Face-Slapping13 min read
The Return of the Ghost Who Broke Me
ButterPicks15 views
I woke up to someone shouting in my head and the smell of coffee that had gone cold hours ago. My forehead burned where I had leaned on my desk. For a strange, sleep-wet second I still tasted last night's wine. Then my phone buzzed and Emily barged in like she owned the air.
"Cat, your old flame is back in town," she said, flinging her coat onto the chair.
"Isn't he dead?" I rubbed at my eyes and tried to make the world stop spinning.
Emily sat, folding and unfolding her long fingers. "Not dead. Edmund Lundberg is alive, and he just—" she tapped some newsfeed on her laptop, her patience a wire. "—he just said you used to chase him."
"Edmund?" I lifted my chin. "The one who vanished six years ago? The one everyone said died in that crash?"
Emily rolled her eyes. "He was 'dead' in gossip. Real life just disagreed. He went on camera and said you chased him. Investors backed out. We lost the deal."
"Of course." I tasted amusement and something colder. Edmund could still ruin money like he used to ruin evenings. "Show me."
She turned the screen. The video played: Edmund in black, hair perfect, posture like a statue. When the reporter asked him if I had once pursued him, he answered plainly, flat as a blade.
"No opinion," he said. "I did." Then, when asked if we'd work together again, he said, "No."
"That's it?" I sipped air. The room ticked louder. Emily slammed the laptop shut with a small Noises-of-Despair sound.
"He didn't just say it," she said. "He said it live. The funding pulled. People like headlines more than they like scripts. They like being safe. They like clean faces."
I smiled like a cat. "Then we go make a bigger headline."
"There's an alumni dinner tonight. People are talking about giving Edmund a welcome. The producer said maybe—" Emily's voice jumped. "—maybe you should go. Meet him. Hold his sleeve. Let him remember."
I thought of six years. The echo of a train platform. A scream. The way rumor had swallowed me whole. The children of the rich point and the world said I had nothing to do but rot. The idea made my fingers cramp: if Edmund could topple me, he could also lift me.
"Fine," I said. "I'll go."
That night I put on a black dress that kept more than it revealed. A dress gets you in; a look gets you remembered. Emily pinned my hair. Hayden—my assistant—tucked a business card into my clutch and said, "Don't flirt with him."
"Flirt?" I laughed. "No. I'm going to watch him squirm."
The venue smelled like perfume and money. Cameras smiled like teeth. I waited outside in a smoking area and asked a stranger for a light. He obliged, and three men fell into conversation with me as if I'd always belonged to that river.
"Isn't that Edmund back there?" someone whispered.
"Yes. And hasn't court gossip been quiet?"
They drew me in like moths and pushed me toward the room. As soon as I stepped in, noise dropped a degree. A name makes a vacuum. Edmund arrived like dusk: clean lines, the slow fold of a rich man's shoulder. He looked up and the light caught a tattoo on his ring finger, a small red heartbeat line I would later learn meant more than it should have.
"Edmund," Emily cooed, pushing me forward. "Meet the writer. Catherine—"
"Hello," I said, and it was ridiculous how steady I felt.
Someone suggested a drinking game. A joke. Before I knew I had two glasses in my hand. Edmund stood close enough that when the crowd cheered, I could feel the draft of his breath.
"Drink this for me," someone heckled. I poured both glasses of the 'penalty' together and handed them to him. He looked at me like he was weighing a choice.
"Cat," he said later, when he sat next to me and tossed his jacket onto my lap. "Stand straight."
"Thank you," I told him, crossing my legs the way a woman who has been broken learns to cross. He watched my thigh as if it were a map. I let him.
"I'll drink this off for you," I said into his face, and I leaned forward and kissed him. Right there, to everyone's small and ugly delight.
He tasted like ash. The room exploded into that neat, hungry gossip: cameras clicked. People whispered. The wine slid down. He looked annoyed, then amused, then—briefly—something that wanted to burn me and protect me at once.
"You satisfied?" I asked, grinning.
He let his fingers brush my jaw. "You know how to make a scene."
I walked out while people still gossiped, walking like a woman who controlled the record. Backstage, a woman I knew from old days, Beatrice Kaiser—perfect smile, silk hair—collapsed into praise. She was loud, arrogant, the sort of girl who had been pampered into entitlement.
"You shouldn't have kissed him," she said, though she smiled like moths do.
"Why not?" I flicked a cigarette, only for someone to offer a lighter I didn't need.
That night set things in motion. Edmund's short "no" on camera became a battlefield that fed my hunger. He had knocked me down once. He'd made me a story. Now I could make him a reason.
—
Edmund wrote to me the next day, a quick, cold text: Come.
"I suppose we must talk," he said when I answered the phone.
I rode in his black car and pretended I'm small and harmless. He measured me with a glance. "You were loud," he said.
"You came," I said.
"I recall you saying you liked to bite." He flicked a match and it spit tiny stars. "Do you still?"
I forgot my earlier resolve and laughed. "You mean, do I still taste like wine?"
"You always tasted like smoke," he said.
He took me to an apartment I had once walked out of like a ghost and found myself again. The light there was wrong and kind. I woke up with the memory of being small, and of course it's easier to be hurt when you are small.
"You slept badly," he said, coming back with coffee. His hand moved like someone unused to being soft with another person. "Did I hurt you?"
"You did worse," I replied.
He read my face like a ledger. "Let me help."
He did help. He broke me and built me in six-year intervals of small kindnesses that tasted like poison. He paid for my mother's medical transfer. He signed papers. He moved my mother out of the house that smelled like condescension and bad soup. The man who was capable of destroying me was also capable of buying me the world.
We kept a balance of debt and gift between us: he gave my mother a new hospital, I accepted, and the world tilted. I told myself I would keep my heart a safe, locked place. I told myself I would not fall.
Then the first lie came.
Olaf Ricci—the sly, oily executive who had groped me in an office for money—had been let go, and I thought I could forget what he had done. Edmund's entrance into the negotiation saved my script's funding. In exchange, Edmund's company insisted his niece, Beatrice, be considered for the lead because alliances like seams tie families to futures.
"She'd be perfect," Edmund said once, dry as the desert. "She has a face investors like."
"But she will ruin the character," I argued. "She lacks gravity. She can't hold the sadness."
He smiled like a man folding a complicated chess piece. "Your script will be better for being seen."
The producers tried to push Amelia Sanchez, another actress, toward a fight. Rumors grew like mold. I learned the industry had ways to feed itself on rumor.
On a filming day, Naomi—my assistant Hayden—vanished. Her messages stopped and then came one that shook my bones: I can't do this. I am sorry.
I found her at the old warehouse district. She'd packed a bag and sat at a low table, face swollen with overdue hopelessness.
"Hayden," I whispered. "What happened?"
"My contract," she said. "My father's debts. The penalty. Beatrice's mother, Lea Lemaire, threatened my family. They want me to go back."
"How much?" I demanded.
"Five million." She squeezed my hand like it would break. "I am sorry."
I felt something hot and dangerous rise like smoke. Empires of the entitled live on fear. I wanted to tear the world apart with my bare hands.
"Not a chance," I hissed. "I will get you out."
I started to work like a woman who has nothing to lose. I used every contact, worked nights and days, translating messages for Nash Sandberg, helping Carver Harper's law team, stirring sympathy into a bowl and serving it hot. Fox Ford, the boy I once half-loved and had used to make Edmund jealous, reappeared with news and little favors. Oliver Daniel, who was to be my film's leading man, listened and gave me time. He had a clean face like a statue but a gentle voice.
I marshaled evidence: recorded messages, bank transfers, a contract slipped by a careless assistant. When I dug, the dirt sang. Lea Lemaire had been buying influence. Beatrice had been coached to sabotage auditions. Olaf had been in the shadows, paying for favors.
I did the only thing I knew I could: make the world watch.
"Are you sure?" Emily asked as we hovered outside the gala months later where industry cameras would sniff news like dogs. "This will be messy."
"I want them to watch me build them a gallows out of words," I said. "And I'll be careful to make the pulley their own greed."
We planned a press conference disguised as a celebration. Edmund stayed silent throughout. He did not like public shows but he allowed me one stage. He watched like a man who never wanted applause to be directed at anyone else.
I stood at a podium. The room was full—agents leaned forward, assistants recorded on their phones, a hundred vipers in silk. I did not start with "I'm here to forgive." I started with evidence and a slow, dangerous smile.
"Two weeks ago," I said, holding a paper like a weapon, "my assistant, Hayden Cohen, received threats. They said, 'If you leave your post, we will make your family bankrupt.' The threats came from a number connected to Carver's partner's account. Say hello, Lea."
A hush fell like rain. Lea Lemaire sat like a queen, hand steady on a glass.
"Here's a bank record," I continued. "Here's the message. Here's the voice memo where Olaf Ricci discusses 'following orders' and 'scaring the help.'"
Phones rose. The room smelled like a storm. Edmund's jaw tightened into a line. Beatrice turned pale, then hard. Lea's face changed color. It was a small, human palette I could read. Apprehension shifted like tide.
"Why show all this?" asked a producer on the far side. His voice shook like a plank in a storm.
"So the people who bought power from fear will see themselves," I said. "The actual script talks about the price of pretending to be pure. Tonight, the play is real."
The video we had compiled rolled on the big screen. Olaf's voice, oily and shrill, bragged about 'making a person disappear from the set.' Lea's voice, cold as ice, spoke of penalties meant to ensure obedience. Beatrice's messages played—she had been coached to insult my assistant in front of cameras, to drum fear.
"Is this real?" someone muttered, phone videoing everything. Edmund's eyes flicked to mine. I lifted a hand. "Yes."
"Turn it off!" Lea snapped like a wounded animal. Her hands started to tremble.
But the clips kept playing. In the room, phones multiplied like stars. People recorded, streamed, whispered. One by one, their faces lost armor. Olaf's mouth went slack and he pressed a hand to his jacket as if it might hide him.
"Where did you get these?" Beatrice asked, voice like thread.
"From the people who didn't think they'd need to hide," I said. "From the bills. From the contracts. From the way you texted and expected fear to do your bidding."
A crowd reaction built like a wave. Cameras zoomed. A woman near the back yelled, "What a scandal!" A man laughed and then stopped, his phone held high. Someone clapped—at the audacity. A young intern pulled out a phone and started live-streaming. Comments poured in a torrent: People were shocked, stunned, angry, vindicated.
Lea's expression collapsed in stages. First she was flushed and furious. Then her smile twitched. Then her eyes went glassy. "This is slander," she shrilled. "I never—"
"Do you deny authorizing the transfer to the intimidation account?" I asked.
"How dare you!" she shrieked.
"Do you deny it?" I repeated.
She faltered. The room smelled of perfume and fear. A hundred pairs of eyes sharpened like knives. I watched the lines of her face break into alarm. Her denial turned into stammers that made her sound small. People started to murmur.
"You asked me to pay them to frighten a girl?" The producer who had once waved us aside repeated, loud enough for the cameras. "You paid five hundred thousand for that? This is—"
Lea's voice broke. She tried to stand, but a group of PR assistants had the mic aimed at her like a judge.
"Lea, explain," the press demanded.
"Give—Give me a moment," she begged. Her eyes darted around. A woman from the front row stood up, phone raised, and said, "This is criminal. Someone call the police." Her voice was steady and public.
Olaf's face went a peculiar shade. For a second he bit his lip and looked like a man who had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. His arrogance evaporated into a frantic scramble. He lunged toward the control desk and tried to stop the video. People shouted and someone screamed, "Don't touch it!"
Lea turned pale. Her face cycled from shock to denial to violent indignation to a sudden tremor. "I never—" she started again.
A cluster of facts unloaded at her like rain: the bank transfer, witnesses, voice identifications. I had them all. She tried to circle, to find a hole where she could escape.
"Please," she said to the crowd, "this is not how respectable people behave."
A woman nearby who had been filming for an influencer channel raised her phone with shaking fingers. "Respectable?" she spat. "Is that what you call it when you threaten a child's family money? The hashtags exploded. People who follow scandal pumped their feeds.
Lea's knees gave out. Someone gasped. She fell to her knees on the carpeted floor. Cameras rolled; a thousand thumbs got to capture a woman of status in terrible motion: rise, fall, plead. Her hands dug into the carpet as if she could claw back her reputation.
"Stop!" she cried, voice high and wet. "Don't publish—"
Too late. Phones streamed, people talked, the room buzzed with electricity of witness.
Beatrice watched her mother's collapse. Her own face fluttered from confidence to disbelief. For the first time public opinion had a hook into their carefully built façade. She clutched the table, then charged the speaker stand, wild-eyed.
"You liar!" she shrieked at me. "You are wrecking us!"
People circled. A group of onlookers started to clap, not in mockery but in judgment. "Finally," someone said. "Finally, someone called them."
"Apologize," a man shouted. "Kneel and apologize."
Beatrice's cheeks crumpled. Her bravado broke like glass. She sagged, sank to her knees next to her mother, and the room was full of a sound: critique. Phones recorded. Hands covered mouths. Some people cheered. Some filmed. A few simply stared, their faces shocked and satisfied and terrible in equal measure.
"You wanted me to go. You wanted small people to be scared," I said, my voice low but the microphones drank it and carried it. "You wanted to rule by fear. Now let's see how that sits."
Lea's face changed yet another color. First she was angry, then afraid, then tiny, then pleading. The cycle of powerful-to-humbled is a visible thing. She went from red to ghost white in twenty seconds. She sobbed. "Please," she whispered, "please, we never meant—"
They sought to buy obedience. The market they traded in was fear. Tonight we replaced their currency with shame.
I had prepared this to be public. I had wanted a crowd. I had wanted cameras, because shame only turns to consequence when people witness it. The room provided both.
A man at the back recorded the last scene, a video that later trended for days: Beatrice, knees pressed to the plush carpet, hands up like a supplicant. Her mouth opened and closed in silent prayer. Her makeup had run; a smear traced cheekbone to jaw like a river. Her mother begged, "Please don't ruin my family."
Someone in the crowd started to clap. Then others joined. Their applause wasn't celebration so much as a verdict. People circled, phones lifted, and the sound of the room was a chorus.
A minute later, security walked in and escorted both women away. They pleaded all the way. Edmund looked at me from the edge of the stage; his eyes were unreadable.
"Good," he said simply.
I felt no triumph. I felt something thinner: justice is not a meal; it's a wound being lanced in public. I had wanted them to stop. I had also wanted Hayden to breathe.
The next day the headlines were less subtle: "A Night of Reckoning," "Big Names Fall," "The Writer Who Brought Them Down." My email filled with messages—some hateful, some grateful. Hayden called me crying and laughing all at once.
"You're a monster," Emily said on the phone, two days later. "A public monster who got the job done."
"I am a monster who keeps my people alive," I answered.
The world is not kind to women who refuse to vanish quietly. It is also not kind to the privileged when the mirror shows them what they bought and how cheaply they bought it. Public shaming doesn't bring back years of peace, but it buys time.
—
After the gala, the chessboard rearranged itself. Edmund stood a little closer. He claimed my right to his attention like a man who had bought a lottery ticket and kept expecting the prize.
"You were reckless," he said once in his study, where the books made small fences. He looked annoyed that I had used a microphone the way people use a scalpel.
"You helped," I said.
"I gave you a stage," he amended. "Don't forget who lent you the weapon."
"Neither do you," I said. "You lent it to use. Remember that power sleeps in the hands of whoever holds the stage."
He smiled, a tight thing. "You smell like smoke."
"I did that," I replied.
He reached for me then, eyes like a dark tide. "Stay here," he murmured. "Stay with me."
I had to choose: the man who could ruin and heal me, or the hunger that had powered me through six years. I chose the plan.
"I'll stay," I said, but I meant something else. I meant I would stay in the room with him while I finished what I started. I did not promise my heart.
Over the next months we made the film. Oliver Daniel agreed to play my male lead because he liked the script. Edmund put funds in but set terms: I kept creative control, but my contract said his company could supervise production. That was a leash; being close to the thing that could commit you lets you guard it. I took the leash. I wrote, directed with a hard little heart, and watched the crew become a small, brave army.
I fought more small battles. Lydia—Beatrice—tried to sabotage a scene by switching a prop. We caught it on camera. She tried to smear me during press; the evidence we had trapped her voice and she had to back down. Each time some new hound of privilege tried to bite, the public cement hardened under my feet.
Hayden was eventually free. I paid off a portion of her contract through the film's producers and a secret escrow Edmund set up. I had to swallow a little pride with that money. But she was back, smiling in the makeup chair and calling me "boss" with affection, and the sound stitched some of my ragged edges.
Edmund and I—our dance continued. We argued about time and about truth. We lay awake and told each other half-truths like bedtime stories.
"Would you have done any of this if not for me?" he demanded one night.
I thought of the night I was pushed into abyss, of the rumor that kept me below the waterline. "Would you have left everything if not for me?" I answered. "You turned up, and you made choices."
We were both contradictions. He had done violence and offered shelter. I had bared wounds and taught how to fight.
In the end, the film shipped, the lead roles set, the crew paid. The city that once tried to swallow me now had to respect me because I had proven I could burn and rebuild.
A year later we premiered. The press asked about the gala, about Edmund, about the scandals. I showed up in a red dress with a slit and a repaired hand—there was still a faint white line, a small souvenir of when I had branded myself to prove a point. Cameras caught the scar; fans called it authenticity. Edmund watched from the front row; for the first time, applause was shared, not wielded.
After the show, when the lights were dying down and people were leaving glitter like confetti in a tide, I sat alone for a second. I reached back into my purse and took out a black lighter—the cheap one I'd swiped from a stranger months ago at an awkward party. It had been in my pocket through every decision. I thumbed it open, watching the tiny flame sprint like a startled child.
I snapped it shut.
"Keep it," I heard Edmund say near the door. He had been close for a while, and his voice was soft enough to be dangerous. "A memory like that is useful."
I held the lighter in my palm. It felt like a small thing with big teeth.
"Don't forget," I said.
He smiled, the man who could ruin or rescue. "I won't."
The lighter stayed.
The End
— Thank you for reading —