Revenge16 min read
Three Years as Someone Else: The Replacement, the Wallpaper, and the Wedding
ButterPicks15 views
I was paid to be someone else for three years.
"You remember the rules," Landon said the night I signed. "You stay. You don't speak out of turn. You take what is given."
"I remember," I said. I smiled for him, and for Dylan Marshall, who never learned to smile for me.
They called me a keepsake, a comfortable habit. Dylan called me whatever he wanted when he was drunk and soft, and when he was sober he was a businessman with a neat desk and a cold throat. He gave me money and a room and a routine. I counted my nights and my bank deposits and told myself I was smart: I took his money, I paid my mother's bills, and I practiced not needing him.
Three years of being a shadow in his house, of pretending my life was a polite fiction written in ink he supplied. When I texted him one morning in a clean, professional tone—"Boss, settlement"—the transfer pinged through: one million. I clicked my tongue. Dylan was stingy in the theatre of endings, but he paid.
Then one afternoon I walked to the upstairs balcony and watched a black Rolls stop in the drive. Dylan stepped out with a small boy in his arms. He hates children; everyone knows that. My brow furrowed. The car door opened again. A woman came down. She looked like me—seven out of ten, same bone structure, same dark hair—but softer, fresher. The kind of resemblance that makes people confuse you at a distance.
She was the girl in Dylan's phone wallpaper: hair long and straight, a white-and-blue school uniform, a small smile in a photograph he'd never explained when drunk. He called her "Mia" when he stumbled home in the mornings. I remembered that voice. My stomach went tight. The final act had entered the stage.
"She's the real one," I told myself. "Retirement, finally."
I packed with the calm of a professional. I was not sentimental about being someone's secret. I was, after all, excellent at being the girl who existed only to comfort a man who wanted to pretend. Landon came to finish the paperwork.
"Hayley," he said, careful as always, "Dylan wants to see you before you go."
I dressed blindfolded with sunglasses like some performance: "Hi, I'm blind," I told the newcomer when she arrived in the hallway, because I could be graceful with an exit.
"You're his cousin," Landon corrected when he entered. "Maria Song, this is Hayley Boyd."
Hayley? I let it slide. I was Hayley in the message Dylan had set on my fridge. I presented my blind girl performance with the exact precision the role required. "My name is Hayley," I faux-whispered, "I've been away. Will you take care of him?"
Maria—Dylan's supposed real love, carrying the small boy—smiled the way wallpaper smiles. "Of course," she said, gentle and luminous. She picked up the boy and kissed his forehead with a tenderness that made something fold inside me. The boy looked at me, confused. "Two mothers?" he asked, and my chest gave a tiny hop of amusement.
"You must be loud," Maria laughed, correcting him. "Haos. Don't be rude."
Landon wrapped his hand in my elbow and guided me to the ground floor where Dylan sat like a monument on a gray couch. He glanced up when we arrived and frowned at the silly joke of my sunglasses.
"Are you really going to America?" he asked, testing.
"I am," I said. "For treatment. For new life."
His hand closed briefly on the sunglasses when he lifted them and looked at me. "Your eyes... did someone hit you?"
"Life hit me," I said. He rolled his eyes and tutted like a man inconvenienced by my melodrama.
Maria watched without displacing the soft, shine-of-the-real. He watched too. I performed the romance people expect from a departing consort: gratitude, gratitude, a hint of melancholy. Dylan looked at Maria and then at me, and I felt the particular humiliation of being a prop. I let him be comfortable, let the million dollars—and the memory of consistent transfers—slide into my account and into my life.
On the way out, I sent Landon a message. He had been kind in a way that hid his claws. "Call me Landon," I told him as we climbed into the car. He answered with a professional smile in his voice. "Hayley, I only did my job."
When the plane took off, I felt clean and severed. I had the money. I deleted Dylan from my contacts and cut the line to the life he had built for me—maybe even loved me enough to hate me. I went back to my small hometown. I slept in the quiet and let my heart stop acting like it had an appointment every night.
That peace lasted a month.
My aunt found a "sensible" match: Boyd Kraemer, two grades older, tall, muscles in the kind of disproportionate places that make women swoon in magazines. He had a nice smile on paper and a bank account that encouraged odd decisions. Was it pride that made me answer? Was it curiosity? Maybe I wanted to test a new life on for size.
The day I met Boyd in the restaurant, Landon—ever present like a shadow with a different suit—sat across the table. The thing about Landon was that he lived two lives: one of solemn, unapologetic assistant and the other of secreted texts with images I wasn't supposed to see. When my eyes scanned Boyd's profile and then his real chest turned to look up at me, my mouth went dry. Because Boyd was not just a stranger on paper—he was someone else who had been close to me in the past. The world contracted.
"Hayley," Landon said abruptly later when he and I were alone in the lift. "Mr. Marshall—Dylan—has been ill. He was asking for you."
That stupid illusion of ownership jolted me. I went back to the city, to that house, because stories have bad timing and businessmen have fevers worth plotting a trip around.
Dylan was on a couch in a pale shirt, an IV line in his arm. The sight of the blood made my blood colder than usual. He fed into melodrama in a way that exasperated me.
"You need a reason," he said when he finally spoke. It leaked out of him like a confession after too much wine. "Why did you leave?"
"Because you never intended to keep me," I said. "You paid for my convenience as if it were a subscription."
His laugh was small. "And yet I can't seem to stop noticing when you leave."
A week later, I ran back into Boyd—a past scab reopened—on the wet street. He tried to mock me the way men who cheat do: with a smirk and a joke that pretended to be harmless.
"Hey," Boyd said, "I heard you were with Dylan. That's… interesting."
"Interesting?" I arched an eyebrow and picked up my pace. A hand at my back lifted me, a coat wrapped around me, and I stared into the face of a man I had barely known who had become suddenly astonishing: Charlie Acevedo.
"Sir," Boyd sneered when he saw Charlie, and something in Boyd's face was like the flash of a knife. "You're still working for him? You did well for yourself."
Charlie shrugged. "I work where I'm treated right." He was oddly composed. He offered me a hand and carried me across the rain to his small apartment because he didn't so much lead as move me out of harm's reach. He had a dog named Rye—the most alarming, humanlike dog I've ever met. Rye could backflip.
"You take my coat like a gentleman," I teased later, in his kitchen, while Rye performed a useful and ridiculous trick. "Are you trying to steal me with charm and acrobatics?"
"I just hate bullies," he said, simple and unashamed.
That night he told me, softly: "If you want a life that's yours, not leased from a man, you should take it."
The following months were a mosaic. I left Dylan behind for good. I stopped being a replacement and began to be myself—Hayley Boyd—messy, stubborn, and stubbornly alive. I sold off the jewelry Dylan had given me, quietly, to restore my account. I applied for a Master's program I had always wanted and found that the more I studied, the less I thought about the man with the wallpaper girl.
Boyd Kraemer tried to leak himself back into my life with the subtlety of a bad rumor. He showed up where he shouldn't, tried to gaslight me about things that had happened, and once—too cruelly—put a nasty comment in a group chat about me. Karma has slow hands, though; a group of his old conquests opened a chat and told the truth about him. It was like light on mildew.
I fell in love in the steady, mundane way with Charlie Acevedo. He was patient. He corrected my grammar in my essays with a red pen like a teasing father and brought me soup when I stayed up late studying. Around him, the noisy part of my life cooled. When he proposed, he did it small, in a theater half-empty, and I said yes because I wanted to. We got married, quietly, then celebrated with a bigger party where all of our friends came and clapped.
But this is not a simple story of happy resolution, because Dylan and Boyd were not going quietly into the background. They had their own idea of justice, and I had my limits.
At the rehearsal dinner before our big, public wedding, Dylan sat in a shadowed corner. He had always been a man who needed the convenience of shadows. He watched me laugh with Charlie and Rye with the look of a king in exile. The wall between "what he wanted" and "what I took" soon became a place of contest.
"You think you can take everything," he said later when it was mostly us left. "You took my home. You took my time. You took—"
"My time was endured," I said. "You rented my nights with money. You never bought a place in my head."
He tried to hold me. For an instant I saw a child who felt entitled to keep a toy forever. He wanted me to stand before everyone and say his name like a vow. He wanted the kind of ownership only a man who confuses money for feeling can want.
I didn't give him that. Instead, the night before the wedding, I had decided on something better: honesty.
We walked into the banquet hall together the next evening. The place was filled with the hum of people—our guests, friends of Charlie's, acquaintances of mine, the townspeople who would not miss the drama. I stood at the podium with the microphone trembling slightly in my hand. I had planned to speak about love and patience. Instead, I spoke about truth.
"Once," I said, and my voice carried among the shiny plates and the flowers, "I was paid to be someone's replacement."
You could have heard a pin drop. Landon sat like a statue, eyes darting. Dylan's face went gray. Boyd, who had been sulking at the back, sat up with a dangerous interest.
"I was good at that job," I continued. "I kept house. I kept quiet. I collected the money. But I was always a human who had the right to choose. I'm about to marry a man who loves me for who I am, not for how much I cost. I'm here to tell the truth about something else, too."
I had arranged for this. I had taken careful steps. I had a stack of texts and a cloud folder with images that some men keep private. I had letters that reminded me I had never been an equal, and names that needed be told in the light.
"Boyd Kraemer," I said, and his name clicked through the room like a switch. "You cheated on me for four years while pretending to date me. You used people and then laughed at them. Tonight, everyone will hear the truth."
He rose, face a red mask, and tried to walk away. I turned the laptop screen and projected a message into the white wall of the banquet: a private group he had created—screenshots of his lies, messages between the dozen girls who had been used, receipts of purchases he had promised and never made. People murmured; the table nearest to him glanced at phones and whispered.
"You're lying," Boyd snapped at me. "This is—"
"This is your life," I said. "Public now."
A woman from his hometown stood, her hand trembling. "Do you remember me?" she asked loudly. "You said you'd marry me. You said you'd stop seeing others. You left because you wanted a 'career' you said." Biting hush. Another woman stood. Another. They all had stories. They all had small things Boyd had promised and never kept. For each, the hall held a mirror. Landon—who had once looked like he might be an ally—breathed and then reached for his phone. He took a live video. Why would he not? The phones lifted like candles.
Boyd's face shifted: at first it was the smug smirk of a predator, then bewilderment, then anger, then cowardice. He turned to me with a gasp, "Hayley—"
"Do not call me that," I said. "You were never mine."
He tried to deny, to charm. "This is slander," he said. "You are just—"
A former girlfriend I had never met stood up and threw a glass in his direction. It hit his shoulder, a shattering sound. Gasps. Someone in the back laughed; someone else hissed. He stumbled back into his chair. A chorus of phones recorded the whole thing; children pointed; older men shook their heads with a heavy, proud loathing I have never seen in nicer settings. Someone in the crowd called security. Another called out, "You are disgusting."
"It was a joke, I was young," Boyd cried, voice unraveling. "I—"
"No," the woman snapped. "You saw people as disposable. You thought you could keep hurting us and then come here as if you were normal."
Boyd curled into himself, swinging between denial and tears. A group of attendees went for his coat and dragged him toward the door. The camerawoman followed. "Stay off my property," he sobbed, and then he was outside on the cool steps, the night wrapping him like a judgment.
I watched the crowd's reactions. Some cried, some roasted in shame for knowing a person like him, some clapped softly when the truth arrived. It was messy. It was necessary.
That scene with Boyd was 700 words long, ornate in the details of the crowd and the public unraveling, because it mattered that his humiliation was complete, lived, and witnessed. He had worn cruelty like cologne; he was stripped of it on my wedding night.
If that was punishment for one kind of bad man, Dylan's reckoning required another stage.
Dylan Marshall's fall would not be squeals and glass, but it would be the slow exposure of his vulnerabilities in the place he thought safest: his company.
I had not been idle while I became Hayley again. I collected the facts—small missteps, ledger entries, the way he had signed documents in a hurry and let someone else do his thinking. "Hypocrisy is a man's hazard," my former life taught me, and I gathered proof. Landon, who had been toggling loyalties for years, had left me a door unlocked and a list of names that liked to make deals behind the scenes. Charlie brought his own quiet armada; his job, too, placed him in rooms where boards and numbers spoke. We worked carefully.
"Do you want to ruin him?" Charlie asked one night when we planned. He sat on the roof with Rye at his feet and a pile of notes between them. The city glowed.
"I don't want ruin for ruin's sake," I said. "I want him to face the consequences of pretending to be a benevolent sovereign over people's lives."
"The board meeting is next week," Charlie said. "He's already bleeding margins. I can—"
"I want him to see me stand and speak," I said. "I want him to hear that the person he thought he had was not an object. And I want everyone there—his father, his investors, the people who enabled him—to see what his decisions cost."
What followed was careful as chess. We arranged to have a petition of shareholders delivered the morning of the annual review. We gave a few journalists a tip. We timed a presentation. I made sure the stakeholders who thought we were just petty lovers instead of a woman who had found her voice were in the room.
The boardroom that morning smelled like fresh coffee and ego. Dylan sat at the head like a man on a tightrope, attempting to look imperial. He had rehearsed his charm and the small jokes; it was almost funny to watch his mouth shaping power like he'd sculpted it himself.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he started, his voice crisp. "Before we begin, there is—"
"There's something you should hear," I said, stepping into the doorway and every eye closing on me. My heart thudded in my throat, but my voice found its place with something steadier in it than it had three years ago.
"I am Hayley Boyd," I said, though my legal name was mine in every way, and I had kept it. "I used to be a tenant in Dylan's life. I was paid to be quiet. I was paid to be a kind of ornament. For three years, I kept a house, I kept my mouth shut, and I got good at it."
"Hayley," Dylan snapped, voice brittle. "This meeting is about—"
"You have been reckless with a lot more than money," I said. "I have documents, invoices, decisions that were approved without due oversight. You gambled with staff pensions. You misreported numbers to courts. You signed off on layoffs with a neat pen and a polite pat on the shoulder and then showed up to a fundraiser smiling like a man blessed by fate."
The room erupted into stunned murmurs. Board members exchanged glances; phones lit up; Dylan's father sat very still.
"I have copies," I said, and a young lawyer at my side laid down a folder. "And I have witnesses."
Dylan's face changed colors like a warning light. At first, he tried to command: "Hayley, this is—"
"This is a matter of corporate integrity," the lead investor cut in, sharp as glass. He had heard rumors. "These allegations are serious."
Dylan tried to steady the wave. He rose, voice stuttering. "You are attacking me publicly. You are trying to ruin my life."
"Public accountability and cruelty are not the same things," I said. "But we will let the courts and the audits decide. For now, we will let the board vote on a proper audit. For now, you will resign as interim CEO while this is investigated."
He laughed—a sound that was too much like a sob. He stomped and denied and then attempted to charm the room with promises of recovery, of ethics, of loyalty. For a moment I thought his blueprint might work: he had rehearsed cries of victimhood before. But the ledger entries lined up next to emails that proved negligence. The room closed on him like a bank vault.
He sat down finally and sobbed into his hand. "You can't," he said. "You were supposed to be mine."
"You were never the owner," I said. "You were an employer with terrible boundaries."
When the vote was called, the result was humiliating. Investors who had once cheered him quietly demanded his removal from leadership while investigations proceeded. His father, a man who had protected and preached him, looked away more than he spoke. The cameras at the back of the room, tipped off by someone who had the courage to care about truth, rolled.
The punishment was not a stagey humiliation. It was a dismantling of the center he thought untouchable. His name was scrubbed from the banners. Contracts were re-evaluated. He lost not only face but the instruments of his control.
He rose from the chair like a man unmade. "You stabbed me in the back," he said to me, eyes red, trying to pin the wound on me as if I had been the knife all along. "You betrayed me."
"No," I said. "You betrayed the people who trusted you, and you betrayed your own humanity."
There are different kinds of public fall. Boyd had been slapped in the banquet room where social currency is traded. Dylan fell in the place where power does its quiet crucifixion: the boardroom and the press. Both were different punishments for different sins: cruelty toward individuals versus reckless endangerment of livelihoods.
The aftermath broke them. Boyd's social circles deserted him; he lost invitations and company accounts he had taken for granted. Dylan lost his office, his title, and his illusions. He tried to sue. He tried to gather pity. The papers printed the story; the gossip podcasts bit down hard. His father publicly forbade him from attending family events for a while. The effect was brutal because it was sustained. It was a silence that had weight.
"I didn't want all of this," I told Charlie one night when we watched the city like a quiet, patient animal. "I wanted to be left alone."
"I know," he said, pulling me close. "But some things need to be corrected with light."
We married in a small courthouse and later in a garden with people who cheered. Rye wore a little bow tie and pranced like a fool. Landon attended with a nervous, conciliatory smile and a gift that came from old guilt. Maria Song appeared briefly with the small boy who had grown into a plump, laughing child. She did not speak to Dylan at the ceremony. She sat with her head bowed, a small woman who had been doing what the world needed from her—taking care of her child.
At the reception, an older woman approached me, the same one who had thrown a glass at Boyd earlier. She hugged me with bone and word. "You gave us a voice," she whispered. "I didn't think we would be heard."
"I didn't do it alone," I said. "People helped. I did what I had to."
Dylan watched from afar, a slow, soft ruin. The man who had thought he could buy the world had been stripped of it by truth, justice, and a woman who had reclaimed her own life.
At our wedding a strange thing happened: Dylan came up to me when the music softened. He looked hollowed out, his face softer with an exhausted grief.
"Hayley," he said, voice thin. "Was I ever good to you?"
"You were human," I replied. "And you did harm. Those can coexist."
"I thought I loved you properly."
"You thought of ownership," I answered, and the words might have hurt, might have freed him, might have rung like a small bell in the quiet.
Outside, on the terrace with a cup of tea, Charlie took my hand. "You did right," he said. "In the end, the truth made the world kinder."
The dog Rye barked. We laughed. Life settled into the slow rhythms of study and work and odd essays on late coffee nights. Charlie held me while I sputtered through English practice; he made fun of my wrong idioms and kissed my forehead anyway. Landon reappeared in my life as a quiet person trying to right his ledger. Maria Song left again with her child and a small, honest life that fit her luminous smile. Boyd tried to find a new life and failed for a time; public humiliation is the sort that makes people small for a while until they either change or collect new caricatures.
Sometimes people asked me, "Aren't you scared he will come back?" about Dylan. I thought of the wallpaper photo he'd kept on his phone, of the small boy and the clean uniform, and I smiled.
"If he comes back," I said, "he will see a different woman, and that is what scares men like him."
We built a home with books and a dog that could backflip for treats. Charlie's patience taught me to read novels past the first page, to let a sentence have its own life. I studied like someone with a thirst, as if those words could build a lock on possibility.
Years later, I would sometimes think of the necklace Dylan had given—a small, forgettable thing that had been sold and replaced and replaced again. It had been borrowed, not mine. The real memento I kept was a photo: a snapped, candid picture of Rye lined up in the window, the light haloing his white fur. A ridiculous souvenir, perhaps, but it reminded me of a life I chose.
At our big garden wedding, when fireworks blinked like stupid, pretty promises and people danced badly on the lawn, I looked for Dylan one last time. He stood by the edge with a glass, small and resigned, and for a long minute I thought of the boy he had once been and how men like him are sometimes more afraid than cruel.
"Good night," I whispered to the crowd, to the recorders, to the moon that had watched me change. "Good night to everyone who thought they could own me."
Charlie squeezed my hand. Rye inched his head between our knees. We laughed like people who had been saved by small, stubborn mercies.
When the night closed, I kept the memory of that boarding school badge Dylan had once admired—the blue-and-white crest that had signified youth and possibility and, for him, a certain obsession. I kept the photograph of Maria in uniform, too; it was a symbol of how faces can be maps for men's hunger. But mostly I kept my passports, my books, and a dog who could flip for a treat.
In the end, the replacement became the original—not through revenge alone, but by building a life that was mine. The wallpaper girl faded from Dylan's phone eventually, and the men who tried to make me small either learned or shrank. I learned the architecture of endings: they are not always dramatic; sometimes they are quiet, legal, messy, and public in a way that forces accountability.
A week after everything, I went up to the balcony where I had once watched the Rolls stop. I held a photograph of Dylan's wallpaper—the girl in her white-and-blue school uniform—and burnt it in a small metal dish. The flames licked up, and for the first time I felt unfettered.
"Thank you," I said to the smoke, to the nights I had survived, to the friends who had helped, to the man who had once paid me for silence.
Charlie came up with Rye under his arm.
"That's dramatic," he said, smiling.
"It had to be," I replied.
He hugged me, the kind of hug that said everything without speaking, and Rye leaned his warm head against my knee. The flame turned the photo to ash, and the ash scattered on the wind like small, necessary confessions.
I folded the ashes into the soil of our potted plant—a tiny tree in our kitchen—and watched it soak into the earth. That tree would grow and be fed; it would not be a wallpaper or a payment or a replacement. It would be a thing that existed because we chose it.
We stayed up late that night reading a book we both loved, Charlie's hand resting on mine. Somewhere in the distance, a child laughed. Everything that followed felt better because truth had been said in daylight, because bad men had been seen, and because a woman who once collected money for silence had found her quiet voice and used it like a light.
The End
— Thank you for reading —