Sweet Romance12 min read
"Pregnancy Ointment, Ten Boxes of Crayfish, and the Courtroom That Broke Her Step‑Mother"
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I never thought a jar of ointment and ten boxes of crayfish would be the punctuation marks of my life.
"Yo, you're pregnant?" Valentina Archer said like it was a joke and a knife both.
"Yes," I said.
She laughed, but I tilted my chin. "It's your brother's baby. Aren't you happy to be an aunt?"
There was a sound of keys in the lock.
"Nicoletta—" she started, then froze when Emmett Martini walked in and heard us.
He stood there, coat half-removed, a shadow in the doorway. For a second the room was a photograph: Valentina's mouth open, my jaw clenched, Emmett's face unreadable. Then he smiled—no warmth in it, just a curve of lips that meant something cold and precise.
"You—" Valentina began.
"You're shameless," she hissed. "You left him when he was nothing. Now that he's back and successful, what? You come back with a story and expect him to welcome you?"
Emmett's laugh was soft. "The community is closed during the lockdown. The 'biyun' ointment—pregnancy ointment—it's impossible to buy, and impossible to borrow."
I stared. Valentina stared. I felt my mouth go dry.
"Leave," Emmett said, setting his coat on the rack. "Take your things. During the lockdown, don't come and go between apartments like it's a market."
"We're family," she protested.
"I'm a tenant," he said, slow and clear. "I'm your landlord."
Valentina stormed out, slamming the door like it would make a difference. I wanted to sink into the floor.
"There's nothing here for me," I whispered.
"Do you have any idea if you're really pregnant?" Emmett asked, unblinking, and stepped closer. The air changed. "Because if you are—"
"I'm not," I blurted. "I said that to spite her. I'm not pregnant."
He lifted a pack of alcohol pads, rubbed his index finger, cleaned it with excessive care. "I wouldn't 'dare' know," he said, and the words were a kind of gentle cruelty, like cold water thrown on a fever. "You really shouldn't use pregnancy ointment as a prop."
"I—" I looked away. "I don't know why I said it. I just wanted to hurt her."
He watched me for a long moment. "What makes you think she deserves that?"
"I don't know," I whispered.
He let a hum of disapproval out through his teeth, then, quieter: "You make a lot of noise about your novels and your heart, Nicoletta. What else do you do?"
"You really—" I couldn't meet his eyes; when I did, all the years between us folded into a single thin slice. He was different. He was taller, quieter, more controlled. He had the smell of someone who had learned how to hold himself steady.
"Do you want something to eat?" I offered lamely, and he closed the distance between us in two steps, the space clean and sharp.
"You're not pregnant," he repeated after I tried to explain, and then, absurdly, he offered, "I'll give you half a month's rent if your food is good."
"Excuse me?" I paused with a knife in my hand.
"Half a month," he said as if he had not just asked the most private thing and exposed my shame.
It felt like being a child again, bargaining for a small mercy. I swallowed and let him leave for his room without a sound. For days afterward we lived in the same building, passing like ghosts, pretending to not see the tender war between us. My friend Freya Nguyen shouted at me in texts until my phone vibrated itself into aching silence.
"Go get him," Freya said. "You're a writer. Use forty-seven romantic tricks."
"Which of the 47 involve me being slapped by my stepmother and calling myself pregnant?" I muttered.
"Just go. You'll fix things."
I tried. I followed a plan that tasted like desperation: cook his favorite meals, stand by the door with steaming plates, test his expression when he ate. Once, he took my plate without looking up and said, "I'm your guinea pig?" and then bit into the food.
"It's good," he said, so plainly I wanted to cry.
"That was the plan," I told my own reflection in the spoon.
He looked at me. "Chen—Nicoletta. You're very good at pretending."
"Can you be quiet about that?"
"Not a chance," he said, standing up to leave. "But your food is good. I owe you."
"You can use it to buy your conscience," I muttered.
Valentina came back one night in a dress that showed more than manners. She knocked until my hands cramped. She wanted Emmett in a way that had nothing to do with family affection; it was about entitlement, about a door she thought she could open whenever it suited her. When she forced her way inside, I cut loose.
"Don't you dare," she shrieked when I dared to bar her.
She slapped me—an old habit she'd practiced for years under my father's approving silence. Something in me answered. I struck back—only once—and she collapsed to the floor, suddenly small and real. She sobbed and played the victim. Emmett stepped forward like a man I'd never known. He was protective in a way that outraced every plan in my head.
"Stand up," he said to her. "Can you stand?"
She staged everything: the tears, the cries, the accusations. She moved like a practiced actress. Emmett escorted her out and slammed the door. That night, I could not eat. When I tasted the stew, the flavor broke apart like a memory.
Days later, Emmett came back with a jar of ointment, a small cardboard box labeled by hand in blocky letters: pregnancy ointment. He had to get it from a pharmacist named Raphael Youssef, who knew how to find things others couldn't.
"You're not going to use that as a prop again," he told me, watching me mix herbs like someone watching a child rake sand through fingers.
"I won't," I said. "It was stupid."
"Good." He sat nearby and quietly did nothing. That, too, was a kind of tenderness.
Weeks rolled forward. I was writing less and eating more. Once, when I turned suddenly cold, Emmett came and leaned over me, checking my throat as if he were checking a precious machine. "You can be quiet now," he muttered, like an old friend. "I just want you to be alive."
"I know," I whispered.
Then my father, Clark Berg, reared up like a storm. He had been absent for years—absent both in money and in duty—but he reappeared on television: a begging man, a liar with a tired face. He shouted my name to reporters, claimed I had mental illness, tried to make pity his currency. The press swallowed it. Comments and headlines did the rest. He wrote me out of dignity and tried to sell his lies.
"Father," I said into the phone until my voice cracked and broke. "Don't you dare—"
"Thirty thousand," he croaked. "Give me thirty thousand and I'll leave."
"You're asking me for money after everything?" I heard the outrage in my own voice.
"You owe me for my troubles," he said. "You owe me for my lost time."
I felt like a puppet whose strings were tugged by greed. He leaked a "lost daughter" story; he sued for sympathy. The world believed him for a while. Emmett's silence turned into a plan. He moved like a man who had read the best parts of my life and decided to fix them.
"You have to decide," he said, one night when I couldn't sleep. "Do you want to live under his shadow? Or do you want to cut him out?"
"I don't have thirty thousand," I said.
"You don't have to sell yourself to that man," Emmett said. He sounded furious, and then exhausted. "We will deal with him."
I wanted to say yes and I wanted to run away. Instead, I packed my things and left for a cheap flat. Emmett followed me like an echo. Sometimes he left before I woke; sometimes he stayed and sat still like a soldier waiting for orders.
Freya threw advice like confetti. "Sell the jewelry," she said. "Do whatever."
"I can't," I said. "Those pieces were my mother's."
Every choice was a wound.
When my father escalated—physically breaking into a hall, shouting and grabbing—police came. He lied about my "instability" to the public again. He claimed I had a disorder to cover his tracks. I sat in a restaurant, trembling, when I saw Emmett across the street in a window booth with another woman who was not my stepmother. My heart broke and didn't know what to do with the pieces.
"You okay?" he asked later, as I sat broken on a bench. He called me "Mrs." sarcastically once—"Mrs. Emmett"—then ducked. "Don't be dramatic."
I blocked him. He blocked me. We did childish things even when grown-up ones were needed. The world went on.
Then the knock at midnight came. Men in uniforms, the sound of keys being changed. Someone had filed complaints; my stepmother had made a show to the neighbors accusing me of theft and demanding ransom money. The wording she'd used on posters stuck to the stairwell: "Give me thirty thousand or I leave." It was petty, cruel.
I panicked. I sold pieces of my mother's jewelry. I gathered cash into a cheap envelope and went to meet my father.
He wasn't there. He was with Valentina, laughing and counting, like two vultures. I hung up and walked away, sick.
I wasn't ready for what happened next: the man I'd once loved—Emmett—showed up with the money in his pocket and a plan in his head.
"I gave it to her," he said later, voice flat. "But I told her to leave for good. I paid the three hundred hundred— thirty thousand—and told him never to come back."
"Why would you—" My voice broke.
"I can't watch you be prey," he answered. "I don't want your life to be taxes and fear and grudges."
Days blurred into courtrooms. Valentina's scheme unraveled; she had been stealing from wallets, forging signatures, and coercing people. In one magnificent, horrible day, the sun inched into the courthouse foyer and the world watched.
The courtroom was full. I had never imagined my life would be paraded under fluorescent lights and whispered about by strangers who would later post screenshots. Cameras watched everything. Valentina stood—beautiful in her breakdown, mascara streaked, voice higher than a grown woman's should be. She begged, she lied, she blamed me and then my father and then the world.
"She started it!" she howled toward anyone who would listen. "If she hadn't been away, none of this would have happened. I was forced—forced—into a marriage!"
The judge took his time. "You are charged with theft, forgery, and intentional assault," the prosecutor read. "You took advantage of the defendant's vulnerabilities. You forged accounts to siphon funds. You assaulted the defendant leading to bodily injury."
Valentina's hands flew to her face. "But I'm family!" she screeched. "I'm his wife—"
"You're charged," the prosecutor cut in. "The evidence is a paper trail, recorded transfers, witness testimony, and your phone calls."
On the gallery benches, people leaned forward. A woman in a yellow coat whispered, "I recognized her from the hall." A man clicked a photo. The judge turned pages and listened. The prosecutor had a folder the size of a small novel.
Valentina's reaction changed over minutes like the stages of a bad play: first indignant, then shocked, then frantic denial. She tried to smile at familiar faces in the crowd. She pleaded sorrow. She accused me of being cruel for testifying. She asked for my forgiveness in a voice that had been rehearsed.
I sat very straight. Emmett's fingers found mine beneath the bench and squeezed. "Don't look down," he breathed.
Her echoing performance couldn't erase the transfers laid bare: bank records, messages where she had arranged to take money with the promise she'd "help" me, photos of items taken from my late mother's safe. Witnesses testified: a neighbor who had seen her with packages, Raphael the pharmacist who had described being threatened when he refused to participate in forging medical notes, Ramon the locksmith who had been offered money to break my locks at night. The prosecution played a recording of Valentina telling a friend she would "get what she deserved from Nicoletta."
"You're not the victim here," the prosecutor said, quietly, to the room, then louder, to the judge: "She profited off the marital status she willed for herself to take. She attacked, she lied, she stole, she weaponized a family."
Valentina's face went from white to purple. She had always been the kind of woman who believed her own stories; now she found herself outlived by evidence. The crowd breathed as if the verdict were a wave. Her hands trembled. She tried to reach for my eyes, to find any path to pity, but I tried not to give any.
Then they read the sentence.
"Because of the gravity of the crimes and the premeditation, the court sentences Valentina Archer to the maximum allowed under law," the judge announced.
Her mouth fell open. Tears stopped. A shocked silence filled the room. I felt a low hum under my ribs.
"Do you have anything to say?" the judge asked.
She turned to me, the woman who had hit me and tried to cash in my fear. Her eyes begged for forgiveness as if it could be a currency. She dropped to her knees, a dramatic move—pleading on hands and knees in a public place.
"Please," she whispered. "Nicoletta, I was desperate. I was—"
I stood.
"Stand," Emmett whispered.
When I looked at her, she looked like someone who had been stripped of everything but a small, fevered hope. The gallery rustled. Phones came out. A murmur rolled like distant thunder and then silence that asked for judgement.
"Valentina Archer," I said, and my voice came out steady. "You wanted my life, my money, my family connections. You hit me. You forged my name. You threatened people. You thought the world would feel sorry for you and pay. You were wrong. You made choices."
Faces turned, cameras clicked. Valentina's expression wavered: pride to panic to a brittleness that seemed to be cracking her like pottery. She begged. She tried to bargain with the judge, with the people, even with me. "I'll give everything back," she promised. "I'll confess to all. Please, please—"
The prosecutor put a hand up and read the law to the room. People who had watched gossip and rumor now watched a legal engine dismantle the liar's claims. The judge pronounced the sentence: a long period of restitution, community shaming measures, jail time possibility, and orders for publications requiring her to confess in the public record.
The crowd's reaction was immediate. People who had hissed behind their hands earlier now applauded softly. Someone laughed; someone clapped. A woman near the back recorded the moment and grinned in that private, powerful way that strangers do when they see justice served. Valentina screened for cameras, tried to smile, but her face did not reach the gesture.
She was led away, protesting, then quieting. The handcuffs looked ridiculous on her. Someone from the gallery spit; someone else whispered, "Finally." The man in yellow who'd recognized her earlier stood and said, "She did this to me, too," and a dozen heads nodded. A young woman cried openly and said it had given her courage to go to the police.
Valentina's downfall was not only the judge's gavel. It was the way the lights of public opinion found her and did not soften. For days afterward, the story was everywhere—the courtroom footage, the journalist's short piece with money trails and testimony. People wrote comments calling her names I'd never heard them use before; other people used kinder language and wondered about why anyone would do such a thing.
I felt a strange lightness in the middle of that noise. It wasn't glee; it was relief. I had been carrying a thousand small fears for years: the fear that my father's voice would drown out mine, the fear that my stepmother would rewrite the past for profit. Watching her led away in chains was a reckoning. The crowd that watched was a chorus of private grudges finally getting their day.
Emmett stayed with me the whole time. After the verdict he held my hand and didn't let go.
"Do you regret calling me back?" he asked quietly that night.
"No," I said. "I regret a lot of things, but not that I came back."
He smiled—a small, private smile. "Good. Because I plan to stay."
After Valentina's sentencing, there were other aftershocks. My father's cruelty finally found its end not in my forgiveness but in his own collapse: an accident, some justice of its own, left him bedridden and mute. The news footage showed him in a hospital bed as if the man who had been loud and manipulative had been drained of breath and power. I watched, and I felt no joy—only an exhausted, hollow release.
"Don't ever speak to him again," Emmett murmured.
"I won't," I said.
Later, at home, Raphael Youssef dropped off a package. "For the tenant," he said, smiling like a man who'd been part of a small plot to protect someone.
"What did he do?" I asked.
"He saved your life," Raphael said, and he turned to leave.
Emmett had become a constant. He bought ten boxes of crayfish one evening—outrageous for two people—and placed them like a small altar on the coffee table. "You deserve good things," he said, and we ate with our hands and laughed, and the shells piled like a mountain between us.
"Did you pay for the whole thing?" I asked between bites.
"From your rent," he said, and watched me with something like fondness.
My editor, Fisher Ayers, called with news that my manuscript would be published. "It's small," he said, but his voice was proud. "You did it."
"I did," I whispered, and for the first time in years the future looked like a page I could write on.
We married quietly. Emmett liked to joke about "forced love"—how he would "force" me to love him until I couldn't help it. I laughed, and then realized his joke was a promise he meant to keep.
Years later, when someone asked me what saved me, I'd finger the small jar of ointment in my drawer, the one that had triggered so much in our lives. I'd point to the mound of crayfish shells in the sink, the wedding ring on my finger, the courtroom footage on a hard-drive, and I'd say, "I didn't save myself by being silent. I saved myself by speaking up."
The last line on the final day of trial had been simple: you cannot buy a life with other people's pain. The public had watched my stepmother's performance break down under light and law. She had fallen hard, and the sound of her shattering reached me like a bell.
That night Emmett and I sat under the lamp and counted the shells. "You owe me for half a month's rent," he said softly.
"I owe you everything," I said.
He kissed me on the forehead, then opened the drawer to tuck the small jar of pregnancy ointment away. "One day," he said, "we'll tell our child this story."
"Which one?" I asked.
"The one where ten boxes of crayfish and a jar of ointment changed everything."
He laughed, and I let the sound rest in my chest.
The End
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