Revenge12 min read
The Cost of a Changed Heart
ButterPicks19 views
I woke up to the smell of antiseptic and someone's awkward kindness.
"You're awake," a man said. "Don't talk yet. Breathe slowly."
I tried to answer and a nurse shushed me like a child. My throat felt like gravel. "What day is it?"
"Two days after surgery. I—" he swallowed. "I stayed."
He was always good at small confessions.
I looked at his face and didn't know it as well as I thought I did. It was Tomas Garnier's face, the same hands that tied my shoelaces for me, the same voice that read me bad poetry. He brushed a stray hair off my forehead with fingers that had held other things at night.
"You should sleep," he whispered. "I'll get you water."
He left the curtain a little open. Through the gap a woman on the next bed peered over and mouthed, "When's the wedding?" like a private joke.
"I haven't told him yet," I said without deciding whether it was a lie.
He laughed and called me a pig because my nose was red. He always laughed like the world could forgive him.
At night, when he set his phone beside my bed, he forgot to lock it. He must have been exhausted. I had the freedom of a small crime: I looked.
There was a message thread with a nickname I didn't recognize—"Porridge"—stuck to his screen like a second life. They were "game-couple" on some app, hearts connected, spouse icons glowing. 147 days, the screen said. 147 days of messages, jokes, check-ins that landed in another pocket of his heart.
I slid the phone back like a thief who had taken too much.
"Why are you crying?" he asked the next morning when I tried to swallow the sight away with a smile.
"Nothing," I lied. "My stomach hurts."
He kissed the soft place just beneath my ear, and I felt the lie drop like a stone.
Months later, months of little miracles marked in his social media—photos of me, the food he avoided smoking for me, the text messages where he counted my cycles like a calendar of affection—loomed like proof that he was mine. Yet the phone in the crook of his arm hid another map.
"Can you teach me your game?" I asked once, as he stirred a pot of congee for me and hummed the same half-tune he used when concentrating.
He blinked. "You? Really? Since when do you like games?"
"Since you hide in them," I said. He laughed and ruffled my hair.
He used a smaller account when we played. I didn't know. I didn't want to know. But when I lost patience and threw my phone across the sofa, he didn't scold. He wrapped his arms around me and murmured like he always did. I pushed him away like I meant it.
The next day I followed him.
"Why are you following me?" he said at the cinema when he realized I was with him. "Did you want popcorn?"
"Go on," I said. "I'll walk home."
He left before the credits ended. I stepped outside and watched his silhouette disappear into the city light, then followed.
He went to the hospital. It was ordinary to be there for students or staff, but ordinary turned jagged when a woman barreled out from a ward and hugged him like he was home: Julia Monteiro, laughing, the nickname "Porridge" bright in my memory.
He smiled and did not pull away.
I watched him let another woman be the safe harbor he promised to be for me.
When I arrived at our kitchen that night, he sat at the table like nothing had shifted.
"You've been distant," he said, then kissed my neck like an apology.
"Go wash," I told him. "I need space."
He left the bathroom humming. He left the phone unlocked on the table.
I tipped the scales of my courage and sifted through his accounts. A hidden app, another login, another life. Julia's nickname was a pinned conversation.
"I hurt," she texted. "When will you break it off with her?"
"I already don't have feelings for her," he replied. "I like you."
The world retched around me. My last surgery had been for a complication; they called it a small thing. I had always been light, comforted by food when grief grew too big. High school jokes about my weight, the way girls in gym class avoided me like a pebble in a shoe—I learned to hide. He found me on a school podium and kept me in the light.
"Why me?" I had asked him long ago, when the world was simpler.
"You're cute no matter what," he said, and my heart tripped like someone falling in slow motion.
But he belonged to a wandering impulse. He belonged to whispering options. He loved the chase of novelty as much as the quiet grace of me.
The messages and the photograph—he and Julia at a dog café, smiling as if he had always been hers—pulled me down. My stomach spasm returned like a bad song.
That night he told me he was working late. I told him I would come to him.
"Stay warm," he said on the phone. "Don't go alone."
I did go. He was waiting under the cold lights of our old campus. He pulled me into his arms and asked again why I looked so sad. I had rehearsed the words. I had wanted to finish them.
"I wanted to break up," I thought I said. "I wanted to—"
We saw a truck first, then the sound like a throat being cut. He shoved me away without knowing he was saving me. The truck hit him instead.
He smiled at me, blood on his shirt. "You okay?" he asked like the strangest, cruelest joke of all.
He survived. He woke in an ICU that smelled like lemon and regret. He slept for days. In the spaces I read his phone like scripture. Julia messaged him constantly, concerned about flowers, classes, small things. "Are you in class?" "Do you want to come to the movie?" "I'm waiting for you." Her voice threaded through his sleep.
I stared until the edges blurred.
When he woke, the world bent for an instant as we both stood facing each other with a woman named Julia at the bedside. "Porridge," she said, with an angle of the mouth like a dare.
"You two—" I tried and found that I carried a different ache now. "We need to talk."
He smiled like someone explaining a puzzling math problem. "I should have wiped my phone clean a long time ago," he said. "I kept it all because I wasn't sure."
"I have something to tell you too." I leaned in and said it slow. "We're done."
We did not fight. He laughed like an explanation.
"Can we still be friends?" he asked.
"No," I said. "I don't want that."
He didn't look surprised. He reached for me once, the old habit of touching that I had let in too often, and I stepped away. I left his room while winter snow dissolved into the hospital gutters.
I thought that would be an ending. It wasn't.
A week later, my results came back. "I'm sorry," the doctor said. He used three different words and none of them softened the fact. "It's a tumor. If we had caught it earlier—"
"How long?" I whispered.
"Possibly months if we delay. We need to arrange treatment."
The ground opened like a mouth. Months. Not enough for plans to be made or dreams to be finished, but enough to make the rest of my life feel like a list of undone things. My mother had been gone for years. There was no one to hold my hand. I wanted to be brave, but the first night I sat on a bench in the hospital corridor and cried until an older woman I had never met asked me if I had family.
"Life's short, honey," she said. "You have to say what you need to say."
She patted my shoulder like a fundraiser of small comforts.
I walked back to Tomas's room because old habits are anchors even in storms. There stood Julia in a white dress, waiting like a witness. I told her, with a quietness born of standing at the edge of a cliff, "When he wakes, tell him I don't want him."
She tilted her head. "You sure? He seemed very attached to you."
"Tell him," I said. "He knows."
I suppose I thought that a break would be enough to keep us both safe. The universe had other plans.
When he woke fully and looked at us, his face shifted in a way that made my knees weak. There was no guilt in his eyes, only a slow, distant smile. He said he had no defense when he laughed, and Julia held on to him like she had claimed him already.
We left the hospital in different directions. I tried to map a life with the tumor in the corner like an unwelcome roommate.
Two months later, at a reunion, a rumor slid into Tomas's ears like a cold. "Did you hear?" someone said over a drink. "Did you go to—" and the word funeral landed.
"She—" he stood up like a man who had been slapped by air. "Which—"
People love a simple cruel story. They told him: there had been a funeral, small and secret. They told him she had been gone for a year, that it had been stomach cancer, that no one had known how to find her. He staggered as if his feet had turned to ice.
In the days after, he became a monument to a single emotion: despair. He drank until the color left his face. He called people he used to know. He beat the bathroom mirror with his fist until his knuckles bled. "Where was I?" he screamed into empty rooms. "Why didn't I—"
I heard of his decline like a storm report. He began to speak in fragments to mutual friends, "She—she was gone, wasn't she? I couldn't find her," as if the world had stolen her off the map and sewn a blank spot where memory should be.
I watched from my window of choices he had left open and felt a complexity of things: grief for the life we might have had, relief that he suffered, shame for wanting him to suffer. The truth is messy and dishonest; it lives between moral points.
But I was not the hand that finished the choreography.
One week in a cold December, in a town square lit with holiday light and crowded with strangers, I watched what I had been waiting for and what I had feared: a public unmasking that was not tender.
He stumbled into the square with the sort of hollow look drunk men get when their souls are for rent, and a small group of people, led by two women who knew the story better than most, surrounded him. They were friends of the woman he had loved—of Julia.
"What did you do?" one of them demanded, voice pitched to carry over the crowd.
He tried to laugh; his laugh was a rusted hinge. "I...I didn't—"
"You left her," the woman said, and the circle tightened.
"Look at him," said another. "He hurt a girl who had cancer. He lied. He cheated. He left."
"Did you ever care?" someone threw. A child near them clutched a paper star and watched like this was a theatrical demonstration.
He fell to his knees then, not from a blow but from the weight of being seen. For the first time in public he was small.
"Please," he said. "Please, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I swear—"
The woman who had been his most recent anchor—Julia—approached. "Do you remember my funeral?" she asked softly, not unkind. People leaned in.
He blinked like a man whose world had become a slide of images. "What? No—"
She pulled from her bag a printed photo of his own attendance at a memorial that didn't exist and handed it to him with a smile that had the edge of victory. The crowd gasped. Someone who had been watching from across the street took out a phone and started filming. Others murmured.
He paled. "Where—where did you get this?"
"We made it," Julia said. "We made the funeral you missed."
"Made it?" he echoed, the word emptying like water from a cup.
"You said you wanted something to remember her by," she said. "We gave you that. You couldn't be bothered to keep her. So we gave you the idea of a grave to kneel at."
At that moment, his face crumpled and his defenses faltered. He reached out to steady himself on one of the women and the crowd pressed in. Voices rose.
"Shame on you." "Look at him now." "You deserve this."
He began to weep. First the tears came slow, then thick. He clung to the woman nearest him as if to steady a sinking ship.
"Don't touch me," she hissed, and stepped away. The crowd's whispers hardened into harsher things. Someone shouted, "You ruined her life!"
He started to plead, clumsy and childish. "Stop—please—I'll do anything—I'll apologize—I'll—"
"Anything?" Julia asked, voice steady. "Will you undo the nights you were absent? Will you take back the promises you made and broke? Will you bring my nights back?"
He could not answer. The people around him, who had once been amused by his charm, who had once called him brilliant or funny, now kept distance and spat sentences like gravel.
"I thought he loved me," someone said close by. "He stood by her. He told me he would be there—"
"He even lied to his friends," a man said. "Said he was working late while he was with her."
He tried to regain dignity by explaining—explaining is the cowboy's last act—but words flopped like fish.
At one point he tried to kneel and pray. A woman in the crowd—someone who had lost a sister to neglect—pushed him lightly on the shoulder.
"Stand," she said. "Don't drown in your performance. If you want to be better you must start by actually standing."
He rose, staggering like a puppet with loose strings.
The camera phones had multiplied. Those who had once smiled at him now embroidered his collapse into stories. Someone uploaded a clip to a social feed and it spun away like a bottle cork. Comments came: "How could he?" "Good, serve him right." "This is therapy."
He moved through stages: defiance, confusion, then numbness. At one point he laughed, not from humor but because his mind had nowhere else to go. "It's not fair," he said.
Julia's face remained placid. "You wanted to be punished," she said quietly. "We gave you a stage."
People clapped, not for joy but for the public's appetite to see truth made visible. A man took a photograph as if saving proof of a lesson learned.
When it was over, when the crowd had thinned enough for cold to pierce, he sat on the curb and the world went about its business. A child walked by with a sugar cone and didn't notice him. A bus wheezed its way down the street. The snow came down soft as forgetting.
That night he drank and later told friends he had been humiliated. He carved words into his forearm with a shard from a broken bottle like someone tracing the shape of guilt. He later ended up in a clinic, his wrist stiched, and the story folded into a rumor.
The punishment was not a single moment but a weathered path. It had sunlight—mockery on social media, the loss of reputation, the retreat of friends, the silence of colleagues—then a colder season: the inability to find Julia, the memory that someone he had loved might be gone.
Months passed and he did what his grief made him do: he looked for absolution in every wrong place. He called people who told him to move on. He went to pubs that used to ring with laughter and found echoes. He missed deadlines and talks and started a slow, tall descent that he mistook for truth.
I, on the other hand, counted out treatments, the careful arithmetic of chemo days and hospital corridors. There were lighter moments—nurses with tiny jokes, a volunteer who read out loud from a bad novel—tiny lives that insisted on being kind. I learned the cold vocabulary of survival and then the harder vocabulary of living with uncertainty.
One night, after a chemo session that left me hollow like a husk, I walked past a window and saw him across the street. He was bruised and thin and trying to buy a handful of dried roses from a child who had found an old bouquet in his backpack. He looked ridiculous and tragic and deeply human.
I crossed the street without thinking.
"Leoni," he said, the name falling out of him like an old coin. "I—"
"Don't," I said. "You should stop. Being sorry isn't enough."
He went down on his knees again in the snow. Around him people walked, their breath steaming in the cold air. A few stopped to stare. "Please," he said. "I imagined you dead and I—"
"I know," I said. "You thought I was the one gone. You chose so many times to not be there."
He reached out, and for a second the old habit made my hand shake.
"Why did you do it?" he whispered, meaning Julia's fake funeral, the rumor factory, the lie made into a grave.
"Because something had to make you feel what you made her feel," she—Julia—had told mutual friends later, when they asked how a woman could stage a ghost. "It turns out the best memory is one you must carry. He needed to carry hers."
He looked at me like a man caught between two mirrors. "I'm punished," he said. "Is it...is it enough?"
"It's yours to live with," I answered. "Not mine."
Later, I heard he moved out of the city. He tried to find a life that didn't remind him of what he'd thrown away. He hammered apology letters into boxes and sent them to places they would never reach.
Months after that, in the space where a wound becomes a scar, I walked into a small café and saw Julia sitting near the window with a bouquet of flowers, alive and laughing, and friends picking at pastries.
She caught my eye and waved like someone who had won a quiet war. "Hi," she said. "Guess what? The doctors were wrong. I made it. I'm in Barcelona next month."
"You're—" I was speechless, stunned by how ordinary she looked breathing in a life that had been a tale.
She smiled and said, "I heard about him. Good. People get what they deserve sometimes."
I sat down. We talked about the small things: the weather, a mutual friend who had changed hair color, the perfect way to make congee when you were sick. Our voices were ordinary and safe. Outside, a man with a face like a map of long nights walked by and didn't look in our direction.
There are things I still carry like a secret—texts I read, the smell of his hair when he leaned close, the way he said my name like a promise and then like a question. But there is also the fact that some punishments happen quietly and some happen in the light with phones recording every falter. I watched him be punished by the world and by his own hands. I learned that vengeance is not sweet when you taste it; it is bitter and cold and does not bring back the warmth you miss.
The hospital corridors taught me how to breathe in measured increments. When my treatment slid into memory like a faint line, I found I could laugh at small things again. I learned to cook for one, to buy more flowers for myself. I kept a small jar on my windowsill and put a coin in it each time I won a day. The coins clinked like a little triumph.
On snowy mornings, sometimes I remember the man who used to call me a pig and tuck my scarf around my neck like a guardian and the woman who learned to call herself Porridge and smiled differently in the light. I remember the hidden game accounts that taught me how easily people can have two lives in one pocket.
"Did it hurt?" someone once asked me about the public scene, the videos, the judgment.
"It did," I said. "But it also taught me to be selfish about what I keep for myself."
At the end of one long winter, I folded his last message and put it in the jar with the coins. It said, "I kept your laughter. I kept thinking I'd fix it."
I lit a candle and watched the flame take its time like an honest thing about endings.
The End
— Thank you for reading —