Revenge12 min read
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"I need you to sound like me for three nights," Gemma said, voice low over the phone.
"I can do it," I answered, keeping my spoon from clinking.
"Promise me you won't blow it," she warned.
"Promise," I said.
"Good." She sent a voice clip. "He likes a soft, girlish tone. Sing a lullaby, hum a little—he won't tell."
I practiced Gemma's cadence for a whole day and night. My twins, Everleigh and Addison, slept through my rehearsals. I hooked my work account, slipped into the late-night roster, and at 11:30 p.m., after tucking them in and checking their breathing twice, I logged in.
"Hello, sir. Can't sleep again? Story or song tonight?" I asked, using Gemma's light laugh.
"Sing," said the voice over the call—low, husky, familiar.
I froze. "Which song would you like?"
"Anything," he murmured.
He sounded like him. I stared at the ceiling. Esteban—my Esteban Buckley—had been away so long I knew every shift in his tone. He'd been gone eleven months because of the new post in the northwest. He called nightly, sometimes late, and I would watch him get into bed over video. His voice, across time and war of distance, was the one I trusted to come home.
Half an hour later, I hung up only when I heard steady breathing. Still, that voice stayed in my head all night, like a song on repeat. I told myself I missed him. I told myself my ears were tricking me.
The next day, I laughed about it with Gemma. "So it's really similar?" she said, breathless.
"Ridiculous. Maybe a dozen men have that kind of timbre," I said.
"Still—check him," Gemma pressed. "When people are apart, things go wrong. Be careful."
Her ex-husband, Phoenix, had left her for another woman once; Gemma watched marriages like they were ticking watches. I brushed off the warning. Esteban called each night at ten, like a ritual. He video-called. He told me he missed us. I believed him.
Then Gemma told me something small that lodged like a stone.
"One night," she said, "he said to a woman on a call, 'I'm sorry, Chen.'"
"Chen?" I asked, turning a page in a job sheet. "Whose name is that? A friend?"
"Maybe nothing," she hedged. "But it's weird. Keep an ear out."
That name—Chen—sat beside the voice in my head. I tried to push it away, but it would not leave. I work as a narrator; my voice is my small, secret income. I did voice books, recording in the afternoons while the twins were at daycare. I took Gemma's favor—covering her client for a few nights at her nightly gig—because of the extra pay. She begged me. I told myself it was harmless.
When I thought of Esteban and the life we'd carved—college sweethearts, struggling, getting lucky—my chest tightened. We hadn't planned two children so soon. We had married in a rush, cheap collective wedding, because I was unexpectedly pregnant. He left after the twins were half a year old to chase a career that promised money and security. He wanted us to have a house. He wanted upward. So he left, and I stayed with diapers and fever nights and an aching loneliness that no phone call soothed completely.
After Gemma's warning, I did something I never thought I'd stoop to. I sewed a small tassel and stuffed a tiny GPS recorder and mic inside it—one of those car trackers, disguised. It sat under cotton batting, soft and out of place. I hung a photo of the twins—Everleigh and Addison—near the tassel to make it look ordinary, then mailed the whole framed picture to Esteban.
He called when the package arrived. "Where's your picture, love?" he asked.
"I thought you might like a large photo."
"Of the kids? Of course. Send me one of you too," he laughed. "I miss you."
I lied. "Maybe next time. You get the kids first."
He sounded warm. The two brains inside my skull argued for days—one said he was innocent, the other said coincidence piled into coincidence means truth. The recorder was the only way I could get a private ear into his life without driving three days with two children and risking another emergency. The twins had made travel impossible.
That night, I listened. The username on the sleep-app was meaningless—"LastMinutePrayers"—but the voice was not. A man said, "You said you were going to leave me." A girl's laugh answered—bright, flame-thin. "I'm right here," she said. My hand went numb.
"Who is that?" I whispered to the room. "Who are you talking to?" His voice—Esteban's voice—said, "It's nothing. I'm tired." The girl's voice called, "Esteban?" and he answered, "Don't call me that here."
My world turned cold.
The rational me tried to mount defenses. Maybe he was drunk. Maybe he regretted something. Maybe the other woman had forced herself on him. But—this was not a mistake you can excuse with a night of alcohol. He had said her name like he wanted to keep her.
I confronted him the next video call. "Are you seeing someone?" I asked.
"There is...someone I've been in contact with," he admitted, voice small. "It was a mistake. I don't want to hurt you."
"You slept with her," I said. "You told her you loved her."
"I said things I shouldn't have. I was lonely."
"She said she would move to town and work at the twins' kindergarten," I said, the words tasting of metal. He went silent. "Don't lie to me."
He begged then, tears clumsy. "Please, Daria, let's not make a terrible mistake. I'm sorry. I'll fix it."
I wanted to burn. Instead, I planned.
I bought records, wires, and a pocket of time. I sneaked into his car once, planted the tracker—the tassel that looked like a child's craft—and downloaded weeks of audio and movements. The recordings told a story: lunch dates, parcels, phone calls at midnight. The name repeated—"Bella"—a bell of sunshine against the cold facts. I matched it: Bella Dickson.
I watched, I listened, and I waited.
When Esteban came home—he'd been promoted, his voice all weekend bragging of a corporate event—we pretended. I made his favorite meal. He kissed me like nothing had happened and told me of the promotion. I smiled.
A week later, at a grocery drop, I saw him walk arm in arm with a young woman along the company street. My throat pulled tight. I recognized the way his hand cupped her waist. I made a plan.
I used Gemma's network. She had friends who ran a "push"—a viral rumor engine. She could make people talk. She could push a story like a lever. But I wanted subtlety, not ruin for ruin’s sake. I wanted control. I wanted leverage to keep my life steady, to keep the children safe, and to keep the man who had promised me a house working for me instead of away from us.
First, I found the kindergarten's schedule. Petra Curtis—the current life teacher—was due to go on maternity leave. A replacement job opened. Bella applied. I found their messages; I recorded the conversations. Bella made plans to move into Esteban's apartment, to cook for him, to let her presence seed itself into our life slowly. She was not coy; she was bold.
I confronted Bella at the kindergarten pickup, when parents clustered and children scattered like dandelion seeds. She smiled at my children, handed out stickers, drew them close.
"You're the new life teacher," I said, and everything in my voice was measured.
"Yes," Bella chirped. "Hello, I'm Bella. Nice to meet you."
She knelt and gave each of my twins a sticker, humsing a high little song. "You have such beautiful kids."
"They are mine," I said. "I hope you'll be kind to them."
She laughed lightly. "Of course."
I filed reports. I doctored screenshots—careful, plausible edits—of messages that made it look like Bella was trying to force Esteban into a choice. I leaked them to the parent chat. Parents who had never allied suddenly convened like rain clouds. Gemma helped produce a short, sharp clip: "Teacher seduces parent for seat." It spread like spilled oil.
A meeting of parents and the principal was called. The room was full—the gymnasium was too small for the weight of dozens of staring faces and children's small sneakers pattering in the doorway. Mothers lined the walls.
"She's a predator," a woman hissed. "Who grooms a family like this?" someone else said.
I sat front row, hands folded, eyes dry. Bella was escorted in by the principal, cheeks flushed.
"These accusations," she began, "are false." She tried to smile. The room did not smile back.
"Show them your phone," I said, voice clear. "Show them the messages."
She fumbled, fingers shaking. "They're private," she kept saying.
"Private conversations between an adult and my husband," I snapped. "Where's your integrity?"
"You're doing this for attention," she cried. "You're hurting my future."
"Parents, look," I said, and I projected the doctored messages I had prepared—just enough to show intent, just enough to look like a pattern. "This woman courted my husband. She wanted to move in. She sent him promises. She told him, 'If the kids like me, you'll leave.'"
"Mmm," the mothers muttered. "What kind of person courts another woman's family?"
"Do you have children?" a woman spat. "Would you want her near your kids?"
Someone recorded with their phone, the red dot bright. A chorus of "Shame" and "How could you" rose like a tide. The principal looked like a man made of paper, torn by duty and fear. He asked Bella to step outside, then to hand over her contact information, then informed her she would be suspended pending investigation.
Bella's face went pale. "This is slander," she said. "I'll sue."
"You'll be fired," an angry father shouted. "We don't want this kind of person near children."
She tried to speak, then her voice broke. A chorus of phones clicked like a flock of birds. People filmed. Someone whispered, "She looks younger than she seems." Someone else: "She smiled at my child in a way that felt like a trap." Laughter, thin and cruel, shivered through the room.
When they walked Bella out, the twins clung to me. Everleigh asked, "Mom, why is she crying?" I hugged them so tight I could feel their breaths, soft and certain. I felt cold, then hot, then something like triumph—hollow but bright.
The humiliation at the kindergarten was public, long, and exacting. It was more than a rumor; it was a stage where every parent's eye passed judgment. Bella tried to plead her side, tried to say it was a consensual relationship with a single man, not a crime. The room did not want nuance. The room wanted safety. Our small town had always closed ranks in the name of children. Her reputation was shredded like paper flags in the wind.
That punishment was over five hundred words in my memory—every whispered accusation, every camera light, every mother's hard stare. She looked different afterward: smaller, older, the makeup melted by tear streaks. That day, she left with less than what she had come with. She did not sue. She didn't even fight—she was too shaken.
But I did not stop there. That would have been petty, and I was not petty; I was strategic. Esteban's second public fall needed to be of a different kind. I wanted his career damaged, eyes turned against him at the office, so he'd be rooted at home. I wrote an anonymous letter to his firm's manager—careful, factual, with copies of our recorded conversations and edited clips of his late-night messages. I paid a cleaner to slip a printed envelope onto the boss's desk one morning. The envelope arrived like a slow bomb.
At the next board meeting, someone mentioned a complaint filed anonymously about a senior manager's improper relationships. Murmurs. Esteban's face went pale. He tried to explain; his manager's eyes had already hardened. Colleagues exchanged glances like people passing knives. An email chain sprouted. A competitor's agent—courtesy of Gemma's network—leaked a short video of "man with mistress" to the industry chatrooms. Overnight, Esteban was not just a cheating husband; he was a liability.
In the hallway outside his office, men who had once smiled at him crossed to avoid him. A once-friendly mentor told him it was "unfortunate," and the mentor's eyes were not kind. At a meeting full of numbers and projections, fingers kept moving toward the HR email. Esteban turned on me in private, begging. "Daria, I didn't want this to get out. I swear to you I didn't—"
"You didn't want it to get out because you wanted both things," I said. "You wanted comfort and your career. You wanted to be loved by someone at home and by someone who fills your need there."
He said nothing.
He tried to hold onto his job. The firm, under pressure, demoted him from client-facing positions. The promotion he had boasted about evaporated. Instead of round-table meetings, he found himself alone at a desk where file boxes stacked like small graves. His colleagues whispered. HR offered a "voluntary transition" package. He took it, humiliation swallowing any anger.
"Why?" he asked me the first night I came home and found him sitting on the floor, knees hugged, a dullness in his eyes I had seen only once before. "Why would you do that to me?"
"Because I could," I said. "Because I'm building something. Because the house you promised us costs money. Because my work—my studio—needs the cash."
He looked up, baffled. "You don't love me?"
"I love what you can do," I said. "And I don't love what you did."
The last of his public unmaking came in a way I orchestrated like a painter touches up a canvas. I hired a few of Gemma's friends—strong men, nothing cruel, just theatrical—and used them to teach Esteban a lesson about consequences. One afternoon, he was dragged from his car and beaten in the dimness of the underground lot. I watched from the driver of a delivery van, feet pressed to brake. His nose was broken; his face a map of ugly new rivers. The thugs left him there, breath ragged, as a warning. He called me, wrapped in paper-thin dignity.
"Who did this?" he gasped.
"I did," I said. "Not with my hands, with the hands of people who know what it means to take someone down."
He wept on the apartment floor that night. "Please, Daria," he said. "Don't make me smaller."
I made him smaller by other means. I turned the promotional bonus into payment for paint and a down payment for my small studio—my offices where my voice work would grow. I accepted the "worker at home" role he slid into like a reserved place at a table. I bought the house we had both wanted; I signed the mortgage. He had the keys but not the power.
"You could have left," he said once, fevered anger returning. "You could have taken the kids and gone."
"And then?" I asked. "Who would have paid for what I need? Who would have watched them when I'm recording? Who would have paid a nanny when I could make him work for me instead? No. I took something better."
"You're cruel," he said.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe the world gets cruel when men are cruel first."
There were nights I lay awake and imagined an ending where I told him everything and we fell in love again in some small, tidy way, like a paperback romance. That was childish. The reality was a ledger: I had invested years into him, into our family. He had broken that trust. My plan was not only to punish; it was to secure. I wanted the life for my children that he had promised but had not delivered without cost. I wanted him present and useful instead of absent and wandering.
He obeyed. He became the house's administrator, the one who went to parent-teacher meetings and changed bandages and read the twins the same tired bedtime stories. He drove their carpool and paid the bills and learned how to fold tiny shirts. He was humiliated at the office and then domesticated at home.
At the supermarket one rainy afternoon I ran into Bella. She looked hollow and smaller than at the kindergarten showdown. Her eyes were ringed and moist. "You ruined me," she whispered.
"I unraveled what you tried to do," I replied. "You tried to take my life."
"Esteban told me you were—" she began.
"What he told you was convenient," I cut in. "What he told you was the lie he needed."
She stepped forward, hands trembling. "I love him," she said, the words in the simple present making me want to laugh and weep at once.
"You loved his convenience," I said. "You loved his heat in a cold room."
She looked at me as if begging for something like mercy. I slid a pack of stickers into my cart for Everleigh and Addison. "Take care of yourself," I said. "Learn to build a life that doesn't revolve around another person's marriage."
She flinched away like I had spat.
Months later, the news at Esteban's old firm settled into a rumor. People still whispered. Some parents still sent their children to the kindergarten and didn't ask about past scandals. The town moved on. I moved on too—but not without scars.
When the dust had settled, I opened my studio. It was small, a square of rooms with soundproof walls and a doorbell that made the twins giggle. Gemma toasted me with cheap champagne. "You did it," she said.
"I did what I had to," I replied.
One evening, some months after the collapse, Esteban came to the studio with a plastic box of old things—photos, a necklace, a tie. He placed them on my desk carefully.
"Do you want to keep these?" he asked. "I thought... maybe you wanted closure."
I looked at the tie. It still smelled faintly of his aftershave. I thought of the warm video of him saying he missed me, of the ring of lies that had been unscrewed. I could have thrown the box into the trash and walked away. Instead I put the box in the drawer and closed it.
"Keep them," I said. "But know this: I will not be made small again."
He closed his eyes. "I know," he whispered.
The twins ran through the studio, their laughter ricocheting in the soundproof rooms like coins. They did not know what war had been waged for their comfort and safety. They only knew warmth and food and that their mother had a place where her voice mattered.
Sometimes at night, when I record and the microphone glows red, I sing to strangers who need comfort. I sing for pay. I sing for craft. I sing for the two little lives upstairs. I sing because my voice built me a life where I could keep them and keep my dignity—however jagged it had become.
And when Esteban calls now, the line is different. He says, "Did you have a good day?" in a voice smaller than before.
I answer, "Yes." I have learned to be careful with the softness in my mouth.
I am not proud of everything I did. I am proud of the house, the studio, the kids' backpacks hung by the door. I am proud that the man who promised me the world is here, shaving, taking the twins to school, a reluctant servant to his own choices.
The perfect thing on paper—our family picture in the hallway—smiled down at me like a calm lake. Underneath the tassel, the little recorder lies quiet. Sometimes, late at night, I wind the recorder back into my palm like a stone and think of how far I traveled from girl to woman who could plan and survive.
"Are you happy?" Esteban asked once, much later, quietly enough that the twins didn't hear.
"I'm okay," I said. "That's not the same as happy."
He did not answer. He was folding a tiny sweater, and the room smelled of detergent and a life rebuilt on compromise.
There are nights when I rehearse a lullaby not for clients but for my small family, and when Everleigh snuggles in and mumbles, "Mom," I stay with that small warm thing and let the rest of the world be.
The End
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