Sweet Romance14 min read
My Childhood Friend, His White Moon, and the Ring with My Initials
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"Two years," he said, voice breaking like thin glass. "Please, Ava — divorce me."
I looked at Franz Luo and the world tilted. The lamp in his study had burned through the night; I had seen its light when I fell asleep on the couch. Now Franz knelt on our living room floor, eyes rimmed red, beard stubble on his jaw. He was the boy who’d learned to say my childhood nickname first. He was the man who had married me because our families fit. He was also the one begging to be let go.
"Why now?" I asked. "Why—"
"I met her again," he choked. "Belen is back."
My throat tightened. "Belen who?"
"Don't play dumb," Franz said, and for the first time in our lives he looked small to me. "Belen Collins."
Belen Collins. The girl who once vanished and returned like a rumor. The girl they called his white moon.
I swallowed hard. "What if I say no?"
He shook his head. "You are carrying a child, Ava. I can't— I can't hurt you. Please."
"You want a divorce because you met her again?" I whispered.
Franz closed his eyes and the knuckles on his hand went white. "I can't compete with a ghost from my past. I thought— I thought I could be practical. I thought we could be family. But it's eating me, Ava."
I laughed once, a short sound that startled me. "We were childhood friends, Franz. Since diapers, remember? You used to crawl to me and call me 'Keke' before you even knew your parents' names."
He winced. "You say that like a fairy tale."
"And?" I asked. "Is she a fairy? Or just a woman with hair in the right place and a story that fits your pity?"
He flinched as if I'd struck him. "Stop it. This isn't simple."
"It isn't simple? You cheated on me in your heart for years and married me because it was convenient," I said. "You think I'm not allowed to be bitter?"
Franz looked like he might cry. "I never meant to—"
"You never meant to," I repeated. The sentence rang hollow.
We had grown up together. Franz and I learned to climb, to speak, to fall. He used to be my best partner in mischief. I remembered when his first full word in life, so the story goes, was my childhood name. He denied it when told, but the elders laughed and kept the tale. I changed myself for him. I cut my hair long for him. I learned to play the piano, to draw, to study— all for the idea that I could be the heroine beside him.
"Do you remember when you pulled my pigtails in third grade?" I said, softer now.
He managed a weak smile. "Do you remember the time you dragged me into the boys' toilet and we both nearly got expelled?"
We both laughed then. That memory was a tether.
"But that was then," Franz said. "People change."
"People change," I agreed. "Sometimes they change into crueler versions."
A day earlier, his study light burned. Tonight, his knees hit the wooden floor and the ring in the jewelry box still had my initials engraved inside. I could not reconcile the ring and the plea.
"I am pregnant," I said, because I wanted to see the truth in his face.
He stared. "Pregnant?"
"Six weeks," I said. No tremor, no hiding. "I checked. It's real."
Franz's face collapsed. "We can't—" he whispered. "We can't keep it."
I felt the ground open. "You want me to abort our child?"
"I don't want to hurt anyone," he said. "Belen suffered so much—"
"Belen," I repeated with acid. "The woman who vanished? The woman who left because she thought herself unfit?"
"She had reasons," he said. "She told me—"
"She lied to you," I said. "Or she hid things. She used to be my roommate's enemy in college. She used to be everyone's bright star, and she left. You married me, Franz, for convenience. Don't ask me to erase my own child because you couldn't move on."
He lowered his head. "Ava, please—"
I got my bag and left. Two years of marriage packed into two suitcases. I did not go home first. I rented a studio, called my friend Brielle Butler, and we screamed and cursed and then cried. My mother rang like a storm, scolding and then sobbing. My father took it with quiet fury.
"She is not welcome in the house again," my mother said, spitting the name with venom. "If Franz comes here, I'll..."
"You promised him as your son," my father said. "But he is old enough to decide."
"I'll file for divorce," I said that night to Brielle.
"Don't be hasty," Brielle said, but her voice trembled. "You need time, Ava."
"Time for what? To be cuckolded by a memory?"
"To choose, to think."
I decided to keep the baby. "He's mine," I told Brielle later. "He will not be stripped away because of someone's jealousy."
Brielle was the one who texted me a link early the next morning. "Ava, look at Johanna's moments."
"Don't," I said.
"Just—"
I looked. A birthday photo of Belen Collins in Johanna Meyer’s post. Belen's hands clasped, crown tilted, eyes closed in a wish. In the lower corner of the picture was a hand wearing an engagement-looking platinum band. The band had an engraving visible inside the rim — my initials.
I called Franz. "Where were you last night?"
He stammered. "I went to the office early, I— I told you I'd be late."
"You were at her birthday," I said. "You were wearing my ring."
He sounded a stranger. "It wasn't like that— we ran into each other. She is back in the city. She came back a month ago."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
He said nothing and then, in a voice like a leaf, "I didn't want to... hurt you."
"Too late," I said. "You already did."
At midnight I waited and waited and the car didn't come. At three in the morning a vehicle pulled into the driveway. Franz came in reeking of smoke and cheap liquor. He looked seven years older.
"Ava," he mouthed. Then he knelt and begged for a divorce.
"I will not let you make my child a casualty of your nostalgia," I said. "I will have this baby."
Franz said, "Please don't. Don't have it."
"Fine," I said. "I will leave."
He begged. I left.
In S City I tried to rebuild. I learned to be alone with a life growing inside me. I opened a small rental, kept my belly warm, watched videos about pregnancy and parenting, and took long walks by the river. I thought about the boy inside me. "You will have a mother who wanted you," I told my belly. "Not one who is an afterthought."
Belen made the city loud. She had become a beauty influencer, a star whose face could drown out a crowd. Her followers numbered in the hundreds of thousands. When her posts blew up, so did a rumor thread that accused me of climbing into their love triangle. An emotional blogger used Johanna's post and wove a story that painted me as the scheming childhood friend who wanted everything. The comments were vicious.
"Everyone believes her," Brielle told me. "They've got her side and your side is—"
"I have proof," I said. "Franz's call records, photos from Johanna's moments, timestamps that don't lie. She is claiming victimhood, but the timeline says otherwise."
I posted the evidence and a bigger platform picked it up. Belen's fans swore revenge. Her followers felt betrayed and I watched their fury shift as evidence landed. Yet Belen's fame only grew. Her online persona gleamed. She had the uncanny ability to turn accusation into sympathy.
"It's like she planned it," Brielle muttered. "Get her on hot search twice and then she'll be the victim."
"Why would she want any of this?" I asked the empty room.
"Maybe she wanted you out," Brielle said. "Maybe she wanted Franz back. Maybe she wanted to climb to the top."
I didn't know. My biggest fear was that she might reach further. Then the night I almost died happened.
I was crossing the street for pastry. I remember thinking of butter and sugar and the sound of Brielle laughing. I saw a face, familiar and ugly with scorn, call me names, and then a metal bike struck me. There was a screech, a flash of pain, and then black.
The attackers were low-level fans, foolish and easy to manipulate. Daxton Copeland was the rider. He later admitted he had been egged on and had chatted online with a user that he thought was Belen's manager. He said it was a righteous thing to defend his idol. The blow took everything from me. The child slipped away.
At the hospital I pressed ice and tiny needles of guilt. "This is what you wanted," people whispered. "You wanted the baby's father to suffer."
I could not think of Belen as only a beauty. She had become a presence in my life, a threat and a ghost. People came and went. Franz came, drunk and begging, and I told him to go. He said he would find whoever did it. He was desperate to do something.
"I will give you justice," he promised.
The police arrested Daxton. He said he was alone. He said he recognized my face from a post and then overshot. He said he was sorry. He said it many times, but it could not bring back what was gone. I sat in the hospital bed and refused to forgive the man who crashed into my life.
At the trial, Daxton Copeland was convicted of intentional bodily harm. He received five years. He cried on the stand and apologized. He said he'd been a fool for a face on a screen.
But the noise did not stop there. The evidence my relatives pulled together dug up secret rooms and trails we had not suspected. Zoe's return to the city had a shadow behind it. A man named Zhang — "Zach" — chapters of Belen's past whispered — had been in her life. Later investigators found a dead body in a cave miles away. DNA matched. The trail tightened.
We got one truth: Belen had left before because— she had not left to nurse wounds or to be noble. She had been arranging a life where obligations and threats tangled. She had hidden relationships, men who were both protector and threat. When control slipped and a man threatened to expose her secrets, she snapped.
The courtroom was full. I had not intended to attend, but news drew people like moths to flame. Belen entered with a face of porcelain, hair arranged, the kind of look agents curate. She smiled a smile of someone with a script. The charges were murder, a cold set of words that made the air heavier than any season.
She had killed Zhang Yajun — the man from her old life — the evidence said, in a rage that was as deliberate as it was desperate. I sat there with my hands folded. Brielle squeezed my fingers tight and whispered, "We saw it coming."
"Don't watch," I told her.
"No," Brielle said. "You must."
When Belen was brought into the glass booth to testify, the court fell silent.
"You think I killed him for power?" she asked then, to the room, the cameras, the web. Her voice was small, but she looked at Franz with something like a triumph. "No. I killed him because he threatened my future. Didn't you all do the same? Anyone who loves and fears loses control."
She laughed then, a small barking sound that made people lean back.
"How could you?" a woman in the gallery gasped.
Belen's eyes flashed. "You don't know what it is to be pushed. You don't know how it feels to be used. He threatened me. He blackmailed me. I saw a life and I chose it."
"Did you love him?" someone asked.
"I loved myself," she said. "More. I loved the platform, the safety. If a man is a barrier to what I must have, he doesn't belong."
Her voice made the hair on my arms stand up. Her face was calm, but I saw the collapse in her eyes when the prosecutor laid out messages, money transfers, the timeline. The gallery stirred. A vertex of humanity sometimes slips from people's faces when they realize the other person was not merely cruel but monstrous.
Then she began to unravel, not quickly but painfully. At first she denied. Then she insisted. Then the defense screeched for sympathy, calling a tortured childhood and a forced decision. The judge's face remained unmoved.
I watched the change.
"She smiled as if she were the star of a show," a woman in the crowd whispered. "She thought the cameras were on her, not her crime."
Belen's expression snapped in the courtroom like a drawn wire. "I did it," she said suddenly, voice small and steady, as if she had concluded something and was finished. "I thought if he was out of the picture, I could return to the life I wanted. I thought that would fix everything."
Silence increased to a roar as people murmured.
"But you killed him!" the prosecutor shouted. "You ended a life!"
"He threatened me," Belen murmured. "He threatened me more than any of you ever could understand."
There were gasps. Someone filmed with a phone; the camera light blinked. Belen looked at the phones and sneered, then her face crumpled like brittle paper in rain. "I didn't mean for anyone to get hurt like this," she said. "I didn't know it would be like this. I thought I could control the story."
Her hands shook. "Franz," she said then, voice breaking, "I wanted you."
Franz trembled. He was seated not far and his face went as white as ash. "Belen—"
She turned. "You were mine and you chose her. You were supposed to be mine and I couldn't let you go."
For a beat, the courtroom seemed to tilt. Spectators blinked, some in tears, some with their phones pressed to their mouths. "You were mine," she repeated, and it sounded like a child trying to lay claim to a toy. Then she laughed and it was a terrible sound.
"You could have walked away," she told Franz. "You could have said no and left them both alone."
Franz said nothing. He looked like a man who had watched a stage collapse.
The rest of the punishment played out differently in public and private. The judge pronounced a sentence: guilty of murder. The news choked with reactions — shock, vindication, horror. But in that court I saw something else that the sentence could not reach: the exact breadth of humiliation. For Belen, who had so expertly molded sympathy, there was no cheers, only a coldness from the gallery. Those who had once praised her beauty now spat. People who had followed her for tips on contouring and lipstick now whispered about a killer.
"How did it feel?" an old neighbor from the day sat in the gallery and asked when a chance came. "Did it feel good when you cut his throat from the safety of your plans?"
Belen's eyes darted. She had tried to keep control but now, stripped of props and fans, she was naked in her choices. She begged, she raged, she denied, and then she collapsed into a heap of self-accusation. I watched her go from arrogant to broken in front of everyone. That was the punishment I wanted — not the prison cell, but the exposure. People recorded it, but for once it wasn't adoration. It was the verdict of a crowd that had once loved her.
The press swarmed later. "Confession or psychosis?" they asked. They replayed her testimony and froze frames of that smile. "Was she always like this?" they asked.
"She manipulated, lied, and killed to maintain an image," Brielle said bitterly when we watched the coverage at my apartment. "She wanted to be a queen. She chose a crown of bones."
I did not feel triumphant. I did not feel joy. Watching someone fall so completely into ruin is not sweet. It is only a measure of how far they had been willing to go to fix their life with other's lives as collateral.
Weeks later, the legal process confirmed the sentence and the appeals failed. Belen's trial had been long and public. She tried to make herself the tragic heroine in the media and failed because the truth was too ugly. The public watched her transition — ambition, lies, love, murder, confession — and met it with derision and pity in equal measure.
At the sentencing hearing, a torrent of reactions erupted. A woman recorded the moment Belen was led away and shouted, "You ruined three lives!" Others clapped like executioners. Some tried to hold a stance of forgiveness, but the air was cold. Belen's voice was small; she begged for Franz at one point, "Please don't let them take me like this." He turned his face away.
When the sentence was read, Belen's composure finally broke. Her shoulders shook with sobs. "I thought I could buy life," she whispered. "I thought I could buy forgiveness."
And then she began to change faces again: desperate, defiant, pleading. She begged at the foot of the court for any scrap of sympathy. People filmed. Some old fans wept. Others booed.
When I left the building that day, a soft snow began to fall and draped the streets in a white clean enough to be cruel.
After the storm of the trial, life reassembled itself into quieter shapes. Justice had been served, but its echo was only beginning to be felt. Franz left the city for months, trying to fix his company and his guilt. He came back broken, apologetic, and hollow with remorse.
Elliot Suzuki was the quiet hand that steadied me. Elliot was someone I had known from university — polite, reserved, and oddly constant. He had been friendly enough in college; now he was inexplicably present. He helped in ways he didn't have to. He visited with soup, rearranged furniture when I could not manage stairs, and when my coffeemaker broke he spent an afternoon fixing it with the patience of a man who had all the time in the world.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked him once over tea.
He set down the cup and met my eyes. "Because you were my friend and because you're not alone in this."
"It isn't like that, Elliot," I said, thinking of what I had done to push people away. "I don't want to drag you into my wreckage."
"Then don't," he said. "Just let me be someone who's here for you."
He was not flashy. He did not make grand speeches. He simply was. And in the wrecked quiet of my days, that steadiness felt like a shade of home.
We grew close in the kind, slow way that people who have time to learn each other's small things do. He remembered my coffee order, the way my left foot turned inward when I walked fast, the names of my parents' dog. Little moments became the anchors of something deeper. We talked about nothing and everything. He worked late sometimes and called to tell me to sleep. He teased me about being dramatic. He loved me with ordinary things.
"Do you remember when I thought you were just a friend?" he asked one night.
"I do," I said.
"And?"
"And I wished you'd been more brazen," I admitted.
He smiled. "I am brazen now."
We married a year later under light snowfall. The ceremony was small and warm. Elliot’s parents hugged me like a daughter. In the hotel lobby, I saw a man standing out in the snow for quite a while. I recognized Franz, red-faced from the cold. He watched from the glass doors as snow settled on his coat and the red in his cheeks reminded me of the plum blossoms that break winter. His eyes found me for a moment, then slid away. No words passed between us.
On the bench outside, where the snow had not entirely melted, there were tiny red stains in the white — a memory, a remorse. I thought of the baby who was never born. I thought of the ring he had given me once, the band with my initials inside. I took a breath.
Elliot took my hand and looked into my eyes. "You have been brave," he said.
"I lost something," I whispered. "But I also found someone honest."
"You did."
At the reception, my mother presented a small bundle — a scarf she'd knitted. "For your first winter together," she said.
Later, when the guests left and the room grew quiet, Elliot helped me slip off my shoe. He placed his jacket around my shoulders. "I will keep you warm," he said, and for the first time in a long time I believed him.
I have a ring now — a simple band Elliot gave me with nothing engraved but my initials on the inside, a little mirror of the past but kinder. I keep it in the drawer sometimes and touch it to remind myself I made choices. Not all were right, but some were mine.
When the news still mentioned Belen, it was in the past tense. Her punishment had been public and final. The trials and words could not bring back a child or erase the nights I had spent crying under clinic lights or the feeling of being betrayed by a man who had been my playground companion.
Yet life continued.
"Do you ever regret it?" Elliot asked me once, smiling softly.
"What?" I asked.
"Marrying me. Choosing to live again."
I thought of the nights I’d refused to speak, of my hands folded under covers, of the childless womb, of Franz kneeling and begging, of the woman whose ambition had killed. I thought of the coffee shops we planned, of the baby clothes my mother still kept in a drawer "just in case", of the way the river in S City reflects light differently after storms.
"No," I said. "I don't regret turning the page. It is not forgetting, but choosing where to place my feet."
And so I live. I run the small café I dreamed of. I sell coffee from Y province and tell farmers' stories on a weekly chalkboard. Elliot opens the shop on Sundays and fluffs the chairs. Brielle still calls and sneaks pastries when I am not looking. My mother knits, my father visits, Johanna posts photos without malice now that the worst is behind her. Franz occasionally writes an email apologizing in ways he cannot find words for in person. I read them sometimes, fold them, and put them away.
At night I sometimes take out Franz's old ring with my initials inside and press it to my lips. There was a time when a childhood friendship was everything. There was a time when loyalty and longing tangled until they choked us. I have learned that love is messy and sometimes cruel, but people can find their way back to light.
Once, when the first winter after the trial turned to snow, I walked to the small park by the river and found a single red plum blossom pinned to the bench. Someone had left it there like a message.
"To the one who kept living," a note said.
I smiled and wrapped my scarf tighter. The world was wide and there were many stories. Mine had been harsh and strange and painfully human. I had lost a child and yet had not lost the capacity to choose. I had been betrayed and yet I had been loved back.
Elliot kissed my forehead beneath the plum tree. "We will grow," he whispered.
"We will," I answered.
That ring with my initials still lives in my drawer. Sometimes I wind it around my finger and feel a tug — like a ghost of the past reminding me how much I have changed. I do not forget. I simply do not let the past own my present.
The End
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