Revenge13 min read
The Gift I Left Behind
ButterPicks16 views
When I was fifteen, Shane Cummings took my hand and promised me the moon.
"I'll keep you safe," he said then, like a vow carved into bone. "Whatever comes, I won't leave you."
I believed him the way children believe in tides. I believed him until the winter when the snow fell so hard it erased the world and showed me the shape of his lies.
"I have to tell you something," I whispered into the sterile light of the clinic, clutching the pregnancy slip between my fingers.
Shane didn't answer. He watched the screen light up with my name and then slid his phone back into his pocket like a man putting away a tool.
"He's texting someone," I told myself. "Maybe it's work. Maybe it's—"
I followed him that day because small doubts became large devils when you were already fragile. I saw him with my mother-in-law, Loretta Baldwin, and a girl who laughed like a bell—Keily Masson. They walked arm in arm through the hospital doors, and the hospital's bright hum made their closeness an affront.
"I thought it was lunch," I said into the phone when Shane finally answered, turning his voice into sugar. "I'll come by the office later."
"You know I have meetings all morning," he replied. "Lunch, then? I'll pick you up."
"I'll come now," I said, though every step toward his company felt like stepping into a trap.
He set a cake down when I arrived, safe and foolish, like the little boy who thinks a wrapped box fixes everything.
"Orange mousse," he said, as if flavor could hide betrayal.
Keily smiled too wide. "Oh, Mrs. Cummings! You look as elegant as always."
"How long have you been here?" My voice was paper-thin.
Shane's face tightened. "Keily, leave us—"
"It was lunch," he told me, like a sacerdotal apology. "I told you. I—"
"Is she…?" I didn't finish.
Shane closed his eyes. "I don't want to lose you," he said. "I can't—"
"You can't what?" I asked. "Tell me the truth?"
"I am so sorry, Emely," he whispered, and the name in his mouth was the softest cruelty. "Keily is pregnant."
The word landed like a hammer. "Pregnant?"
"She—my mother wanted a grandchild," he said, stumbling through a sudden confession. "Loretta—she manipulated things. She—
"You're saying it's not—" My throat burned. "She is carrying your child?"
Shane's hands trembled against my shoulders. "I didn't—it's artificial insemination. I didn't sleep with her. I swear."
The cake sat between us like a lie with frosting.
"Would that make it better?" I asked. "Would that make you less of a traitor? Less of a liar?"
"I would never leave you," he pleaded. "I'm trying to protect you. She threatened—"
"Threatened you with what?" I laughed, a hard, brittle sound. "Threatened to kill herself? She has before. She told you she would. You'd rather have her alive with my absence than have me alive with her displeasure."
He tried to touch my face. I pulled away.
"Don't," I said.
That afternoon, in a bathroom stall that smelled of antiseptic, I vomited until there was nothing left to throw up. I realized with a sick, cold clarity that the life inside me—five weeks old by the date—was the very thing that would bind him to Loretta, that would make him choose the music of his childhood over the vows he'd given me. I thought of all the nights he had promised me forever. I thought of him holding me the way he used to, and how he could now hold someone else and call her "the one who will keep my mother whole."
I went home and packed a small bag. I called Daniel English.
"Emely," he said when he answered. "Your voice—are you okay?"
"No," I said. "I need help. I need you."
Daniel had been my junior at med school—linking steady intelligence with a kind, careful temper. He had never tried to take what belonged to another. "I'll come right now," he promised.
At home, Shane tried to cajole me with future vacations, with a week off and promises. He kissed me on the forehead and said, "We will go to the theme park like you always wanted. We'll forget this."
I let him kiss me because I wanted my last memory of him to be gentleness, to give him the impression of a pardon. "Okay," I said. "Fine."
When Daniel arrived, I was already at the edge of a decision that felt like both mercy and punishment. "I don't want to keep this," I told him in the quiet of my bedroom. "Not if he wants children with Loretta and Keily. Not if they'll use that child's life as a lever to move me out."
Daniel looked at me like someone trying to understand an impossible geometry. "What do you want?"
"I don't want him to have everything he wants. I want him to have the knowledge that he lost me and why. I'm tired of being second and lying in the space where his honesty should be."
He put a careful hand on mine. "Have you spoken to him? Really spoken?"
"I have," I said. "And he begged. He begged and then made excuses."
Daniel hesitated. "This is—this is not a small thing."
"I know." I closed my eyes. "I want the process done anesthetically. I will sign anything, consent to anything, if it spares the fetus pain and spares me future medicine I cannot handle. But I'm not asking him for forgiveness. I'm asking him to understand what it means to be betrayed."
He didn't argue. He knew the quiet cruelty of truth. He arranged the procedure. He later told me, softly, "You chose this like someone choosing a chess move. You wanted to trade pain for a different kind of victory."
I went under for the procedure with the word "gift" in my mouth. I wanted to believe that a life lost could be paid back with a life spared from the uglier things that might come. I wanted to believe that pain could translate to meaning. When I woke up in the hospital, the sky outside was a hard, colorless blue and my throat felt raw with unshed grief.
"I made sure you were safe," Daniel said when he came into the room. "You were brave."
"I don't feel brave," I whispered. "I feel—"
"Empty," he finished.
Daniel put his hand on mine. "You won't be alone."
I smiled at that, and then later I learned that the emptiness I felt was not final.
Weeks after, when my scans came back with the diagnosis—renal cell carcinoma—I thought the world had opened its maw and taken more than I'd fathomed. I had one kidney left; the other had been gone since an accident years before. The prognosis wasn't kind. But Daniel promised a plan, and Daniel expected results. He gave me clinical hope the way other people give flowers.
"There's a chance," he said, "if we operate early and follow up. We can buy you time."
"Time," I echoed. "For what?"
"For you to live," he said simply. "For you to decide."
He was right. I decided to fight. I also decided to not go home and pretend everything was okay. I told Shane that I'd be hospitalized for treatment.
He came to the hospital, cradling a string of pearls. "For you," he said. "Pearls like the moon you always said you wanted."
"You bought these for Keily," I said, and the pearls suddenly looked like a necklace threaded through the throat of a lie.
Shane's face fell. "I didn't buy—"
"Yes," I said. "You did."
And then life, in all its messy cruelty, kept moving. On New Year's Eve he promised me a week away at the theme park. We went. He put rabbit ears on me and kissed my forehead under fireworks and for two hours I let myself be a woman who loved instead of a woman who had been discarded in secret.
"Stay," he said softly under the giant, fake stars. "I love you."
I believed him for two hours.
"Go help your mother," I said when the call came. "Go. I can't—"
And he left me on the pavement as the world fell away in a vision of light.
I fell twice that night. The second fall was the one that put me in surgery—not the cancer, not yet, but a fractured skull and a long, brutal stay in ICU. When I woke, Daniel was there, his voice the first thing I heard. "Emely—you're back. We saved you."
The truth I had planned to hand to him—my gift, my punishment—was no longer only mine to give. I had tried to take his complacency and gift him lifelong sorrow. Fate, with a surgeon's hand, had decided differently.
Shane came to the hospital in a storm of panic. "Can I see you?" he begged the nurse at the door.
"You can't," Daniel said quietly. "She asked not to see him."
"Why?" Shane demanded, wounded and indignant.
"Because she wanted to decide without being made small," Daniel answered. "Because she wanted to keep whatever dignity she could."
When Daniel handed Shane the things Emely had left—her phone, a sealed audio recorder, a single sheet of paper—the look on his face was slow unspooling horror.
He later played the recording in the privacy of his anger. He heard his mother's voice, Loretta's, coaxing and scheming, heard Keily's giggle, had the audio of him confessing to Daniel and to himself—but the damage had been done. The recording was not secret for long.
I had been quiet about my plans: in the weeks I thought I would die I had written a drawer full of notes for Shane—gentle reminders, small domestic instructions, and at the bottom of the drawer a line that burned: "Bless Shane and Keily; may they find their happiness."
He tore that note apart in the hospital bathroom and screamed like a man who had been stripped of his illusions.
Daniel, who had loved in silence for years, decided that passive grief was not enough. He wanted justice like a doctor wants a cure. He wanted Loretta and Keily's manipulation and the public ease with which they had taken a life—our life—to be seen.
A week later, Shane held a shareholder meeting for the company he had built with the money his father left him. It was at the grand hotel ballroom, silver chandeliers buzzing like trapped insects. The room smelled of coffee and expensive cologne. The board sat on the stage, faces glossed by the lights. Reporters filled the back like gulls. He was supposed to announce a merger and a philanthropic initiative in his mother's name.
"Shane," Daniel had said, "you need to come clean."
"Clean?" Shane scoffed. "Why would I humiliate myself? Why would I—"
"Because otherwise," Daniel said softly, "they will humiliate you."
The ballroom was packed. The lights dimmed as the CEO spoke about vision and legacy. When it was time for Q&A, a hush fell like snow. Daniel stood at the back, a slim figure in a plain suit, pushing past the ruffled security.
"Excuse me," he said into a microphone. "I have a question for Mr. Cummings."
Shane blinked at the intrusion. "This is a closed session—"
"Open my question," Daniel said. "Or everyone here has a right to hear the truth."
Shane's assistant tried to block him. Reporters leaned forward with their recorders. Daniel clicked a small device the size of a pen; the room did not yet know there were strings connected.
"Mr. Cummings," Daniel said loudly. "How long have you been deceiving your wife?"
A ripple of confusion, then a murmur. Shane stood, face a mask. "What are you talking about—"
"You and your mother arranged for Keily Masson to be implanted with your sperm. You hid it from your wife," Daniel said. "You used the miracle of medicine like a bargaining chip. You privatized the life of a child to save your family's comfort."
Shane opened his mouth. "This is libel—"
Daniel touched a button. A clear, recorded voice played across the speaker system. Loretta's voice, high and honeyed, begging; Keily's reply, soft and solicitous. Shane's own voice, caught between shame and pleading. They were there—indisputable.
"No," Shane said. "You can't—"
People in the ballroom looked up. The reporters stopped scribbling and started recording with renewed, greedy interest.
"This isn't private," a woman near the stage said. "He ran that lie in his own board."
The device rolled on. A recording Shane had made to himself—an apology to his wife, a justification—played out loud for everyone. His words: "I did it to save my mother. I didn't think—"
The sound of a wrongdoing confession in a room full of witnesses is a small, surgical thing. It dissects the liar.
"Shane!" a woman shouted. "You put a life at the center of your family's politics!"
"He hid it!" another voice cried. "He lied to his wife!"
Shane tried to rally the room. "This is private family business!" he said, but the word "family" felt like a splinter now.
Loretta stood. Her face was an artful mask. "This is a smear," she whispered. "They're making a spectacle."
Keily put a hand to her mouth and then pulled it away. "I—" She couldn't finish. Her cheeks reddened in a way that only bad actors and frightened women redden.
The chair of the board, who had prided himself on neutrality, looked at Shane with new calculation. "We cannot have this level of distraction," he said. "Shareholders... reputational risk..."
Voices in the crowd turned from puzzled to furious with an alarming speed. "This is fraud," a reporter said. "They used the company name to hide family planning. They misled investors."
"I invested in a man and a firm of principle," an elderly investor snapped. "Not in someone who treats life as a bargaining chip."
Shane's voice grew thin. "It's complicated," he pleaded. "My mother—"
"Your mother blackmailed you," Daniel said into the microphone. "She threatened self-harm to coerce you. You consented to manufacturing a child to keep comfort in exchange for your wife's silence."
"Stop it!" Loretta screamed. "This is a lie! You—"
A woman in the audience—the assistant who had served cake that day—stood up and pointed. "I saw you with her. I saw you bring her to the clinic."
The room was no longer a ballroom; it had turned into a courtroom. People pointed, took pictures. Someone uploaded a clip that went viral in minutes. Phones flashed. In the foyer a dozen reporters clustered around the board's PR, which attempted to salvage the evening into a damage-control exercise.
Shane's hands shook. He looked like a man whose hands had been stolen. Keily shrank inward. Loretta's smile cracked.
"This is monstrous," Loretta whispered, but there were a hundred witnesses to the monstrosity now.
"What do you want?" Shane asked Daniel, the world narrowing to the man who had pulled the thread.
"Truth," Daniel said. "Acknowledgment. Resignation where meritless. Public apology. And for Keily and Loretta to step out of positions where they can continue to hurt others."
Shane's investors demanded calm. "We need to vote on leadership," the chair said. "This impacts governance."
"Mr. Cummings," the chair said. "Given the new facts and the reputational risk, the board must discuss your position."
Shane's supporters were few. The newsrooms were already composing their headlines—"Corporate Scandal: CEO's Family Secret"—and within an hour feed posts and talk shows turned his domestic treachery into public property.
The public punishment was not a single act. It was a cascade: a resignation letter signed in shaking ink; Loretta's charity association being suspended; Keily's employment terminated when an HR investigator concluded nepotism and misconduct. Their friends who had once smiled in photos with them now took down the pictures. The local paper ran a detailed piece about Loretta's past manipulations, complete with medical records showing her previous attempts to blackmail. Keily's family business faced backlash—clients withdrew, vendors stopped calls.
"You're ruining our family," Loretta sobbed, once it became clear that private cruelty had become public ruination.
"Maybe you should have thought of that before you treated life like a tool," Daniel said. There was no joy in his voice. Only the thin, clinical satisfaction of corrective justice.
Shane collapsed into his chair in the back room of the hotel, the bright world of the ballroom dimming to a halo. His phone buzzed with messages: shareholders, friends, his mother. The chair beside him filled with journalists at midnight. The next morning his face smiled from screens with the caption "Fall From Grace."
The crowd's reaction was a living animal. People leaned forward, mouths half-open. "I can't believe he did that," one investor said. "He lied to his wife for status." "What kind of man uses medicine for bargaining?" asked a woman with a child in her arms. Cameras flashed. A man in the back recorded a live stream and shouted, "He deserves to lose everything!"
Keily was the first to be carried out, her head bowed under the weight of her own knowledge. Loretta left with her dignity in tatters, dragging the ghost of a life to the parking lot amid whispers and the staccato cameras.
Shane watched them go. For the first time, the promises he had made as a young man were not rock but ash. He had no anchor, only exposure.
But public punishment was not enough for some. A few weeks later the social media storm became a legal storm: questions about consent, about corporate governance, about the ethics of "manufacturing" a child for private ends. Keily's family sued for slander; Loretta attempted to claim defamation. It was messy, ugly, and the law dragged it into public forums that framed them as villains or victims depending on who paid for the piece.
In the following months, the pressure made them small in a way that private cruelty often does not allow. Board meetings became tribunals; dinner parties became interrogations. Friends left. Invitations evaporated. The people who once clinked glasses with them suddenly clucked and withdrew. Keily's parents wept in public interviews, and Loretta—who had once been a proud matriarch—found herself wandering the neighborhood, facing whispers.
Shane tried to fight it, to stitch back his life with statements and charity donations, but the world moves fast enough to let memory harden into judgement. He lost board votes. He lost sponsors. He lost the simple and terrible thing most feared: reputation.
When Loretta cried at the hospital for mercy, no one came running. People filmed; someone posted the video with the caption "The mother who engineered betrayal." The police came once for a complaint, then left when there was no crime to arrest. But the social sentence, the slow starvation of respect and dignity, was worse than any badge of punishment. They had been stripped in public.
"I wanted them to feel what it is to be discarded," I had written in a note and never sent. Justice had a messy face, but it was yours now, Shane. The thing I most hated had been turned outward.
Months later, a car on a rainy night took his life. The headlines said "CEO Shane Cummings dies in traffic accident." Loretta's mind frayed; she was hospitalized for psychiatric care. Keily's family business collapsed under reputational assault and financial ruin. People felt hungry and vindicated in equal measure. They said, "Poetic justice," and their words had teeth.
I did not celebrate. No victory tastes like bile. I had wanted truth, not ruin. But the world doesn't trade in ethics easily. It trades in spectacle. The men and women who used me as a pawn were stripped, shamed, and then left to flounder with the ruins. Spectators took photos while they wept.
After the storm, the quiet settled like dust. Daniel kept working. He built, with stubborn patience, a program that would later change the future of kidney cancer treatment. He credited me quietly when he finally announced a breakthrough years later: a line in a speech, "For Emely Lombardi, who taught us to fight, to choose dignity in the face of harm."
"You did it," I said to him once when he sent me a clipping. "You took my small revenge and made something that matters."
He smiled, a tired, honest thing. "You are the reason I couldn't just let them be small. You were brave, Emely. You were always brave."
In the end, I kept my donations, kept my decision, and survived. I never went back to the house we had shared. I packed the photographs of our early years into a single box and put them in the attic. The pearl necklace? I kept it, too, wrapped in tissue, a weight that fit in the palm of my hand like a stone.
When someone asks me whether revenge made me whole, I shake my head.
"No," I tell them. "But it made him see."
And there is a difference, however small.
The End
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