Revenge11 min read
The Day I Stopped Waiting
ButterPicks15 views
I first stopped loving him on the tenth anniversary of my being born into someone else’s story.
"I cooked your favorite beef-and-chili pot," I typed, then deleted it.
"You're not coming back this month," his message had said a week ago.
I sat in the small kitchen with a bubbling pot that smelled like a promise and a lie both. The dumplings had cooled into greasy lumps that made my stomach churn. I flipped the light on, found the white floral dress I’d worn the night we met, smoothed its folds by habit, then folded it again like someone folding away a life.
"Do you still want to keep this?" I asked the empty apartment, the question landing like a coin into water.
I pressed open his WeChat profile. The avatar was a white Samoyed, tongue out, almost cartoonish in its happiness. He’d used the dog as his profile for eight years.
Eight years.
I laughed quietly. The sound surprised me.
"Why are you laughing?" Annika asked two days later over the phone. Her voice smelled of cheap beer and concern.
"Because his avatar is a dog," I said. "And because I suddenly don't care."
Annika laughed too. "Leticia, sometimes endings are comedic."
"You always make endings funny even when they're ugly," I said.
We had been together five years. I had shaped myself around him like clay around a mold. I’d learned to cook the way he liked, to wear the colors he loved, to study what he approved. My feed looked like a scrapbook where everything had been edited to make him appear bigger in every frame.
"I’m done," I typed finally, and sent a single line.
"Break up," the message read like a small crack in a window. I packed the rest of my life into a suitcase. A lot of it was paper — sketchbooks, a half-filled study abroad application, my final-year design portfolio rolled and yellowing at the edges. The suitcase shut easily. I added the dress.
"Why don't you say anything more?" Annika asked when she came to help me move.
"Because one line is honest," I said.
She hugged me like she had a map to where my pieces might fit together. "You’re finally moving for you."
"I am," I said. "I hope."
The driver’s alert dinged as I left: "Please remember your phone and personal items." I looked at the street as the city sped by, and for the first time in years I felt strange and light. I was a character who had stepped out from the margins into her own scene.
Decker came with me to the new apartment, thick blue hair, a grin, always loud with a joke. "You look like you're going to use your passport the way people use scissors," he said, clapping me on the shoulder.
"Maybe I will."
When I landed in Puerto Rico I slept a whole night on my belly like a child, the ocean making itself a distant drum. I woke to nine dozen messages, but the ones that mattered were three: Annika, Decker, and an e-mail from Professor Hans Rashid that said, "We should talk about your application."
I cried when I clicked open the message, then laughed, then cried again. There was a strange order to everything at last: papers, stamps, the smell of glue, and the bright possibility of making things that belonged to me.
"You remember how we used to play games?" Decker asked over a video call three days later, voice thrilled. "We were idiots but we were happy idiots. Go back to that."
"I miss being an idiot sometimes," I said. "I miss the small things."
"You can have small things again," Annika said. "And bigger things."
I sent in my application in midnight sweats. I woke to a return e-mail from Hans — an acceptance and an urging hand. "Keep your hands dirty," he wrote. "Design to wake up at dawn."
"I will," I told him, and I meant it.
When I came back to the country two years later, I came with a stub of a name on a waiting list, designs folded into a case, and a heart that had learned its own compass. Decker had been my launching pad. Annika had been my anchor. I had learned the language of metal and stone. I learned to listen to silence and to the clink of a tiny hammer. I learned that desire could be made into something crafted and durable, not just a fever for someone else’s light.
"Do you remember the orange kitten?" Decker asked one evening as we set out our samples for a local show.
"That pathetic scrappy thing?" I smiled. "I thought it would be dead. Instead it wound up here, fat and proud."
"You kept it in your photos like a talisman," Annika said. "You can keep an orange-cat life now, not because of him but because of you."
When the phone vibrated on the table as we were setting up in the gallery it was a number I knew: Zachary Cornelius.
"You're back?" His voice was thin with something between surprise and annoyance.
"Yes," I said. "I'm here."
There is a moment that sometimes arrives in the middle of a room where light makes everyone seem made of a single material. The exhibition hall had that light. My necklace – the one I had designed in college and then reworked into a piece called the Dreamer’s Compass – sat under glass and sparkled. It was mine.
"You're wearing it?" Zachary asked. He sounded like he was trying to keep his voice level.
"It’s not for you," I said.
He came forward anyway, like a figure stepping into a painting he thought he owned.
Around the room, people murmured.
"Leticia," he said softly. "We can—"
"Stop," I said.
He reached for my hand — a reflex. He had done it for years and I had let him straighten my sleeve, fluff my hair, arrange my clothes. I let him try to do it now out of habit and I pulled my hand back.
"This," I said, voice steady, "is not ours to share."
His face shifted through a dozen small shades: confusion, shock, then the white-hot entitlement of someone who had taken without giving. "Why are you here?" he asked finally. "Why are you making a show of me?"
"This is not about you," I said. "This is everything I reclaimed."
He didn’t like it. People who have been used to receiving adoration prefer it uninterrupted.
"Why did you leave?" he asked later, under a pretense of a private hallway. He sounded tired the way someone who has been always entitled sounds tired.
"Because I had to stop pretending," I said. "Because I loved a version of myself I thought he'd choose, but the choice wasn't his."
"Come back," he said, the sentence small but loaded. "We can try again. We can—"
"No," I said. "No, Zachary."
That was where, in the original pages I had once read in secret, the story would have moved in a predictable arc: he would be lost without me, I would be the one to forgive, and the world would applaud. But this is my life now. The silence that followed my "no" was not a hole to be filled.
After the show, after the applause, after the reporters and the strangers’ congratulations, I walked through a door that led to a pressroom lit with camera flashes. It was not the place where endings live; it was the place where truth can be tuned to a microphone.
"Can we have a statement?" a journalist asked.
I looked at Zachary, who had followed in like someone resentful at being invited to his own funeral. Josefina Evans stood behind him, flawless, smiling with the practiced warmth of someone who had read the right scripts. She had always been written as the bright other; the book’s heroine in a shade I’d once tried to mimic.
"No," I told the journalist. "I have things to say."
"What is this about?" someone asked, the panic of curiosity thin in their voice.
"This," I said, "is about one person who thought my life could be a stage he stood on without noticing the props were mine."
I set my metalwork case on the table, opened it. I drew out something small and silver and plain — the cufflink I had designed in college. I placed it on the table between microphones.
"When I was twenty-one," I said, "I chose him over myself. I chose a safe rhythm over my own pulse, because he told me my dreams were too loud for his life. He told me to put down my goals. He handed my ambitions a small box and said, 'Keep it small.'"
Zachary's face hardened.
"You applauded her career," I nodded to Josefina, not unkindly. "You celebrated her because she matched the story you wanted. But you told me my dreams were inconvenient."
"Is this— a private matter?" someone flung out, scandal-starved.
"This is a public matter when a powerful person's private choices shape the futures of those who trust them," I said. "People deserve to know how easily they can be erased."
He moved to interrupt me. "You're making lies," he said, voice climbing.
"Am I?" I asked, and the room drew tight as the edge of a drum.
"I waited for you," he said. "I have been patient. I supported—"
"You supported the version of me that fit beside you," I said. "You praised others' lights and dimmed mine. You made your loyalty into a weapon."
A camera clicked. People leaned in. Josefina’s smile faltered as reporters turned their attention to the small graveyard of my past: the notes left unread, the application forms with the 'Expectations' box smudged, the draft e-mails that never left the outbox.
"You cheated me with neglect," I said plainly. "Not with another person in the physical sense—but with choice. You chose to nurture someone else's career while erasing my name from mine."
"I'm not the villain here," Zachary said, furious now, his voice gone brittle. "You're twisting it."
"Then tell them," I said. "Tell them whose life you built. Tell them whom you have watched blossom."
"You're performing." He turned to the room as if unmasking would make my words false. "You wrote this to make me look bad."
"Let the cameras decide," I said. "Let her decide if my life looked like theft."
Josefina's eyes hardened. For the first time, the polish of her image cracked.
"Why are you doing this now?" she asked, sharper than anyone had a right to be. "We have history."
"You have history," I said. "So do I. But history is not an excuse to smother others under the weight of your 'support.'"
Voices rose. The lights burned hotter. Zachary's hands curled into fists; his jaw worked like a trap. Around us people were talking into their phones, tapping headlines. A young reporter pushed a smartphone into my face.
"Did you tell him things like this when you were together?" she asked.
I looked at the cufflink on the table, at the Dreamer's Compass under glass. "I told him," I said. "I told him everything that mattered. I told him I wanted to go abroad. I told him I wanted to design. He told me to be practical, to be safe. He told me I could be small and still be loved. He taught me what it meant to buy options for me and buy him the narrative of generosity."
Someone whispered, "But he buys everything for people. He's so generous."
"He buys the image of generosity," I said. "Not the practice."
Zachary stepped forward, then stopped as the room swelled with journalists. A woman in the front row, a former classmate with whom we'd once shared notes, said into a recorder, "So this is true?" Her voice had a tremor.
"Yes," I said. "It is true."
For the next ten minutes, Zachary tried every defense. He tried indignation, then reason, then quiet charm. He accused me of grandstanding. He said I was angry because I hadn't gotten what I wanted. He called me bitter.
"What did you expect?" he asked finally, to the journalist, as if pleading to a judge. "Should I have broken my back to make someone into what she couldn't be?"
"You made the choice," I said, and my voice did not shake.
Zachary's expression changed at last — not the composed, distanced look he'd always worn, but a rawness: surprise that the people in the room were listening to more than his side. He had expected the crowd to soothe him, to look away and chalk this up to a private quarrel. Instead there was murmured sympathy for me, for the girl who had rebuilt herself.
A woman I didn't know stood up, voice steady. "I was in his office," she said. "He told me once that someone had to stay close and be practical, else the others will fly away. He said he couldn't support instability."
Another voice: "I thought it looked sad, how he would post with that dog avatar like a shrine."
Phones lifted. A camera flashed. Jacob Payne, a design editor I had met once, raised his hand. "All of a sudden the man who held the narrative of generosity looks like he had a list of who to groom and who to put aside."
He had no script for this, no PR shield thick enough. People who had admired the neatness of his life felt the cold edge of someone removing the ribbon and seeing what was underneath.
Zachary's face crumpled then — not in the way of someone who is merely embarrassed, but in the way of someone who realizes people are turning away.
"What do you want from me?" he asked, voice small.
"I don't want anything," I said. "I want a record. I want it to be known that my life did not belong to him. He made choices that cost me years. He had time to encourage me and chose not to. He placed his 'family' where his heart had already been."
The journalist nodded, making notes. Josefina looked at him, then at me. The air between them had changed. People began to murmur about how often public "support" masks private neglect.
Zachary stood alone under a public light, and that was the cruelty of it: his actions had weight in conversations and newsfeeds, and now the weight tipped against him.
He tried to salvage his dignity with charm, with a clumsy apology, but the room — the witnesses — were unkind in their kindness. There was anger and then distance, and in that space the man who had once felt entitled to decide for others felt small.
He left the pressroom as if pulled by a current. Reporters followed. Phones buzzed. For a man who had been used to commanding applause, this was a humiliating new currency.
"That was brave," Annika said later when the flood of comments began. "You took the stage on your terms."
"I took my life back," I said.
The punishment was not a single blow but a long, public unmasking. In the days after, the articles multiplied. Colleagues who'd once smiled at him in hallways now sent curt messages. Sponsors who'd loved the stability of his image asked questions. Josefina faced awkward interviews where she was asked if she'd known. He received no single dramatic scene of catastrophe — but he received instead a slow collapse of the narrative construction he had relied on. People spoke differently around him. Invitations cooled. Hosts introduced him with a polite, thin distance. His name stopped carrying the same soft warmth.
I watched this not with glee but with a clear, simple satisfaction: truth had been told where silence had reigned. He had to stand in the public square while others unfolded what he had kept private. He reacted with shock, denial, anger, and finally a kind of shriveling apology when the support he'd expected did not arrive. The audience shifted from curiosity to judgment and, finally, to empathy for someone who had been pushed aside.
"Do you regret any of this?" Decker asked weeks later over coffee.
"I don't think regret will fix anything," I said. "But accountability might prevent repetition."
"That's cold," Decker said, laughing.
"It's also real," I said.
The public unmasking made him small in the way that matters — not crushed violently but revealed. People who had cheered for his curated kindness now spoke of the quiet ways he'd withheld it. He learned what it meant to be watched not for his power, but for his choices.
I moved on. I built my studio with Annika and Decker. We designed collections, found clients who wanted honest work, not curated narratives. The Dreamer’s Compass found a place in a magazine featuring people who had made lives out of their pieces.
One winter night at a small awards ceremony, Jacob Payne came up to me with a glass of champagne. "You were brilliant on stage," he said. "Your work brings light to people who have been told to dim themselves."
"Thank you," I said.
Zachary never asked me to return. He sent messages that went unread. He leaned in public statements toward safe phrasing: "regret," "learning," "moving forward." People watched the headlines and then moved on. His humiliation was not dramatic because real life rarely is. It was a series of small withdrawals: fans who no longer yelled his name, editors who found words to describe him that were less admiring. He saw that what you build by making choices of who matters can be undone by exposing that choice.
When I closed my studio at night I would sometimes touch the scar on my wrist, the old reminder. It had once been a map of shame. Now it was a ledger of survival.
"Do you miss him?" Annika asked once as we walked past an old café.
"No," I said. "I miss parts of a girl I used to be who thought her worth was tied to being seen by someone who wouldn't look. But I have her back."
She squeezed my hand. "That's all any of us could want."
Years later, when a young woman wrote me an e-mail about leaving someone who told her to be "practical," I wrote back: "Practical is fine when it's a choice. It is not fine when it is a veto."
I kept the orange-cat photo on my clean social feed, and sometimes I watched Zachary’s comments pass by, thin and apologetic. Sometimes I thought about Josefina, who had smiled through interviews and then later in private messaged me something honest: "I didn't know."
"It's not enough," I replied. "But it's something."
And that was the truth: people change, or they do not. Some learn to own the weight of the small cruelties they practiced. Some learn only to crouch and wait for the applause to come back.
I turned my back on waiting. I learned to make things that held light not for him, but for me and for those brave enough to call themselves by their own names.
The End
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