Face-Slapping13 min read
Tea, a Broken Necklace, and a Recording Pen
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"I got 731," I said when the message finally blinked on my phone.
"You got 731?" my mother repeated, breathless with a laugh that had the tired edges of all the years she'd carried alone.
"Yes." I let the number settle between us like a small, hot stone. "And—" I hesitated because the truth felt both ridiculous and necessary, "—my sister got 317."
My mother wiped her hands on her apron, eyes gone wet for a moment. "Jaden, that's... you did it. You did it."
I should have felt whole. Instead, a cold, precise thought slid into place: the same numbers that would make my life safe would also draw him out. Roman Peters, the man who had been absent for eighteen years, who had made a fortune and a reputation for turning his face toward whatever shone.
"He's going to appear," I said, already knowing it would happen. "He'll show up to the birthday."
"Let him," Ami said. "Let him come and see what he gave up."
Two days later, I met him under banners and chandeliers, in a hotel lobby trimmed like a palace. He was exactly what a successful self-made man looks like: round belly in a tailored suit, hair greased into a neat line, smile set for cameras. He saw me, his smile widened, and the world made a small, sick turn.
"Jaden," he said like he had found a lost trinket. "Come meet your grandmother."
"Hi, Grandpa," I said, and the lie was soft on my tongue. I accepted his arm because the cameras wanted what cameras always want: the perfect family picture.
Frida stood beside him like a practiced flower. She had been taught to be loud and to take space where I had learned to step back. "Isn't this the genius girl?" she asked, voice sugary. "You took the test twice for fun? How brave."
I smiled. "I wanted to be sure."
Her laugh was a knife. "You'd better be good with money, or we’ll show you how the family bank works."
The tea ceremony was a glittering trap. My hand reached for the cup, my fingers brushed porcelain. Someone—Frida—leaned and the cup toppled. Hot tea scalded my arm and my handbag tumbled. There was a shriek, a gasp, a lady's pearls clattering like small, offended moons.
"She did this on purpose!" Frida cried. "She cursed the old woman. Look—look!" She held a yellow paper with red writing, a charmless talisman. I froze because the paper wasn't almost the point; the paper had my grandmother's picture glued on the back in red ink.
"You planted this?" I asked, voice smooth.
"Of course not!" Frida wailed. "How dare you! She—she almost killed Grandma!"
Roman slapped my face like a judge giving a verdict. "Ungrateful!" he spat. "How can you—"
"Stop," my mother said, her hand between us. Ami was not built for public fights. She was built for careful economies and staying open on rainy days. But the dam had broken.
Someone clapped. Haruka Yamazaki—Roman's woman, the one who had moved in like a storm—had the perfect villain's smile. She moved forward as if rehearsal had taught her every step.
"Haruka," I said, and everyone looked. "What are you doing here, on my grandmother's birthday?"
"Me?" Haruka laughed. "I'm family now. I protect what's mine."
My voice stayed calm. "Check your sleeves."
In front of a hundred guests, the pockets of Haruka's dress were empty. She had been coached to have an alibi; she had also been taught to throw someone else under the bus. The room's attention flicked like a moth.
"You're making this about me?" Frida sobbed, clinging to Roman's arm. "She—"
"Enough." I pushed to my feet. "If you want proof, check the cameras."
The manager moved, eyes glassy. A staff member hurried off. For a second it was the calm before a storm—then the lobby's televisions flickered, and a loop of the staircase flashed. The moment of the spill, the angle where a tiny hand reached and the other hand dropped something into a sleeve before the cup slipped—so small, so practiced.
A hundred people leaned in to watch. Haruka's face went through five shades in two heartbeats.
"This—" she started. "I—"
Roman's hand left her arm and landed on mine. "You did this."
"No!" she screamed, then quieter, "I didn't."
"Show us your bag," someone shouted from the crowd.
She opened it. It was empty except for a lipstick case and red gloves. Her face was shining with the knowledge that the cameras didn't lie. The crowd hummed.
My father had the taste of a man who knew how to cut a deal. He used the chance to distance himself. He turned to the guests, gave a short laugh, and tucked the incident away like a well-used napkin. The story of the talisman would be arranged as embroidery on Haruka's back later. But the first crack had shown.
"You're the one who brought the charm?" I said, pinning the look on Frida.
She trembled, and then Haruka spoke up, but her voice had that brittle fake softness. "My daughter would never—"
"Then how would she know Grandma's lunar sign, her photo?" I said. "How would she have Grandma's birthdate? Did you tell her?"
"No!" Haruka's eyes darted to Roman. "It wasn't me!"
People whispered, and the scene ended in dishes and quiet escape. But the taste of what's to come had settled in my mouth.
Years before, when my mother set up a little dessert shop with the divorce money Roman would grudgingly pay, Haruka had been the shadow who'd send complaints and hired hands to smear our windows with rumors. When I was smaller, people with loud voices called us names and called my mother weak. I had a pen then—a small digital recorder she slipped in her apron pocket after the first bad rumor. She put it there like a tiny bulletproof vest.
"Did you turn it on?" I whispered later, in the alley behind the hall.
She nodded. "Always. For hate, for lies."
I clipped the recorder into my palm like a secret. It had been there at the shop when Haruka and Frida came to sneer. It had been there at the parent meeting where they tried to buy the principal. That pen held a hundred small violences, a hundred proofs.
"This is just the beginning," I said. "We take what we have and we light it up."
"Isn't that dangerous?" Ami asked.
"It’s safe," I lied. "It’s smart."
School had been where the war began. Frida had found me and kept finding me, edging into my life like a leak. She would push me down a stair, taunt me over my mother's shop, spit that we were trash. I had learned to be a quiet bomb: study, record, plan.
When the principal had considered the power of money versus the weight of truth during the stair incident, I hadn't flinched. I had left one foot in the record pen and one foot on the camera. When the footage surfaced online under the tag "School Bullying," the tide turned.
"How did you get this?" the principal asked at the meeting.
"A tape," I said. "A recording. We recorded it for safety."
"You manipulated it," Haruka had hissed to Roman once—at home, later, as I watched through windows that didn't belong to me.
"I didn't." Roman had looked at her like his patience had been taxed. "People with records have no standing."
She cried; she turned the family drama into a performance piece, and won small pity. Small pity is like small coins—useful in a small life, but not for a dynasty.
Years passed. I worked. I studied finance because money was both a weapon and the proof that they'd underestimated me. Mateo, Roman's son by Haruka—handsome in a blank way—ran the jewelry branch. He had the charm of a man who never had to apologize. He had designs named "Cloud Dream." He had a new necklace called "Yunmeng" that sold like a promise. But one night, I stared at the pendant and thought: this is wrong. The stone looked wrong.
"Who designed this?" I asked Mateo during a family dinner, keeping my face smooth.
He blinked. "I did."
"You're sure?"
"Of course."
I let the question go. It was a pin. A test. I waited.
One rainy afternoon I met Boston at his tea room. He had a little shop where gossip brewed as strong as the tea. He knew everyone, and if you sponsored his soft smile, you could get a favor.
"He's hiding something," I told him. "Mateo isn't the designer."
Boston sipped and smiled. "You have evidence?"
"A hunch," I said. "And a lot of small things adding up."
"I'll put a camera under the veranda," he promised, "and listen for the squeak of paper that isn't paper."
Declan—sharp, patient—ran the private side of things. "Follow the money," he said like a sermon. "Look at the accounts."
We looked. The ledger showed accounts labeled 'materials' wired to a person who answered to Haruka. The same account that bought lipstick and red gloves drained into shell companies Jameson had never heard of. And a man who had been Roman's business friend, Jasper Cohen, turned up in footage with Haruka in a tea room where words were not just words.
"She's sleeping with Jasper?" Boston whispered, still not believing. "That's the old partnership."
"Not so much sleeping as stealing," I said.
We brought the evidence to Roman like a bouquet of knives. The man who had once smoothed his hair and smiled at my exam results turned pale in a way my mother never did.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked, clutching a handkerchief like it was a talisman.
"Leave her," I said. "And break the chain."
He tried. Men of his age and power find it easier to trade people like playing cards. He snapped a few legal papers, paid a few assistants, and had Haruka out of the house in a week. She begged, then plotted; when you have claws, you use them.
But I wanted more than a private coup. I wanted their public placards removed. I wanted the family name to feel the shock of being stripped.
"Let's go public," I told Declan. "Make it loud."
He tapped his phone. "We can expose the Yunmeng supply and Mateo's accounts. We can get Jude Burks, the real designer, to speak. And—" he grinned a little—"we can feed the press the tea-room footage."
"Do it," I said. "Make it unbearable."
When the story broke, it burned. First, a consumer complaint escalated to a rally at a flagship store. I walked in as an angry customer and let the fever catch. "You sold me a zircon pretending it's a sapphire!" I said in front of cameras. "You cheated trusted buyers!"
Security came. The manager called the police. But a phone slipped into my coat. It was Declan's network, broadcasting the ledger lines and the bank numbers like bright red thread.
Mateo arrived furious. "What is this?" he demanded.
"Your necklace," I said. "Sell it as fake and we'll call you a thief. Sell it as diamond and we'll call you a liar."
"You can't—" he started, then stopped as the store's screen showed invoices and wire transfers. They were linked to Jasper and Haruka. Mateo's face drained color like paint running in the rain.
"You're lying," he said, voice cracking. "This is slander."
"You're the one who wired money to the suppliers that bought cubic stones and labeled them as diamonds," Jude Burks said into the mic, calm and terrible. "I designed the pieces. He replicated them and sold them as originals."
The crowd swelled and a hundred phones pointed. Mateo's supporters tried to shout him down, but the noise was a river. Haruka's name glowed on a dozen feeds. Jasper's phone numbers were printed like shame.
I remember the moment clear as a bell: Mateo's hands opened and closed, like a man trying to hold onto breath. He went from arrogance to panic, from denial to pleading.
"Please!" he said. "I'm sorry! I didn't know! I—"
"Did you sign these contracts?" someone asked.
"Yes." He swallowed. "But I didn't know—"
"Who approved the shipments?" another voice demanded.
"You—" His eyes darted to Haruka. She looked away.
They filmed him apologizing because it was the modern form of ruin: public, recorded, endlessly replayable. The crowd hissed. Someone spat near his shoes. A woman from the front row pointed a trembling finger and shouted, "Thief!"
Mateo stumbled. "I'll refund everyone. I'll—"
"You're fired," a manager said into a microphone. "You're removed from your position. The company resigns your privileges."
The chairman—shaken—walked up to the stage and read a statement that had been written by legal teams and lit by fury. Mateo's contracts were nullified. The "Cloud Dream" was recalled. They tried to make it a corporate oversight, but the ledger made it personal.
Haruka's downfall came quicker because she had underestimated how public hatred multiplies. Videos from the tea room showed her with Jasper, laughing over cigarette smoke and contracts. She had signed papers. She had inked checks. People replayed the footage and added captions: "Mistress or mastermind?" "Gold digger or kingpin?"
Mateo burst into tears in front of the store. "Please!" he begged at the glass, his forehead mashed against the cool surface. Fans and customers took photos. The staff looked away. The CEO hid behind statements.
The punishment was not one single act; it was a slow erosion: investors pulled out, clients demanded refunds, models who once posed with "Cloud Dream" removed once-shiny photos. Mateo's bank accounts were frozen pending investigation. Journalists dug into family photos and found patterns of spending and exotic vacations charged against accounts marked 'design procurement.' Haruka's social media was dismantled by hordes; past photos were annotated with accusations. Jasper's board members staged an inquiry and removed him in a week.
At a shareholders' meeting where Mateo was expected to defend himself, the scene became theater. The meeting hall filled with people who wanted a spectacle. "We deserve a full audit," a shareholder shouted. "You sold us a lie!"
"A lie?" Mateo began. "We—"
"You sold a lie!" Jude jumped up and showed slides of sketches, timestamps, and messages. He pointed to an email chain where Mateo had asked for 'cheaper stones' and a supplier wrote back: 'We can provide cubic for this price.' The room swallowed.
Mateo's face went pale. He tried to smile and the smile snapped like a cheap string.
"This is fraud," someone in the back said. "This is theft of intellectual property."
Mateo dropped to his knees with his head in his hands. His fall was not cinematic; it was ordinary and therefore crueler. A camera crew crouched and whispered into microphones, and viewers at home watched his pride collapse.
"You're a disgrace," a woman hissed. "You ruined jobs."
Mateo sobbed. "Please—my mother—"
"Your mother used you," I said, not from malice but as final accounting. "She used the house, the names, the charity, and the children. You were a tool."
Haruka fainted later in a hallway when the press followed her to a car and asked for comment. She tried to laugh, tried to deny, tried to summon the old theater. "It was all a big misunderstanding," she stammered. "We loved this family!"
But the crowd no longer loved drama. They loved truth. They loved an end to polite abuses. They applauded when the company announced refunds. They clapped when the designing artist, Jude Burks, walked up and accepted apologies.
The immediate public punishment—Mateo's firing, Haruka's exposure, Jasper's removal—lasted like a fever. But the deeper punishment climbed slowly. Their names were fenced off from contracts. Their phones rang with collectors. People who had once sought their favor now closed doors. Mateo watched investors walk away on a loop.
In the middle of all this, Roman had a stroke. The timing was cinematic; a man who had built his life on convenient truths collapsed when the truth no longer suited him. The family scrambled. I felt nothing when I heard—no triumph, only the cold logic of what I had done.
"Did we go too far?" Ami asked that night, voice raw.
"No," I said. "We leveled the field. We asked the truth to be public."
"But he collapsed."
"He had a choice," I said. "So did they all. We only asked them to live with the consequences."
He recovered slowly. He had to learn how to look at his life and name it.
The fallout didn't end with headlines. It arranged itself into insurance claims, resignations, and, importantly, a removal of the power that had once let Roman dismiss me with a slap. After the press burned out, the family meetings started where I had the power to sign my own name without apology. I moved out of the villa that had never belonged to me and back to my mother's small apartment with its battered door and its warm kitchen, with the shop that smelled of caramel and citrus.
"Are you okay with what happened?" Ami asked one evening, while we ate food that came in small bowls.
"I am," I said, honest. "We asked them to be seen."
"Is that enough?"
"No," I admitted. "We wanted more. But that's not ours to take. We wanted our dignity."
"You have it," she said. "You earned it."
The last public humiliation had been the paternity reveal. Declan had quietly taken DNA samples from family hairbrushes and compared them. The result came back like a verdict: Mateo was not Roman's son.
They scheduled a family assembly, thinking they could control the narrative. I scheduled cameras.
"Why are you doing this?" Roman demanded when I walked into the room with Declan's sealed report.
"Because history has teeth," I said.
"I gave you everything," he said weakly.
"You gave us money," I said. "You gave us a name when it was convenient. When it wasn't, you stripped it."
The report was unfolded. Silence. Mateo's hands went to his mouth. Haruka turned green. Roman's chin trembled like a man who had miscounted his bets.
"This is impossible," Mateo protested, but his voice had gone thin.
"It is not impossible," Declan said. "It is true."
In that moment, the room became its own tribunal. Family came in from the shadows of alliances. Some pretended not to have believed in them. Others were too invested in the lie to watch it burn. A crowd had gathered outside because the news had leaked. Phones were raised. Cameras rolled.
Mateo sobbed, then begged, then ranted. Haruka flailed—accusations, splintered defenses, then finally collapse. Roman sat and bowed his head. It was not a neat sentence; it was an unraveling.
People laughed, or gasped, or whispered. Some clapped like an audience at a play. But what they had seen was real: a constructed family had been exposed. The man who had lived like a king lost the crown.
I did not dance on their ruins. I walked out with a small bag and my mother at my side. Ami squeezed my hand and smiled.
"You did right," she said.
"Not just me," I answered. "We all did it together."
The last time I saw Mateo in public he was going into a building with a folder and an attorney. He looked up at me and said, "You made me lose everything."
I looked back and met his eyes. "You chose how to use what you were given," I said. "So did they. It’s not mine to give back."
At home, I placed my recorded pen on the windowsill. It had been a small thing against a long system. It had been the proof of bullying, the proof of a talisman planted, the paperwork of bank transfers. It had made them visible.
I boiled rice. I listened to the patter of rain. Outside, the jewelry shop's name was taped and the headlines had faded into later pages. Inside, the light was warm and my mother's soup smelled like safety. I had the feeling, finally, of being exactly where I deserved to be.
When the trial and the investigations wound down and the company issued refunds, a reporter asked me at the door of the tea room one last time, "Do you regret any of it?"
"I regret only that it took so long," I said. "My mother and I lost years waiting to be seen. But no—I do not regret asking for what was true."
She closed her notebook. "What's next for you?"
I lifted my chin. "Finish my studies. Help the shop grow. Write better contracts."
She smiled. "And the blue pendant?"
I touched the place where the "Cloud Dream" had once sat in the headlines. "It wasn't a dream at all," I said. "It was a mistake that became a lesson."
My mother's eyes shone. "Then let it be a lesson."
I pressed the little recorder back into my pocket. "Promise me one thing," Ami said softly.
"What?"
"Don't make the same mistakes. Let truth be your courage, not your vengeance."
"I won't," I said, and I truly meant it. My vengeance was a lever. My life from now on would be the machine I built with care.
The eighty-year-old grandmother's birthday faded into memory. The family portrait, once hung proud, was taken down. People eventually forgave or forgot or moved on. The blue "Cloud Dream" was returned and recycled into honest stones.
Later, when I walked past the jewelry store's empty window, I caught sight of a small turquoise bead on the pavement. I picked it up, turned it in my palm, and slid it into my pocket.
"I keep the proof," I told Ami that night. "Not for revenge. For the record."
She laughed. "You always liked keeping receipts."
"Always," I said. "But now the receipts are ours."
The End
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