Face-Slapping15 min read
My Tie Was Crooked
ButterPicks21 views
I lit a cigarette in the dark and watched the smoke curl toward the moon. I did not turn the light on. The room felt huge and empty even with two beds in it.
He left the bed, walked to the bathroom, and did not come back the way he had left. I peeled my face from the pillow and watched the doorway until he was gone. I only knew his shape by the thin strip of moon on his shoulders and the dull glow coming from the courtyard lights.
I am Juniper Morin. For two years I wore my sister’s name like a borrowed dress. Fallon Brooks ran away, and my parents packed me into a wedding gown. I wore her name at the ceremony, signed with it on a register I barely read, and moved into Brandon Gerard’s house as his bride.
Tonight, sitting in the moonlight, I watched him stand at the window with a towel tied around his waist. He was all muscle and silence. He made a smoke ring and watched it vanish. I watched his tie the next morning, slouched and crooked under his collar, and I wanted to fix it. I am short; he is impossibly tall. I reached and failed. I said, "Your tie's crooked."
He looked down at me and tugged it straight without a thank you. He walked to breakfast and left me to sweep snow from the garden.
"Juniper," his mother said from the doorway later, "did you wash Fallon’s gowns? The one for tonight?"
"I tried," I said. "I'm sorry. I fell asleep ironing."
"Do not lie to me," Elizabeth Romano said, sharp as broken glass. "Do you want my son to divorce you?"
"No—" I started, and she slapped me hard enough that the kitchen tiles echoed.
I learned fast: you keep your head down, you scrub, you cook, you sleep in clothes that are faded, and you say nothing. To the world I was married to one of the richest men in the city; to the house I was a thing to be used, scolded, blamed. I made breakfast by five, I swept the gardens, and at night I helped the younger house resident—the one nobody wanted in the main rooms.
Evert Davis lived in a small wooden cottage tucked into winter's arms at the back of the property. He was twenty-eight but soft as a child. A fall as a child had clouded the brightness in his head. He smiled at me with the trust of someone who had been given a stable sun.
"Pretty sister," he would say, and eat every sandwich I brought. "Thank you."
"You're welcome," I would whisper. "Eat slowly, Evert."
One morning, miraculously, Brandon spoke directly to me. He told my parents to come to the hotel downtown for a signing. I told my father the business needed that money, and he arranged to come. They were proud and eager—what better proof of success than a loan from our son-in-law?
The hall at the hotel filled with cameras and microphones. I stood at the edge of the crowd like a ghost. The signing table had two heavy-looking folders. My father took the contract and smiled the smile of a man who thinks he has won. He signed without reading the pages.
Brandon studied the printed sheet with an expression as calm as winter. He unfolded his pen and signed. The ceremony was sweet on the outside: clapping, cameras, a gentle toast.
After the applause the assistant started to distribute copies of the contract to both families. My father opened his and his smile died. "What is this?" he said aloud.
Brandon's voice, the way it cut through the room, was cold and steady. "Read your contract. It says what it says." The reporters waited. My father scanned, his hands trembling. I watched his face go white.
"What does it say?" my mother whispered.
"It says what you signed," Brandon said. "You gave me your company. You signed it." He stood up and moved away, and the cameras followed him like moths.
My father folded the page in half and looked at me as if I had become a stranger. "You told him to do what, Juniper? Was this your plan?"
"I... I told him you needed help," I whispered. "I asked for enough to keep you from going under. I didn't—"
"Enough," my father said, and the word fractured into something ugly and small. He left to find a lawyer. He tripped on the marble steps. He sent me a dozen voices worth of pleas and shouts and then silence.
When news vans left the hotel, I went back to the estate. Elizabeth and Izabella Abe—my sister-in-law—waited to make sure I had heard every ugly thing. They held a fork between them and used it like a weapon.
"You are a liar," Izabella said, every syllable a little like a spit. "You pretended to be Fallon to trick my brother."
"I didn't—" I said, and my chest felt like someone had tightened a band around it.
"You are a disgrace," Elizabeth said. She threw a fork at me and it hit my cheek. The next morning I woke with a red print on my face and a bruise on my hand. My hand had been catching a hot iron when I fell asleep from exhaustion; my wrist bore a wound that refused to stop bleeding.
That night Brandon came home sweaty and smelled of whiskey. He noticed the bandage on my hand and stared long enough to make me think he might say something. A cigarette glowed between his fingers. He asked, without turning, "What happened?" I lied to him and said I'd burned myself. He washed, dressed, and slept beside me like a statue.
"Are you asleep?" I asked, voice small as the candlelight.
"No," he answered. "Say it."
"My father," I said, "they need money. I asked you—could you help? Eight million. Please." Eight million in our currency was nothing to his company. It was our last hope.
He said, simply, "Yes." The word felt like a mistake somewhere in the joints of the world—and then he put his hand on me in a way I learned to accept because I had nothing else to give him in return for his money.
The check for eight million arrived, and my father and mother flew to the hotel like hungry birds. They signed the papers and came home with their heads bowed and wallets heavier for a day. For five hours everything seemed fixed. Then my father called me.
"Juniper," he said, frantic. "You have to come back. Come back now. They… he—"
"What's wrong?" I asked. My breath stuttered.
"The contract—read it. It's yours. He took our company."
I ran. I was like a child plugging holes in a dam, useless. At the company, in a sudden room full of cameras and executives, my parents learned the truth: they had signed under terms that changed ownership. Brandon had found the smallest clause, the only place that made an entire house of cards fall.
They called it legal. I called it a grave.
My parents staggered away as if someone had hit them. My father, frail before, ran his hands over the papers like letters of doom.
"You signed for us," my mother hissed. "You told us it was capital. You—"
"Mom," I tried to say. "I didn't know. I wouldn't have—"
"You're lying," she said, the old way returning. "You told him. You wanted our company gone."
And when my father finally heard the news, he drove like a man with his whole life burning. He crashed. The hospital lights were cold and long. I held his hand and he did not open his eyes for a while.
On the next morning Brandon sat outside the intensive care unit, like a statue carved from ice and silk. "I gave you eight million," he said without looking at me.
"You stole everything," I whispered.
"You signed. You could have read it," he replied. "I helped you. You chose."
I went back to work. I took small roles—extra, stand-in, bit parts—anything that put food on our table and the few coins in my pocket for medicine. I wrapped my injured hand and said nothing.
At the studio I met people who treated me like a warm blanket on a cold set. Isabella Cleveland, a star who walked with staff like she was made of sun, once put a warm rice pack against my side and said, "Keep it. You're cold."
"You shouldn't," I whispered.
"You're good," she said. "Save every bit of warmth you can."
I slept that night smelling of more than smoke; I slept smelling of the kindness of strangers.
One winter evening, I collapsed on the roadside and someone pulled up. Graydon Hansson, a quiet man who ran a small clinic, tended my fever and bound my wounds. He asked nothing and wheeled me into his home. He told me I was pregnant.
"I am the last person who should be telling you," he said softly. "But you have to rest. You are carrying a child."
My body filled with a terrible, private joy.
"How long?" I asked.
"Percentage of weeks matters less now," he said. "You are very early. Be careful."
I thanked him like someone choosing words from a dry well. He wrapped his coat around me and drove me to the estate, refusing my insistence to pay him. He said only, "Take your coat. Keep warm."
When Elizabeth and Izabella caught sight of the coat they screamed as though seeing a flag of treason. They took it from me, and accused me of going to another man.
"Who gave you that coat?" Izabella demanded.
"A friend," I said.
"A man?" she sneered.
"Yes," I said, and her voice turned cold with suspicion and rage. "You're having an affair with other men."
They pushed me out of the house into the snow. They closed the doors with keys and slapped locks on my suitcase and my dignity.
"Don't come back," Elizabeth said.
"Tell him we want a divorce," Izabella said.
The next morning Brandon asked me to sign the papers. He pushed the stack of documents across the table without a word of comfort. "Sign," he said. "It will be cleaner."
I looked up at him and saw something terrible: his eyes had always been private property—remorselessly his. He said, "We are done."
"Brandon, I—" I began, and my voice fell into the hollow between us.
"I don't love you," he said.
"Why?" The word was small, a child's. "Two years. You—"
"Because someone I loved woke up," he answered. "Go. You were always a substitute."
The words were surgical. I felt my bones quiet to allow the cut.
The divorce papers were signed with calm pens. He told me later he had invested three hundred million across the last two years in the company I had thought belonged to my father, that when he took it, he did not intend theft so much as rescue from incompetence—his excuse like an umbrella in a storm.
I packed a cardboard box with the few clothes I had. Izabella took the rest of my things and scuffed them in the snow. She laughed at me. Elizabeth spat on the ground.
"Good riddance," they said. "Roll along. You are nothing."
I left the estate. I left the name. I left the house with a coat falling off my shoulders and a small, impossible child inside me.
A man named Boden Ilyin found me that night at a shabby club where my brother, Emery Herrera, had gotten into trouble drinking and debt. Boden paid the bill and left as quietly as he'd come. He said only, "Take care. He'll be fine." I did not know him well, but he had the habit of turning up like a weather change—unexpected and necessary.
Days passed like pages from a book I could not read. I saw my father for a minute in a hospital room; he looked at me like a man who had lost a map. My mother wanted money and not a single gentle word. Emery drank until the sound of his sadness filled the rooms.
I worked. I saved. I held my secret like treasure.
Then everything changed again.
"Juniper," Boden said one night as he sat low in a hospital waiting room, "they are going to hold a benefit. A charity gala. The city will be there. This is where they will announce the capital rebuilding fund. Someone will be at the podium. There will be cameras. If you want them exposed, this is the place."
"Expose who?" I asked.
"Everyone," he said. "If you want to make them pay, do it now."
I thought of the folder at the signing, the small clause that had swallowed our company. I thought of the bruises, the fork, the way Brandon had signed away my father’s name. I thought of every time I had held my breath waiting for someone to see me.
"Will you stand with me?" I whispered.
"Yes," Boden said.
We made a plan. It was not complicated: evidence, witnesses, footage. Graydon, who had stitches in his sleeves for working late, was a good man to keep secrets. He found the document trail, the digital proofs that the contract had been drafted with a predatory editor buried in plain sight. Boden contacted several journalists. Emily papers wanted a story. The city loved scandal.
On the night of the gala the ballroom flashed like a firefly field. Elizabeth wore pearls, Izabella wore red, Brandon wore a tux that could have been carved by light. Cameras buried in flower arrangements caught the laughter and the clink of champagne.
Boden handed me a small recorder. "When you go up," he said, "say what you remember. Show the clause. Do not look like a victim. Look like someone who has a ledger."
"Do you think it will change anything?" I asked.
"It will change the story," he said.
I stepped out into the open and the camera swallowed me whole.
"Good evening," the MC said, bright and unaware. "I would like to welcome our special guests—"
"Stop," I said. The microphone shrieked and then quieted. All eyes turned to me as if I were a stray star dropped into a ceiling. Brandon turned slowly, his jacket catching the light in a way that made him look dangerous and poor in pity all at once.
"Juniper?" he said.
"Brandon," I said. "People, please, a moment."
There were whispers. The front row leaned forward. Cameras clicked like nervous birds. Journalists smelled blood and leaned closer.
I held the microphone and my hand did not shake. "Two years ago," I said, "my parents signed a contract. They were told it would be investment. They were told the terms were standard. My father had no lawyer; my mother could only sign."
Brandon's face was a blank stone. "You are making a scene," he said quietly.
"This is not a scene," I answered. "This is a reading." My voice threaded through the room. "Please, someone bring the signed copy," I said to a producer who stood like a lost man by the soundboard.
A secretary came forward with a folder that glittered with the sheen of deceit. I opened it in front of a hundred people. The clause was small and printed in legal serif like a snake curled in page margins. It said, plainly: transfer of ownership to the funding party if certain performance metrics were not met within thirty days. It had been written so that the metrics would never be met.
"Brandon Gerard," I said. "You signed this knowing. You advertised help and you took a house. You told my father it was investment for the company. You took our name."
The microphones were on. The cameras circled and recorded. My voice projected across the chandeliers. "You used my wedding day to thin us out. That is not business. That is cruelty. That is theft."
He did not look angry at first. He looked like a man who had been surprised by a story he had thought buried. Then his expression folded into practiced calm. "Everything I did was legal," he said.
"Laws can be weapons," I answered, and I held up my phone. Boden had compiled a file: emails, drafts, drafts with different names, an assistant’s log where an editor wrote, 'Draft clause: transfer upon default—use language to avoid red flag.'"
A woman in the second row gasped. Someone pressed record on a phone so loudly I heard the click.
"Turn it on," Brandon said to the assistant at his side. "Turn it on. Authorities—"
He had a quickness like a huntsman. His suit fell around him like armor. He stepped toward me exactly two inches too slow and two inches too quick. He was composed until the assistant, a pale man in too-big glasses, lifted his head with a shame that looked like apology.
"Sir," the assistant said. "He told me to draft it. He told me to..." The assistant's voice broke. "He said it was for securing investors."
"Is that so?" I said into the microphone. "Then predictably—I have the printed emails." I handed pages to a reporter and to a lawyer in the front row. The pages smelled of office toner and the cheap glue of human conscience. "Here are the drafts. Here is the mail where your assistant says, 'This clause will secure ownership if necessary.'"
"People," Brandon said, and his voice had a crack I had not heard before. "This is private. She has gone too far."
"No," I said. "What is private is private. This is public." Cameras flared. The microphones were a chorus. Reporters shouted questions. Elizabeth's face stiffened. Izabella's mouth hung open.
"Stop," Izabella cried. "You liar."
"Who lied?" I asked. "Look at these pages." I stepped closer to Brandon and the room seemed to draw tight like a fist. My heart felt like an animal, but my mouth was steady. "Did you tell my parents you were donating funds for investment? Or did you write this clause yourself so you could take them if it failed?"
He looked past me at the faces in the crowd—friends, clients, board members. They had been with him for so long that some of them seemed to want to turn away like those who have stood too long in the sun.
"Answer him," Izabella hissed, and she pushed a hand into her clutch for courage.
"Are these your actions?" I asked the room. "Do you take what is not yours because the law gives you the chance?"
Brandon's jaw ticked. His hand, which had once been gentle on my hair, mustered something that looked like tension. He heard a laugh from a table behind him—the one where a board member of his sat and sipped with the feel of men who have not seen hunger.
"I'm not a monster," he said. "I'm a businessman."
"A businessman can be a thief," I said.
There were murmurs and then a roar. A reporter shouted, "Where are the signatures?" A camera slid in close. The assistant's face was bright red; he was suddenly small and so new in the world of consequence.
Brandon laughed, a sound that dropped like ice. "You think this—" he gestured with a hand, "—this will ruin me? I own everything now. I can buy your father back and make him sign again."
"One moment," Boden said. He stood and held up his phone. "Journalists, lawyers—this isn't done. The contracts here show the intent to wrong someone. The legal world will see this. The public will see this. Do you want to be the man who took a company with a clause hidden in the margins?"
Brandon's composure cracked like a dry pie crust. He stepped back and a photographer snapped. The flash painted his face in white. He stumbled and then steadied himself.
"Shame," I said. "Shame on those who thought they were above shame."
He straightened. "I will sue you," he said. "Slander. This is slander."
"Prove it," I said. "Prove that my father was complicit. Prove I consented."
He opened his mouth and then closed it. He looked like a man discovering for the first time the bottom of a well. He saw the assistant's guilty face. He saw the editor’s notes in his inbox. He saw two months of emails.
It happened slowly and then fast: the board members shifted their chairs; clients backed away; a woman near the stage turned her camera on him. Someone—somewhere—phone in hand—started a live stream.
"Get out of my sight," Brandon said, and his voice did not have the business calm it once had. He backed toward the exit, then to the podium. His mother grabbed his arm and murmured something to him. Izabella's eyes were wet with a rage that had nothing to do with me; she had lost a convenient story.
As the cameras hummed and the crowd leaned in, the assistants, the lawyer, the reporters began to talk, and the story widened like a ring in a pond. Someone shouted, "Kneel!" as if calling for an old ritual. It was folly, but the room wanted a spectacle.
Brandon stopped in the center of the floor, the stage, the center of everything he had built. People were taking pictures. The live stream had a hundred thousand viewers by now. He looked at the man who had worked for him—the assistant—and then at me. He seemed to decide something.
He fell to his knees.
It was filmed. It was delicious in the way revenge is not justice but it is proof of vulnerability. He knelt and placed his head in his hands. "Please," he said in a voice that had nothing of the man who had once told me he loved someone he had left for many years. "Please."
It was not immediate. There were giggles and the shocked silence of people who had watched greed make a throne and now saw it overturned. Someone recorded. Phones uplifted, circling, then sending, then saving. Reporters whispered into microphones. "The billionaire kneels."
"Want to plea?" asked a journalist loudly. "Want to beg forgiveness on camera?"
His face looked like thin paper. "I—" he said, and the sentence dissolved.
His mother, Elizabeth, tried to pull him up and her face flushed, the lines of her jewels cutting her sadness like knives. "Brandon," she said, "get up. Stand."
"Get up," Izabella said, but her voice was a blade. She didn't help.
He looked up and the cameras made him a portrait of humiliation. He tried to speak and return dignity somehow, but his words were small. "Forgive me," he said. "Forgive me. I—"
He was begging. No lawyer would rescue him from what everyone saw. People clapped—some in glee, some in relief. A few sneered. Strangers shouted at him across the hall. Some recorded and streamed. A woman in the crowd pressed a poster under a phone camera: "HONESTY."
He begged for money. He begged for mercy. He asked for a second chance on camera and the city found it bitterly satisfying.
I stood at a distance, the microphone in my hand, and watched. I had not wanted his fall to become a circus, but I had wanted the truth. I had wanted the house to smell like the simple air of being seen. The cameras caught him sobbing. I felt sick and light at once. He did not deserve this; no one should be smashed by strangers. But he had done this to my father. He had done this to many. He had used a contract like a knife.
The crowd recorded. They discussed on social feeds. People cheered. The assistants filmed with gooseflesh fingers. The mayor’s aide insisted the legal office look into the drafting. Investigations were promised like rain.
When he finally staggered up and fled into a corridor lined with photographers, his mother clutched his sleeve and cried. Izabella ran after him like a vulture. Guests had their phones raised. The live stream had millions watching. The footage went viral.
Later, in the days that followed, lawyers came and papers flew. The assistant gave testimony. The clause was declared predatory by a court-appointed review panel. My father's company was returned under a temporary injunction pending litigation. The public punished him with headlines, and the board quietly severed ties. The stock dropped, and he fell from a glittering ledge to something closer to the earth.
It did not fix everything. It did not take away every bruise, or the nights when I would wake and think of the fork on my cheek. But it was a day when people looked and said, "This is wrong," and a man felt his knees give.
The fallout took weeks, and in that time the city watched Brandon break down in print and in real time. He appeared on morning shows, a shaken, contrite man. He begged for privacy. He was photographed in the car with his face hidden. The law went through motions. The assistant was offered witness protection for agreeing to testify.
When the worst had been said and the laws were in motion, everything that followed felt like a softer, smaller breath. I moved through it like a person walking out of a far room into daylight. I would never be his wife again. I would keep the child inside me. I would learn to be seen on my own terms.
Days later, as I packed a small trunk for a place far from the estate, Graydon sat beside me and said, "You did right."
"What did I do?" I asked.
"You told the truth," he said. "You let people see the law for what it is when not guided by compassion."
I smiled because the world felt very suddenly large and clean in a way I had not noticed before. My phone rang with a soft sound. It was my father. "Juniper," he said. "They gave it back. They said—"
"I know," I said.
He was crying on the other end. "They returned it. They said it's only provisional. But—Juniper—"
"I know," I said. "Come home when you can. We'll fix this. We can fix the rest."
He laughed like a man who had found his map again. "You saved us."
"No," I said. "Boden, Graydon, the reporters—no. I just gave them words."
And then, sometimes—when the house was very quiet and the winter wind made the garden's hedges whisper like an audience—I would take the small blanket Graydon had put over my shoulders the night he drove me home. It smelled like a human being who had simply decided to be kind. It had a stitched label, a crooked thread. Whenever I pulled it close, I remembered the stage with the lights and the thing inside the contract that had started it all.
"Keep it," Graydon had said. "For your child. To remember that people can help."
So I keep it in a drawer above the small trunk with my few good dresses. When everything looks at me like an accusation, I make a cup of tea, and I tuck the blanket around my shoulders and think of the long night when the truth finally came out and a man with a perfect tie had to kneel.
The End
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