Revenge14 min read
The First Night I Watched Him Bring Her Home
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The first day I died, he brought his first love home.
They kissed on the sofa I had bought. They ate the celery dumplings I had learned to make for him. They laughed with the game console I had wrapped for his birthday.
I floated by the ceiling like a bad lightbulb—clear, useless, and too close to everything. I wanted to scream at them to stop. I wanted to shove the lamp off the table, to clap my transparent hands over her mouth. But I couldn't touch them. I couldn't change the sound of the room.
"I thought she was out of town," Brielle said, sleepy and sloppy. "Where is Kaylin?"
Lucas looked down at her like she was someone he had to place on a shelf. "She went on a business trip a few days ago after our fight."
He didn't know I was dead.
"Why didn't she answer?" Brielle asked, frowning like the answer mattered less than dessert.
Lucas did not answer. He was so calm I could feel the calm like a chill.
I remember the day he first kissed me in the dorm courtyard. His hand had been awkward. He was awkward. He had smelled of rain and cheap coffee. He said, "Kaylin, will you stay?" and I said yes, stupid and new.
Years had been like small stitches between us. I made his birthday long and silly, I learned his favorite games, I stayed up all night when he had to work, I cut my finger making us dumplings and he praised them like they were a gift.
That is why the hole hurt so much when he brought Brielle home.
"You promised," I whispered. No sound. I wrapped my arms around myself and watched.
Brielle lay on the sofa like a cat. Her face was bright against the dim lamp light. She mumbled, "A-choo," and rolled toward Lucas.
Lucas helped her, gentle and sure. He brushed her hair back, like he brushed it for a patient child. His palm worked from her forehead to her temple with small, perfect motions. I had rubbed his shoulders that way in the wine-dark nights. I had learned the pressure that would smooth his jaw.
"You're pregnant," he said once, low, more a warning than a comfort.
Brielle's laugh bubbled. "I know. So what?"
"I know you shouldn't drink," he said. "I know you're scared."
"Not when you're here," she breathed and leaned her face into his neck.
My heart made a small, useless thump. I had been the person who counted his work days and his appointments. I had been the person who stitched little notes into his coat. I had been the person who kept his secondhand shirts folded like promises.
"Why did you bring her home?" I asked the shadows. No one answered. I sat on the edge of the lamp's warm glow and watched them.
We had fought two nights before. He had wanted to bring Brielle back to our apartment "just for a while—" because her ex had run away with his company money, because she was pregnant and frightened and because he owed her parents who had once helped his family. He said all of that in one breath, the same breath he used to promise me he'd marry me.
"I promised I'd marry you," he said when I accused him. "I said I will."
"You promised," I echoed. My voice rang hollow. Then I said something I never planned to say, something I thought could not possibly happen.
"Unless you want me to agree, you should take the ring back. Unless—" My voice jumped. "Unless you want me to die."
The words left me like a cliff. I did not mean them like a spell. I meant them like a dare.
A truck took my answer the next day.
The last image I had before the red metal crushed the car was the small paper on the passenger seat, the ultrasound printout, folded like a secret.
I died with that secret pressed into my hands.
I didn't know right away that I had died. I only knew I couldn't move from the house. I tried the door and felt a knife-thin pain like being yanked by the throat. I tried the gate and the pain pulled me back. The house was a small island and I was stuck in its tide.
I tried to leave Lucas. I tried to run. The pain came like a chain.
"Why can't I go?" I whispered into an empty hallway.
"You're attached," said a voice like static. I turned. No one.
Attached to what? I was attached to him.
I watched him let Brielle sleep on my sofa. He wrapped a towel around her head and hummed. He hummed the same low, almost angry song he hummed when he was concentrating on a tax return. He hummed when he was tender.
"You're being ridiculous," Lucas told the night like he believed only the night could hear. "She's here because she needs me. She won't be here forever."
Brielle lifted her face and smiled at him.
"Will you leave when her ex is found?" she asked.
Lucas's hand tightened on her waist, the way a promise tightens. "Of course," he said.
"Of course," she echoed like she had been given proof.
"Remember my password is 0802. Don't change anything," Brielle said, teasingly.
He checked his phone and nodded.
"Did she really say she would bring dumplings?" Brielle asked, reaching for the plate on the coffee table, the plate with my fingerprints half on the edge.
"They were her idea always," Lucas said, quietly. "She used to make them because of my heart. She was worried."
Brielle ate one, closed her eyes and hummed. "This tastes like someone else."
I wanted to retch. I tore myself away and drifted to the balcony. He smoked, the smoke shaping the air. He stared at his phone like it might speak.
He opened our messages. There was the chat where I had asked him a week earlier, "Want a birthday gift?" and he had not replied. He tapped the screen and sent one message to nobody.
"11:30," he wrote.
His thumb poised. He didn't press send. He slid the phone into his pocket and looked like someone waiting to be rescued.
"You still care," I told the darkness. The darkness wrapped itself around my voice and took it away.
Two days later, I was no longer invisible to the edges of his life. I could smell the soup he boiled. It smelled like sweat and something mine. He sat eating my dumplings alone, slow and steady.
He put a small plate in the sink and I drifted forward to look. He flicked his cigarette in the ashtray the way he always did. His face looked pale with something that wasn't sleep.
"Who made these?" Brielle asked, picking one up.
"Kaylin," Lucas said. "She wanted to make them special."
Brielle stared at him. "She did a lot for you, didn't she?"
"She did," he said. His face lowered. "She always did."
Brielle looked at the dumpling as if it spelled out a crime. "Does she know you're here with me? Does she know you like her like that?"
Lucas shrugged, but his fingers clenched. "She went away."
"When you get back together, will you still remember..." Brielle trailed off.
"I won't forget," Lucas said, suddenly fierce. "I won't forget anything."
I laughed once, a small sound that tasted like rust.
Days passed like wet paper. He brought Brielle to sit on the couch more and more. He answered her messages. He hummed for her when she got sharp with fear.
"Kaylin?" Brielle asked one afternoon, tentative. "Where is she?"
Lucas's thumb trembled on his cigarette. "A week ago," he said, slow as a confession, "she and I had a fight. She said she was going on a business trip."
Brielle smiled, half a victory, half pity. "Maybe she's just done."
"No," Lucas said, "she won't leave like that."
"People change," Brielle said.
"Not her," Lucas answered with the small, stubborn voice he used for the important things. "Not the way she does."
He lied for me and about me and to me. He tried to wrap the truth into a shirt and hand it back.
Then the police called.
"Lucas," Geoffrey said into the receiver, "listen, we need you at the station."
"What about?" Lucas asked.
"There's been an accident. A car went over the cliff. They found remains. DNA match with... Kaylin Bengtsson."
I heard the room go quiet. I had never heard silence so loud.
"No," Lucas whispered. "Not her."
"Go now." Geoffrey's voice cut short, rough with something like pity. "You need to know."
He ran out like someone late for the last train. He pushed past Brielle. "I'm going," he said.
"Take me with you," she begged.
"No." He shut the door behind him.
At the station, they told him small facts like needles. The accident, the prints, the DNA match. "She's listed as the missing passenger on the taxi." Facts smashed together like thrown cards.
He called me. He called my number until the line clicked. He called the hospital. No one answered.
He came home with hands cold like the inside of a suitcase. He looked like someone whose map had been ripped.
"She—" he said under his breath, "She was pregnant."
Geoffrey came over to our tiny kitchen like a man entering a crime scene. He stood in front of my ashes—my bones placed in a box that fit like a secret—and said, "Lucas, you have to come with me."
"She's mine," Lucas said, as if repeating a word would make it true.
I loomed quiet and vast.
At the crematorium, the staff moved like they had rehearsed being gentle. People whispered behind me. I felt like a missing sentence in a book.
He told a story, low and choked. "She once stood in the rain and ripped a boy's hand out of his fist to return the coins to an old woman's bowl. She'd been accused of stealing once at school, but she never stole for herself." He looked at me like he was trying to read me for the first time. "I loved that."
"Where were you?" Geoffrey said, in the same flat voice he had used in the ambulance.
Lucas could not answer that. He sat down on the floor and folded into himself like paper. He kept saying, "It can't be true."
He tried to wake me with his voice. He told the room about the dumplings, about the birthdays, about the little things no one else would know. He told strangers my stupid, small stories. His voice turned the room into a theater and the audience into witnesses.
"She promised me she would marry me," he said. "We fought and then she went away. She sent back the ring. But she was going to come back. She was going to tell me."
A woman in the back said, "They say it's tragic. The driver couldn't stop."
"They were together all those years," Geoffrey said. "You can't bring her back, Lucas."
"I know," Lucas said, soft as if admitting it to a child. "I know."
I watched the funeral like a slow film. People placed white chrysanthemums and mumbled condolences they had probably practiced.
After the funeral, when people went back to their loud, full lives, Bruno—no, Geoffrey—took him aside.
"Why did you bring her home while she was gone?" Geoffrey asked, neutral as a judge.
Lucas's face weathered. "Because she asked me to help. She told me she had no one. I couldn't leave her."
"Did you think about Kaylin?" Geoffrey pushed. "Did you think of her feeling safe?"
Lucas looked at his hands. "I don't know," he said. "I thought... I thought she would understand. I thought she would come back."
Geoffrey's eyes were cold and open. "You loved her and you didn't look."
That was the first public punishment, the first crack in the box.
But it wasn't enough.
I remembered the way his friends gaped when they heard. I remembered Brielle's face when she saw him at the crematorium, horror and love making small tents at the corners of her mouth. I wanted them all to see him—see him choose, see him answer for every empty small kindness he had given me and then taken away.
So I went louder.
I found the old photographs he had kept in a drawer: us on a beach, my hair in a messy bun, his hand in mine; me asleep on his shoulder; the dumpling day with flour like snow. I hovered over his phone and watched his thumb hover over pictures of Brielle. I pushed at his keys till he sent the message. I let him reread the last line of our messages until his eyes were raw.
"Why didn't you call her those nights?" Geoffrey barked one evening at a small gathering in Lucas's office when we were supposed to celebrate a quarter's win. A group of colleagues had gathered. Lena from the design team was laughing a little too loud at a joke. Faith from HR was pouring coffee.
"Because I was busy," Lucas lied at first. Then the lie collapsed. "I was with her."
"No," Geoffrey said, louder. "You brought her here."
People's cups clinked. The office laughed uncomfortable. Someone's phone lit up with the news.
"Is this about Kaylin?" someone asked.
"It is," Geoffrey said. "He's been lying about where his girlfriend is."
"Why would he lie?" a colleague said. "He was with Brielle. Isn't she—"
"Pregnant," Lucas said, and the word sliced the air. Then he covered his face and the room spun.
"Kaylin died. She was pregnant. She was on her way to tell him," Geoffrey said. "She died with their child. Do you know what it feels like to choke on that?"
Silence.
Brielle stood up then, pale and fierce. "I didn't know," she whispered. "I swear—"
"You knew enough to come home," Geoffrey snapped. "You knew enough to ask for his phone. You knew enough to put your arms around him in his house. You knew enough to come here and be comforted."
Brielle's eyes flashed like someone pushed. "He didn't know."
"He did," Geoffrey said, and he was right. Lucas's phone showed the last messages on repeat, the ring that had been returned like a small white flag.
Every head turned. Phones were raised. The woman from accounting whispered, "Record it."
"Stop," Lucas begged. "Please."
"Why?" Geoffrey asked the whole room. "Why did you choose her, Lucas? Why did you let her make soup and call you home and sit on the sofa you bought together, and then act like she wasn't there?"
Lucas began to tremble. "I—" His voice broke. "I was helping someone who needed me."
"And you couldn't help her by going to see Kaylin that week," Geoffrey said. "You couldn't go to her. You left her to die."
It hit him like a weight. His face turned an awful gray.
"What do you want me to do?" he said, distant and weak. "I wanted to be fair. I wanted to be good."
Brielle finally cried. "I didn't mean—"
"You didn't mean?" Geoffrey's laugh was a small, ugly thing. "She meant. She died with your child inside her. She thought she was coming back to tell you. She thought she was your home."
Phones kept humming. The scene streamed into a thousand pockets.
He tried to speak, to make them understand, but his words were straw in a wind. A man from his company, who had always liked Lucas's smile, put his hand on Lucas's shoulder and said nothing. A junior colleague turned away. A group of women in the corner had tears they could not hide.
"You're a coward," one of them said, softly.
That night, videos of him and Brielle laughing in his apartment, of him reading messages from Kaylin, of him on the phone when the call came, spread on the small screens of people who worked in the same building. Comments scrolled: "How could he?" "What did he do?" "He killed her with silence."
The public punishment was not a punch or a jail. It was a thousand small twitters and murmurs. It was the knowledge that the whole world could watch the exact way he folded me into memory and then let another woman sit on my sofa.
The next day, the news came that Brielle's ex had surrendered. He had been arrested for running a company into the ground and disappearing with money. They said he had nothing to do with the accident. The news said "tragic coincidence." It said "no foul play." It said "we are sorry."
It did not say how I watched him bring her home on my sofa and press my dumplings to his lips.
There was a different punishment yet. He tried to end it. He tried to cut across the room with a blade.
I was there, hovering, and when he raised the knife I shouted—a great sound that wasn't a sound. Or maybe I made his mind waver. Either way, the blade slipped and his wrist bled slow and bright. He sank to his knees and sobbed like a child. He kept the clothes I had bought him stained with his panic.
I told him, quietly and at last, in a voice that he could somehow hear like a shadow: "You don't get to take this away."
He called 911 and lived. The ambulance lights painted his face blue and then red, flickering like confessions.
"Why do you deserve to live?" I said to him then.
He looked up with red, swollen eyes. "Because—" he said. "Because I love her. I love Kaylin."
"I watched you ignore me," I said. "I watched you choose safety over me. You will not die to ease your pain."
He had wanted to end the story with himself. He had wanted to be allowed to be undone by grief. I would not let him have that peace.
The public punishment I designed was simple and slow. I let everyone see the rawness of his choices. I let his colleagues record him pleading for forgiveness. I let the social feeds fill with his face and my story.
At the funeral, a woman whose groceries I had helped carry once in the street stood up. "You treated her like she was air," she said to his face so many could hear. "You took her warmth and kept it in your pocket, and then you didn't look when she left."
People whispered. A neighbor took a photo. The video made the rounds.
The punishment had stages: first, exposure; then, humiliation; then, isolation.
He could not go into the same cafe. He could not sit at the same poker table. An invitation went out: "We can't be friends," the messages said. His inbox filled with silence. People he had helped called to ask whether he needed money. They did not invite him for dinner. They did not ask him about his day.
He fell into that quiet like someone falling through thin ice. He looked like a man with all the light drained from him.
I watched all of it and felt something change. I felt an odd coolness that was not satisfaction. It was heavier, more true.
At night he came fetch to the balcony and stared at the empty city. He smoked too much. He ate my dumplings like a penitent and then locked my bones in a closet like a thing you hide when you are ashamed.
"Why did you stay?" he asked one night, when the room was only his breath and his fear.
"Because I can't go," I answered. "Because I wanted to see what you would do."
"I would have come," he said. "I would have been there."
"You weren't," I said.
"No," he said, and his voice broke like a brittle branch.
"I don't want you to die," I said. "I want you to live in the thing you made."
He laughed, small and ugly. "I deserve it."
"Deserve," I said, tasting the word. "Yes. But not in the way you mean."
So I did the only cruel thing left. When he reached for peace, I took it away. When he wanted to fall and be forgiven by the cold world, I made the world keep him.
"You must live the rest of your life with knowing," I told him the night he tried to slit his palm. "Every birthday you will remember the dumplings and the ring you returned. Every child you see you will think of the one that never came. You will carry this. You will carry me."
He looked at me with something like pleading. "Make it stop," he begged.
"It won't stop," I said. "You cannot stand in a room and not feel her ghost when it is your fault."
Days later, Lucas sold his shares and donated much of his money to the orphanage where I grew up. He gave away the things I had loved and the places I had mapped in my life. He slept with my ashes like a confession. He visited the hospital where Brielle recovered and apologized in a voice that trembled.
"Are you angry at her?" a reporter asked once when she found him on the street near the hospital.
"I am angry at myself," he said. "I failed her. I failed Kaylin."
"Do you think you'll ever make it up?" the reporter pressed, like a small legal judgment.
"I don't know," he whispered. "I can only try."
That was the punishment that hurt him more than any other. It was slow and full of small cuts. It was when he tried to do good and it tasted like ash.
One evening, a year after the accident, there was a small ceremony at the orphanage. He had brought flowers and a cheque. He spoke softly to a room full of children and said, "She taught me what love could be. I want to teach others."
Afterwards, a woman from the charity sat him down and, quietly, told him what really crushed me: "A person doesn't get to pick how they teach. They only get to decide whether they will learn. You have to carry her memory like you would a fragile thing. You can't let it crush you."
He looked like a man listening to the last instruction from the shore.
I watched him, and though the burns of betrayal were still present in me, something loosened. I had been so full of a single, white-hot fury that I had not seen my own exhaustion.
He would live. He would spend the rest of his life trying to pay for a crime he had not been judged for in court. He would be the man who gave to the orphanage, who sat quiet at meetings, who stitched little good deeds into a fabric too thin to repair what he had torn.
"You will never again rest easily on a couch," I told him once, when he tried to sit where Brielle had. "Every touch will be a question."
He swallowed. "I know."
"And you must never die for it," I said. "You must live and feel everything you refused to feel when she was alive."
"That's my punishment?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "To live."
That was my final act. I let him live.
When I let go, I had an odd moment of relief. Not peace—relief. I saw him pick up my ashes one last time, close the box, and whisper, "I will not waste this."
Then I felt myself leave like a bird finally choosing a direction. I did not want to see him seduce a new life out of the ruins of ours. I did not want to watch his slow penance for a crime I could not unlearn. I wanted a different ending, maybe a home where someone loved me back properly and where the sound of laughter did not split.
So I left.
Before I went, I kept one promise of the living: I told him the terrible truth in a public place. At a small memorial, with news crews and neighbors and the rector of the church, I made him say my name out loud and say what he had done.
He did. His voice broke the silence like glass. Cameras caught him and then the world did.
When I finally closed my eyes, I had one small wish: that he would keep living long enough to understand the weight of the word "home." I hoped he would be the man who sat at orphanage tables and listened. I hoped he would never again let someone leave his house with a secret.
I hoped, selfishly, that he would never forget what he had taken.
And then I left.
The End
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