Sweet Romance11 min read
Today I Found the Red Booklet
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The red booklet fell out from between the old wardrobe doors like a confession I had been forgetting for three years.
I picked it up and flipped the heavy cover with shaking fingers. It was a marriage certificate. For a moment the world narrowed to the rectangle of paper in my hands.
I called the number on his card.
"Hello?" a low, composed voice answered after a pause.
"Are you free tomorrow to sign the divorce?" I asked.
There was a breath. "Tomorrow?"
"I found the certificate," I said. "Do you have time to go with me?"
"Wait for me," he said, and there was that slow, measured warmth that made my throat tighten—like a chord being plucked, familiar and impossible to ignore.
Three years ago I married a man I had met twice. It was an agreement: six months, no questions. He helped me with my uncle's family; I went with him to see his grandmother for the last time. Then life swallowed us both: graduation, job hunting, moving houses. The divorce drifted away like a boat with a broken oar.
"Are you rushing to find someone?" he asked after a beat on that call.
"No," I lied.
"Then wait three months. My project will finish by then."
"Three months?" I asked carefully.
"Yes. Can you wait?"
"I can... I guess," I said. Saying no made me sound frantic, like a woman desperate for a husband.
"Good." He hung up.
I spent afternoons and nights calling and waiting. I learned to expect a polite avoidance: "I'm in a meeting," "I'll call later." Once, he told me the next available date was April next year, and I nearly laughed out loud into my pillow.
"Can you call once a week to confirm?" I begged his assistant when I caught him at the civil affairs bureau doors, seven minutes late.
"Sometimes schedules change," Kenji said, and for the first time he offered me a sliver of hope.
Three months passed, then a year of tentative phone games. He was always busy. His voice—the voice that had steadied me when high school rumors and family bullying drowned me—was infrequent but magnetic.
Then one night, after a day of waiting, Kenji called me frantic. "Miss Devine, Mr. Morin is drunk outside the civil affairs bureau. He insists on getting this done."
I ran. The man in a tailcoat sat calmly on the steps like a child who had lost his way, cigarette stub forgotten at his feet. When I crouched in front of him, he looked up with a glass-soft smile.
"Do you know who I am?" I asked, keeping my voice level.
"You are my wife," he said without hesitation.
"Let's just go home then," I tried.
"I can't. I promised." He hiccuped, very sober in his insistence.
We sat on the cold steps until dawn arguing about dates and schedules while passersby gave us that curious, pitying glance. He finally admitted, almost apologetically, "Then come back in eight months."
"You said three months," I said.
"I revised it to eight." He smiled like a child bargaining over a toy. "Will you wait?"
"No," I said, but the word fell soft. He looked meaningfully toward Kenji.
"She says she can wait," Kenji reported.
He stood, a sudden gentlemanly firmness in his posture. "Then eight months."
I thought he might be joking. He wasn't.
Weeks passed like currency in sharks' paws—spent, then gone. There were moments he appeared unannounced: once at midnight at my door smelling of cheap alcohol and stubbornness; once to share the dinner I had cooked for one; once with a small silver card that read, "Buy yourself something nice." He left like summer rain—unexpected, and strangely warm.
"Why are you here?" I asked the night he sat at my table.
"To clear something up," he said simply. "Divorce. And to tell you something you don't know: you deserve far more than five hundred thousand."
I blinked. "That's very specific."
"You have no idea what I make," he said. "Let my people do the calculations."
"For the last time, I am not taking anything. I said I would leave with nothing."
He smiled in a way that knitted both pride and mischief. "I don't let the women I care for leave empty-handed."
"You're not my man," I said. "We agreed."
"You said that three years ago," he replied. "Do you still feel that way?"
I thought of the bruises my dignity had taken from an old boyfriend's bets, the nights my life had been a series of apologies. "I don't know," I admitted.
He reached across the table and caught my hand in his. "Then try me," he said.
It was the first time he smiled like that, real and unguarded. My heart thudded like a trapped thing against my ribs.
Days blurred into a rhythm of small, disarming kindnesses. He taught me to trust his silence when it was needed and to read the softness behind his rare laugh. My friends noticed. "He's different with you," Cassidy told me with a little wild excitement. "He never does that with anyone else."
"You make it sound scandalous," I said.
"Good different," she corrected.
Our private moments were simple but electric. He took off his coat for me when the restaurant AC bit my shoulders. He quietly removed the plate off my lap when I dozed off brushing at him like I was the child again. Once, when I did not say a word about the cold on my hands, his coat came off without a word.
"You always take that long to call back?" I teased one evening.
He rose out of his chair and came to sit beside me. "You used to call me by my old name," he said. "Sitting here, I realized I wanted to hear it again."
"Your old name?" I asked.
"I was called something else when I was small," he murmured. "Call me what you like."
Heart flutter number one: He answered my teasing with a memory only I was allowed to touch.
Meanwhile, the other man, Santiago Cook, haunted my periphery. He had been a storm in high school—rich, entitled, cruel. He had tried to make me someone else's experiment. I had left, determined to disappear. He came back polished, dipped in arrogance.
"You're married?" he said the first time he appeared at my apartment, like entry was his right.
"Yes," I replied.
He laughed, but it was an animal sound. "Cute," he said, then offered a retort I could smell like ozone. He tossed a card on the table. "If you ever change your mind, call me."
When he saw Galileo's name on the card he had thrown like a challenge, his face tightened in a way that looked almost human. He was not a man easily embarrassed.
"Stop trying," I said to Santiago later when he tried to make a scene at a restaurant.
"She's mine," he hissed.
"You're a dollar-store prince," Galileo said coolly, and everything in me stood straighter. "You use people and discard them when bored."
That was the second heart flutter: he defended me in public without theatrics, only a quiet cut of honesty.
Santiago was not a gentle adversary. He fanned rumors, paid for slanders. He used family influence to make my life smaller. Once, at the company where I worked, people were told that I'd been bought by a stranger. I felt my world compress to the size of a rumor.
Galileo stepped into that fight like a storm. He was not showy; he hired Grant Smith to clean the mud, used Kenji to arrange meetings, and quietly erased the lies. He found videos of threats, payments of hush money, and, like a surgeon, cut out the infection.
"I never wanted you to need me," he said once, hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling as if it contained stars. "I wanted you to be safe."
"Why help me then?" I asked.
"Because you were a twelve-year-old who deserved better." His voice broke. "Because I remember buying you ice cream and losing you to a world I couldn't stop."
For the third heart flutter, he fixed my childhood memory with his presence—no grand speeches, just the quiet certainty that he had always kept me in his mind.
Santiago's attempts stewed into rage. He came to my home, to my workplace, to my friends. He tried to buy my silence with obscene sums.
"Five million," he said once, smirking. "Walk away."
Galileo only poured tea and slid a sleek card across the table.
"Five thousand?" Santiago scoffed.
"Try five billion dollars," Galileo said, like a kid showing a firework. "In USD."
Santiago's skin paled. He had the look of a man realizing the rules of his world do not apply in someone else's kingdom.
"You think money buys you everything?" Santiago hissed. "You think your bride is a prize?"
"She's not yours to claim," Galileo said softly. "And even if she were—the cost would still be wrong."
Santiago stormed out, cursing. That night he threw the card on the pavement and drove away.
Time turned a kind of careful page. Galileo and I grew closer not because of grand gestures but because he quietly dismantled my daily fears: he made Kenji coordinate schedules with mine so we could be near; he introduced me to people who mattered to me for reasons other than my being "his wife." He invited me to meet his grandmother's grave—he had showed me family things before I knew him as more than a benefactor.
One afternoon, unexpected and violent, the public stripping of Santiago began.
It was at the annual charity gala—glass and white linen, chandeliers dripping like icicles—where business and arrogance mingled like expensive wine. Santiago planned to make a scene, to put on a show of power and ownership. I expected his usual theatrics: a show of wealth, a sneer at my choice.
Instead, the night turned into his unmaking.
"Good evening," I said from the stage when I was unexpectedly asked to present an award. "This foundation supports children who have been through what I once endured."
Santiago was at the edge of the room, in a dark tuxedo, eyes scanning for me like a hawk.
Midway through the ceremony, a screen behind the stage went dark and then filled with images—bank transfers, emails, recordings. The hush in the room was immediate, like the air had been sucked out.
"That feed is unauthorized!" someone shouted. A murmur rolled through the room. Cameras flashed. I recognized a name credited in the feed: inquiries made by Grant Smith at Galileo's request. Kenji stood a few rows behind me, impassive.
The first images were innocuous: event invites, payment schedules. The second wave cut deeper: Santiago's company had been paying for "reputation management" at a rate that matched the hush-money spreadsheets that accompanied older accusations he'd made against me in school. The third wave was the worst: an audio file of a man with Santiago's voice laughing, describing plans to break someone's life, a casual cruelty that made the room step back as though burned.
Santiago rose from his seat, face blanched. "This is illegal," he barked. "You can't play my private messages."
"You published nothing illegal," Galileo's voice came over the speakers. He had stepped onto the stage and was calm and unruffled, a wave that made the crowd still. "I asked a legal audit. I asked Grant to investigate rumors. The board approved displaying facts. You can explain yourself to the press."
Santiago's jaw worked. "You—this is manipulation!" He lunged toward the podium, but cameras caught him and the security cords around him tightened as if of their own accord. He strode to the microphone and tried to regain a performance. "Everything here is lies! I will sue—"
At that moment a video played that dropped like a stone: a grainy clip of a conversation in which Santiago's mother instructed him to threaten a girl, offering money for her silence and promising favors if the job were done.
The room exhaled a collective sound that was equal parts disbelief and vindication. Someone in the crowd whispered, "No way. That's her voice." Phones rose; people filmed; journalists leaned forward like a pack sensing blood. Santiago's face shifted—first a mask of bluster, then a flash of confusion like a curtain jerked.
"No," he insisted. "This is doctored."
"Tell that to the court," a woman in the second row said coldly, voice like a gavel. "Tell that to the families your company pretended to help."
Santiago tried to laugh; it came out hollow. He pounded the podium in a theater of rage. "You're a liar! He planted this!"
A quiet figure stepped forward from the back: a former associate of Santiago, pale and shaking. "I was paid to set her up. I was paid to spread the rumor. It was Santiago's order." There was a ripple—someone had recorded him, it seemed, or else he had finally found his moral spine.
Santiago's posture crumpled. He shook his head. "You—how could you—"
People began to circle. "Shame on you," whispered several voices, growing louder. A woman took a picture and posted it instantaneously; a dozen others did. Within minutes the main feed of the event streamed the exposure live. The hush-money numbers scrolled on the screen like tabulations of theft. Hands pointed. Phones recorded. The formerly admired man was defamed by his own machinations.
Santiago tried to leave but the security long detached him from his myth. He spoke in a voice that tried to reassert control: "I will sue you for slander!"
He had not accounted for the men and women whose lives he had broken. A line of those people, faces set like flints, stepped forward from the audience. One by one they told a story—of bribes, of threats, of ruined careers and sleepless nights. Their words were precise; their anger ringed with truth. People in the room gasped, clucked, and then began to murmur, then to applaud.
"You used money to try to make me silent," I said from the stage in a voice that shakily did not betray the memory of the cheap years. "You tried to make my life smaller because you could. You are not big enough to own what you thought you could possess."
Santiago turned toward me, hungry for reproach. For a second he wore the expression of a man who believed the room would crush me. Instead the room crushed him.
He went from bluster to denial to pleading—all before the crowd. "Please," he begged at one point, the words scraping his throat like sand. "I didn't—"
"Stop," said one of his former employees, voice flat. "You made us do things that have ruined us. You thought no one could see behind your curtain."
The crowd erupted into a chorus of censure: "Liars," "Shame," "Disgust." Phones recorded the scene; a dozen videos would be uploaded in minutes, then hours, then days—each at least one witness to his fall. The cameras had captured an arc: arrogance, entrapment, exposure.
He knelt, not theatrically but as if his knees gave way. People took pictures. A woman shouted, "Turn around—let everyone see you!" Someone else laughed—the laughter of someone who had paid bills he never would again.
In those moments his expression changed fastest of all: from contempt to injury to panic to stunned regret. He scrambled to protect his image, then to salvage his pride, then to deny, and finally to beg. His voice became small; the spectators' eyes huge. Every word he had once used as a sledgehammer was now a feather.
That was the punishment I had not wanted for another man—even a man who had hurt me—but it was fair in its full, public reveal. He could not sue away what the crowd saw. He could not buy the cameras back.
When it ended, he left the building with his suit less pristine and his title less tethering. People turned their backs. A few sneered. A few applauded. A girl in the lobby spat, not at him but at the idea of him. His attempts to command pity were met with indifference. For the first time in his life the world did not bend. He had used little people as props and now, on a grand stage with a thousand witnesses, the props had names and stories and strategy.
Later, as I sat beside Galileo and pressed my head into his shoulder, he whispered, "I'm sorry you had to see that."
"It needed to happen," I said. "But it still hurts."
He kissed my forehead. "I will keep you safe."
After that night, things changed. Some people left my life. Some came back apologetically. The gossip died like a lit match snuffed by a curtain; facts don't flame as rumors do. Santiago's reputation fractured into pieces he could not glue together. Invitations stopped coming. His bank lines shrank. People who used to eat at his table found new tables. He tried to call me once, from a different number, voice trembling. I did not answer.
Our relationship remapped itself along new lines. He was no longer just a protector from a past I had escaped—he had been the boy who had once bought me ice cream and who had kept me in his mind across oceans and operations. He was also the man who commanded a private life and chose to invest it in me.
One quiet afternoon, months after the gala, he took my hands and said, "Eden, do you remember when you thought you were only a girl with bad timing? You are not that girl anymore."
"I remember," I said, because I did.
He smiled and then did something no part of our past had prepared me for—he proposed again, not for pomp but for the next chapter. I said yes, and the "red booklet" that had once felt like a lost anchor became a small laugh in the drawer.
I kept the certificate because it reminded me how fragile decisions can be. I kept the card he had once left on my table because it was the first time he told me my safety mattered. I kept a photograph he had of me as a child in a yellow dress—the one he had found in an old album—and I placed it on the shelf.
At the end, on a warm night after a small wedding with fewer guests than perhaps expected, he handed me a tiny red box. Inside, a ring not ostentatious but steady.
"I know we promised once to part," he said, looking at me with that calm fire again. "But I think some promises can be postponed."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because I want to try being the man who keeps you, not the man who sets you free," he said.
I looked at the red booklet, at the certificate that had made me run to the civil affairs bureau three years before. The promise we had made then had been to keep each other safe against a world that sometimes took children's toys and turned them to instruments.
"I think I'd like that," I said.
He smiled like a sunrise, and I believed him.
The End
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