Revenge9 min read
The Substitute Girlfriend: Red Dresses, a Pink Car, and the Truth
ButterPicks12 views
They call me Dahlia Turner now in the papers; once I had a name in someone else’s heart.
"I thought you were asleep," he said that night, rolling his hand around the edge of the pillow like a man who thinks he owns time.
"I was," I answered, because the truth would have taken too long.
When I first met Dallas Farrell, it felt like a story written to comfort lonely readers. He brought flowers so extravagantly that our living room looked like a florist's private vault. He remembered birthdays like a clock—down to the minute. He read my favorite sentence in books and sent me an awkward recording of his voice trying to say it, and I kept that message even after rewinding it a hundred times.
"You know," he used to say, "I can't believe I got lucky."
"I don't know why you're lucky," I said, and he laughed and kissed me.
For three years, his actions said he loved me. He bought me a waterbed because he thought I'd find it fun. He held my hand through thick client dinners and never touched another woman closely. People whispered, "How did you get him?" and I smiled, because I had no honest answer. I had just been there when the lights came on.
Then one night he came home late from a reunion he said he didn't even like. He smelled of whiskey, and his speech had the slur of someone stepping on the wax of his own secrets.
"I love you," he mumbled.
"Me too," I replied, and his mouth kept moving.
"Rourou," he said.
I sat perfectly still and listened.
"Rourou, I miss you."
"Rourou, I love you."
"Rourou, Rourou..."
The name landed on the bed like a stone. I had never heard it before. I would later learn he had been typing it for years into a little message box, like a ritual no one interrupted.
I reached for the phone under his pillow—he never used a lock—and I found thousands of messages he had been sending to someone else. From five years back.
"Rourou, today I met a girl who looked like you."
"Rourou, I'm going to chase her."
"Rourou, will you be jealous?"
"Rourou, I moved to a new place. The balcony is big, the TV is huge, the bed is—"
Everything he'd once whispered to me had been rehearsed to an absent woman called Rourou. He copied her likes into my life. He suggested red dresses because Rourou wore red. He told me to wear my hair down because Rourou wore it that way. I realized I had been filling a role more than being loved.
I didn't cry. I chopped off seven years of my hair with a rusted pair of scissors in the bathroom and burned the red dresses. I left him a note and the ring he bought before he even asked, and I walked out of our four-year life as if the door shut behind me with a legal echo.
For a while I lived like a ghost with a better résumé. Dallas's absence didn't stop the world; clients still called, coffee still got cold on my desk, and some nights the loneliness came in pulses and left. I moved cities carefully, bought my own small apartment with a prudent loan I had taken in secret the day I first suspected I was living someone else's life, and I refused invitations to be small again.
"Did he ever try to find you?" Lillian asked one afternoon as we sorted through contracts.
"Once," I said. "I let him find his own faults."
Time is an honest medicine. My anger softened into something like pity. He sent messages at first—broken apologies, thin explanations—and then he surfaced in the worst way: on the internet.
A smear appeared, written as if from a man with bruised sentiment. It said I was a mercenary; that I had used him to climb. It dug into private things and placed them on a stage. The post used our photos and our words, and then it invited the world to judge.
"She slept with a boss," the rumor mill would hum. "She threw him away for someone richer."
I felt the hot press of hundreds of strangers' thumbs on my life. My phone filled with calls. My office door had a small crowd waiting the next morning, holding phones up like judges. People yelled. One shoved me hard enough that I fell into the arms I had learned to trust more than any other.
"Sorry I'm late," he said when he helped me up. "I couldn't get there sooner."
Jaxon Hall—my old junior school acquaintance who had built a company from a risk and a stubbornness—pushed through the crowd and led me to a waiting car. He had spent a year changing, from the careless boy to a man who could sign budgets and set entire product lines in motion.
"You're safe with me," he said. "I know it's messy, but believe me: this isn't your fault."
He took me to a house he had bought for us to pretend in, though he swore it was real. The interior was a clean, pale calm—exactly the opposite of the chaos on my phone.
"People believe what they want," Jaxon said later, setting a bouquet of baby's breath on the table. "Let's tell them a true story."
He wrote a long post — longer than Dallas’s smear — about how he had watched me from college, how he had pursued me and been rejected, and how he'd come to admire the way I kept trying. Within hours his words pulled the tide. In the middle of the backlash, a heavier truth landed: Kendall Chavez appeared.
Kendall’s face on camera looked like a twin of mine. She wore the red dress Dallas had loved. She told a clear, shocking story: she had been Dallas's original love. They had been each other's first times. She had gone away for reasons of her own; she never read those messages; she never saw the replacement; she was returning to end a chapter and start a new one—with a fiancé.
"I didn't know," Kendall said on video. "I didn't read—he told me we'd never meet. He messaged me, yes, but I thought it was memory. I thought it was—"
She looked directly at the camera like she was looking at a courtroom. "I never asked him to replace me."
The video clicked like a key. Followers of gossip flipped. The crowd’s rage shifted from me to him. But it wasn't enough. The story needed punishment that was public, humble-making, irreversible.
I did not plan what came next. Jaxon did.
Three weeks after Kendall’s revelation, Dallas stood behind a sleek podium in a glass atrium packed with reporters, shareholders, employees, and two cameras broadcasting live. It was the annual review of the company he still fancied himself the star of, and Jaxon had booked the room. Crammed in the back were the same strangers who had once shouted at me, some curious and some vindictive. Phones were out; hashtags were lit up.
"Dallas Farrell," the moderator said, "you have been asked to comment on allegations of personal misconduct that have impacted the company's image."
Dallas's jaw was set. He stuck to corporate calm at first. "I will not get into my private life," he said. His voice was measured, the voice that had once written romantic sentences in my shared notes. "This company has its responsibilities."
From the floor, someone shouted, "What about the lies? What about the messages?"
Dallas smiled, the same smile that had wooed me into believing fiction. "You will try to make private things public for a quick headline," he said. "We are here to discuss business."
Jaxon stood from his seat and walked to the microphone. He let the room settle into a confusion that tasted like cotton.
"Let's be honest," Jaxon said. "We are all here because trust matters. If one of us lies, it hurts the rest. If someone's private deception becomes a corporate problem, we need to see the truth."
"You seem very fond of theater, Jaxon," Dallas snapped. "Is this a spectacle?"
Jaxon ignored him. "Kendall Chavez has agreed to join us," he announced. A ripple moved through the room. A woman came forward from the left side—a small, confident step—and took the other microphone.
"This is not about spectacle for me either," Kendall said. "I did not know the meaning of his messages. I did not agree to be someone else's memory."
She handed a slim, thick envelope to the moderator. "Here are the original messages he sent me when I left town," she said. "And here are recent messages he wrote, pretending that he loved only me. He created a private shrine of words to someone who wasn't there, and then he used another person to recreate her."
The moderator read aloud short, damning excerpts: the repetition of the name, the affectionate details, the phrases Dallas had insisted on making reality.
"Why are you doing this?" a shareholder demanded.
"Because truth isn't a simple thing," Kendall replied. "Because what he did was plan deceit."
Someone behind the cameras switched Jaxon’s live feed to show the messages. Flat text turned into a cut-throat mirror; the audience saw what I'd only found under his pillow. The employees who had admired Dallas began to look as if a stage had been pulled from under their feet.
Dallas's expression shifted. At first he was angry, then incredulous, then defensive. "This is manipulation!" he sang. "She's orchestrating—"
"Stop." Jaxon cut him with a look like a scalpel. "We have emails that show you asked a contractor to write the smear post. We have invoices. We have a timeline. We have witnesses who saw you planning this as a PR move to paint a woman black and get sympathy."
A murmur rose and curdled. The investors shifted in their chairs. Someone pulled up the online analytics: the smear spike, the bot accounts, the paid amplifiers. It looked less like a woman's heartbreak and more like a trap set by a man.
Dallas's face drained. "You—those are lies," he said, voice thinner now.
"Everything is recorded," Jaxon said softly. "You took a private story and sold it as truth. You abused someone's life for pity."
The first employee stood. "We trusted you," she said, voice wavering. "You took the company's name to play with your reputation."
Another member of the board, the one who had once toasted Dallas at a gala, asked, "Is this legal?"
"It's grossly immoral," Jaxon said.
A camera clicked in the audience as a blogger uploaded a clip: "CEO caught in fake smear operation." Someone behind Dallas took a photo of the invoice on the moderator's desk and posted it. The sound of fingers typing became a physical breath in the room.
Dallas tried to laugh. The sound was hollow. "I'm being punished for loving the wrong way," he said. "I married my memories."
"You staged it," Kendall replied. "You created a false narrative and then walked the consequences into the company meeting room. You thought being loved would absolve you."
Eyes in the room changed from curiosity to scorn. One by one the employees stood and turned their backs on him. A woman near the front whispered, "He lied to us all."
His mouth moved. "I didn't—"
He clutched the podium, as if it were going to steady a ship. When he looked up, his composure had thinned to something brittle. A senior investor cleared his throat.
"This behavior cannot be allowed to continue," the investor declared. "We need trust in leadership. We will not have a CEO who weaponizes personal matters. Effective immediately, the board is convening."
The board vote came like a bell. The moderator announced a temporary suspension while an independent review was launched. In the span of one hour Dallas had gone from confident to collapsed. He sat down as if the room had dropped from beneath him.
He tried to deny it. He tried to claim trap and misinterpretation. He begged, in a voice that now sounded like a child, "Don't punish me—"
"Please," he pleaded toward the crowd, "I loved her. I didn't mean it like this."
Reporters leaned forward. Someone asked, "Are you sorry?"
He swallowed. "Yes. I'm sorry."
They wanted more than a private remorse. They wanted a public unraveling that matched the scale of the deceit. Cameras caught his tears as if he were a performer at last stripped of props. Employees snapped pictures with simple faces—shock, sorrow, betrayal. A few people applauded, a thin, sharp sound, not for him but for the moment of truth.
Afterwards, standing by the glass wall as the crowd dispersed, I watched him walk out head bowed. His steps were small. For all his money, he had no place to hide the way a man can hide with truth.
A reporter asked Kendall if she wanted comment. She said, "I wanted nothing of this. I only wanted him to be honest."
That was punishment enough for a few. For others, it was a beginning: shareholders moved to cut contracts, public sympathies shifted, and Dallas found doors that had once opened for him closing instead.
I stood with Jaxon and Lillian near the exit. Lillian grinned with the glee of the young: "Karma is a headline today!"
"Don't say that," Jaxon warned gently.
"Why?" I asked. "He hurt me."
"No," Jaxon said. "He hurt other people too. But I don't want us to live by destruction. I want truth and building."
I slipped my hand into Jaxon's. The warmth was small and ordinary and perfect.
Time stitched what had been torn. Offers came—real ones. The smear that had tried to bury me had accidentally proclaimed my worth. Companies reached out. People apologized in the odd, awkward way the internet allows: public threads, then private messages. My career accelerated through a few lucky openings and months of hard, honest work. Jaxon gave me shares, yes, but more importantly he gave steadiness and the courage to accept help.
One evening as we drove back in his pink car—yes, he had painted it that color because one day I had said, "I liked pink when I was small"—I asked, "Why did you fight so hard?"
He smiled, one hand on the wheel, one hand on the radio. "Because the woman I liked didn't deserve to be considered a costume," he said. "Because you are not someone's memory, Dahlia."
"I thought—" I started.
"You thought you were just a substitute," he finished for me. "You were never a placeholder to me."
At our small dinner that night, he offered a ring and a joke about returns.
"Not refundable," he said, and I laughed.
My life isn't a perfect script. I still have bad days. I still wake some nights remembering a bed full of someone else's wishes. But the world learned a helpful lesson: male vanity and deception can be burned on a public stage, and when they are, they ruin the stage for themselves.
Months later, at a quiet opening of my own project, a journalist asked me, "Do you regret anything?"
I picked up a sprig of baby's breath that Jaxon had tucked into the brochure and smelled it.
"I regret the pain," I said. "I don't regret the lesson."
We keep the pink car. Sometimes I tie a tiny ribbon to the mirror—baby's breath in miniature. I keep the ring in the drawer of the small house Jaxon bought before he asked me to choose. It feels right there.
People still sometimes say, "You were lucky." I never feel lucky. I feel practical, stubborn, and capable. I also feel loved, which is new.
At night, when I close the door and turn the key, I sometimes say the name I never wanted to be: Rourou. But I say it in a different voice—one that belongs to the woman who survived being someone's idea and became herself.
That is the difference.
The End
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