Face-Slapping13 min read
The Monstera on the Window: How I Broke a Life and Kept My Own
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I smelled it first.
"It smells like someone has been smoking," I said without looking up from the sink where a serum bead had slipped from my fingers.
"Restaurant smokers, can you believe it? They don't care," Trey Roussel said from the hallway.
He walked past the bathroom then into the bedroom; I heard the shower door slide.
I didn't answer. I kept applying the serum, slow and careful, as if following a ritual might delay what I already suspected.
Later, he came back into the bedroom wrapped in a towel. The scent hit me again — not on his coat or his trousers, but faint and stubborn on the underwear he bunched to toss in the laundry.
"I thought you said tonight's meeting was with someone who doesn't smoke," I said.
He laughed, the laugh he'd always used to smooth edges. "People change, Clarissa. Besides, someone else was smoking in the corner."
"You didn't say you changed your clothes there," I said.
He shrugged and kissed my forehead like he had a million times before. "You're dramatic."
I let him leave the small contradictions hang in the air. Ten years of marriage teaches you which small contradictions are accidents and which are patterns. That night his appetite was fierce in bed, as if he'd starved some private appetite for weeks. Afterwards he smiled and asked me about my day as if nothing had happened.
"You seem tense," he said. "Work getting to you? Another case?"
"Another case about infidelity," I said. "I don't understand why people risk everything."
He smiled, indulgent. "Not everyone is like us, Clarissa."
"Are you implying I'm morally superior?" I asked.
"Not implying. Stating it."
He kissed my hand and went to sleep. The cigarette smell lingered, and the cigarette smell by the underwear made me do the thing I have never liked to do — the thing I always told myself I would not: I took the phone that sat on his nightstand and opened the Settings.
"Privacy," I whispered to myself. "Location Services. System Services. Significant Locations."
The map came up. A string of dates and a single place kept popping for the last month: Pearl River Southview — an upscale riverfront complex with floor-to-ceiling windows and prices that made people whisper. The coordinates for tonight were clearer than the rest: 19:00 to 21:40. A place he never had reason to be unless he had reason to be. My throat tightened.
He'd left his phone on charge. He never set it to silent when he was going out. He never deleted messages that mattered. He never changed who he wanted to be in public.
So I did what I knew how to do. I collected facts.
"I need help with a small case," I told Cody Bradley the next morning. Cody is my assistant, young and efficient, and dreadfully good at getting things done that otherwise take days.
"What kind of case?" she asked, tapping through the calendar on my desk.
"An investigation," I said. "A neighbor wants to rent out a unit and needs to check the landlord's behavior."
Cody didn't even blink. "I'll call some of the building management numbers you flagged. Why are you whispering?"
"Because it feels dramatic," I said. "And because I like doing things quietly."
Two days later I had a rental contract in my hand signed in Trey Roussel's name and photos from the night of him entering and leaving the riverfront unit with a young woman. The woman had a soft wave to her hair, pink in the sunlight, a small gap tooth from a childhood grin that made her look, dangerously, all the more innocent. Her name was on the contract as the main tenant on paper: Jazlyn Collier.
"She is young," Cody said, scanning the photos in my office. She knows the press people. Trey is the editor-in-chief of a respected paper; he always had women around him who admired his mind. "Is she the intern?"
"She's an intern and a tenant," I said. "And she smells like my husband's underwear."
Cody's mouth made a small O. "So... what's the plan, Clarissa?"
I took a breath. "We gather everything. We don't do anything until I have the right pieces."
We filmed. We followed. We rented the apartment opposite theirs and put two big Monstera plants on the windowsill so we could hide a camera in the leaves. The plant looked ridiculous and perfect there, glossy green leaves cradling the lens like a secret.
"You put a camera in a plant?" Cody said, peeking in.
"It is a legal tool," I said. "And it will tell me what I need to know."
The camera caught countless nights. It caught Trey leaving his own home and crossing the bridge to the riverfront. It caught him laughing with her, close enough to breathe in each other's hair. It captured whispers and handholds and, later, something more.
"She's pregnant," Trey told me one evening without preface. He came home earlier than usual, flushed and careful. His pockets smelled like smoke. There was a cigarette burn faint on his shoulder where he'd dropped a lit ash while standing in the hallway.
"What?" I said. I put down my pen and looked straight at him.
"She told me. She said she's pregnant."
"Do you believe her?" I asked.
He blinked as if the question was sudden and foreign. "I... I think so."
It should have been the end of everything at once. A man tells you, "I'm leaving," or "I'm leaving you for someone else," and even if your world crumbles, there's a clarity to the collapse. But he didn't say that. He folded paternal talk into his voice like a mask.
"You should be happy," he added, in the same breath. "We need someone to continue the Roussels."
"I thought you liked being childless," I said. "We agreed—"
"We had a tentative agreement," he said. "Things change."
Things change in the way men like him want them to change. The intern wanted money for the risk, and the man who had built himself as a moral beacon at his workplace was suddenly a bargain hunter.
I made a decision then: if he wanted to make life-changing decisions based on half-truths and body parts, he didn't get the luxury of secrecy.
"How much?" I asked the intern one afternoon in the coffee shop near the firm. She looked smaller in sunlight than the photos had suggested. Younger and brittle like porcelain someone had dropped and glued back.
"Thirty thousand," she said without flinching. "To get through things. For the baby. For my family."
"That's not small," I said. "Why did he offer you that instead of supporting you properly?"
She shrugged. "We talked." Her voice held a borrowed maturity. "He said it's just how things are right now."
"Do you want the money?" I asked.
She seemed startled. "What?"
"Do you want the money if I give it to you to go away with?" I said.
Her eyes lit like that gap tooth grinning. "Why would you—"
"Because I want to be kind and because I want you to know I'm not a monster, Jazlyn."
She said his name like it was a talisman.
That meeting started a dangerous exchange. I bought her the membership to the nearby swim club that Knox Alvarez frequented. Knox Alvarez, twenty-seven, an heir who liked to broadcast his life with cars and fit bodies, liked a certain type of prey. The plan was petty and precise: give her access to someone with more appetite than responsibility. Make sure everything ended up where I could see it.
"Are you sure about this?" Cody asked. She had her doubts but she trusted me enough to follow.
"People like Trey think they can have both a wife and a side life," I said. "They forget that silence is expensive."
The weeks blurred. I watched footage after footage. I listened to a device in his car that recorded the soft, stupid, ordinary words he used when he thought the world wasn't listening. Trey laughed about futures. He joked that if I made a scene he'd "handle it" with the right lawyer and the right smear.
"Women in our circle," he said to Jazlyn during a drive-captured conversation, "can be made to look small. There's always a story, Clarissa. You worry. I will manage."
I saved every file. I labeled them like bundles of proof: Date—Time—Content. I backed them up to a hard drive that lived in a locked drawer in my office. When the evidence was full and my patience thin, I began to prepare the scene.
The party was one of those monthly gatherings Trey organized. People brought teapots that cost more than a month's rent, bottles of wine with pedigrees, hands that shook and patted backs with practiced warmth. Joel Franklin, the owner of a small chain of factories who liked to play the big man now that his luck had turned, sat in the corner waiting to poke. He'd made a joke at our expense before; tonight he would look for drama like hyenas look for blood.
I dressed in the same way I'd always dressed to these events—nothing to draw suspicion, everything to be precise. At the piano I played a few notes, an old lullaby that would make listeners look away if they were guilty. Trey noticed me; he noticed his arrangement had been kept intact.
"Are you introducing her as family?" I asked as I pushed the piano bench.
"Yes." He answered without looking at me. His voice had a sweetness that meant he believed he had cued the world.
"Family," I repeated. "How generous."
Dinner began. Conversation circled like polite sharks. I sat between Trey and Jazlyn. Trey had his arm lightly draped across her chair, handing her shrimp as if he were giving alms. The room waited for some signal from me, to see the "wife's" reaction. I gave them nothing for a long moment. I ate a spoonful of beans and let people grow impatient.
"Trey," Joel said with a laugh, "you've gone fancy with your choice. Who's this? A cousin?"
"She's family now," Trey replied, looking like a man stating a pleasant fact.
"Family can be broad these days," Joel said. He smiled in a way that means he wanted a spectacle.
I let the silence grow and let the knife in: "How is the baby?"
The table stilled like a pond after a stone. Every head pivoted toward us. Some eyes were hopeful, some hungry for scandal, others carefully neutral to avoid being the next headline.
Trey's face went slack. "What do you mean?"
"You told everyone, at dinner," I said, loud enough. "You told the room the intern is pregnant with your child."
"I—" he began.
"Is she?" I asked Jaslyn. "Did you tell people together? Did you put this on the table of our mutual friends?"
She looked small and huge at once. "He told me," she said.
"And you—did you go to the doctor?"
Her voice shook. "Yes."
"Do you have paperwork?" I asked. "Ultrasound? Doctor's note?"
"It was early," she said. "I have an appointment next week."
I let it hang and said something I had rehearsed down to tones and breath: "Trey, have you had any tests about fatherhood?"
The room didn't understand the trap. They thought I was trying to corner him into a petty fight. They didn't know the paper I held under my napkin.
"Clarissa," he whispered. "What are you doing?"
"I'm being charitable," I said. I slid the report onto the table like dealing cards. "This is the test from when we first married. You never told anyone."
He squinted at the printout. He looked pale in the candlelight.
"What's this?" Joel asked, leaning in.
I pushed the paper toward him. "It says he has azoospermia. No sperm. The test was done years ago. I changed the report then because I loved him. I wanted children. He wanted to be the kind of man who could produce heirs without thought."
Gasps punctured the dining room like a flock of startled birds. Trey stammered, his jaw working. "This is— this is personal—"
"It's public now," I said. "Because you've decided to make my body into a bargaining chip for another woman."
He stood, as if to strike, but he didn't. Instead he said, "You can't do this."
"Why not?" I asked. "You told them 'it's our family now.' You told them you were proud. You told them you were doing the right thing."
Around us, people murmured. Phones were out. Someone in the corner started filming. Joel's amusement slipped into discomfort. "Trey," he said softly, "this is... complicated."
"Clarissa," Trey said, his voice small and dangerous, "that report is old—"
"Old enough for you to hide," I said. "Old enough for you to assume the world would take your word because you are a man of the press."
He moved toward the side room and dragged Jazlyn with him, a desperate attempt to remove her from the circle of witnesses. I stood and followed. At the door the room's eyes followed us like spotlights.
"Stop!" Trey shouted, but the room had already become witness.
I opened the door to the smaller study and locked it. "You wanted secrecy. You liked the thrill of having both the domestic facade and the messy project. Now you get public."
He pounded on the door. "Clarissa, this is a private matter. We're married—"
"You married a public persona, Trey," I said. "You made a life that depends on performance. You chose to play both sides and thought no one would look behind the curtain."
"And you're going to ruin me." His voice changed. Rage leaned into it with a wet, animal edge. "You're going to ruin the paper, my friends—"
"I already ruined what you thought you owned," I said. "And maybe that's the only thing I didn't ruin."
He started to laugh then, a high, brittle noise. "You think you're so clever. You think that will make everything even. You think money and humiliation are the same."
"Money?" I said. "Do you mean the thirty thousand? I wired it to her account last week."
Trey's face changed shape. "You—"
"I paid for kindness once," I said. "I didn't want to see a young woman be used. I didn't want her to be trapped. But you were never going to do the right thing. You never intended to be honorable. You bargain in small betrayals and call it freedom."
He lurched forward, and for a second I feared he might strike. Instead, he grabbed the stack of hard-drives from my bag that I had planted there earlier with a calmness that made my skin prickle.
"You can't do this," he repeated.
"I already did," I said.
We came out of the room together. He wasn't the man who had refused compromise at his desk that morning; he was small and collapsed. The table saw him with smudged lipstick on his cheek where he'd leaned too close to Jazlyn and laughed.
"He's good at the press," someone murmured.
"He's always been good at press," someone else said, with a tight grin.
The cameras in pockets recorded the rest. I watched the faces at the table change: surprise, then a kind of gleeful recalibration. People love to see a pedestal tested. They love the fall.
Trey's reaction moved through stages: incredulous, then denial, then an attempt to shift blame. He said, "You made this public. You could have handled it privately."
"Privately, I'd have let you continue making choices that weren't mine," I said. "Publicly, maybe people will stop believing the myth."
"You're cruel," he said.
"You're dishonest," I answered. I pushed my chair back. "I want a divorce. I want two things: my name clean and two percent of the shared assets." He stared at me as if the numbers were broken logic.
"Two percent?" he barked. "After everything—after ten years—two percent?"
"Two percent," I repeated. "You will sign. You will accept. You will not drag this into court unless you want the videos and the recordings online for everyone."
He laughed and spat a curse. The room buzzed. People whispered. Some shook their heads at me; some shot warning looks at Trey. Some, like Joel, looked as if they'd had their week of entertainment and were ready for more if the drama escalated.
He refused.
That night, he left the party with his dignity in tatters and his pride a raw wound. The next morning he went to banks, to insurance offices, calculating. He tried to buy time.
"It won't hold up in court," he said a week later when I served him papers. "You can't just release private material."
"I can," I said. "And I will. Or we settle."
He made threats that sounded like the same hollow noises men like him make when they can't buy silence. He called contacts and asked for reputations to be protected. He tried to appeal to people we both knew. People took sides quietly, then more loudly. The press smelled blood and drew nearer to him like vultures and to me like curiosity.
The public punishment had already happened: he had been stripped of the performance he spent years cultivating. He was now an adulterer in the eyes of people who had once admired him for his restraint. That is a taste many cannot forget. I had watched the room around us belay his shame with phones and conversations. They filmed him in the moment of his unraveling. They took pictures of the Monstera by the window. They whispered about the Tiffany box on the coffee table. They recorded his choking laughter.
But punishment is not only a public moment. It is the slow unraveling afterwards. Trey woke to messages and calls. He discovered offers dry up. A column he was scheduled to write was retracted politely. Sponsors withdrew quietly. That night he sat alone in our living room and finally saw, in its full ugliness, what his choices had cost.
"Clarissa," he said once, raw and small. "I need you to think about the children... about the legacy—"
"Your legacy was a performance," I said. "And you used my body as currency. There will be no more performance."
He begged. He offered backhanded apologies and promises he clearly did not intend to keep. He cried a little and scribbled lots of legalistic pleas. He tried to charm my parents, wept on the shoulder of friends. People record such things. People shared such things quietly.
I walked out of the courtroom with my freedom the first week after the settlement was signed. I had given Jazlyn the money I promised. I had cleaned out our shared accounts in a way professional enough to be efficient and pointed enough to be painful. I had left him with a sliver. Two percent is not a trifle when you know the exact way he hoarded his paper fortune in small, secret shelves. But it was enough to let him think, in the reckless chambers of his mind, that he had been treated fairly by someone he always underestimated.
"You hurt me," he said the last time we spoke.
"You taught me how to hurt," I replied. "You gave me the curriculum."
I moved out. I changed the locks. I kept the Monstera plant — not because I was sentimental but because it reminded me of the place where truth could be made to grow between leaves. I kept small things that mattered and burned the little illusions that didn't.
A month later, in a quiet futile act of mercy I hadn't expected to have left in me, I wired thirty thousand to Jazlyn's account and wrote her one message.
"Go somewhere, get well, and don't decide to bargain again," I wrote. She sent a string of grateful emojis and offered me a shaky "Thank you."
I washed my hands of the rest.
The world moved on. Trey tried to repair his image with op-eds about ethics and privacy. He pontificated about the sanctity of the press and how personal lives were always messy. People nodded politely. The vendetta took its toll; his columns declined in readership. He lost invitations. His name became a footnote in articles about the ethics of the powerful.
Sometimes I think about the night I played the old lullaby at the piano and let the last note thud with a deliberate weight. That sound was not an end, but a punctuation. I had spent ten careful years editing my life to make it neat. The repair cost me more than I expected. But I had not sacrificed myself to silence the way he had asked.
"Will you ever forgive me?" Trey asked once, with a voice that had nothing left to sell.
"Forgiveness isn't for sale," I said. "And it isn't owed."
I kept the Tiffany box photograph as a token of how frivolous human valuations are. I still write law. I still press for truth. I still go to parties sometimes, where people smile and pretend to be what they wish to be, and I look at them like an editor looking at a sloppy paragraph — patient, ruthless, and precise.
When people ask me now how I did it, I tell them two things: I collected facts, and I kept my heart. The heart part is the trickier one. It is easy to become hollow when you wage war; easier still to decide ruin is a victory. I learned to let some compassion remain. I wired the money not because he deserved it or because she deserved it, but because I had not wanted to end as a person who only knew how to destroy.
And no, I never smoked. But sometimes, late at night, I catch a faint smell on an old towel and I remember the way truth hides in the smallest corners — in laundry, in plant leaves, in a doctor's envelope.
I think of the Monstera by their window. It still had one leaf bent from where my camera had rested. I keep that leaf in my memory. Whenever anyone asks whether I regret it, I press my thumb gently on my palm and say, "No. It was the only way to open the curtains."
The End
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