Revenge15 min read
Relatives, Revenge, and Clay: Four Confessions from My Loft
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Part One — The Aunt Who Came to Stay
"My name is Jenna Bailey. I make tiny clay animals and two-head cartoon figures in a loft with a ladder to the bedroom. I like my toys lined up on half a wall. I like quiet. I liked my life until my aunt moved in."
"I told Mom, 'Why did Helene bring the kid?'"
"Mom answered, 'Your uncle and his wife work far away; there's no one to look after him.'"
Helene Kuenz arrived like a gust of opinionated wind, hair carefully done, voice loud with entitlement. Her boy—Gavan Bentley—had pockets full of sugar, knees full of mischief. He went straight for the children's play area and hauled another child off a swing. I watched the scene over my shoulder and wanted to vanish.
"That's what happens when grown people are lazy," Helene declared as if announcing a weather forecast, not the uprooting of someone else’s comfort.
"You should keep him close," I said when the children spilled juice in the hot pot restaurant. "That sauce..."
"What? The food's great. Bring more," she told the waitress and ordered like she was lecturing the world. Gavan climbed up on benches, toppled a pitcher. A girl at the next table got splashed with oil. Voices rose like fire. Helene pointed at the girl.
"Who are you to scold a child?" she barked. "A brat needs patience, not scolding from strangers!"
"You don't say—" the girl snapped back. "If his parents let him behave like that he'll throw watermelon rinds into hot pots. What's wrong with you?"
The argument escalated into shouts and humiliations; Helene used a phrase I still hear in my head: "You have no manners, you little—" followed by every insult she could fetch. The manager calmed things down, gave the scorched guest a comped meal, and politely escorted Helene and Gavan out.
"Why did you refuse the comp?" Helene hissed at me in the taxi. "You always throw money away!"
"I paid. I couldn't let them be the reason people think I'm one of the kind Helene likes to describe," I said. "Besides, I work for living."
We lived in a two-level loft. The stair was steep. I chose the upper bed, thinking of quiet. Helene insisted on the same—Gavan began to tread over my sleep, switching the thermostat up and down, yelling at midnight because "It's too hot! I'm dying!"
"Can you lower the AC? Downstairs freezes," I said once.
"You're always cold. Lower it," she scolded. Neighbors came to complain; she played victim and I gave in. I slept badly.
That first week a small, humiliating cruelty occurred: my porcelain bowl—a prize I'd earned in a clay competition—was used as a urinal. "Who put this here?" I asked, my voice steady but thin.
Helene grinned, her teeth bright. "It's nothing. A bowl is a bowl. I grew up with less. You can buy another."
"You let him pee in my bowl?" I said. Gavan was rubbing his eyes; his scream filled the small kitchen. Helene wrapped him like a shield.
"He’s a child," she bleated when I accused her. "You shouldn't be so harsh. I raised children—"
"You raised him by letting him ruin my things!" I pointed at a half-made clay figurine whose head had been violently torn off.
Helene's voice jumped an octave. "It's just clay! I could throw this away and you wouldn't die!"
"You don't get it," I said. "These are my living. I need this work for clients."
"Clients? Women like you… you spend money on toys," she mocked. "Save for marriage. A woman who spends on little plastic toys is unusable!"
I clenched my teeth. I had thought to be generous—invite them for a month. But as Gavan stomped through my studio, and as Helene acted like our home had been claimed, my patience frayed.
A few days later, Gavan smashed my display case. Dozens of Lego models lay ruined like fallen soldiers. The sight knocked the air out of me.
Helene smiled. "Kids will be kids. You can rebuild."
"I can't," I said, voice tight. I called the police.
"You called?" Helene turned white. "You're insane."
Two officers, Wesley Svensson and Clancy Gallo, arrived. They looked at the chaos and listened as Helene and Gavan performed the victim act.
"She treats us like criminals," Helene wailed. "We came here to get her to be kind—"
"Mr. Gallo, please—" I said. "They damaged a lot of my things. That's theft and intentional damage."
Wesley took my statement calmly. "We will mediate. If there's evidence of theft, we may take action."
Helene screamed at me in the hallway. "You will regret this! Nobody's on your side!"
I pressed on. I needed to protect my work. I had invoices and receipts on my phone: limited-edition models, imported customs fees, commissions—the numbers were real.
When the officers viewed camera footage from my hastily installed cameras, Helene's act faltered and then cracked.
"You took what?" Wesley said, flipping through timestamps. "You packed jewelry, cash, and a gaming console."
Helene trembled. "We were just… borrowing."
"Returning it now changes things," Clancy said. "You understand we can pursue this legally."
Helene began to sob and bargain. "Please, please, I have heart trouble. We can't have this in her name."
"How will you face a lost job if a theft record shows up?" Wesley asked. He was professional; his calm made Helene break.
She began to cry louder when she realized the evidence was concrete.
"I didn't know!" she wailed. "I thought—" Her pleas slit into incoherent breath. Gavan started mimicking her cries, then turned to hide behind her skirt.
We filed a report. Two days later Helene and Gavan were escorted to the police station, and I watched them leave. It felt grotesque and strangely freeing.
The administrative action that followed was not just an office paperwork exchange. It became a public, humiliating exposure for Helene in the small municipal office where relatives gather.
Helene was made to sit on a folding chair beneath fluorescent lights while a queue of other citizens came to deal with municipal matters. A clerk read aloud the facts, while the room filled with a soft, astonished murmur.
"You took and concealed privately-owned items totaling nearly twenty thousand in value. The complainant provided video evidence and receipts," the official said, placidly. "We are placing an administrative restriction and notifying the community organizations about the incident."
Helene's jaw dropped. Around her, lines formed: an elderly lady paying a fine, a young man renewing license, a mother with a crying child. No one expected this drama—instead they watched.
"Please," Helene begged, voice high. "I didn't mean—"
A woman at the copy counter leaned forward and whispered, "Is that the woman who stayed in the Bailey loft? My cousin saw her at the hot pot. Shameful."
"Shameful," echoed a clerk as he stamped forms.
Helene's mask dissolved. Her face shifted—shock, then frantic denial, then that brittle, theatrical anger she used at home.
"It wasn't theft," she said loudly, as if repeating a memorized line. "We were guests. I thought you would understand."
"Understanding requires honesty," the clerk said. Papers shuffled. A thin crowd gathered—neighbors from the same building, a mother who had earlier been splashed with oil at the pot. Someone took out a phone and started filming.
Helene's expression changed. Her chest heaved. First she pleaded, then she cried, then she tried to charm. "Please," she said to a woman who recognized the porcelain bowl in the photograph that a police officer had placed on the table near Helene's hands. "I'll return the money. We'll move out."
Someone in the queue—an elderly man in a blue cap who had been listening—looked up. "You called that bowl nothing? That was her prize. People work to earn those things."
A young man snapped, "She's using the old 'I'm sick' trick. Heard it all."
Helene's eyes widened. That is the precise arc the punishment required: from bold-faced brazen to stunned silence to gullible bargaining, and finally to being shunned as the crowd’s sympathy evaporated.
She tried to make a scene—rolled on the floor, hugged her knees and wailed about being a sick woman. Gavan began to howl in imitation. But the crowd had already chosen its side. There were whispers about "entitled relatives" and "taking advantage of kind hosts," which stung more than any formal sanction.
When the clerk announced the administrative detention and the restitution schedule, Helene's face showed the exact swing of a person who had gambled on other people's tolerance and lost.
"I didn't mean it like this," she said, to the crowd, to the floor, to me. "I needed help. My home—"
"No one owes you the right to steal," the elderly man said. "You come into a home and break what doesn't belong to you, then cry? Shame on you."
A woman with shopping bags shook her head and said, "People like this make us suspicious of all guests."
Helene's pleading thinned into a whisper. Someone clapped—not out of celebration but as a release, a way to mark that justice had been served in the eyes of the public present.
I felt a strange emptiness watching her go. The anger I carried shrank into a quiet satisfaction: my work was safe, my mother was no longer the one who had to tolerate this, and people had seen what Helene really was. Yet no one applauded me. I knew this kind of victory would be messy and small and not erase the nights I'd been frightened to sleep.
Helene was given five days of administrative custody. Gavan was taken home by social services for a week of supervision; they did not label him a criminal, only a child in need of supervision. The receipts for my items were recorded for restitution. The manager of the hot pot called to apologize.
When they left our building for good, Helene muttered that I had no soul. The neighbors nodded. Someone helping carry out their luggage rolled his eyes and said, "If you hurt someone's livelihood, you get called out. Simple as that."
My mother, Jennifer Donaldson, finally sighed freely for the first time in weeks. "Thank you, Jenna," she said, the words as small as a cup. She had been strong for decades; now she could be strong without the weight of that old, quiet sorrow.
It was humiliation—public, small-town, necessary. Helene had thought she could keep changing roles like outfits; she had decanted our hospitality and broken my livelihood like an expired dish. The public exposure was not a spectacle for me but a safeguard: a line drawn.
After the dust settled, I rebuilt. I reassembled my collection, ordered replacements, and took more pictures for my clients. I installed a stronger camera and a stricter lock. I still liked my toys. But I learned to set doors that lock and to expect no favors from relatives who look comfortable taking what they want.
Part Two — The Cousin and the Hidden Transfers
"I am Kalani Gentile. I married young. I will not say my marriage was a pure fairy tale. But I did not expect my husband's old acquaintance to be my cousin."
"There is one sentence you never want to hear at a family party," my aunt told me at dinner, eyes lowered. "Men in suits will say: 'He was promoted.'"
On the morning my whole world tilted, a family member—my aunt who visits during the holidays, a blunt woman—let a secret fall: "Your husband had a brief thing with your cousin before he met you."
My head screeched like a radio with bad reception. "How long?" I asked, trying to sound unaffected.
"A month," she hedged. "She didn't like him."
A month. A month before he met me—that one small sliver of time—and suddenly my memories stank. I had introduced Wesley Svensson to my cousin, Martina Howard, once. My husband had come to dinner at my aunt’s. Had he kissed her? Had he been there when I wasn't looking? My mind spun down a loom of questions and terrors.
I watched them both at the family gathering. Wesley arrived late—handsome, tidy, promoted. He walked in carrying gifts, his back straight like he had learned how to earn his status. Family instinct turned to him as if he were a flag.
Martina sat in a cream dress. She had that careless glamour; people admired her as if it was habitual. She greeted Wesley like she knew better, like she had been there in his history.
That night I asked him one question at our apartment. "Did you ever have anything with Martina?"
He flinched. "We were never serious," he said. "We went out once or twice. She didn't like me then."
I tried to rest. His hand found mine and tried to close the distance. I pulled away more times than I can count. In secret I began to look—phone records, banking logs. A message disappeared; a transfer lingered on my husband's statements. There it was: a transfer to an unfamiliar name. The recipient label read like a joke: 'FreeAirFish'. It was just a string. But the amount—ten thousand—was not a joke.
She had a hotel selfie on a private account showing a couch that matched one I later found in a screenshot sent to me. The pieces clicked. The hotel, the photos, the late-night messages. My feelings liquefied into cold lucidity: they had slept together.
I could have left, weeping into a pillow. I could have been the wife who dissolves into the marriage's dust. But my fury wanted a map, a plan. So I built one.
"I told Xavier," I said. Xavier Jacobs—our mutual friend—he helped me gather evidence. "He said he'd help."
Xavier—quiet, precise—became my ally. He arranged small traps: a meeting with Martina, a man named Joaquin Turner posing as an admirer who baited her into meeting. She, greedy for attention and gifts, obliged. Joaquin sent me updates—photos, reservations, receipts. Money wired. A hotel hallway shot that matched Wesley's late-night selfie.
The final act was devastating and public. My grandfather's seventieth birthday—the biggest family event of the season—became the theater. I dressed for a life I hoped for the last time. We arrived and sat among a small crowd. Wesley and Martina took seats on opposite sides of the hall and pretended a chilly unfamiliarity.
I stood up and inserted a USB into the hotel projector. "I have something to share," I told the room, and my voice did not tremble.
On the screen they were kissing—feeding each other late-night snacks like lovers. The hotel lounge photograph flashed. Then transfers crossed the screen: payments for a condominium—ninety-eight thousand and partial installments. The chat logs scrolled and scalded. "Dress in black," one message read. "Don't let her see us," another.
The hall sat stunned. The elder cousins looked at their plates. My grandfather's face tightened to grief. Martina's mouth formed an 'o' of shock; then she rolled crimson, then white. Wesley reached forward—"Kalani, what are you doing?"—but his hand trembled like someone who'd been discovered wet-fingered at a secret.
I narrated the timeline calmly: "You met before I met him. You fooled every one of us. You took our money and our trust. You took my husband while I was only trying to trust him."
There was a weight to the visuals. Proof does not require melodrama; it demands clarity. I let the screen speak. The messages, the photos, the transfer receipts—they were a slow, crushing avalanche.
My father stood and struck Wesley. "You animal," he shouted. The slap landed loudly. Martina's mother tried to take her daughter away, covering her face. My aunts reached for my grandfather. The room's whispers turned into a chorus of accusation and contempt. People looked away from Wesley the way you look away from an accident: shocked, guilty at the spectacle, and relieved to be watching rather than participating.
Martina cried, attempted to explain that she had been lonely, that she had wanted help. "She had my number," Wesley tried to beg. "I was tempted. I was weak."
"Tempted?" my cousin's voice said from the corner. It was the oldest relative in the room: my uncle, who had watched us grow up with a kind of brittle justice. He stepped forward and slapped Martina so hard her hair swung. "You knew better!" he said.
The punishment scene was not only the slap. People around them began to speak in the language of small-town retribution. My uncle's hand did not land alone. Words landed, harsh as metal. "Shame on you," said one. "You ruined a marriage for money," said another. Someone took a phone and began to call other relatives. Someone else posted a shortened version of the projection to a closed family group.
Martina's embarrassment was not a single moment; it stretched out. People who had admired her now lowered their eyes. Her mother tried to cover her face, but scorn traveled faster than maternal instinct. Guests murmured about standards, about respect. A cousin got up and left. Another refused to sit with her. Her name became a small stain at the center of every conversation that night.
Wesley tried to beg forgiveness. He cried. "Kalani, I will fix this. I'll pay back—" He held out a paper, an apology he could not make his actions undo.
"I don't want torn promises," I told him. "I want accountability."
The public exposure did two things: it ended the illusion that their actions were private, and it forced my family to choose sides. For Martina and Wesley, their world shrank. For me, the path was grim but clear. We divorced. Martina returned the transfers under pressure; the condominium was reclaimed. The family ostracized Martina. My divorce, hard as it was, became a salvage operation: I retrieved joint finances and fought for a clean break. Xavier—who had watched this whole operation with quiet steadiness—became my friend after the debris settled. He offered company in a small, patient way. Later, in his own time and in the slow, honest way he knew how, he built a life that resembled trust.
Public humiliation had been the instrument this time. It was not an act of cruelty—though it hurt to give—and it was not an act of mercy. It was a way to make forbidding choices public so they could no longer be ignored. Martina left the city months later. People said she had fallen into bad company. She later disappeared from family records. I married again years later—to a man who matched steadiness with ordinary kindness—and I had children who made dinners hum and small mornings precious.
Part Three — The Father in New Jersey
"My name is Christina Gutierrez. By nineteen I had decided a righteous anger was better than quiet grief. I bought a cheap plane ticket and went to New York to confront my father."
My father—Wolfgang Osborne—had a neat Twitter kind of life in my mind: a worn cross of missing birthdays and vanished phone calls. Then I saw him on a vlogger's clip in Costco with a woman and a child. She had the same two moles on the corner of his mouth I'd seen in a faded family picture. I recognized him.
"He's building a life," I told myself. "He's using my mother's money."
My mother had sold family property to cover debts Wolfgang said were business losses. Then he vanished. I went to the U.S. on money saved from odd freelance jobs.
At the Newark airport a man who called himself Angel Barber—tall, with green eyes and a near-addiction to Chinese culture—helped me when I was dazed and lost.
"This is my friend," Angel said. "I lived ten years in China. I'll take you to the place near his postbox tomorrow."
We found him one morning. He had a woman on his arm, and a boy. She saw me and slapped me hard. The woman—callous, trained to laugh at pain—called me a liar, but Angel had already taken my photo.
The woman called the police and I was shoved away, but before that, I caught him on his own phone: messages, family photos with a caption that read like comfort: 'Our little man.' I had proof.
Angel and I followed them to a suburban estate the size of my town's public library. The house had manicured lawns, three garages, and a front door that barely fit a single true conscience. The woman—Lola in my photos—boasted of private schools. She had bought him a life with my mother's sacrifice.
When I knocked, she answered with a purse and a smile.
"You're the daughter?" she mocked. "This is America."
I told her what she was—an accessory to theft. She shrugged. "Domestic matters. Not your business." Then the boy came up and pulled at my skirt. He laughed and called out words that meant nothing until they meant everything: "Heart panties!"—and threw a meanness that tasted like mockery.
I angered them too much. Wolfgang slapped me across the face. The boy bit me. Later, when Angel and I set up cameras, and when the police arrived after I cried foul about them hurting the child, the tables turned. Child Protective Services took the boy for observation; police took statements. The woman was arrested in a matter that made her flip between horror and rage. It was public and procedural—the way small real things are made big by law.
I posted their photos to business contacts, to suppliers Wolfgang worked with. I wrote an email to his partners describing what I'd found—one that included police reports, photographs taken during the dispute, and our statements. Within days, his business email inbox flooded with questions. His reputation, which he had built in whispers and ledgers, unspooled.
My mother, who'd paid off his debts and remained tethered by memory, later divorced him. Too late to stop some grief—my grandmother died without seeing him properly—but the world lined up with me in small ways. Angel and I ate cheap dumplings in Flushing while he sang me a stanza of a Chinese folk song. I never forgave him, but watching him fall from a pedestal had a softness to it: it was justice you could almost touch.
Part Four — The Stepmother Lesson
"I am Edith Kuhn," I said, "and my life was a series of lessons about what a stepmother can do when she chooses cruelty over care."
My stepmother was Lois Campos. My father, Gary Lorenz, had married her and brought in a little boy named Avery McDonald. They made a home designed to erase me. They took my room, they took my space, and they taught me that attention could be spent on one child and withheld from another.
"I'll help you," my grandmother would say. "Go study."
I studied. I hid division notebooks. When I got into the city high school, Lois forced me into chores that blurred into punishments. She beat me when she thought no one was watching. She sold my mother's keepsakes and called them 'expenses.' She called my name as if it was a crime.
When I received my acceptance to a top program at the city high school—one that might have changed everything—Lois tried to block it. She used excuses: tuition, placement, logistics. But the principal, old and fair, pressured her in a hallway that smelled of lemon cleaner and hot lunches. The town stood up for me. I went to boarding school. I found books and friends and a small life that belonged to me.
My revenge was modest. I worked to scholarships and later to a small job that I used to save for myself. I refused to let her define me. I left the house. I wrote down what she had done. Not to shame, but to remember. Some people get loud revenge; I made a life so tidy and full that her voice faded into the hallways.
Lessons
After the four seasons of relatives and scandals—Helene's theft, Martina and Wesley's betrayal, Wolfgang's double life, Lois's small cruelties—my rooms were full of evidence and scars.
"Family," my friend Xavier told me over coffee, "is not always blood. Sometimes it's who keeps your work from getting used as a urine basin."
I laughed then. We had all done things that were loud and necessary, messy and precise. We defended ourselves because we had to.
In my loft, I hung up a tiny clay figure—just a small rabbit with a splinted ear—on the wall near my worktable. It reminded me that people can be small and brave at the same time.
And if a relative comes calling again, I will look at their hands. If those hands have taken without asking, I will show the world the camera footage, the invoices, the receipts, and I will step forward. I will not let kindness be mistaken for weakness.
The End
— Thank you for reading —