Revenge11 min read
The Glass Bridge Photo
ButterPicks15 views
01
I did not go to Kenia's wedding.
"I sent a photo instead," I told nobody. "A photo from the top of the glass bridge."
"I thought you'd be there," Devin said when he found the stamped postcard on my table.
"I thought I would be," I answered, and I lied.
I stood on the bridge for a long time. "I wasn't scared," I said out loud to the city below, to the wind, to the empty river. "When you have nothing left that holds you, fear leaves too."
I mailed the postcard to Kenia. "By the time you get it," I told the river, "you will already be someone else's wife."
02
"Kenia, do you still think of her?" she had asked me once in a theater after a bad movie.
"Who?" I had wanted to ask back. "Who do you mean?"
"You know," she said. "Kaori."
"I know," I lied then. "No." I put my wrist across her shoulder. She smelled like the kitchen smoke and something sweet. She had been the steady thing in my life for three years. She had been the one who waited.
"You promised," she whispered once. "If you two ever split, you will stand on that bridge all day."
"I promised too," I said. "If we break up, you go to the haunted house and come out shaking." She had laughed then. "Deal."
We were young and stupid, and promises were toys.
03
Kaori came back into my life like a name in an old song.
She called and called. I blocked her. I put her on the blacklist of my phone as if a contact could erase a past.
"You have a girlfriend," Devin said. "She is... nice. Stop answering."
"I won't," I said. "I won't let the past breathe."
But the past breathed.
Kaori had been my first. We were neighbors, classmates, everything. She left to study abroad and I did what a kid does: I broke. I broke loudly. I shouted. I said proud things and then felt stupid and lonely.
Kenia knew none of that at first. She only knew the tired man who ate my leftovers, the girl who fell asleep under the rain and then stayed. She did not know I had been a different man.
"You sure?" she asked when I first told her I loved her. Her eyes were a mirror. "You sure you won't love someone else?"
"I am sure," I lied.
04
I cheated.
"It was one night," I told myself. "One mistake. One terrible mistake."
"It was your fault," Devin said soberly. "You chose to go."
I said nothing and slept on the couch. The couch that had been Kenia's couch. The bed was hers too. We never paid rent. We had paid with time and attention and little things: a bowl split between us, a shirt folded just right, a coffee cup kept for years.
"I told you I would be responsible," I had promised when she came back from the storm of rumors. "I will take care of everything."
She had said, "You're a fool," and then, "Alright." She surrendered.
05
When Kenia left after the last fight, she left like she always left: small and quiet. She took the lights with her. I know that sounds poetic. It is not. It was a cold, old light. I had grown used to it.
"I will be fine," she said the night she packed. She looked tiny next to the suitcase. "We are adults," she added, and the words looked wrong in her mouth.
"I can't do this," I told her once. "I can't lose you."
She said, "Then don't make it so easy."
06
I wanted to be a good man then. I lied I had changed. I deleted Kaori's number. I stayed in, practiced sweet things. I cooked bad meals. I bought fake followers to start Kenia's channel. "I just want her to be happy," I kept telling anyone who would listen.
"You are doing it wrong," she said once with a tired grin. "You are trying to buy me back like I am an award."
"I am sorry," I said. "I will learn."
And she laughed—then she cried, because I did not know how to cook properly. She pretended to smile and the camera loved that smile. She became a small online thing: a food streamer who made dinner for the camera and for one real heart that beat across town.
07
Then Kaori came back for real.
She texted first. She asked to see me. "Just talk," she said. "Just like before."
"There is no 'before' for us anymore," I told her. "I have Kenia."
"I don't want her," Kaori said. "I want you."
I let the bad man in me decide. "We were young," I told myself. "We were young, he said." I drank. I made mistakes. I drove straight into wrong.
08
I woke up with the worst of regrets.
Kenia had messaged me all night like she used to. "Drink water," she wrote. "Put on a sweater. You are fragile." It was the last string of messages I received before she cut me off for good.
"You did this," Kaori said—her voice flat. "You chose to come here."
"I didn't mean to—" I began.
"You chose," she said again.
09
She was pregnant.
Kaori's voice was a low thing. "I am going to have a baby," she said. "It is yours."
I could have made another choice.
Instead I said, "We will keep it."
10
We didn't keep anything.
I came home one night, knuckled raw, and I choked her in a blackout of anger. She gasped. I saw a face I didn't want to own. I saw fear and the eyes of a stranger.
"Why did you come back?" I screamed to the empty room in a voice that was not mine. "Why? Why break what I had?"
"Because you left me," she whispered, and I loved her then only in my silent, broken way.
That was the last straw.
11
Kenia sold the apartment like I wished she had before. I kept sitting on the stairwell, hoping to see the light in the same window. Ruben from the estate stood near me and said, "She sold it. She moved."
"Where?" I asked.
"Nowhere you will find, Mr. Solovyov," he said kindly. "People make new homes."
12
Months went like a bad loop. I tried to work. I drank away the spaces between good days and bad ones. My phone filled with messages about projects. I went to dinners for work. I went to events I no longer wanted to attend.
One night at a catering dinner, I saw her again.
"You left," she said, calm and dry. Her new man—Calder Cooper—stood beside her like a steady wall.
"Don't," I started. "Kenia—" My voice cracked.
She looked at me like one looked at a ghost. "Logan," she said—she called me by my name like it was a wound. "Please respect me."
I wanted to reach for her. I wanted to hold her hand. I wanted the warm old things again.
"You are not my husband anymore," she said.
"Then what are you?" I asked.
"A person who deserves better," she answered.
13
We signed the papers in a bland conference room.
"Two notaries, two signatures," the lawyer said. "Simple."
I waited as if a verdict would follow. It did not. Kenia ate nothing at the lunch we had after. I peeled a shrimp and offered it to her like a trivial peace treaty.
"Mr. Solovyov, we are done," she said finally. Her voice sounded stronger than mine.
I slept on the floor that night with the smell of her curry on my hands.
14
I tried to change. I tried to be a better man for Kaori, who carried the child of my momentary weakness. But anger had made me a different animal.
Our fights became violent and loud. I blacked out twice. I lost my temper. One terrible night, I grabbed Kaori and shook her, and I saw the fear like a mirror. "Why?" I begged the ceiling. "Why did you come?"
"Because I thought you needed me," she cried. "Because I thought I loved you."
But the truth was cold: I needed an anchor to stop my slow sinking. She wanted me—badly and plainly. And we hurt each other.
15
I stopped seeing Kenia on purpose when she started to be small smoke in my periphery. I wanted to vanish in guilt. I watched the one video that broke me.
It was her channel. A boy named Lorenzo (I didn't know him then) tried to cook. He fumbled; he was awkward and honest. She stood with hands on hips and watched him like a mother would watch a child learning to walk.
"Look at him," comments said. "He's so clumsy." Another called them "pure and wholesome."
I watched the video twenty times until the lights went out on my life. "She looks happy," a voice said inside my skull, and I cried until I couldn't.
I stopped drinking, for a while. I deleted the apps. I tried to live with my own thoughts.
16
Then came the day of punishment.
I did not see it coming because I never thought she would plan revenge. I thought Kenia's roads were quiet and kind. I was wrong.
"You're going to the food expo," Lane told me at work with a soft smile. "She's doing a live cooking demo."
"No," I said. "I won't go."
"You should," Lane said. "Maybe you need to see her happy."
So I went.
17
The hall smelled like frying oil and fluorescent lights. The crowd was bigger than I expected. I found a spot near the back. Kenia was on stage with a ring of people around her. The camera lights softened her face.
She looked nothing like the woman who forgave me and cooked me bad meals. She looked like a professional who had learned to smile for the world with an arm that could yet say a single honest thing.
"Welcome," she said into the microphone. She smiled. "Today my partner Lorenzo will try to make my comfort dish."
The crowd laughed. "You can do it, Lorenzo," someone cheered.
My heart was a hard stone. I felt nothing. Then a voice I did not expect said, "Logan?"
I turned.
Kaori was there at the edge of the stage, silver on her wrist, a bag at her feet. She did not look broken at all. She looked tired and sharp.
"Why are you here?" I said too loudly.
"To watch Kenia," Kaori said. Her tone was flat like glass.
Someone from the crowd shouted, "Isn't he the one who left her for his mistress?"
The murmur grew. Eyes looked. Phones lifted like a small flock of birds.
I felt a prick of the old arrogance: "They don't know the whole story."
Then a woman from the front stood and walked to the stage. I knew her face. She was one of Kenia's regular viewers, a local food blogger named Jaqueline Seidel, a well-known voice in the community.
She held up a piece of paper.
"This," she said loud enough for the microphones, "is a screenshot of messages sent to Kenia while she was trying to build her channel. This is the man who told her to wait while he ran away to someone else's bed."
The cheers were low at first. Some people gasped. A man clapped. Phones were already recording. "Tell it," someone shouted.
"You have texts," I said. My hands had forgotten how to be steady.
Jaqueline read: "'I'll call you later'—sent at two in the morning. 'I need you'—sent from a hotel address.'"
I heard the sound of my own life cracking. "You're lying," I said, and it came out small.
Kenia took the stage steps in a slow move. She stood between me and the crowd. Her face was calm. "I am not here for revenge," she said. "I am here for truth."
She lifted a small box. I recognized the ring I had worn. The ring I had given her. The ring I had hidden in the drawer.
"I kept this," she said. "I told myself I would throw it away. I didn't have the heart to. So I took it here today."
A woman in the crowd cried. "Show him," someone said.
Kenia opened the box. The ring glinted. She set it on the counter and then placed her finger next to it, as if closing a chapter.
"Do you remember standing with me on that glass bridge?" she asked me. "Do you remember the promise?"
"I remember," I said, and my voice was a thin reed.
She reached into her bag and pulled out the postcard. "He mailed me this on the day I married another man," she said to the whole hall. "He did not come to my wedding. He sent a picture of the bridge."
Phones recorded, cameras panned. "Why?" someone asked from the crowd.
"Because he wanted me to know I was already taken," I said, then winced. "No. I wanted to let it burn me."
A ripple of disgust and sympathy mixed in the air. People whispered. Someone snapped pictures. The live feed that streamed the cooking demo suddenly had a new headline: "Streamer Confronts Ex-Husband Live."
I felt my face go ash-white. My fingers shook. "Kenia, please—" I began.
She looked at me like a verdict. "You promised to be honest," she said. "You promised to love me. You promised to be a home. You left."
My reactions spooled quick: smugness gone; shock; denial; then a slow collapse. "You don't understand," I said. "It wasn't like that. I was—"
"You chose," Jaqueline's voice cut in. "You chose to betray. You hit Kaori. You left Kenia. You think this is private? We watched you break her. We watched you lie. We watched you send postcards while you packed another girl's life into your arms."
The crowd pressed forward like a tide. Some took photos. Some clapped. A few booed. I felt light-headed. "Don't," I begged again, but it was the wrong word for the wrong time.
Calder Cooper stepped forward, a solid man with an open face. He placed his hand on Kenia's shoulder like a shield. "You don't get to show up here," he said to me in a voice like stone. "You don't get to act injured when you were the blade."
Someone in the front row spat a word. "Shame," someone else called. "Shame."
I went through the motions of denials. "She lies," I said. "Kaori lies. You're being used."
"Used?" a stranger laughed. "You used two people's lives."
Kaori watched me without hate. "I was scared," she said quietly. "I was young. I thought you would be the one. But he hurt me. He hurt the baby. We survived."
The word "baby" hit like a weight. The crowd reacted like a struck chord—gasps, silent phones, a few sobs.
I remember the change in my chest: full of hot shame, then hard like a coal. "Please," I said, and my voice broke into a small plea. "Kenia, I'm sorry."
She looked at me finally and the whole hall felt it: she saw the old boy and the new man and neither was enough to hold her.
"You have been punished for your choices already," Kenia said calmly. "You kept me like something you could call when lonely. Now you are lonely with the truth in front of everybody."
I felt that slow collapse the writers love to call "falling." My arrogance was stripped. I said, "I will change."
"Change?" Jaqueline asked the crowd. "We have seen that before."
A few people began to chant, not loudly, but steady: "Accountability. Accountability."
I sank down on the floor at the edge of the stage. My legs wouldn't hold me. People leaned in. Phones filmed the man who had been a husband, a liar, a bruiser. Someone gave me water. It tasted of sins.
The punishment rolled on: comments poured in online. Clips went viral. The local news put "Fallen Husband Exposed" on a headline. Sponsors pulled back from the events I was attached to. People I worked with called me a cautionary tale. My name became a whisper when a room went quiet.
Kaori's reaction was not jubilation. She did not dance. She checked Lorenzo's hand. Kenia kept smiling to the cameras, and a few times she looked straight at me as if measuring how much I could take.
I begged. "Please," I said on live video as comments flowed like rain. "I am sorry. I will go to therapy. I will make amends. I will be a better person."
The viewer count doubled. "Apologies," someone said, "are empty if nothing is done."
I felt the smile leave my face, the voice leave my throat. I watched Kenia pack up her station at the end of the day, not hurriedly but with careful hands. She took her ring box but left the postcard on the counter with a small neatness, as if she wanted the bridge photo to be the last memory any of us would have.
The onlookers reacted in sequences: first shock, then the slow delight of justice, then the wonky pity that comes after public shaming. Some cheered quietly for Kenia. Many recorded. One woman wiped her eyes and mouthed, "Good for you." A teenager in the back clapped hard.
Calder walked Kenia out. He held a steady face for the cameras. He did not look at me.
I stayed on the floor until the janitors shooed me gently away. "Sir, it's time to go," one of them said kindly. "You can't stay here."
I left with my hands in my pockets. The hall seemed larger and colder than when I entered.
18
Afterward, life changed form for me. Sponsors pulled out. My friends called less. People who had once praised my humor now told me quietly, "You had it coming." Online, threads replayed my mistakes like a song stuck in a loop.
I tried to apologize to Kaori properly. She did not answer. I tried to call Kenia and got nothing but a polite reminder: "Please do not contact me."
I walked past the bridge once and thought of the postcard in Kenia's hands, and the way she had left it on the counter. The glass above the river looked like a photograph of my own life: clear and cold.
One night I opened the drawer where the ring had been. It still existed in memory, not in metal. I closed the drawer with a small, decisive motion.
19
Years have a way of making everything smaller. I live now with quiet and work and the possibility that I will be the kind of man people remember only by the things they warned others about.
I see Kenia's videos sometimes, by accident or by chance. Lorenzo is better at cooking. He drops something once and Kenia laughs in that exact warm way that once belonged to me.
One evening, I found the postcard I had mailed. It had never been returned. Its stamp was worn thin, but the photograph of the glass bridge was still crisp. I held it to the light.
"I wanted to let it burn me," I said to the silence of the small apartment. "It did."
I put the postcard in a book and shut it, like a surgeon closing a wound. The end did not feel heroic. It felt like a lesson carved by hand.
I would not ask for Kenia back. I would not ask for Kaori either. I have learned the loud, slow ways of consequence. The punishment was not the crowd's alone; I carry it inside me like an iron weight.
Sometimes, when the city hums and the night is thin as rice paper, I hear the faintest sound of glass underfoot. I think of that day on the bridge. I think how small we are under the sky.
And I close the drawer where the ring had been one last time. The sound it makes is the only thing I will keep for myself.
The End
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