Sweet Romance13 min read
Second Act: The Girl Who Wouldn't Be Quiet
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I woke up smelling old wallpaper and milk tea that was already cold. I blinked and the room around me was five years younger, smaller, less full of trophies and headlines. My hands were sixteen-year-old hands. My heart had the memory of falling.
"You think I'm dead?" I whispered to the ceiling.
"Why would I think that?" My own voice sounded thinner, younger. My throat closed on a laugh that tasted like iron. I remembered the high ledge, the scream, Qi Li's hand—Yulia's face—laughing at the wind. I remembered blood and a rush of sky. I remembered deciding I would stop being a blade in other people's hands.
I sat up. My mirror gave me back a face the world had loved and hated. My eyes were rimmed red with an old, perfect anger. I had lived twenty-one years once. I had fame, I had a film—"Last Luck"—that made me bright and brittle. I had been loved, then destroyed by people I had trusted.
I swung my legs off the bed and stepped into a life I had already survived.
Downstairs, Mallory Luna was petting a little dog as if the house were hers. She saw me and smiled with teeth my mother taught me to distrust. "So late, Ivanna. Really, are you always piggish?"
"Does it bother you?" I said. I kept my voice flat on purpose.
"It should," Mallory said. "You have manners to learn."
My father, Franklin Bowers, sat between them with a look I knew. He loved peace more than truth. He loved an easy table. He said, "Ivanna, watch your tone."
"I did," I breathed. "I did watch it. I watched enough last life."
Yulia came down slow and polite and too-sweet at once. "Mom, it's just a mood. She always gets like that."
I looked at Yulia like I had once looked at my worst reviews: thin, bored with me. "Keep up your shelf life as the family trophy," I said. "Or I'll throw you under the next candidate."
Yulia's smile thinned. She always thought of me as a problem to be managed, not a person who could move.
Three days later I walked into Class 2-1 at Lin Cheng Third Middle School and smelled the same school I had left. The kids clustered around Yulia like she was carved from sunlight. They called her the school flower and fanned her until she almost wilted.
"She didn't mean it," Yulia said to her followers, tossing one of those practiced looks my old life had taught me. "My sister's odd. She doesn't pay attention."
I didn't answer. I had no fondness left for the costume of gentility. I slung my bag over one shoulder and lay down in the back row like I owned the world and everything it owed me.
"Hello, I'm Ivanna," I said when the teacher asked who I was. The class buzzed.
"She's Qi Li's sister," a boy whispered.
"For now," I muttered into my hoodie.
The week blurred into small cruelties. A girl named Genevieve Britt offered me friendship like bait. A teacher, Susanne Chavez, who loved the sound of her own power, started to pick at me the way a child picks at scabs.
One afternoon a familiar presence cut through the noise like a blade through paper.
"What's going on here?" His voice was low and precise and landed in the middle of the classroom like a command. He walked up, tall in a navy suit, two fingers tapping my shoulder not to chastise but to steady.
I looked at him and something slow and steady moved behind my ribs. He didn't make a big show. He simply said, "Don't rush to judge anyone."
Yulia's mouth opened and closed. The room stilled. The man had a presence like a closed door—enough to stop people. He stepped back onto the stage and introduced himself. "Reed Bergmann. I came to give a talk, but I happened to notice something more important—decency."
The students murmured. The teachers shifted. Reed Bergmann had the voice of a man used to being obeyed without explanation. He spoke a few crisp sentences about respect and shame, and when he left, the atmosphere had changed. People looked at me not with the small knives of yesterday but like strangers who had seen something they couldn't name.
After the talk a girl from the back, Kaliyah Simon, tugged my sleeve. "You should be careful," she whispered. "He doesn't usually do that."
"Neither do I," I said.
That night I went to a bar I used to hate. Aquiles Donaldson, who ran the place, slid me an e-cigarette. "You don't have to do auditions tonight," he said. He had always been a useful friend in a dangerous city.
"Maybe I don't want the glare," I said, watching smoke like ghosts. "I want a normal life. A boring school, a bowl of bad noodles, a desk job."
He laughed. "Such a tragic desire. Fine. If you need money, ask."
Reed found his way into my days like a new weather system. He passed by with his car—an expensive black thing that freed him from neighborhood laws—and he would stop for me on the corner. He left me a coffee once with his name printed on the cup like a small signature.
One night he slowed his car beside me and said in that low voice, "Ivanna, where are you going?"
"To the house of a man who refuses to treat his daughter well," I answered, because I could. "My father," I added without softening.
He barked a laugh. "You're a mess."
"That's not a question," I told him.
He took me to the hospital when my stomach did a knot I couldn't ignore. Tobias Powell, a friend we both knew, met us there. Reed sat with me in a waiting room and placed his hand on my back like a promise. My teeth clenched around pain and grief and something like peace.
"You shouldn't be alone," he said softly.
I pressed my fingers into his palm because I was tired of pretending. The monitor beeped in the corner. Rowan nurses skimmed across the floor. People stared. Reed's rough, private face went soft. "I'll stay," he said, and I let the world narrow to the line of his hand over mine.
"You holding my hand?" Tobias joked when finally the doctor told us I would be fine with rest and a few IVs. "You two are ridiculous."
"She held it first," Reed said, voice smug.
"No proof," I murmured. Reed squeezed my fingers and smiled like an idiot. I liked that smile more than I had a right to.
Reed's curiosity into my past was practical at first. He wanted to know who I was. He tried to research me and hit walls. He called Fielding Burgess, a hacker who owed him favors. Fielding scrolled and swore and then told him what I already suspected: whoever had placed me in the headline machine years ago had wiped things clean. "Something's shielding her," Fielding told Reed. "Like a shadow wall."
We both knew that if someone wanted me erased from official maps, there was more behind it than a family feud. Reed promised to dig, which became one of the many ways he gave me his time. He was present. He showed up with coffee and with the patience of a man who had the right to be ruthless and chose instead to be steady.
At school, Susanne Chavez cornered me over an exam. "Practice what you preach," she said, and I snapped. The metal pointer she used hit the desk. I broke it in my hand. People screamed and phones lit up with gossip like torches.
I went to the office. My father and Mallory came in like predators and serenely tried to perform concern. "How could you be so violent?" Mallory cried. She was the kind of woman who cleaned her face with other people's errors. I let her try to own the moral high ground.
"You're the kind who teaches men to move on," I told her. "You made a career out of stepping over mothers."
My voice was small but steady. She recoiled because, for once, I called her by what she had done in the open. I had proof. I had evidence of pain, of our mother's calls to the doctor Mallory had bribed, of loans that had sent the family into a spiral so Mallory could play rich. I had everything because I had lived the end once, and I had not been able to save anyone. This time I would.
The school fringed the gossip feed for a week. People posted, supported, argued. Reed quietly shut down the worst of it—he had friends who could remove the worst slander, but he didn't want to erase the truth so much as clear the noise so I could act.
I built myself a ledger of small moves. I took class. I studied harder than anyone thought I would. I also started working in the little company a friend of mine—Morgan Golubev—had opened with me in secret. We would train actors, shoot short dramas, and keep our pockets from going dry. I took small roles for quick money and kept my face from the camera when I wanted to.
One night someone in the forum posted a photo of me leaving the studio. "She is being supported," someone wrote. "She's a kept woman." I felt the old sick sensation rise. Reed closed the thread before it could spread. He did that at the cost of being honest: "Stop lying about people who can't fight back."
I decided the fight would not be behind anonymous screens. I would tear the floor out from under the people who hurt me.
It was time.
The public challenge happened at a charity luncheon hosted by my father and Mallory. The room was river-gold and stuffed with the city’s polite predators. They had all come to celebrate some grant that gave them fame and self-congratulation, and Mallory had chosen that night to wear pearls like armor.
"Sit," Mallory said to me sweetly, as if she could be the center of my life again.
"I will not sit," I said. "Not until everyone here hears what happened."
People craned. Cameras clicked like crickets. Reed was at my side, quiet, eyes like iron chain.
I unfolded the paper I had brought—bank statements, schedules, the names of the clinics, the call logs. I laid them on the table so the servers had to step around truth. I looked up. Mallory's mouth was a thin line, the pomade on her hair failing at the edges.
"You staged my life," I said. "You and your daughter signed papers, you arranged appointments. You made my mother die with a scar you could never show. You told my father she had fled. You told everyone the grief."
Mallory inhaled sharp enough to be heard. Her pearl necklace trembled. Franklin looked like someone who had lost his map.
"No," she hissed. "You're lying. What proof do you have?"
I let the papers speak. A ledger of transfers. Receipts in odd names. Appointment logs for a private clinic with dates the family had sworn my mother had passed. A note in my mother's handwriting that had Mallory's handwriting on it too, where Mallory signed as witness and the clinic confirmed she had been there.
"Look," I said. "The clinic confirms alteration of records. The bank confirms loans taken in my mother's name and paid to a shell company Mallory had used in the past."
Gasps rose like birds. Someone whispered about lawsuit. Another man took out his phone. Mallory paled; her pearls were suddenly a necklace of danger.
"You're a liar," she spat.
"Am I?" I smiled and let Reed speak. He stood, calm, and went to the head of the table. He addressed the servants first and they stopped, elbows folded like soldiers.
"This won't be solved by whispers," Reed said. "We have the papers. We have witnesses. All public here will know the truth in ten minutes."
The room slowed. Franklin tried to move between me and Mallory. "Ivanna," he said weakly. "Don't be cruel."
"Why did you let her?" I said. "You had a chance to stop her and instead you let your quiet life matter more than your wife's last days."
People began to take photographs. Someone started a live feed.
Mallory's face moved through colors. First white with tags of outrage, then red, then something like panic. She began to deny. "That's a forgery. I would never—"
"Forged by a woman who can't make her own life," I said. "Who takes other people’s bodies as stage props."
Her hands fluttered. "This is insane. You will be exposed."
"Maybe," Reed said quietly. "But we will expose the truth with facts. You had to know how far you'd go."
My words were a match to damp tinder. Guests murmured and a cluster of old acquaintances asked for more proof. I had a recorder with everything—conversations, receipts, messages. I passed them to a journalist at the end table. Phones shone like stars and the feed pulsed more viscerally than any stage.
Mallory's public reaction moved through acts: outrage, denial, fainting then a scramble for lawyers. It was a theater none of them believed they'd find themselves in.
She first began with fury, leaning forward and pointing like a schoolmistress. "If you accuse me of this publicly—"
"I do accuse you," I said. "Of manipulating medical records, taking out loans in my mother's name, and lying to Mr. Bowers to clear your path. I've read every message."
"That's slander!" She shouted. Her voice was high and suddenly raw. People swiveled, leaning into the scandal like gulls.
"Please," Reed said. "Listen to the facts."
Someone started clapping slowly, a ripple of approval. It was the one public sound I felt better than the rest: other people agreeing that truth had weight.
Mallory's reaction turned. She went from angry to frantic. She shoved the table with a little drama, a cheap attempt to make me look melodramatic. Servers hovered like lamplighters. A fashionable woman began to film. People whispered "domestic mess" as if that would make it smaller.
Then the turning point came. A woman from the clinic stepped forward. She was small and fierce-eyed. "I was the nurse on those shifts," she said. "They asked me to change dates. I did, because I was told you'd be given more money to keep quiet. They lied to me too."
Her name was read aloud. She described what Mallory had done. Her testimony undid the last of the crafted deniability like pulling a thread from a sweater. Men and women who had ignored Mallory's smiles before now watched her unravel.
For five hundred words the room described Mallory's fall. I remember how her face changed when different people reacted—shock, then a desperate step to rhetoric, then a denial too thin to cover her hands, which now gripped a napkin. A bank manager recognized a signature and called it official. Friends of Franklin, once placating, now turned pencil into accusation and asked to be taken off the foundation's lists.
Mallory's expressions were a show of collapse: she looked at me as if I had stabbed her, then as if someone else had, then like a drowning thing. She tried a plea. "Please, Ivanna, we'll talk—"
"You destroyed a life for dinner parties," I said. "I want the truth known."
Someone in the room recorded Mallory trying to buy silence with promises. Her pleas were shredded by the proof she hadn't erased: the paper, the nurse's testimony, a bank official's statement confirming loans. Faces in the room shifted from curiosity to contempt. Cameras panned to Mallory's pearls and our father's hands, and I heard whispers that weren't being whispered: "How did she live with herself?"
The public reaction rang like a bell. Servers stopped. A woman in a red dress shouted, "Shame!" Some people put down their wine. Others captured the moment on video. A man from the charity paused, hands shaking, and announced they would freeze the event while they verified funds. Lawyers began to move like sharks, offering counsel to those who had been used as stage props.
Mallory's composure finally broke when my father—Franklin—stood and stepped away from her. He didn't speak at first. He found the evidence at the table and then looked at Mallory like at an old map he had loved. The room felt a pressure change. Franklin's face went very small and then very old.
"You told me she had fled," he said to Mallory, voice barely a whisper. "You said it was best."
Mallory opened her mouth to answer and found only air. She fell into the category of those who had cataloged the city's sin and never thought they'd be its subject. She turned to the crowd and discovered they were not on her page.
They called the police. They took statements. The charity withdrew its sponsorship on the spot. Videos of Mallory's pleas and strange calm flooded the web with ten thousand comments in an hour. People called for Mallory to step down from committees.
Mallory's final act of public collapse—some pleading, some tears, a glass table of documents scattered by a nervous guest—felt like a lie imploded. I watched her face do all the steps of someone who had believed they could arrange the world. Her reactions moved faster now: anger, then denial, then bargain, then defeat.
When the lawyers came, they did not gather around Mallory first. They gathered around Franklin to salvage what they could. Mallory was left in the airport of humiliation while others boarded the plane of salvage. My phone blew up—messages of support, old fans weeping, new ones cheering. The press took the story and turned it into headlines about "truth vs. social performance" and "a daughter's proof."
I left the room with Reed. He never spoke during the worst of it. He only took my hand once we were outside and let me breathe.
"This doesn't bring her back," I said.
"No," he said. "But it brings the truth."
People watched us leave. Someone hissed "scandal," another said "right." Reed squeezed my fingers and kissed the top of my hand like it was fragile and precious.
That punishment scene changed everything. Mallory would not be the same in public again. People said her name with a little less greeting and more distance. Yulia felt the shock of being related to scandal and started to act like someone whose ladder had broken.
After the luncheon everything shifted in small ways. Reed started to come to my school with less show and more patience. He taught me to burn my anger for exams and not on the first person who triggered me. He watched me study until the lines of the test questions became sure as breathing.
We had moments that would later feel like a seed: him fixing my hair with clumsy fingers in the hospital, him calling me "little friend" in a tone that made my skin heat, me catching his hand in mine and not letting go. I would call him "Reed" on good days and he would stumble like a man learning a new name.
Fielding found out who was shielding me: a ghost net named "D" that had been scrubbing records. He didn't catch it but he started seeing patterns. We built our life quietly: training actors with Morgan's company, taking small parts for income, Reed offering a seat at his studio when he could.
Eventually Yulia's arrogance turned brittle. She tried to sell privacy like a shawl and found the buyers reluctant. Her public circle dried. Franklin called me one night, voice raw. "I should have listened," he said. "I should have seen."
"You did what you chose," I told him. "You can only rebuild now."
And rebuild we did. I rebuilt my life slowly and with a kind of joy I had not known in the first go-round. I studied until the moon made my notebooks soft with ink. I learned that being ordinary could be a kind of armor. I also learned that Reed's hand around mine in crowded rooms felt safer than any spotlight.
We had small, wobbly romantic moments—him sitting across from me in an empty theater, leaning in to catch the small laugh I thought I hid; him resting his forehead against mine in silence like a proof that two stubborn things could make a shelter. He was no perfect hero. He had ten years more life than me, and sometimes the age difference made him hesitant like a man who had learned restraint later than desire.
But he kept me, and I kept my temper in check. I learned to use my past as a tool and not a curse. I learned that revenge could be public and precise, and that justice could be a slow act.
Years later, when someone asked me how it felt to come back and take my life again, I liked to say, "I came back for quieter things. A book read in the sun. A friend who chooses to stay. A father who finally sees."
Reed smiled then and tapped his watch, the same one he had been criticized for buying, and said, "You also came back for someone who knows how to hold your hand."
I laughed and pushed him away, which he pretended to resent and then leaned back. He liked it when I called him "Reed" instead of "uncle" in private. I liked that he looked at me with the kind of attention the stars might have if they ever watched humans learn to forgive.
The black car still sits in my rearview sometimes. Sometimes I thumb the small wooden stick I used to break the teacher's pointer and feel something like a compass. It points me back to the day I learned I could choose my fall and choose my rise.
The End
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