.
"Congratulations," I said coldly. She blinked, just enough.
She had reasons to worry. She wanted him. He was her history and, in the novel of our lives, the protagonist. She was the bright woman at the center of the story, everything I was not supposed to be: chosen, adored, clean in the shapes that mattered.
One night, at a family dinner in the grand old house belonging to Fraser's grandfather — Aurelius Zheng, a man whose mere presence could calm a boardroom — I walked through corridors smelling of candle wax and old paper. I went to the small lake to breathe.
"Katherine?" I heard someone say behind me. Her voice was like velvet pulled over glass.
She came closer, and before I could turn, she shoved me.
It happened so quickly: a push, a splash. Cold closed over my head. Air tore from me. There was a second of panicked noise, of beating limbs, and then a searing, blinding darkness.
I remember hands. I remember him. Fraser's arms — angry, capable — hauled me up. He himself had cuts along his back, like someone who'd torn through brambles for me.
When I woke, there was a doctor — Margot Galli — white coat calm. There were nurses fanning and fretful voices. I had a nose full of lake and the echo of Katherine's laugh in my ears.
"You were pushed," I said the next morning, weak but furious. "She tried to kill me."
Fraser looked at me, and for a moment the usual coolness melted. "We checked the yard," he said. "No clear footage. It will be difficult to prove."
"You saw her," I said. "You were there."
"I was late," he admitted. "I saw you in the water. I jumped."
He was angry then, very human. I was supposed to be the ruined wife; here was evidence that he had risked himself for me when he could have turned away. It complicated the neat little map I'd plotted.
But complications breed plans. If the world would not give me justice for what Katherine had done, I would create justice that would be louder than her whisper. I had to protect Sal. I had to keep him safe. I had to make Katherine understand what it meant to target someone's life.
So I recorded. I gathered. I kept notes in phone folders, in a little brass notebook I called ledger, the way old women keep secrets. Dylan offered help that had no transactional edge: he wanted to help the neighbor who had been robbed and yet refused to stay small. He introduced me to contacts, suppliers, and one cold, brave woman at a charity who owed him favors.
Weeks passed. I opened a modest studio and the first racks of handmade pieces hung like bright flags. My hands bled design into cloth. Sal learned to call the mannequin "Mr. Button." Life was small and fixed in newness.
And Katherine watched.
I learned she was petty. I learned she liked to gloat. She thought she had power because she could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Fraser in public. She wanted him back like a monarch wanting a crown.
What she didn't know was that pride, exposed, burns.
I collected evidence. Security footage from the grounds — a blind spot that we had found — recorded a figure at the edge of the lake the night of the incident. A snippet of audio caught a muffled laugh. A cleaner, shaky and guilty, told the truth to a friend who told me because she could no longer carry it alone. It was small: a text message thread Katherine had thought deleted, in which she wrote, "Make it happen tonight." There was a witness — a distant cousin of the household staff — who had seen Katherine near the lake and swore she had been wearing the exact shade of shoes caught in frame.
I didn't want vengeance the way the novel's heroine wanted it; I wanted safety and a lesson that would echo. But I did want Katherine to feel the public bite of being exposed.
The night I chose was calculated. Fraser's company was hosting a gala for a foundation his grandfather supported. The hall was full: trustees, journalists, local celebrities, and a forest of smartphones. Katherine came in the pale silk everyone admired. She walked like she owned the room. My heart hammered, and I felt a strange calm.
I had invited only three people I trusted: Dylan, Margot, and a senior editor friend who had promised to run the story if the proof held.
We arrived with a plan. I had a speech prepared — a short, sharp thread of words designed to catch like fire. But first, the hosts made remarks. I stood near the group of donors, feeling like a small stone with a fuse.
When the moment came, Katherine rose on Fraser's arm and smiled at the crowd. He announced an auction item — a private viewing of a restored painting — and then, as if the stage belonged only to them, raised a glass.
"To family," she said, eyes bright. "To safety."
It made me sick. I moved forward.
"Excuse me," I said, loud enough that some heads turned. "May I have a moment?"
There were whispers. Katherine's smile tightened.
Fraser frowned. "Elaine?"
"Elaine Owens," I corrected softly. "My name is Elaine."
A camera swivelled. Someone I knew snapped the cue; the room's attention snapped like a rubber band.
Katherine's hand searched for Fraser's arm. Someone filmed. Another guest leaned forward.
"I'm sorry to interrupt," I said. "But I need to show you something."
I touched the screen in my pocket. On the large projector behind the stage — a trick arranged with my editor friend — the footage blinked and filled the wall. It showed a night of wet reflections, a sway of hedges, a shape near the water. The angle was imperfect, the light poor. Then the angle cut and we saw the shoes, the shove, the splash.
Gasps. Phones hovered like satellites. Katherine's face slackened for a millisecond and then contorted.
"That's not—" she started, voice paper.
"Her text," I said. "She sent it to a cleaner last month. 'Make it happen tonight.' She wrote it."
I read the message aloud. My voice didn't shake.
"She pushed me," I said. "She tried to kill me. She timed it; she boasted; she planned it."
A murmur grew into a tide. Someone yelled, "Is this a joke?" Another whispered, "She's dangerous."
Katherine's mouth opened. She looked for the friend who might make the moment disappear. There was nothing. The projector played the next clip: Katherine's shoes on camera, a pair of stilettos in the mud.
"You're lying!" she screamed. The sound cut across the room like a blade.
"You wanted me gone," I said, calm. "You wanted me to be swept away so that you could have him with no one to blame."
She staggered back as the evidence looped again. People were recording. Her eyes slid from face to face. She searched for allies and found only faces pinched with dismay.
"Don't," she said, starting to cry. "You don't know—"
"Do it in public," I said, and the words surprised my own tongue. "Make your move in private and you might have gotten away with it. But you did it in a place where family keeps its secrets. You did it where people watch and remember."
She laughed then — a thin, brittle sound like china scraping. "You're insane."
"Look at the messages," I said. "Look at the footage."
A reporter stepped forward. "Miss Lawson, do you have anything to say?"
Katherine's denial crumpled. Her face shifted — from composed to flustered, from defiant to terrified. For a terrifying second she looked like someone on a cliff who suddenly realized the ground had been stolen away.
"I didn't— I didn't mean—" she breathed. The crowd leaned in.
"Beg them," someone muttered. "Beg."
She did not beg at once. She tried to scoff, to conjure the dame she had always been. Then the phone lights multiplied. Someone called for security. Kid gloves dropped. The women around us took their phones out and recorded, and the men turned solemn.
"Give me a chance," Katherine said. Her voice was shaking now; the veneer shattered. "It's not like that. He— he loves me."
A ripple of cold laughter ran through the room.
"Beg," said a woman near the stage, quietly, dangerously.
Katherine's shoulders bowed. She had been proud for so long; pride can be taught to kneel. In front of a hundred witnesses and a hundred more behind their glowing screens, she sank to her knees.
"Please," she whispered. Her hands were like fledglings. "Please forgive me. I didn't mean to—"
The cameras were merciless. People whispered, recorded, clucked. Someone called the police. Someone else took a photo and uploaded it with a caption that spread like spilled oil.
The shift was instant. A tide of shame broke across Katherine. She had been a dagger masked in satin; now she was a person exposed, trembling and small. She tried to reach for Fraser's hand; he stepped back. He did not touch her.
She looked up at me, a life on her face dissolving into puddles. The arc I had traced in private had ended in a public, cold light. I had not wanted to ruin human dignity, but Katherine had put my life in jeopardy. Judges do not always sit in courtrooms.
Her first reaction was venom. "You're a liar," she spat, between sobs.
"Call the police," Fraser said.
The room filled with a sound like rain — murmurs, the rustle of silk, the hum of cameras. Someone started to clap, tentative at first, then with a force that surprised everyone. Not applause for me, not exactly. It was applause for truth. Phones recorded. A hundred voices whispered condemnation. Katherine retched through her apology, her composure gone. She tried to stand. Someone near the exit shouted, "Get her out of here," and people parted like curtains.
She fell again. For a long breath everyone watched the fall. People photographed. A woman shouted, "Shame on you!" Another, "How could you?" A child pointed and tugged his parent's sleeve. Somewhere a click announced a video going viral.
She went through stages the book had promised: first arrogance, then confusion, then denial, then collapse. She clawed at her silk dress in a gesture that looked, suddenly, ridiculous. She grabbed at me once, fingers scraping my sleeve. "Please," she begged, voice small. "Please don't ruin me."
"No," I said, because at that moment I felt a quiet cruelty I hadn't expected. "You tried to kill me."
Katherine sobbed, rewound and repeating her pleas like a scratched record. A man in a suit filmed. Someone put his phone in my face. "Do you want a statement?" the reporter asked.
I said what I've always said I would say: "He saved me. His arms were cut. I almost died that night because of her. I don't want vengeance. I want my son safe. I want responsibility."
The press relayed the videos. The foundation revoked Katherine's invitation to co-chair their next event that afternoon. Her sponsors called their managers. In public, she shrank. She begged. She asked forgiveness in a voice that made old men frown. Cameras gave her no mercy. She had wanted to erase me; instead she had erased herself.
The fallout lasted days. Katherine's name trended. People debated morality on air. Fraser took matters into his own hands with corporate restraint: he filed a complaint, placed the evidence into a legal packet. Private calls were crisp and efficient. Katherine surrendered to the process — the social beating followed by legal consequence. She was stripped of public roles, quietly humiliated at shareholder meetings where once she had smiled and signed a checksheet. Her life, which had gleamed like polished marble, pitted under the first frost of public shame.
At home, in the quiet aftermath, Fraser did something I had not expected: he took Sal from my lap and tucked him under his chin like a man who had found a secret map. "You cooked for him," he said to me once. "I will help with school drop-off."
"I don't need favors," I said.
He smiled, and for the first time the armor around him creased into something softer. "Maybe not," he said. "But your shop — the moon-blue silk — tell me what you need."
Those words were small mercy and a business offer braided together. I had asked for money; instead I was offered support with the kind of deliberate calm that changes things.
Months later, when my first window display gleamed at dusk and customers fingered moon-blue silk as if testing water for salt, Katherine's name was a rumor with a bruise on it. She kept low. Her staircase in the social world had been roped off.
I stood at my shop window with Fraser and Sal, and I felt a strange, easy peace.
"You kept your promise," Fraser said. "You kept him safe."
"I kept both of us safe," I said. Sal yawned, two small teeth shining.
Fraser handed me a small velvet box. Inside lay a delicate emerald bracelet. He had bought it for no reason I could name, a private gesture in a world of negotiations.
I slid it onto my wrist. "Not because I wanted jewelry," I said.
He watched me like someone watching an experiment that had yielded something human at last. "Because you wanted your life back."
I looked down at the emerald catching the late light and tucked my ledger into my bag. Outside, the café across the street, with its warm wood counter and Dylan's easy smile, hummed like a good song.
The bracelet felt heavy in a way money never had. It was a reminder that some things could be bought, some must be earned, and some — like the smell of a good cup of coffee on a noisy morning, or the small, steady weight of a child in your arms — were worth more than any headline.
And when I passed the lake one evening, I didn't look back at the dark water. I didn't need to. The memory had done its work; the truth had been made a mirror everyone could see. The emerald warmed my wrist like a tiny, private sunrise.
The End
— Thank you for reading —