Revenge15 min read
The Old iPhone and the Hour I Couldn't Change
ButterPicks13 views
I still remember the flight number burning on the boarding pass, the storm that pushed us back, and the way the world narrowed to the small, persistent voice in my head that said I would propose at midnight.
"I'll be waiting," Ellie said earlier that week.
"Don't be late," I told her. "I'll make it worth the wait."
The plane touched down at three in the morning. My phone lit up before the cabin lights came on—the caller ID was a name I had not seen for four years: Ellie Diaz.
"Kingston, come to Baoshan Hospital. Now," said Pierce Austin on the line, urgent and too calm.
"Why? Tell me," I said.
"Ellie is—" he stopped. "She's in the morgue."
I folded a paper napkin until the corners cut into my palms. "Don't say that."
"Kingston, please—"
"I said don't say that."
He gave a sound between a sob and a laugh. "You should see her."
At the hospital, there was a white sheet and a face that looked like sleep. "You look tired," I wanted to say. "You look like you missed your alarm." I couldn't. I reached for the cloth with hands that would not belong to me if I could have helped it.
"Don't," Pierce warned.
"Let go."
He let go.
I lifted the sheet.
Her skin was pale, almost translucent. There was a strange cut down her neck and then—there was no more of her. The rest was gone, as if someone had cut and peeled away everything that made her human. I dropped to my knees.
"Is this—" I couldn't finish.
Pierce's hand shook on my shoulder. "They say a truck. Driver fell asleep."
"A truck," I echoed. The word tasted like poison.
"Driver didn't brake," Pierce said.
"He's lying," I said.
"Kingston, don't—"
"Let me see his face."
Pierce swallowed. "You shouldn't."
I didn't listen. I had already heard the word "murder" in my head and tasted it like rust. A police officer smiled when he said "fatigue driving" in the interview room. His smile stayed in my mind long after my lungs stopped working.
"You'll be detained if you keep shouting," the officer said.
"I'll shout at your face," I answered.
He came at me and pinned my head to the table. I remember the cracking. I remember waking up to the world in a different grammar: the officers had photographs, and the photographs had a story.
We called the death "an accident" and then "fatigue driving." When I slammed my fists against that wall, every official I met had the same tired, practiced calm that smelled of something with a market cap. Detrick. The name landed like a stone in my chest: Detrick Pharmaceuticals, a multi-billion-dollar company with polished logos and lawyers who moved like tides.
They buried evidence. They broke cameras. The driver disappeared into a white smog of "vehicle scrapped" and "no proof." Four years slipped past, a cruel measure. I grew hollow.
I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating much. I stopped being a person who had plans.
One rainy night, while reaching blindly under the bed because I couldn't shake the idea of one small thing—one small proof—I found an old iPhone 7 with 2% battery and a name on the screen that made my lungs snap.
Ellie.
"Hello?" I said when I answered.
"Are you—are you not going to call me 'darling'?" Her voice was the same imp that could turn a calendar into a promise.
"Ellie?" My voice was ridiculous. "Where are you anyway?"
"At Detrick's after-party," she said breezily. "Tell Pierce to let me go. It's my anniversary, you know."
"Anniversary? Which year?"
"The third."
"Oh God—2018."
The world closed into a pinhole.
"You're on a delayed flight?"
"My flight got delayed. I was supposed to propose at midnight."
"Kingston, help me with a lie." She laughed. "Wait, hold on. I need to take a call."
Her voice slid, and another man spoke for a moment: Pierce.
"Is the plane okay?" Pierce asked vaguely in the background.
"Tell him to let me go," she said, snatching back the phone. "Bye, darling."
"Don't go to Qingshan and Wenshuo intersection."
She cut me off with a childish, "I have to go."
The call ended.
I stared at the dead battery meter. My throat emptied. I switched the little iPhone on and it showed one recent call: Ellie Diaz. The phone had no SIM. No signal. No way to call anyone. Yet it had him—her—on it.
Then the phone lit again.
"Kingston, you landed?" she said after I answered again.
"Yes. Where are you?"
"A party at Detrick's. You should be here." There was warmth in her voice and something like mischief. "Also, tonight is our anniversary. Don't you dare forget."
"Ellie—what date is it there? Is it the fourteenth?"
"Of course," she said. "You're late."
I told her everything I could. That voice from the future that wasn't mine—that was me—"Don't go to the intersection," I said.
She laughed. "You sound like my grandmother. I will be careful."
Then "help me." Those were the first words she said that night that weren't a joke or a tease.
"Where are you? Who's with you?"
"I'm at Professor Martin's tonight. He said some people will hand me a report."
"Get the report."
"It will take time."
Martin Francois—the professor—was the only hope she mentioned. He had an experimental report showing that a batch of infant hepatitis B vaccines was contaminated. More than two hundred adverse events. A few dozen deaths. A yawning silence where media should have been shouting.
Ellie was a reporter. She hated silence.
I had proof of nothing. I had everything. I had a dead phone that shouldn't connect and a future that told me she would die.
"Don't leave the party," I told her, and she ignored me with the same softness she used to make me laugh on the phone at dawn.
"Kingston, I need to go. Talk to you later." She hung up.
When I saw the morgue sheet lift and saw what they had done to her, I wanted to tear the sky wide and drag her back to me. But I could not.
That phone, with its 2% battery, became my map and my curse. When it rang, it was 2018 in her world and 2022 in mine. She lived in the now that had the report. I lived in the now that had the ashes.
"Why is this happening?" I asked Pierces many times.
"Because Detrick wanted her quiet," Pierce said once, then cursed and explained nothing more.
Ellie was brave. She went to Martin's place despite the rain and despite the fear. She sniffed the air of danger like a smoke detector. She texted: "I found the data." Then it only got worse.
"Someone's in the basement," she whispered into the phone while the thunder made the windows flinch. "Martin's being attacked."
"Get out. Run," I said.
"I can't," she said. "There's a man here. He wears a black raincoat."
"Find the syringe in the bedside drawer if you can," I told her, remembering every horror movie and a detail I had found in the empty house years later: an unused 20 ml syringe.
"You're insane," she said, but she did what I told her. She hid the syringe and the strategy was narrow-minded and genius. Injected air into the neck. It wasn't pretty, but it could stop a man for long enough.
"Hide in the bathroom," I told her.
She gave a tiny laugh. "You make me sound like a spy."
"Act like one," I said.
She did. She survived a long enough time to call me silly little things: "You will never be as funny as that." When the man found her and the fight began, I held the phone and listened like a lover listens to waves.
"He's in the bathroom," she breathed. "He's slashing everything."
She used the syringe. She fought. She stabbed. She said afterward, breathless: "I injected him."
"You're alive," I said, and a ridiculous joy hit me like a wave.
"They found us there," she said.
"No—"
"They left. Sinclair engines. Black cars." Her voice slid. "They're coming for me."
"Get out," I whispered. "Run to the police."
"I'm going to the police," she said. "They'll protect me."
She did not. The men in suits came faster than the sirens. Detrick had resources that bent time and people. They had people in places where people were not supposed to be friendly.
They took her. They took the data. The report vanished. The world shifted.
I went after them. I smashed through prudence and conscience.
They found me with a story they wrote for me: I was the murderer. There it was on paper, as clean as a knife. New records placed me at Detrick as an insider. Old photographs showed me in places I had never been, and the police offered me a narrative with teeth.
"You're the one who killed her," one detective said with a smile like a crook's. "You were jealous. You killed her, then mutilated her, and put her in the tub. You attacked a cop. You remember? You hit an officer in a fit."
I remembered hitting the officer. I remembered the crack and the world going dark. But I did not remember slicing anyone in a bathtub.
All at once my life had alternate dates stamped into it.
"Tell us where you put the body," the detective demanded.
"I didn't—" I tried.
They had photographs. They had a manufactured history. They had people who loved their paychecks more than their jobs.
So I did the only thing left to me: I stopped trusting the world; I trusted my rage. I did what the bereft do. I hunted.
I learned how Detrick moved slabs of influence, how it leaned on professors and police and men like Pierce who wanted to be more than their place allowed. I learned which charities wore the company's logos like medals. I learned the shape of their private rooms and the tastes of their bosses.
I broke in and I looked for proof. I smashed things and I bruised people until they spilled. I was careful and crude. I hurt my best friend until he could not stand. For a while I became the very monster the detectives said I was.
"Where's the hard drive you took?" I demanded, and he begged like a child.
"I didn't—" His leg was a ruin and he promised anything. "I didn't hide it."
"Who did you work for?"
He whispered in the dark, "Rowan Fernandez."
"That's a name," I said.
It was the name with the polished suits and the private jets and the smile that said you could not touch him.
My methods were ugly. We all have back alleys. But the truth had a dangerous quality: once you see it, you cannot pretend it is not a wound.
Eventually I found Martin's files, shredded and hashed. I found a buried hard disk that smelled of fear and solvents. I found a memory stick in the belly of places I had to crawl to reach.
I also found a tape of Ellie's last hours.
"It's him," I whispered to the investigator who had once knelt on my throat. "Rowan Fernandez. He ordered them to take the data. He killed her."
"Proof?" the investigator asked, and for a long time I had none. I had only a hunger and a collection of ragged leads. But one thing I had that they did not: a body of witnesses who had seen the same men carrying the same bags into the same building. One by one they remembered.
We were not gentle. We had to be loud.
The first public unmasking happened at a town hall that had been rented under false pretenses. It was too small for what we planned. The mayor was there. Reporters squeezed in the doorway. Someone livestreamed.
"Rowan Fernandez is here," I said into the recorder. "Rowan Fernandez is the man who killed Ellie Diaz."
"You're hysterical," a woman in the audience told me.
"Maybe," I said. "Watch."
Pierce—my supposed friend, my betrayer—stood on a stage with the company's general counsel and a man who looked like good teeth. They had prepared a speech about ethics. They would not be allowed a speech.
"Why don't you tell them the truth?" I demanded. "Tell them how the syringe came from your bedside drawer, Pierce. Tell them who asked you to break her knees and steal the data."
He blanched.
"You're lying," he said.
"Then explain the photographs," I said. I played them on a phone screen until the image filled the faces of everyone on the front row. There was a photo of a van with a Detrick logo. There was a photo of a man in a raincoat entering Martin's basement. There was a blurred photo of men in black. More than enough to start a fire.
"He was there," one of the janitors snapped. "I saw him with his laptop the night she came in."
"Rowan, you will stand up," I said, and the room grew very small and hot.
He stood like a man hearing the first step in an earthquake.
"Who says I killed her?"
I cued the livestream. A hundred thousand eyes would see. The man who had never had to be public in his shame now had to listen to it.
"Do you remember the Ford truck on Wenshuo and Qingshan?" I asked. "Do you remember the 'accident' that wasn't?"
"You're slandering me," Rowan said, voice thin.
"Then tell them about the emails," I said. "Tell them about the meetings where you decided to cut corners on the vaccine. Tell them how you decided to silence a reporter."
He laughed then, small, amused.
"Are you kidding?" he said. "You can't prove anything."
Someone hit play. The recording started with a soft voice and then the electric crackle of a generator. It was a phone recorded video of a conference call. Rowan's voice. His orders. A list of names. An address. A time.
The courtroom of public opinion is brutal.
He went white. He went red. He went lips that formed words he thought were velvet: "You have nothing."
"Do you still say that?" a woman called from the back. "You don't look so sure now."
He laughed, and then he did not laugh.
"I'll sue you," he hissed.
"Do it," I said. "Because when you sue me you bring everything into a room with a legal clerk and someone who can subpoena your records."
The police stood by, their hands on their batons. The cameras recorded the man whose money had bought repeated silences.
The audience split like a wave. Some clapped. Some shouted. Some threw their phones at the stage as if they were coins. The janitor in the front row who had seen Rowan's van every night went to the microphone.
"I saw them take a box into Martin's basement," he said. "They took it away." His voice trembled. "She told me once she was scared."
And then the strangest thing happened: Rowan's face changed.
First, he was indifferent. Then he was annoyed. Then his jaw set and denial coated him.
"This is defamation," he croaked. "You have no proof. This is—"
"—a recording of you," I said. "And the U-disk found in her remains contains your orders."
"You lie."
He was no longer a CEO. He was a man tachycardic and small in a suit. He took a step back. His fingers found the rail and clung.
"Get him out of here," he said, but the men around him faltered. They had smelled the tide turning.
The cameras zoomed as public shock changed to fury. A shareholder stood up and snapped a photo of the livestream, and then the boardroom where Rowan had ruled for years became a cage of calls and text messages.
The first slap of public punishment was not a courtroom sentence. It was worse in some ways: it was the slow unravelling that happens when a man's story cannot hold.
"Rowan Fernandez," I said, and my voice carried, "how you smile when babies die." The room went very quiet.
"You won't get away with this," he said. "I will file charges. I will—"
"—file them," I said. "And watch how many subpoenas come back with your name in them."
For the first time his face unfroze. It was not victory he saw; it was the future people on their phones would now bring to bear.
"Security," he called feebly.
The crowd surged. A woman in the front row reached for the microphone and said, "We want answers."
The janitor laughed a single broken laugh. "I just wanted to clean the stairs."
People took down his photo frames with furious hands and posted them sideways on the company's Twitter. They screamed his name and the company hashtag. The regulators called that afternoon.
The first punishment was public humiliation: Rowan was forced to stand before a million strangers as his voice was played back and his plans were spelled out in minutiae. He could not deny that the men in the call were him. He could not deny that the van was on the property that night.
His expression moved through steps: smugness, irritation, anger, denial, an attempt to charm, then raw collapse, and finally pleading. He tried to laugh and his laugh came out a wheeze. He mouthed the words "investigate me" and "fake news," then "I'll sue," and finally "Please, please." Cameras found the shard of humanity and fed on his panic. People around him whispered, "Was he always like this?" A shareholder stomped and shouted, "You cost us money!" A former employee took a photo and uploaded it, captioning: "This man hid our children's deaths."
He was escorted off the dais by men hired to protect him, but the press corner followed. They pushed microphones at his face. He slumped in the chair outside and cried—not quietly, but in the sort of raw, barnacled sound men make when they cannot fix what they broke.
But Rowan's punishment was only the first act.
Pierce waited in the wings and had his own exposure. At a medical conference, where he had once been given a platform by Rowan's charity, we published the images of the scars he'd told me were from athletics. We published videos where he promised to "make her stop." He could not answer all the text messages, the emails where he had whispered the kind of rationalizations men repeat: "We had no choice." He had tried to sell his silence for jobs and smiles. Now the industry jammed his email with demands to resign. His lectures were canceled mid-sentence. Old friends recorded him with phones as he was escorted from stage. His face crumpled in a very public, new way. He begged a reporter to take it down. The reporter uploaded the clip with a caption: "He smiled when he learned she would be gone."
The police officer who had pinned me to the table—Cornelius Hassan—had his own reckoning. He had been proud and petty the night he put his knee into my throat. He had been a man who loved the feeling of bending law to his will. When the videos emerged of him accepting secret payments, he showed the exact motion we'd learned to watch for: a hand that closed around a wallet. Cornelius tried to explain it as "overtime." A rank-and-file officer had the courage to come forward and testify in front of the cameras: "I was told to look away." Cornelius's denial changed. He staggered through stages: defiance, anger, confusion, a demand for due process, then pleading.
The crowd's reaction to his fall was different from Rowan's. People had loved police, and when one became villain, the betrayal struck like a blow. They walked away from him. He watched as colleagues turned their backs. People filmed him being quietly escorted into a van, neighbors on their stoops whispering. He asked for apologies that would not, and were not, given.
By the time real legal action moved, the company's stock price was a downward spiral. The SEC opened an investigation. Regulators subpoenaed emails. A board meeting decimated the executive team. Lawsuits poured in from parents who had lost children to the vaccine the company had marketed without proper tests. The CEO's friends left him. Investors called for immediate resignation. The press took his smile and hung it up to dry.
The punishments fit the crime in narrative terms: Rowan lost power and dignity. Pierce lost trust and career. Cornelius lost his badge and his standing. They all reacted differently: Rowan begged, Pierce tried to explain, Cornelius raged and then crumpled.
But the law would be slower. The justice that mattered to me was visible and public: the world now knew their faces. My private revenge had become a public purge.
There was a final scene, one the newspapers loved: a hearing in the city hall where the prosecutor read charges while cameras clicked. The room filled with parents, journalists, and shareholders. The accused sat under bright lights that made them small and raw. The prosecutor played the recorded call where Rowan said, "Remove the difficulties; this will be more effective." He played Ellie's last footage. The gallery wept as her last laugh played over speakers, clipping between memory and evidence like a tear.
"You did this," one woman said, holding up a photograph of her own child. "You sat in your suite and let babies get sick for numbers." Her voice did not falter. The courtroom weighed and named them all. Rowan's confession was piecemeal, then absent, then full of approximations—he said nothing that looked like remorse.
When the verdicts came, they were not the kind of justice that heals. But they were heavy and public. Rowan Fernandez was convicted on multiple counts: corporate manslaughter by concealment, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and conspiracy to commit bodily harm. He was led away under the same lights that had made him smile. His mouth was open in a soundless protest; the public watched him strip down from myth into a man with a history.
Pierce was stripped of his licenses and barred from practice in the field. Cornelius lost his badge and his pension.
They were all punished differently, and each punishment had a theater. In the hospital, at the conference center, at a live hearing, in a livestream, they were forced into the audience of their own collapse. There were cameras and the world as jury. The satisfaction was complicated. It tasted like ash and a half-satisfied hunger.
After the trials, the U-disk—Ellie's U-disk—was recovered from where it had lain in her remains. It contained the tests and emails and proof that the vaccine batch was poisonous. The reports were published. The court ordered massive recalls and compensation. Detrick's executives faced the law.
At night, I still held the old iPhone. It flashed messages sometimes—tiny traces of another life. Once, it played a voice message from years earlier we had recorded: "Do me a favor," she had said in a rasp of sleep. "If I'm ever dead, don't let them bury the truth."
I kept that promise.
I also kept the crazy little things: her invisible habit of leaving sugar in the sugar bowl, the tiny smear of lipstick on a napkin, the small U-disk wrapped in aluminum like a tiny coffin inside a pocket I had ripped from a suit.
"Do you regret it?" a journalist asked me once, after the trials, when the lights had dimmed and the microphones were picked clean.
"Regret what?" I said.
"Everything. The way you broke him. The way you hurt Pierce. The way you grabbed a knife and broke a rule."
I looked at the live feed of a mother holding a photograph of her child. "I didn't break a rule," I said. "I kept a promise."
"Still," she said. "Did it bring her back?"
"No." I put my hand on the old phone and felt the cold of its case. "But it gave her a voice when the company tried to take hers."
Months later, I found a box of old messages in my drawer. One was from 2015: a sleepy little text she had sent at dawn. It read: "I can't sleep. Hey—promise me something when you wake up."
She had promised it herself to me years ago: to laugh, to fight, to keep going. I had promised to keep her memory honest.
In the end, the last sound I remember from that night of storms wasn't the verdict or a speech. It was a baby's cry—unexpected, impossible in the long stretch of our grief. It came from a house across the street where a neighbor had just become a father. A small sound of life when everything else had been loud with anger and law.
I put the old iPhone back into the box. The 2% battery still glowed like a heart.
"I'm coming," I whispered to the small dead light, to the woman whose laugh I still heard when I closed my eyes.
She had once told me she wanted a name for a child even if she said she didn't want kids. "Call the boy Zixuan or Zixuan," she had joked. "No—call him Zi Xuan. Silly."
I smiled. I folded the box and slid it under a drawer where rainwater could not reach it. In the morning, I took the U-disk to the lab myself and watched the technicians cry when they read the words she had risked everything to uncover.
We gave the world facts. We invited the law to do its work. We never got our private miracle. The thing I had wanted most—her life back—was never returned.
But one morning, months after the reveal, I walked by the lake where we had once rented a boat and a mother and father and a tiny son were taking photographs. The sun flattened their shadows on the water. He held the child on his shoulders, and the child laughed like a little bell.
"That's my son," the man said when he saw me watching. "He likes boats."
"I used to come here," I answered.
He smiled. "Name?"
"Ellie," I said, naming her as though that could change anything.
He looked puzzled and then tender. "That's a beautiful name."
I watched the little boy and thought about the U-disk, the phone, the hospital sheet, and the small, terrible way the world had had to see what it had looked away from.
I said goodbye, quietly, to the old phone and laid it back in the box with the U-disk. It was not a ending the way books like to close. It was a shelf where some things are kept: the memory of a laugh, the echo of a "darling," the sound of a baby crying across a lake.
"Keep it safe," I told the box, and pulled the drawer closed.
The End
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