Revenge12 min read
The Diary, the Dog, and the Sea
ButterPicks14 views
I held the thin diagnosis sheet at the hospital gate and watched the sunset bruise the sky. I wanted to call Lucas, but my thumb hovered and then withdrew. His name was the first on my phone.
"Bea," his voice came, as always low and steady, kinder than usual. "I have something tonight. I might be late. Eat early, okay?"
"Okay," I said. Short and as ordinary as the evening light. He clicked off. The line went dead. My throat closed around the small, heavy secret.
I had loved him for almost ten years. We married because the world pressed him—because duty and timing and the right paperwork made a life for us. Lucas Richardson needed a wife; I fit. He was a man of few words, a face that rarely moved, a kindness wrapped in restraint. I warmed that reserved shore for two years until, slowly, fissures of tenderness showed. We settled into the small rituals of married life: breakfast, the same coffee cup at the same time, the same route to work.
On the day the doctor spoke the word that would color the rest of my days—pancreatic cancer—Veronika Zimmermann came back.
Lucas had gone to fetch her from the airport. He answered my call and said he might be late. He put her before me, and the world tilted.
I waited in the living room. The house smelled of sandalwood and gardenia—Veronika's scent. When Lucas finally closed the door gently that night, eyes meeting mine for a second, the warmth in that second was a thin, cold thing.
"Why are you still awake?" he asked.
"I fell asleep here," I lied. "I woke up when you came in."
He shrugged. "You should sleep more."
He handed me his coat. The gardenia clung to it. I held it and the smell made something coil in my chest. He kissed my forehead when he fell asleep beside me. I lay awake and counted the hours like I counted my pain—one breath, two breaths, a tightening that never quite loosened.
He never cheated.
But he loved the idea of Veronika with a softness he did not show me. He was always patient with my cooking, always grateful when I made something that settled his stomach. When he was sick, I was there. When he was well, he drifted toward another current. Veronika was like sunlight on water—warm and impossible to keep.
At the office—because I still worked for a while—I bumped into Veronika. She smiled with that predatory innocence people mistook for harmlessness.
"Beatrice! So good to see you," she said.
I smiled back. "Veronika."
When she took the breakfast I had packed for him that morning—a box I'd been thinking about while I scrambled eggs at dawn—something in me snagged.
"Oh, I'm sorry," she said, her voice honey. "I had a little low blood sugar. I ate it. Your cooking's wonderful, though."
"You're welcome," I said, and my fingers dug into the handle of my bag until they hurt.
That night he came home with a gift: a delicate pink diamond. He placed it in my hands as apology and repair. I put it away in a drawer and nodded. He was a man who thought in small acts. He would apologize with jewelry and then retreat into quiet.
Every morning I made him breakfast because he forgot to eat when work swallowed him. Every evening I washed up and pretended the ache in my belly was indigestion. I vomited red on dog food trays and hid the towels in the laundry basket. I wrote in a tiny notebook about pain and about the way his profile softened when he laughed at something only he remembered. I wrote about a small white dog we'd rescued—striped and mangy—the dog that curled into my lap and gave me warmth when no one else could.
"I want to keep him," I told Lucas. "His name is Nian. Nian Nian."
He looked at me and for once his expression shifted into something softer. "All right."
"You're sure?"
"Sure." He kissed my temple and left for work. His day started and mine began with doing what kept him whole.
When Veronika came to dinner with him one evening, she caught my hand—pulled it with theatrical charm. "Beatrice, what a small world. He always knows how to choose a wife who cooks well."
"Thank you," I said. My hands shook under the table.
A plan formed, not with cruel precision but with a slow, cold clarity. I would not be left as a footnote in their story. I would not let my last months be a quiet fade. If I could not keep Lucas, I could make sure he could never sleep again without remembering me.
I tried to act normal. I smiled in the mirrors until my face hurt. I planted small kindnesses and recorded small recipes that matched the way he took his tea. I filled notebooks—pages full of the small ways I tried to patch the distance. I wrote that one day I might like to go to a far island with him, just the two of us, to be the wife he never had to look away from. I wrote that if I couldn't make him stay then, I'd make him remember.
One night I nearly succeeded in ending it. I put a handful of pills in my palm and lay down, arranging the room as if I would drift off to sleep. Nian Nian barked and barked until I couldn't ignore the little noise. The dog scrambled across the bed and licked my face until my fingers loosened. I dialed 120 with a numb thumb. Later I woke in a hospital room to a nurse's quiet face and a line of IV and the sickly sweet smell of disinfectant. Someone had saved me.
"Ir is—" the nurse said, throwing me a name I'd later learn: "I can call you a cab, Miss Beatrice. You should rest."
"No," I insisted. "I want to go home."
Home was where the dog waited and where the sun promised an ocean beyond the city. I left the hospital with Nian Nian tucked into my arms and a single, terrible resolve: to go further away than anyone could find, and to write everything down.
On the island, I found a small place with a sea that matched the color of the sky. I hired a caregiver—young Iris Ayala—whose hands were steady and kind. "You need help," she said bluntly the first day, and I nodded. The sea did something to me—slow, indifferent tides that made my pain both smaller and larger at once.
"I won't go back," I told Iris quietly. "I can't be what I was in that house."
"You wanted a simple place," Iris said. She squeezed my hand. "Simple isn't easy, but it's honest."
Days turned into a routine of small pleasures: wind on the terrace, Nian Nian's paws in the sand, Iris's ridiculous stories. I ate less. I slept poorly. Sometimes I coughed blood into a tissue and shoved it away. I learned to accept my diminishing appetite like a thief stripping a room. Yet there was a sweetness to the days: a bathing of truth in sunlight, a time to write everything down.
I wrote my diary like a map—date by date, each small injury and kindness recorded. I wrote the things I had kept secret because they were too small for the world but too huge for me. I wrote how it felt to be left alone, how the man you love could be the one who hurt you most by simply loving someone else more loudly.
"Did you ever tell him?" Iris asked one night as the waves sighed.
"No," I said. "I told him I was fine."
"Why?"
"Because telling would be asking. I didn't want to ask."
She taught me to be practical. "If you want something done," she said, "you ask someone who will do it."
I asked Iris to carry out my last plans. She would be my executor, my voice after my body failed. Before I fell too far, I signed papers, wrote letters, and taped a small voice recording. I told Iris where to find the diaries. "Make him read them," I said. "Not privately. Let him see. And—" My voice caught, "—make sure everyone knows."
"Everyone?" she repeated.
"Not the whole world. Just the people at his office. Veronika. The gala they go to. Let him stand in light and feel it."
She hesitated. "Bea, public—"
"Public is necessary," I said, surprising myself. "He needs witnesses."
I knew this would change me. I knew it would be cruel. But love, when it fades into injustice, calls for a different kind of courage.
I did not want fame. I wanted his attention to be sharp and irreversible. I wanted him to understand the geography of what he had lost: the long winters of my quiet favor, the small gifts I never asked for, the way my lungs had learned how to hurt only for him.
I did not tell him any of the details. I smiled at his messages. I let him call. I let him bring me small things. I kissed his face in memory and then closed the door behind me.
Then I died.
The island did what it does—white sands swallow footprints. My last days were thin with morphine and the sound of waves. Nian Nian slept by my bed. On an afternoon that smelled faintly of crushed shells, my body gave up what it had been holding. I drifted, and the last thing I remember was the dog's warm weight.
I entrusted Iris with everything: my diaries, a small recording pressed into an envelope, payments to her hands like change. "Find Flynn Grant," I told her the last time she sat with me. "He knows how to handle things. He will set the stage."
Flynn came, and with Iris and a lawyer's careful hand, they arranged for the diaries and the recording to be delivered at a moment they agreed would be most visible: the company's annual gala, where Lucas would be center stage in his tailored suit and where Veronika would be a bright, practiced presence at his elbow. I could not be there. I could only set a mechanism in motion.
The night of the gala, I imagined the glittering hall. I imagined the slow scrape of a thousand camera shutters. I imagined Lucas in a spotlight not just of light but of truth.
The evening moved as it always did. Men polished words like jewels; women wore armor of silk. Lucas smiled when he stepped onto the stage to accept a minor award. Veronika, radiant in red, stood beside him. The crowd clapped, the band played, and the glassware chimed.
Iris found her cue. In a small, formal moment between courses, she stood. "Ladies and gentlemen," she said, and her voice cut like a bell. "I am Iris Ayala. I am here on behalf of Beatrice Sullivan."
There was a small murmur.
"Beatrice left something for all of you," Iris said. "She asked that parts of her diary be read tonight."
Whispers swelled like winded birds. People reached for phones. Lucas's smile faltered.
"No," someone near the front whispered. "You can't—"
Iris did not stop. She read slow sentences—dates, small hurts, the way my dinners cooled untouched, the exact scent of gardenia and sandalwood when he walked into our living room. She told them about an early morning when I had made him eggs because he had a headache—"He took the box," she read, "and Veronika ate it." She read the passages where I wrote about the nights I cried into a towel so he would not hear.
As she read, the room became a mirror. Veronika's face shifted from calm to a pale mask. Cameras leaned forward like prey. The drinks in hands were forgotten.
"She wrote," Iris read on, "'I was small with my love, and he mistook it for attention to be spent elsewhere. He learned to be kind to someone who was louder than me.'"
A soft gasp. A woman's laugh from a table two rows back—sharp and unforgiving. Phones caught every word.
"How dare—" someone hissed.
"Is this for sympathy?" another asked. Voices began to fray.
Lucas stood, staggering. He had been a man of control; control slipped like water now. "Iris," he said. "This is private."
"It was not private," Iris answered. "She made it public because she wanted witnesses."
I heard the sound of Veronika's breath catch. She pressed her hand to her mouth as if to hold something in. Her face had been a work—now the paint streaked. People turned. Within moments the hall was full of eyes—my husband’s, my rival's, my colleagues', complete strangers'—bearing down like a verdict.
Iris read on. She recited the scene of the night I almost left the world—how Nian Nian had licked my face and how I had dialed 120 and then chosen life another day. She read the dates I had tucked away like pebbles in a pocket—each one a small fracture.
The audience moved through stages. First astonishment, then a brief wave of anger, then curiosity, then a quiet, spreading discomfort as the realities landed. Phones rose like iron birds. Voices recorded. A woman in a designer dress stood up and shouted, "Shame!" A handful of people began to clap—soft at first, then louder, broken by the shock of what they had seen and the rawness of exposure.
Lucas's expression changed like a landscape during a storm. He went from stunned to furious to pleading, back to stunned. He said things—words that did not hold: "This is private—this is slander—Beatrice was sick—" His voice cracked. Veronika, who had always been quick with a smile, now tried to hold the look of bewildered innocence.
"She asked for witnesses," Iris said into the microphone. "She asked you to remember."
"You're cruel," one of Lucas's board members hissed, looking not at Iris but at Lucas, searching him for failure. "Public spectacle?"
"She left instructions," Flynn said softly, stepping forward. He held a small packet—my sealed recording. He did not play it. He let the diaries speak.
For the next twenty minutes, the gala changed into a public unmasking. Colleagues who had once seen Lucas as a steady leader shifted, whispering about absent kindness and the cost of ambition. Social media lit up. Clips were shared with bite-sized headlines: CEO's Wife's Diary Read at Gala; Woman Exposes Neglected Bride Posthumously; A Love That Could Not Compete With Fame. The mood in the room turned corrosive. Veronika's eyes flooded; she sat down as if she had been struck.
Lucas's reaction was a small, physical collapse. He folded inward, clutching at a podium as if it could slow the descent. People in the crowd—those who had loved him in the way the world loves a man of power—scribed their faces into new maps of judgment. A group of journalists pressed forward, mics aimed, questions sharp.
"Mr. Richardson, is this true? Did you know? Did you abandon her?"
He could not answer. He looked like someone trying to remember a speech he never wrote.
Veronika stood up, voice raw. "Beatrice—" she tried to say. The name faltered like glass. "Beatrice, I—"
She tried to shape apology into a sentence. Instead the room filled with accusations—her social feeds scrolled like evidence, her earlier pictures with Lucas transformed into photographs of a heartless inevitability. A woman behind them snapped a picture and a young man started a live stream. The evening's glitter became a smear of light and accusation.
"She didn't deserve this," a woman wept openly. Others nodded. Some clapped—small hands, an ugly salve—because the truth had come with such theatrical cruelty.
Veronika's face crumpled. She tried to cover it with hands that had once charmed boardrooms. "I didn't know," she wailed. "I didn't—"
"Then why did you eat her breakfast?" someone shouted.
"That's cruel," Veronika said, her voice tiny. "I didn't know she was sick."
"She wrote that you did," Iris said, staring at her like a court witness. "She wrote that you took his lunch and smiled."
Veronika put her head in her hands. "I am sorry," she whispered, and the words had the texture of a costume being removed.
It was not a legal punishment. It was a different thing—an irreversible public naming, a record that would follow them: the videos, the news headlines, the archived articles. For Lucas, every seminar he gave, every smiling portrait, now sat beside the memory of a woman who had loved him quietly until it killed her. For Veronika, the image of her makeup-streaked face would follow the polite ones—her "innocent" smile next to the wet cheeks captured by a smartphone. People took sides and then moved on, but the scar remained.
The punishment was terrible and immediate. People who had offered Lucas praise now murmured judgment. Sponsors pulled back calls for interviews. In the days that followed, the company’s PR team worked to stem the leak. Lucas's colleagues avoided him. Veronika's invitations thinned. The world had seen what had been private.
I knew this was cruel. I had made it so. But as they wilted under the lights, I felt a cold relief: they could no longer be free of me with such ease. My diaries passed like a slow, cruel tide over their public faces.
In private, Lucas found the rest of the diaries and my final letter. He read in a small hotel room, alone, the edges of his composure fraying. He did not stand in a falling hush and plead for forgiveness before cameras. He did something smaller and rawer—he was undone. He slept very little for months. He learned to cook from my recipes and to notice the weight of a silence. He would sometimes sit on the beach, fingers splayed in the sand, and call my name to see if it would come back.
Veronika fled the social hotspots. Her inbox filled with messages, some cruel, some pleading. She tried to speak; her explanations were inadequate.
Public punishment is a blunt instrument. It does violence to everyone it touches. But in the echo, in the way my diaries were read by strangers who had once smiled at his jokes and hers, my absence sat like a permanent mark. People witnessed him as he had been seen in my notebook: not cruel in a single act, but absent in a thousand small, corrosive omissions.
I did not watch it happen.
I did not need to.
I lay on a bed looking at sea glass and felt a wind that tasted like someone else's breath. Nian Nian bumped my hand with a small, earnest nose, and I laughed once, a single, thin sound.
"Good dog," I said.
Nian Nian wagged and went to sleep near my feet.
I had made my decision. I had set the stage, the letters, the recordings. I had given my pain a shape everyone could see. The rest was bedrock for them to stand on or to stumble away from. I wanted them to know that their forgetting had consequences.
When I died, my world was sand and wind and the slow, steady breathing of a small animal. They said later that Lucas visited the island and took Nian Nian home. He kept my recipes and learned to make soup. He became softer in small, unphotogenic ways—turning off phones at dinner, answering calls at odd hours, visiting a dog park alone and sitting on a bench until the light changed.
Public punishment had scorched them. It had been loud and brutal. It had not made me return. It had not given me back my lungs. But it ensured that their story would always be braided to mine.
In the end, he learned to be haunted. And when Nian Nian died, Lucas sat with the dog and, for a long time, did not move. He told those who came that he felt something like forgiveness had visited him—how do you forgive when the person you hurt is gone? He said, later, that he thought sometimes he felt the brush of a hand in the dark. Maybe it was memory. Maybe it was sorrow. Either way, it was not the empty gilded life he once had.
And my diary, the notebooks I had kept while I shrank like a flower in winter, traveled like embers—somewhere to burn down, somewhere to light a hearth. That was what I wanted: not reconciliation, but notice. Not absolution, but a witness.
The sea kept going, like it always had. The dog slept in the bed where my legs had been. The people in the city moved with the same small, precise hunger for comfort. But now, when they clapped for Lucas at a lecture or when Veronika smiled in a photograph, somewhere in the churned retelling there would be an echo—a thin page, a date written in my hand, a line about being left alone. They would not be able to unsee what they had been made to see.
I closed my eyes on the island with the dog sleeping by my feet and felt, at last, a calm I had not known for years. I had given them witnesses. I had made sure that my small life had weight. I had not lived forever, but I had left an instruction that would not dissolve.
"Remember me," I had written once, as if it were a small demand. And who had the right to deny such a last, ordinary wish?
The End
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