Revenge12 min read
One Week, Two Truths, and the Pet Named Three-Seven
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I pushed at the door and stopped as if someone pulled a wire through my chest.
"Anna?" Catalina's voice came out sharp, surprised.
"Why are you in my nightgown?" I managed, though my heart was already pounding so hard my breath felt borrowed.
Jalen looked up. He didn't move much at first—just lifted his head like a statue being nudged. Then he smoothed his shirt slowly, like someone rearranging carefully placed props. His face was calm in a way that belonged to people who practiced indifference every day.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
I couldn't say the one thing I had rehearsed for a week: Please take me back. The words were stuck, thick and useless. I could only stare at the bright red mark along his collarbone and the way Catalina's hand still lay on his chest, fingers tucked in like she owned the space.
"I'm—" Catalina started, voice apologetic but with a quick edge, "I didn't have a nightgown. I took yours, sorry."
"You moved in?" I asked.
"It's after you broke up. We started seeing each other after." She said it like a fact written into the air. No tremor, no shame.
Jalen's eyes flicked to mine. For half a second there was something—I thought it was surprise—then a practiced calm took over. "You can come in if you need to collect things," he said.
The apartment I loved was alien within minutes. My succulents—one I had potted from cuttings—were gone. The couple mugs in the kitchen had been replaced by two new ones, their design hers. The curtains and bedding had shifted from our neutral to bright colors that matched her taste. Even the framed photograph on the shelf was swapped: my childish picture of Jalen and me, grinning at a fair, was replaced by a picture of Catalina with her brother. The bedspread, the toothbrush holder, the little sticky notes on the fridge—everything had been rewritten.
"All my things?" I asked, voice thin. I saw my suitcase in a corner of the balcony like an afterthought, the dog crate with Three-Seven inside. Three-Seven looked up at me, ears flicking like a small engine. When I called, the name tugged something raw inside me.
"Three-Seven," I said. He sniffed, wagged, and then—remembering his place—sat down and wagged his tail through the crate.
Jalen listened, face unreadable. "You should take it," he said.
"You know he was abused. He can't be in a crate like that—" I started, and then Jalen cut me off.
"You know what? She doesn't like dogs." His voice was flat, as if he were giving a fact in a lecture.
That sentence felt like a blade. "She doesn't like dogs?" I repeated in a small voice. The rest of my plea stuck like a stone in my throat.
Two months earlier I might have missed the first signs. Jalen's offers were arriving. He was busy with interviews, with projects, and sometimes his messages arrived late the next morning. He was getting older in the way of people who feel their lives folding into careers. "He's busy," Catalina told me once, smoothing my frayed nerves like a seamstress smoothing fabric. "Don't think too much."
The first real crack came one Valentine's night. Catalina handed me two movie tickets. I thought it was a friendly gesture. I invited Jalen to the movie to ease the strange distance. During the film he kept looking at his phone. Halfway through, he left.
"I have to take a call," he said, and walked out. He didn't come back. At the exit he stood leaning against the wall, as if he'd been waiting there the whole time. He had buttoned his collar all the way to the top. Later, he said it was "a project." "You think everything is a conspiracy," was how he answered when I asked why he would leave me in the theater.
After that night he started coming home later. Sometimes he didn't answer my texts for a whole day. He was apologetic when he was around, but apology had started to mean less than it had before. Our arguments grew out of small things—if he told me where he was, if he texted, if he remembered our inside jokes. One fight escalated into me asking the question: "Do you still want to be with me?"
"Do as you wish," he answered without looking at me.
It took only five days to go from that answer to someone else's laughter in my apartment and someone else's hand on his chest. "Five days," I told myself. "Five days and my whole life is packed on a balcony."
I took Three-Seven to my parents' house that night. The dog had been with us since the day we found him, because we met him on March seventh—hence the name. Jalen used to joke at how proud he'd be that each time I called Three-Seven's name I'd remember the first kiss. Now, each time I called the dog's name, my stomach turned.
I wrote about it that night—angry, raw, not censoring. The post blew up. Comment notifications blinked like a panic light. "Why did he answer so fast after you said break up?" "No, that's too fast to be real." People started to pick apart small clues: the buttons, the social posts. Someone even dug into the campus and said, "This is Anna and the roommate is Catalina Briggs." It spread like a stain.
Then, someone posted a photo—an old photo of me and a tall man outside a hotel. The caption read that I'd been with another man months ago. Someone said, "Isn't that Burke Davis? The reserved guy from the next dorm?" Their comments were vicious. My phone buzzed with dozens of calls from numbers I didn't know. Jalen's calls were the loudest. "Delete it," he ordered the next day when he found me walking down the quad.
"Who are you asking?" I asked.
"Just delete it," he barked and then, softer, "Please."
I was stunned when Catalina conveniently appeared with a smile. "I didn't do anything," she said. "You're making a mountain out of a molehill." But my feed had a user claiming I had been taken to a hotel by Burke Davis months earlier. People believed it—sometimes rumor is more satisfying than truth.
When the harassment grew, I did the only thing I thought reasonable: I answered the lies openly. I refused to be shamed into silence. But then Catalina pushed. She wrote back publicly claiming she had a "real reason" to confront me and showed photo "evidence" that looked so damning I couldn't breathe. My relatives were messaged. The university group chat filled with murmurs. People I had never met commented. The campus had become a small theater where people whispered about me in the corridors.
I called Catalina. "Is this you?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, with a cool composure. "And so what? You started it."
"You started what? Why would you—"
She laughed. "Because I can. Because you're soft. Because you cry and beg, and watching is fun." The words were quiet but sharp. "Listen. If you delete your post and apologize publicly, I will remove what I have." She sounded like someone bargaining in a market.
She placed photos on the table when we met in a café. "You should be grateful I let you keep face," she said. "Tell your fans the truth."
"I won't apologize for the truth," I said, swallowing like it was a bitter pill.
A crowd at the café grew overheard. People were drawn to drama. "This is campus, not a courtroom," someone muttered. I turned on my phone, recorded the exchange; I would need proof if she tried extortion. "If you share, I'll take you to the authorities," I said, calm for the first time in days.
Catalina smiled at my threat and went for a harder move. She slid an extra stack of printed photos toward me. My breath caught. They were of a night I hardly remembered, grainy and angled to hurt. "You have been a lot of things, Anna," she said. "But I'm not the villain here. You made your own choices."
"Give them back," I said. "Now."
"Or what?" she asked. "I'm not the one being judged here."
"You will be if you post these. You're threatening me." I kept my phone in my hand and kept recording.
Catalina paled the instant I said "authorities." She faltered in front of the café's glass window and a dozen students watching. She tried to smile, then lost the courage to keep it. Her face, which had been polished for months, showed cracks.
"Anna, don't be rash," she muttered. "I can make your life harder. I can make it impossible for you to remain at school. Think about your family."
"I have thought about it," I said. "I thought about being a quiet victim. But those days are over."
She tried to argue, then attempted to pick up the phone on the table. I heard her fingers tremble. When she realized I had the recording of our conversation already saved, she stuttered, "You—"
"I recorded you," I said simply. "And I recorded how you plan to publish private photos to ruin someone. Do you know what that's called? Extortion. Harassment. Illegal."
Her eyes darted to the glass. A cluster of students outside the café leaned close to the window and whispered. One told another into a phone. The rumour mill swung into motion.
Catalina's defenses unstitched in public like cheap thread. First she tried indignation: "You have no right to threaten me!" Then she moved to blame: "She started it," pointing at me. Then she shifted to denial and outrage, "I'm the victim here!" Finally her voice cracked and shifted. Her face folded in on itself as disbelief, then shock, then pleading.
"You—please," she asked, voice thin as a curtain. "I didn't mean—I'll delete—I'll delete everything." The "I'll delete" was automatic, the same line she'd used on me hours earlier. Now the reverse was spoken into a room full of onlookers whose phones were alarming with screenshots and short videos.
"You're going to delete it now," I told her.
"Okay, okay." She handed over a phone. Her hands shook so badly she had trouble unlocking it. I watched her in the café window while she typed and pressed; the screen updated, and the threats slid away like tide drawing back.
The crowd reacted. Some whispered, some clapped quietly. A woman outside yelled, "Good for you!" Someone else asked, "What did she think she was doing?"
Catalina's face changed as more people learned what she'd tried. It wasn't just my recording—someone in the crowd had been filming, someone else had a friend in the campus paper. Before I knew it the story was spreading the other way: not "Anna the liar" but "Catalina admitted to blackmail." Camera phones pointed at her as if she had been a wild animal cornered.
She shifted through the emotional stages with a kind of theatrical speed. First: rigid anger. "You don't understand." Second: confusion, "I only tried to protect myself." Third: disbelief, "No, I can't—" Fourth: denial, "You set me up!" Fifth: collapse—she began to cry, real tears this time.
"Why are you crying?" someone asked bluntly.
She looked at them, then at me. "Because I can't—" she sobbed. "I can't do this anymore." Astonishment washed through the room. I watched her go from predator to hunted before my eyes. It was not sweet. It wasn't satisfying in the way I'd expected. Seeing someone break publicly felt heavy; victory is not always clean.
A student took a video and added a caption: Catalina Briggs caught attempting to extort a classmate. Then another student asked, "Are you going to press charges?" I spoke up, because the room was not a courtroom but it was full of witnesses.
"I will," I said. "This recording and what she posted are proof. If she posts anything else, I will file a complaint."
"I won't," Catalina told the crowd, but the crowd had already decided. A few people approached me, murmuring apologies for their earlier gossip. A handful shook their heads at Catalina and walked away. Another group recorded her apology as proof—her own voice would prove her intent.
She went through a final stage: bargaining. "Please—it's my future—" she begged, and then, in the space between breaths, "I didn't know it would blow up."
"Then don't do it again," I said. "And return every photo."
There were witnesses to everything: the café staff, students leaning on window ledges, a couple who lingered over coffee, the campus bloggers who had been tracking the scandal. When Catalina pushed her phone across to me, her knuckles white, she tried at first to snatch it back. A student blocked her hand, saying, "Don't touch her property." She cried "Fine!" and released it.
The moment stretched. Catalina's denial turned to pleading to anyone who would listen. "I didn't mean this to go public. I only wanted you to take yours down." Tears wet her cheeks. The crowd's reaction slowed from excitable to judgmental. Someone muttered, "That's the worst part—she tried to control everything."
Catalina's reaction had a pattern: arrogance, arrogance shaken to denial, then pleas, and finally collapse. The spectators shifted from prying to holding evidence. I left the café with the copies of her posts and the recording saved. The social momentum had turned. The rumor mill that had eaten at me now shone its light on her.
Weeks later, the campus disciplinary committee called Catalina in. The campus blog that had smeared me now published a retraction and a long piece about extortion. Catalina's mother called. Her scholarship committee asked for a meeting. People who had once laughed at me now avoided Catalina's eye. There were no dramatic arrests—this is a college, not a soap opera—yet the consequences were civil and public: a formal reprimand, community service, mandatory counseling, removal from student leadership opportunities. The humiliation was not just mine anymore.
That day catalyzed the reversal. Once the cafe video circulated, my post no longer received angry messages. Some students stood up for me. Even Jalen looked different—sudden quiet and avoidance, like guilt worn as winter clothing. He came to the apartment, fell on his knees in the rain and begged. "Forgive me," he said. "Please."
"No," I said finally. He looked at me with that old gaze and tried to make himself small. "If you want forgiveness, go find it in a grave. Don't come to me."
He left. For weeks I wanted him to come back, to say he made a mistake, to show regret and change. He did not. He watched from a distance sometimes, standing on the stairs and staring. There is a kind of patience for the people who do not deserve it; I didn't give it.
Burke Davis, the man in the photos, was not what people assumed. He had been a helpful acquaintance once, the man who pulled me back from traffic. He was steady, quiet, exact. He sat with me after the café incident and listened without giving solutions.
"You did right," he said simply. "Not everything needs to be fixed by you alone."
"Maybe I shouldn't have posted," I said. "Maybe I should have walked away."
"Would it have changed anything?" he asked. "Sometimes standing up is the only thing that stops the next person."
We spent long walks together. The city felt softer when I didn't go home to an apartment filled with other people's things. Burke never pushed. He brought tea and books, and sometimes he drove me to the hospital when my stomach rebelled. He never demanded explanations. When I asked him why he had taken me away from that traffic months ago, he shrugged.
"You were not paying attention," he said. "I was."
People started to say we were dating. Sometimes I thought about it. Once, after a bad month, he sat on the porch and said, "If you need a place to crash until you get your life back—"
"I don't want to use you," I answered, wary.
"Then don't," he said. "Be with me because you want to, not because life is collapsing."
He left months later to take a year-long overseas assignment. We tried two months together and realized the split was different from the empty stretch of being used. "We tried," I said when it ended. "We tried and it didn't break, it just changed."
"Change is not always loss," Burke told me. He kissed my forehead in the airport and left.
After graduation, my life quietly recovered. I took a job relevant to my major and learned how to set boundaries. Wesley—my kid brother, mischievous and loud—moved through life like a wind that always made me turn my head. He teased me about every relationship. He joked at my expense in our family's lunch conversations.
A few years later, Wesley got married. During the reception, someone threw the bouquet. It landed right in my arms after years of not expecting anything. I laughed and then a hand reached for mine from the crowd. I looked up and there was Burke, back early. He had finished his project and flown back, standing a little unsure in a suit that fit him better than his passport.
"You're back?" I whispered, stunned.
"I finished early," he said, half-smiling. "And I came back for you."
We talked later that night. "Why now?" I asked.
He sighed, looking at the people dancing around us. "Because I realized some things you can't justify staying away from." He took my hand. "Because if someone cares, they make space."
A year later we married quietly. The mess from college became an obituary in a past chapter. Catalina's name faded from the news cycle; sometimes I saw her in the distance at a coffee shop with a different, smaller crowd. Jalen? I never saw him again. Rumors said he had moved to the rural hills and hurt a leg in a landslide. I never went to see him. My mother asked if I would; I said no.
In the back of my jewelry box I kept a little token of the old times: a butterfly hairpin, slightly bent from years of worry. I had worn it the day Jalen had helped me in a fight and later been accused of stealing. When Burke first saw it he asked, "You kept it?"
"Because some things are more about who we were than what happened to us," I said. "Some things are anchors."
He smiled and put his hand on mine. "Then keep it. We'll give it a new meaning."
The last time I said Three-Seven's name out loud in a crowd was when Wesley had a kid and we brought the little dog to the park. The puppy ran in circles like a small comet. I watched him bark at birds and thought of how many times I had felt like I was made of glass.
"You okay?" Burke asked, reading my face.
"I am," I said, and I meant it. I had been quiet and broken and then loud and brave. I had recorded a threat and watched a predator crumble. I had stood in the rain and said "no" to the man who chose himself over us. I had learned that courage is more about continuing than about the moment of triumph.
In a crowded airport months after the wedding, I watched Burke walk toward his gate for a short business trip. He paused, looked back at me, and tapped his own chest.
"Come on," he mouthed. "Bring the butterfly."
I did. I put the hairpin in his pocket and kissed his knuckle. The small metal pressed into my palm like a coin that paid for the future.
"Don't go more than a week," I joked.
He smiled and left. I stood and watched him disappear down the walkway, heart steady this time, not because I had no fear but because I had decided that if someone mattered, they would return.
When the plane was just a dot, I held out my hand toward the sky and thought of Jalen's collarbone, of Catalina's panic, of Burke's steady hands and Wesley's loud jokes. The shape of my life had changed, and it had room for pain and healing. I kept a photograph of us—me, Burke, Wesley—on the living room shelf. Next to it I placed a tiny clay pot with a new succulent cutting. Every time I watered it I thought of small things that lived even after all else had been rearranged.
"Three-Seven," I said once as the dog nosed my hand. He licked my palm as if to promise—no, to remind me—that names carry memory, but people choose what they become.
The End
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