Face-Slapping19 min read
The Anniversary That Broke the Mirror
ButterPicks15 views
"I promise, tonight is our anniversary. Dress nicely," my mother said into the phone, her voice thick with worry and that particular tone mothers use when they want obedience more than answers.
"Okay, Mom," I lied. I had already planned to wait. I had already planned nothing.
I set the last candle on the small table Jasper had allowed me to keep in our huge dining room. The apartment hummed with a polite kind of silence that made my bones ache. Three years married, and I had become an unpaid housekeeper, a rumor, and—if truth had a shape—an invisible stain on the Andreev living room rug.
"You're being dramatic," I told the candlelight. The flames did not answer.
At one-thirty in the morning, a sound broke the quiet. My phone's ringtone was not the default, the one Jasper had made for me. It was a thin, impossible trill that always meant work—his work. I picked up because habits die slower than vows.
"Hello?"
The line clicked. Nothing. Then my inbox filled with images.
They were intimate. They were ugly in a clarifying way. A blonde man with a thin mole beneath his eye. A woman with hair like midnight. Their bodies blurred together in angles I did not want to think about, in a bed that did not belong to me.
I swallowed.
"Who is that?" I whispered to the empty house.
I recognized the mole. Not because I wanted to, but because some things brand themselves into your mind like heat. Jasper had that mole. Jasper had that jaw.
"You're not thinking straight," I told the photos. "You're imagining things."
When he walked in, the house smelled like someone who had showered to forget something. He didn't look at the candles. He didn't look at me as if he were meeting his wife. He looked like a man who had accidentally found a houseplant in his path.
"Are you back from the office?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, voice cool as a polished blade. "You should sleep."
"Do you want to explain these?" I held up my phone. The images were small and too loud.
He skimmed them as if scanning copy. "Photos can be edited," he said. "We can check—"
"Edited?" My hand touched his belt. "Have you been lying to me for three years?"
He flinched at my touch like it was a surprise. "Don't be ridiculous," he said. "Company business."
"Company business?" I laughed once, a brittle sound that came out like glass. "You're telling me you were doing company business in a bed with her?"
His jaw did something I had seen before when he processed something he did not like. "Don't be crude," he said. "Keep your hands to yourself."
"Keep your hands to yourself?" I repeated. "You came home smelling like someone else's perfume and asked me to be quiet."
He stepped back enough to button his towel. "Dirty. Stop."
"Dirty?" Supposedly, I was the thing he did not want to touch. I had been the clean servant for three years and apparently that made me disposable. "You mean like you're clean?"
He aimed a look that felt like an audit. "This is ridiculous. I don't have to listen to this."
"Then sign the papers," I said abruptly. "I've prepared a divorce agreement. I'll sign. I will walk away."
He snorted. "Why would I sign?"
"Because," I said, for the first time feeling the wrongness of our marriage like a living thing, "I told your mother you'd be cheerful tonight. We can spare her."
He rolled his eyes, the practiced look of someone who gives orders at breakfast. "You want money?"
"No." I kept my voice steady. "I want you to stop touching my life."
He stared. The color left his face, then returned like a wave. "You don't understand what you're doing."
"Maybe you are the one who doesn't understand," I said. "You married me in name, not in heart. I am done."
He answered with the small, dismissive sound he used when he meant me to disappear: "Fine."
He left without taking the papers. He left like a man who didn't want to soil his shoes.
A message came through his phone later, a short one from Frida.
"Rose petals for noon," it read. "Make sure the room is warm."
Frida Deng. Office assistant. Voice like honey in a whisper. A name I had heard in boardrooms and on event schedules. I stood very still until my hands stopped shaking.
I walked into the living room and placed the packet of divorce papers on his pillow. "Sign them," I told the empty house. "Do it so I can have my name back."
He did not sign them. He never did.
At the civil affairs office the next day, I stood beside him and the woman who smiled like a secretary on the cover of a quiet magazine. People shuffled through that place in pairs, paper and promises moving like a bad joke. He was calm. I was numb.
"You're sure?" the clerk asked us.
"Yes," I said.
Jasper looked at me as if seeing a stranger. "We're done," he said, then, to the clerk, "We have been done for a while."
"Congratulations," the clerk said with the practiced joy of a vending machine.
Outside, Frida waited by a black car. Her hair glinted like a statement she had been paid to make.
"Congratulations," she told me, bright and lethal. She handed Jasper a small gift wrapped in blue paper. The tag said: For the man I trust.
"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "You call me 'madam' when he ignores me, then call him 'my heart' when the lights go out."
Frida tilted her head. "Have a good life, Kendall," she said.
"Like you will?" I asked.
Her eyes glinted. "I will."
I walked away quickly because my mother called and I was afraid she would cry. She said things that mothers say: "A woman needs a child," and "Don't be stubborn." I told her I was fine. Lying to keep a mother calm is an art form.
"You're not married any more?" my mother asked.
"We signed." I kept the fact that he hadn't signed in my pocket like a fault line. "It's better for both of us."
Later, a notification: a bank alert for a purchase—three million credited for something at the mall. My name charged in numbers. Jasper frowned. Frida smiled as if she had planned color schemes and heartaches.
"She's very careful," Frida told him. "She must be dangerous."
He watched me like a man studying a map he had ruined. "You sold something," he said.
"I bought myself freedom," I said. "Or a start."
He walked away then, fingers tapping the blue paper in his pocket.
"Do you have the photos?" he asked the woman who wore my name like an ornament.
"Yes," she said without hesitation. "But you have to be careful. Many things can be taken as evidence."
"Then take them away," he said.
"Why would I?" she answered, and her mouth was a knife. "You gave them to me."
Three years of being a ghost in my own life came down to that sentence. He had chosen an actress over a wife. He had chosen drama over home.
I left. I left with three suitcases and the dress I'd worn on our wedding night that he never noticed. I walked onto a street that smelled of rain and hot metal and cheap coffee. I called a number I had kept for emergencies.
"Old Jay," I said.
"Who is this? Speak."
"Jayce," I said. "It's Kendall."
There was a pause long enough for me to remember the way the world looked when people who had known you as a girl still spoke squarely to you.
"Come find me," I said. "And don't tell anyone where I'm going."
He came like he always did—on a motorcycle with a singer's swagger and a grin like someone who still thought the world was a stage.
"You left him?" Jayce Crow's voice bounced between mockery and concern.
"I divorced him," I told him. "Legally."
"Good," he said simply. "You did the right thing."
He took me to a hotel. He introduced himself to the bellboy like a man who had entire campaigns crafted around his charm.
"He's your friend," I said later, half reproach, half gratitude.
"You're my friend," Jayce corrected. "I don't flirt with friends' lives for fun."
He stayed near. Not because I was exiled, but because once, when I had been a girl with a voice and a future, Jayce had been there.
That night, I sent a photograph back to Jasper—one of him, asleep, in a company suite. The one I had gotten when I had access to his life. I sent it with a caption.
"Enough," I wrote.
Two days later, I took the job Jayce offered me—small parts, voiceover for little commercials, micro-jobs that paid in enough to not be starving. My mother called and told me to be careful about the entertainment world. "It's shady," she said.
"Everything is shady," I answered. "Even marriage."
My salary was small. My pride was dented. I learned how to stand under hot lights without needing someone to measure the way I breathed.
"You're so brave," Jayce said once, sitting beside me as I recorded a sedated commercial for herbal tea.
"I survived wine and whispers," I said. "I can survive a microphone."
"You deserve more than survival," he told me. "You're stronger than you look."
"You're biased," I said, but he only smiled.
Frida tried to get close on the corporate ladder.
"Jasper told me," she said one morning in the company's kitchen, where she leaned against the counter like a jewel on a pedestal. "He told me he knew you were unhappy."
"Then he didn't do his homework well," I answered.
"You hurt him," she said with honeyed pity. "You humiliated him publicly. Women have to be careful."
"Are you offering me advice or gathering trophies?" I asked.
Her smile sharpened. "I'm offering you a chance to be at peace."
"Peace likes to wear armor," I said. "But it's not for sale."
She took the elevator down with a soft step. I looked at the mirrored doors as if they might reveal the future. They showed only my tired face.
One week grew into months.
At Jayce's concert, I was pressed into choreography as an extra—a dancer among props—my hands shaking with every step. I dropped a prop in the middle of a crowded stadium.
"Watch your step!" a voice yelled from backstage.
"I can't," I muttered.
Jayce waved me on. "You're fine," he said. "Play the part."
I played the part. The crowd cheered. For two minutes, I forgot there had been a kitchen in my life called marriage.
After the show, a group of wealthy women gathered at the edge of the backstage like thunderstorms.
"Isn't that the ex-wife?" one hissed.
"She looks like she belongs on a stage, not in a house," another said.
Before I could answer, a woman with a thin smile and perfectly curated hair stepped forward.
"You're Kendall Felix, aren't you?" she asked.
"Yes. I am."
"You're in position to help my husband with a small event," she said, testing me like a key in a lock. "We could use someone like you."
"Thank you," I said, wondering if any of them remembered what my hands had washed.
"By the way," she said, voice silky, "your former husband invited my friend to dinner. I hope you don't mind."
"Whom?" I asked.
"The woman," she said. "Frida."
"She seems to be enjoying herself," I said. It was true. She always had a way of enjoying other people's disasters.
Weeks later, I found myself playing a small role in a project Jayce's company produced. The part was tiny, just a voice, but it paid enough to keep my phone on.
"You're rising," Jayce said one night over cheap noodles. "You're reincarnating as a working woman."
"You're optimistic," I said.
"I've been that my whole life," he answered. "Do not ruin it by thinking life is only what powers you were granted."
I laughed and then my phone lit up with a headline.
"Scandal at the Andreev Manor," it read. "Jasper Andreev Caught with Secretary?"
They had labeled it scandal. People loved the taste of scandal.
I felt nothing when I read it—no triumph, no joy. Just the distant hum of a city that missed nothing.
And people believed what preferred belief—Jasper's charm, Frida's smile, Jayce's rumors, my absence. The world wanted neat stories.
"Do you regret?" Jayce asked once.
"I regret the waste," I said. "Saying yes when I should have said no."
"You will not be wasted," he insisted. "You will be found."
In a way, he was right. I found a small reputation. I found my voice.
Then I found an idea.
"We can make him suffer," I said to Jayce one afternoon as we walked through a market where vendors sold everything from necklaces to second chances. "Publicly."
"Publicly?" Jayce asked, raising an eyebrow. "You are not turning into a vengeful person, are you?"
"Not vengeful," I said slowly. "Corrective. A lesson. A spectacle."
He laughed, only half believing it. "You wouldn't do it. You are better than that."
But what is better? When someone has treated you like dust, you can either be wind that carries it away or you can make it land where everyone can see. I chose to make it land.
My scheme was simple. We would not invent lies. We would not forge evidence. We would collect what was already there, and we would show it under light so bright the shadows had nowhere to hide.
I saved conversations, receipts, images. I recorded a confession that Frida never expected would be heard outside her glossy walls. I asked a journalist friend—Mae Carter—to help me with the timing. Mae had a small podcast with a sharp audience and an appetite for truth.
"People like spectacle," Mae said. "They will watch the moment when a man who thinks himself untouchable is stripped of his stage presence."
"And you will orchestrate it where?" I asked.
"I have an award ceremony next month," Mae said. "A charity gala. Jasper will be there. He always is."
"He will never forgive me for this," I said.
"Good," Mae said. "Then he will make the most dramatic performance."
On the night of the gala, the ballroom was a forest of glitter. People moved like polished machinery. Cameras flashed like lightning bugs. Jasper came with Frida at his side, and he looked like a man who had avoided consequences for his whole life.
I was not alone. Jayce sat in the second row, his expression a calm sea. Ruben Simpson—my brother, recently promoted to a position that let his voice carry into corridors I could not enter before—stood nearby with a neutral face and a ready phone for documentation. Margarete Golubev—my mother—was in the audience, because she would come to anything where her daughter might need an ally.
I felt like a woman sharpening a blade using the reflection of chandeliers. People around me sipped char and expensive wine.
"Are you nervous?" Jayce asked, leaning to whisper.
"No," I said. "I am not."
Onstage, a famous actor began a speech about charity and image. People clapped.
Then Mae rose to give an unexpected moment. "Tonight," she said, "I want to do something different. I want to show you what happens when private cruelty meets public image. I want to talk about honesty."
There was polite applause. Mae smiled like a conductor.
"Sometimes," Mae said, "the truth is a document. Sometimes the truth is in a photograph. Sometimes the truth is a recording."
There was a soft, curious murmur. The organizers looked nervous. Jasper's smile became thin.
"Tonight," Mae continued, "we will not award the trophy we've prepared. Tonight we will watch evidence."
Lights dimmed. A giant screen behind the stage flickered and then bloomed into color. I felt my heart pounding like someone hitting a bell each time I swallowed.
"Here," Mae said, "are private messages between a man and his secretary. Remember, consent matters, and truth matters."
The screen scrolled words—candor among laughter, planning between sheets, receipts for roses bought for lunch dates. A photo appeared: Jasper kissing Frida in a hotel hallway. A murmur like a storm swept through the room. My mother took my hand and squeezed.
Jasper's hand tightened on Frida's wrist.
"Fake," he said, loud enough for the people at the edge of the ballroom to hear.
"Printed messages?" he asked. "Edited images?"
"Professional verification," Mae said. "Independent. We reached out. They could not falsify the messages."
Frida's mouth was suddenly small and gray. "This is assault," she said.
"Watch the next file," Mae said.
The woman's voice in the room—my voice—played over the speakers, recorded long before in a windowless room where I had been asked to recount things I could not keep silent about. I had recorded everything earlier to be sure my words would not crumble under performance.
"I am Kendall Felix," my voice said, clear and small like a bell. "I am the woman you married, Jasper. You hid in public and behaved in private."
The screen revealed more: not only messages but audio of Frida admitting the scheme to secure a higher position, receipts that matched the time of the photos, and more—messages where Frida laughed about "holding a position" and Jasper promised to "keep the home front" because it was "useful."
Jasper reeled through a motion I had only seen once before—the slow collapse of a man who realized that charisma is no longer a shield.
"No one chooses a scandal," he said, and the room heard the tremor in his voice. "This is a setup."
"Why are you lying?" I walked to the edge of the stage, to a microphone that had been given to me as if I had earned it, not stolen it.
"Because I am tired," I said. "Because for three years my life was not mine. Because a man who tells me I am 'dirty' after choosing another woman in his bed is someone who needs to remember what 'public' means."
The cameras leaned in hungrily. Francesca, one of the organizers, tried to switch off the screen, but the footage had already been shared with several journalists waiting in the room.
"Shut it off," Jasper ordered. His voice was cracked with rage.
"Stop playing" came from a dozen places. "This is a scandal, not a show."
"If you have something to say," I told Jasper, my voice steady, "say it to everyone here."
He stood like a Pope struck by lightning. "This is libel," he said. "You cannot do this."
"Then sue me," I answered. "I'll see you in court."
He laughed a short, ugly laugh and then, seeing my face, went very still. The laughter dried like something gone wrong in the throat.
Public humiliation is a slow thing and a fast thing at once. First came the whispers—like wind threading the chandeliers. Then came the phones lifting like torches. Hands thrust upward, cameras recorded, people spoke into watchers' ears.
A woman in the front row whispered: "Is that true? I've seen him with her."
Another man stepped forward, a supplier who had often been at their dinners. "I knew," he said. "He told me he needed someone for appearances."
"You're lying," Frida cried.
"Where's your apology?" someone called.
"How could you?" Jasper's voice tried to reconstruct authority and failed. He looked like someone who had been carved from marble and discovered his block was a rock.
He faltered between anger and denial. "I'm being slandered," he said. "This is a malicious act."
"You were sloppy," Mae said from the stage. "You treated public and private as separate things. That is the core of privilege."
"You're playing with people's lives," Frida said, finally furious, but the anger in her voice was small next to the tide.
The cameras turned to Jasper. He tried to speak, tried to rebuild. "I—it's not what you think," he said. "She's a colleague. We're friends."
"Friends who meet in hotels?" a journalist asked, blunt and merciless.
He looked at me as if looking at an accusation embodied. For the first time, the man who had always had composed hands fumbled.
"Please," he said suddenly, a low plea that shocked people into silence. "Please. Listen to me."
"Please what?" Mae asked.
"Please remove those—" He stopped. He couldn't complete even the thought of erasing what had been woven into servers and screens and people's retinas.
He moved through the stages: pride, shock, denial. His face was an exhibition in human slide rules.
"Pride," he had always worn as a coat. It came off first.
The room stood, a living creature watching.
"You're a liar," someone shouted. "You made her life small."
"Where is your conscience?" another voice cried.
I felt something hot and bright and terrible gathering in my chest. "You humiliated me," I said to Jasper. "You used people like props. You used me like a set decoration."
He staggered, eyes huge and wet. The first step of the public fall is always when your image does not protect you. The second is when people turn away.
"You're making a scene," Frida hissed, but she was no longer the center.
Jasper went pale, his hands going to his pockets and leaving them empty. He was a man who had believed in rules that only ever applied to others. Now the rules applied to him.
"You're lying!" he screamed—the denial like a last warm thing clutched in a bare fist.
"Prove it," Mae said quietly.
He had nothing to prove; his evidence had simply become visible. The twist is that when a man like that is shown, he first tries to shrink the view, then to pull the lights over and pretend nothing happened. But the cameras had already moved the moment into a thousand pockets.
"Don't kick him when he's down," Frida whispered, but even she sounded distant, like a hand at the end of a long corridor.
"Get out," someone else shouted. "Get out of my sight."
He staggered backward, and people recorded him—phones up like sentries. A few braver souls shouted for him to explain. The applause that came was not for me. The applause was an exhalation by people watching an emperor remove his crown and find his head bare.
Then happened what everyone wanted and feared. A small, serious woman in a black dress walked to the stage and, with surgical calm, removed a chair. She set it in the center of the ballroom floor.
"Sit," she said.
Jasper stood like a man who thought the chair was an insult. He hesitated, then sat because the world had tired of not watching. The woman stepped back, and the room grew as quiet as a held breath.
"Kendall," she said to me. "If you want him to speak, ask him to speak. If you want him to apologize, ask him."
"I want something public," I said, small but clear. "I want him to show repair where he once showed disdain."
The woman nodded and then, with a momentum that the cameras would carry, she asked the question that the room had been hungry to hear.
"Kendall," she said, "ask him."
I drew a breath that tasted of the hotel linens I had once used when he had been kind. "Jasper," I said, voice steady, "kneel. Ask for what you took."
The hush that followed felt like the world listening to an old instrument. Jasper's face contorted through disbelief and a shrinking pride. His breath hitched. He looked at me—really looked.
"I won't kneel," he said at first. The denial was quick and small.
"Then do you deny everything?" I asked.
"I deny it was wrong," he said. "I deny the intentions you give me."
A ripple moved through the crowd. The woman's hand moved subtly to the cameraman.
"You have to kneel," I said again. "Tell everyone why you treated me like this. Tell them you were wrong."
He looked crazed. "You—" he began. "Please—"
"Please what?" I asked, and the room leaned in.
"I didn't mean for this to happen. I didn't—" His voice dissolved into a raw sound. His pride folded to shame like paper.
Kneeling is a slow artifice. Many men cannot do it. Jasper lowered his knees with a jerk, as if hurt by the movement. The chandeliers seemed suddenly very far away.
"Please," he said on his knees. "Please forgive me."
The phrase was tiny. His hands trembled like someone who had dropped a priceless cup.
"Say it in front of them," I said.
"Forgive me," he repeated, louder now, eyes pleading with an audience that had just learned too much. "Forgive me, Kendall. I am sorry. I'm sorry for what I did. I'm sorry for how I made you feel."
"Say her name," the woman in black said. "Say the truth of your choices."
"My truth," he stammered, "is that I failed. I failed you. I wanted to keep the image of us. I wanted to keep an appearance. I thought I could manage both. I thought I deserved more."
The crowd watched like a chorus watching a tragic actor. Phones raised, people whispered, and a few started to clap—some out of relief, some out of discomfort, some because they were watching human collapse.
Then came the denial again: "This is private," Jasper said wildly. "You can't make private public like this. This is an invasion."
"That invasion is why we are here," Mae said, and her voice carried like law. "Because private cruelties become public harm when they are tolerated."
I watched him change. He went from brutal pride to a child who had been told he could not have dessert. He tried to hold on to his image, but the cameras had already fed his undoing into every corner of the internet.
"Please," he whispered again. "Please, please."
Around us, people shifted. Some recorded. Some cried. A woman I didn't know reached out and laid a hand on his shoulder.
"You're not a monster," she said softly.
He nodded like a man who had been given water after hunger. "I know what I did. I'm sorry."
The crowd's reactions changed: some scorn, some pity, some curiosity. Reporters shouted questions. The people nearest filmed with shaking hands. A hundred thousand eyes watched that night, and a thousand tongues repeated it in the days to come.
He begged, and he was photographed begging. He denied, and he was filmed denying. He fell and was filmed falling. People clapped and cursed. The footage ran for three days on trending lists. For a man so used to controlling narratives, losing control was a punishment worse than any fine.
But punishment alone is not vengeance. Later, after the lights dimmed and the last wine glass hit a tray, something softer happened, a realness I hadn't expected.
He followed me outside of the ballroom, shoes clacking on marble. He crouched near the valet as if the world had a stage and he refused to leave it.
"Kendall," he said, and his voice broke into pieces. "I will fix it."
"How?" I asked.
"By the truth," he said. "By leaving Frida. By publicly apologizing. By making amends."
I laughed, an ugly, genuine sound. "Can apology buy back three years?"
"Then let me try," he said.
"Try where? On the internet? On press releases?" I asked.
He swallowed. "Yes."
I looked at him then and, for a brief second, a memory flickered: him in advantage, us in union. But memory lives different from belonging.
"Stand up," I said.
He obeyed, but his knees were still raw.
"Leave the building," I told him. "Go away, Jasper. Leave me to be my own."
He did not. He begged more. He whispered in a voice only I could hear, "Please, Kendall. For the last time."
The last time people watched him was public. He rose and apologized again in a voice that cracked like ice underfoot. He knelt once more, and the videos of him, of him at the bottom of himself, ran across feeds. He tried to hold on to anything that seemed like mercy. He asked me to forgive him in front of crowds that would never forget.
The truth is, public punishment can be satisfying, but it is also hollow. Years of shame and private cruelty cannot be undone in one night with the cameras rolling.
I did not forgive him that night. I did not promise anything. I let him kneel. The crowd said what crowds say: some shouted mercy, some wanted his head, some recorded him begging like a lesson. He had become a spectacle. He had been made small.
Later, when he left the gala, people followed. Some yelled at him. Some took photographs. A woman even knelt in front of him and spat the words "shame" like a currency.
He stumbled away into a car. The video went viral. People debated the morality of our act and the ethics of my strategy. Some called me cruel. Some called me brave.
"Is this what you wanted?" Jayce asked me quietly in the midnight after the storm, when the city settled under an exhausted sky.
"No," I said slowly. "I wanted him to see himself. I wanted him to feel what he had put on others. If that made him fall, let him fall."
"Will it be enough?" Jayce asked.
"For who?" I asked.
"For you."
"For me," I said, "it's the silence that matters now. People can watch. People can point. But tomorrow I will wake, make a cup of tea, go to my small job and record a line into a microphone until it sounds honest. That's not a spectacle. That's a life."
I left the party with no triumph but a small relief. The world had seen the truth. It would say what it wanted. Jasper had been brought low by his own choices. He had knelt and begged, and the cameras had framed him at his worst.
Three months later, the trending pages moved on. People argued about the ethics of exposure. Jasper's company lost a few endorsements. Frida's image was damaged. He was a cautionary tale on talk shows. He had suffered in full public view.
I went back to work. I learned to record the sound of a kettle. I learned to nod when an editor said, "More warmth." I learned, in small, quiet steps, how to be alone and not lonely.
The necklace Frida wore that first night—the gold leaf with her name on it—went up for auction months later, and I bid on it anonymously. I kept it in a small box. I never wore it. Sometimes I opened the box just to remember how small things can show much larger truths.
"Are you okay?" Ruben asked on the phone one morning.
"I am," I said. "I'm keeping busy."
"And the thirty billion thing?"
"Thirty billion?" I laughed. "Only in fairy tales do men set prices on women's dignity."
"Good," he said. "Because I will arrest anyone who tries to buy you back for a number."
I smiled then, thinking of a small, ridiculous line and the sound of my voice on a microphone. The city moved forward. People forgot to look at a nameplate long enough to see the person.
Once in a while, at night, I think of Jasper on his knees. He had met the world and found himself small. In my pocket I still have a scrap of paper—our initial agreement, folded thrice. I keep it not like a grudge but as a measure.
"Do you miss being his wife?" Mae asked me on a podcast once, the microphones catching everything like a truth hungry for air.
"No," I said. "I miss what I thought I had when I said 'I do,' but a promise shouted alone is not a marriage."
She smiled across the table like a neutral judge. "And the end?"
"I keep a tiny trinket," I said. "A piece of jewelry that smells like office lights."
She laughed. "That's a unique ending."
"It is," I said. "And it's mine."
The necklace sits in a small wooden box now, beside the voice recorder I use for auditions. When people ask what I keep from that time, I show them the box.
"A little proof," I say. "A reminder that some things are private until they are shown on a stage."
"Are you happy?" Jayce asked that night as we packed up microphones and sheets and stage lights.
"I am learning to be," I said.
He put a hand on my shoulder like an anchor, and for once I did not flinch.
The End
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