Face-Slapping13 min read
Wrong Ride, Right Trouble
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I was standing in the rain, my son asleep in my arms, watching the street turn into a sheet of silver. The app said the car was there. The tail number made me pause for a second because it looked oddly familiar.
"It’s here," I told myself, and I rushed, hugging Corbin tighter.
The car was black. Tail digits 88.
I slid into the back without thinking and shut the door like a person with no other options.
The interior smelled faintly of leather and citrus. Too clean. Too quiet.
"Ready?" I called.
The car didn't move.
A voice from the front said, "Long time, Miriam."
I froze. The voice was low, smooth, the kind that used to sound like home and then like a lie.
"Julio?" My mouth moved before my brain caught up.
Julio Koehler turned his head slightly. The narrow shape of his jaw, the softness in his eyes gone hard—everything about him reached in and tugged at old parts of me.
"I thought you said you got into the wrong car," he said.
My face burned. "I—this isn't my—my husband drives this model."
He laughed, slow and dry. "There are only two of these in the city. One belongs to me, the other to a fifty-year-old real estate tycoon. Which one is your husband?"
Corbin let out a small, sleepy voice from my arms. "My mama says my daddy is a super bad guy. He's dead."
I almost dropped him.
Julio's laugh faded. He looked at me like he was trying on a new expression. "Your taste hasn't changed much, Miriam."
"I didn't mean to—" I grabbed for words and found air. "I'll get out."
The handle clicked. The door locked.
Julio folded his hands on the steering wheel. He didn't look at me. "Where are we going?"
"Uh—Muir Gardens. Please." I tried to smile like it was nothing. My thumb kept finding the soft spot at the back of Corbin's neck.
The phone in my coat vibrated. The driver from the app called. "Miss, sorry, the car's broken down. Could you cancel?"
I wanted to crawl out of my skin.
Julio's half-smile cut the silence. "Your husband isn't coming?"
I swallowed. "No, he's... busy."
Julio glanced in the rearview. He kept talking like we were old friends flip-cards and nothing more. "How old is your boy?"
"Three." I lied, tucked my chin in. Corbin was three but I shaved a year off for reasons I couldn't fully explain.
"He looks older." He said it like a test.
"He's big at birth," I snapped, because that was the only defense I had.
Julio's eyes found mine in the mirror. "You used to touch your nose and then the back of your neck when you were lying."
I stopped, hand arrested halfway.
Five years had not erased some habits.
When the car pulled up at my gate I said thank you and tried to climb out. He handed me a card.
His hand—long fingers, a familiar warmth—brushed mine. I wanted to flinch. I wanted to keep the card and tear it too.
"If you need anything," he said as if offering help was something he could do without a second thought. "Call me."
I balled the card in my fist and tossed it in my bag like I was tossing back a memory.
That night Corbin spiked a fever.
The city pediatric ER smelled like lemon disinfectant and lost patience. I checked his temperature, waited in line, waited for blood tests and doctors who never looked like they slept. The world asked for proof of everything. My job, my apartment, the rent due next week—proof, proof, proof.
Carter Sanchez, a friend who worked in orthopedics, took Corbin into his care without fanfare. He always had that gentle way about him. "Go do your interview," he said. "Get back to me as soon as you can."
"So reasonable," I told Corbin on the bed. "You stay here with the doctor who actually knows what he's doing. Don't wander off."
Carter walked me to the door. "He's fine. Rest," he said.
I ran to work and back like someone trying to stitch a life while it was falling apart.
When I came back to the ward, Corbin's temperature had dropped. He was peering up at me as if I was the moon. My chest unclenched.
And of course, because the universe likes to make theater, Julio walked into the hospital like he owned the lights.
He was with Dermot Berg—limping, irritated, but always in Julio's orbit.
I tried to be invisible. He had no reason to be here. There were rules that said exes belonged in old photographs, not pediatric wards. My boy didn't belong in someone else's past.
"Your son had a fever?" Julio asked.
"Yes."
He crouched down without being invited. "Hi, I'm Julio. I'm Miriam's—my friend's?" He smiled in a way that made my skin prickle.
Corbin blinked up at Julio and said, "You're not my daddy, you're just Julio!"
I wanted him to stop talking.
"Your mama says my dad is a super bad guy," Corbin told Julio, proudly, thinking he was being clever.
Julio went still.
I stepped forward before the next question arrived. "He's very tired. He's been getting better," I said.
Julio grabbed his phone like a man who had been given a thread and wasn't sure if it was rope or a noose. "Who's Corbin's dad?"
"No comment."
He pressed like someone who had learned the art of peeling things away. "You used to be terrible at lying because you scratched your nose then your neck. You still do it."
"I—" I tried to laugh but got the sound of a rubbed match.
Julio studied me. "You had me because you never told me."
My throat tightened. For a moment he looked like regret had weight.
"It's none of your business," I said.
"Maybe," he said. "Or maybe it's everything."
Over the next days, we kept running into each other. The city is smaller if you share a history with someone. Julio began appearing in the hospital more often than a man with no claim would. Dermot came too, because Julio was the kind of person who wrapped his life in other people's.
Carter became my fake husband to everyone in the hospital. "Miriam's husband" is such a useful label. It let Julio and the rest of them sleep better, I think. It let me keep a secret that felt like a living thing in my chest.
Julio was courting me like a man who had all the time in the world. He would appear with flowers on a random Tuesday.
"You're not required to accept," he'd say when I took them.
"You keep coming for a reason." I'd say.
"I want to make up for five years of being an idiot." He'd say.
"Five years of being a CEO doesn't look much like being an idiot," I'd tease.
He'd laugh and toss the flirting aside like someone who owned a planet.
Then he shocked me by advancing on the one point I had kept carefully at arm's length.
"Who is Corbin's father?" he asked.
The question cut through the small normalities we were building. My ears rang.
I had married a broken choice once, a man I had thought would be safe because he was predictable. We had a night—faint, angry, necessary—and then I left. I kept Corbin because he was a compass I did not want to lose.
"I can't tell you," I said.
He straightened. "If he's a bad man—someone who did things that deserve to be punished—do you want me to handle it?"
"You want to play hero with my life?" I barked.
"I want to be honest," he said. "With you."
One night, too many drinks, too much bad lighting at a work dinner—Benito Mitchell had arranged it; Benito liked to think of himself as a matchmaker—Julio slammed a wine glass on the table and pulled me into his arms.
"Don't be ridiculous," I told him and pushed him away. He went after me into the hallway, like the past had found its right to trespass.
"You don't get to make jokes any more," he said.
"Who said it was a joke?"
His hands were steady on my wrists. "If you kiss me, will you tell me the truth?"
"I kissed you because I stumbled," I said.
He looked at me for a long time, as if reconstructing what I had said.
"When you left," he said finally, "you left with a phone call and a suitcase. You left because you thought I had a girlfriend. If that's what happened, I think you should have given me the chance to explain."
Five years of silence. The gap wasn't silence; it was a canyon.
"You had a girlfriend?" I said.
"No. She said she was my girlfriend to stop a stalker," Julio said slowly.
"You believed her?"
"I didn't know I should," he admitted. "I didn't tell you. I should have."
"You left because you were sure."
"Because I didn't call," he said. "I didn't call because I didn't know what was happening."
It was small, honest, and terrible. It explained a little, but it could not stitch back all the years.
Then Kaylie Costa showed up like a storm.
She'd always been around Julio in the past. I had seen her in the photos. She came with a smile that could be an accusation and words that acted like a wedge.
"You should let me help you," Kaylie said one afternoon, her tone all honey. She offered an envelope. "High-paying job, good school for Corbin. Stop making things difficult for Julio."
"For him?" I asked.
"For herself," Kaylie smiled. "I don't want drama. We could use less noise."
She put the whole thing on the table like a business deal. I felt sick.
"You think I would trade my child and my story for a nursery and a paycheck?" I said.
"It would be simpler." She blinked like that proved her point.
"I won't accept bribes." I picked up Corbin and walked away.
Of course Kaylie was a villain. She had built a palace of advantage on someone else's pain. She believed that convenience could buy silence. She understood leverage and played it like a maestro.
When I refused, she moved on to social sabotage. Little lies at meetings. A whispered rumor. A text planted about me to Benito. A fabricated memory about my life. It traveled like a stain.
Julio started to look tired.
One night at a charity gala Benito had organized, Julio took the stage to speak. I stood near the back, holding Corbin while he nursed a warm bottle. This was a carefully lit event full of cameras and sponsors, the kind where reputations are display windows.
"Everyone," Julio said, his voice steady. "There's something I need to say."
Silence folded into that ballroom like a curtain.
"I have been trying to find out what really happened five years ago," he said. Then he looked straight at Kaylie sitting under a chandelier, smile very still. "And I discovered something."
My heart hammered.
"Kaylie," he said. "Tell everyone what you told me in the lobby three years ago."
Kaylie blinked, the glitter on her dress catching the light and breaking it.
"I told Mr. Koehler that I was his girlfriend to fend off a harasser," she began. "I told him because I feared for myself." Her voice trembled slightly. "He... he trusted me."
Julio's face didn't move. "And that's the part you thought made you honorary?"
Kaylie didn't understand where this was going.
"You told Mr. Koehler that Miriam had another man so that he would stop calling you." Julio inhaled. "You told him that she had moved on because you wanted him out of your life."
Kaylie's smile hardened. "You're saying I lied."
"You told him that," Julio repeated. "You used your lie to break a relationship."
Gasps were the first things to move through the room. A camera light flashed. Becky from the board whispered into her husband's ear. People shifted.
"That night, Miriam came to me with a pregnancy test," Kaylie's voice now small, "and I told Mr. Koehler—" Her words trailed. People turned toward her.
Julio stretched his hand out and let it fall. "You told me a story that stained someone for five years."
Kaylie stood. Her composure started to crack. "I did what I had to," she said. "I protected myself."
"Protected by lying about a woman and destroying her life?" Julio's voice, quiet, became the sharpest blade in the room.
"It wasn't like that," Kaylie blurted. "I didn't mean to—"
The room breathed like an audience holding its breath before the fall.
"Do you have proof?" Kaylie demanded.
Julio smiled the tiniest, cold smile. "Then let me remind you of the call logs, Kaylie. Remember who was with you when you called my phone? Remember the emails asking you to confirm the story? Remember your message to Benito just after the call?"
She looked around like someone who had been caught opening a bank vault by mistake.
The hush in the ballroom broke into murmurs. Someone's phone started recording. A man in the front row whispered, "Is that true?"
Benito, who loved to manage every narrative, found himself exposed. For the first time he didn't have the script.
Kaylie's face went white as paper. The lights were worse than cold now; they were truth's courtroom. People leaned in.
"I—" she began, but the sentence fell apart.
Julio told the room details only he could have known. He read messages, quoted her words. He showed the email threads. He showed the texts to Benito. Each piece of evidence was a little sound: a note, a screenshot, a voice clip that slid across the phones in the crowd.
"You told me a story because you wanted me to leave you be," Julio said. "And you used Miriam as the pawn."
Kaylie's expression rippled through stages: denial, then anger, then shrinking.
"I'm not the only one who suffered," she said, voice thin. "Mr. Koehler, you were hurt too."
"Perhaps." Julio's expression softened for a fraction. "But lying to make a woman lose five years with her child is not just hurt. It's cruelty."
I watched her unravel. Julio did not yell. He did not explode. He delivered the facts and let the bright lights do the rest.
The crowd reacted the way crowds do when a show turns into reality. Phones came out. People whispered. Some shook their heads. Others clapped—small bursts like pebbles against a window.
Kaylie's colleagues averted their eyes. Her name, which had been a status card, now felt like a dirty note passing from hand to hand.
She stood there, cheeks wet, not from the lights but from the weight of being found out.
"You will apologize," Julio said, almost gentle. "To Miriam, to everyone you dragged into this."
Kaylie's voice cracked. "I won't—"
"You will apologize and then you will explain to HR," Julio continued. "Benito, you will remove any mention of her from your invitations and stop using her as a consultant. If anyone takes her calls, they will send them to legal."
The room hummed with the finality of order.
Her public fall did not include a dramatic weeping on stage. She was escorted out by PR because that is how humiliations are handled now: polite, efficient, and captured on three hundred cameras.
The next day, Kaylie's professional life started to fall apart: clients rescinded contracts, a board member texted her that she had brought liabilities, a podcast guest canceled. Her social feeds filled with comments—some cruel, many curious. The thing that a person like Kaylie feared most was not silence; it was the sound of people turning away.
Her apology video was lame, auto-captioned, and posted after someone suggested legal consequences. It was watched six thousand times, then a thousand more, then faded. For Kaylie, a reputation built on influence had the brittle quality of sugar sculptures.
I didn't savor it. It hurt to watch someone break. But I also felt something else: a cautious relief, like a window finally opened in a room that had not had air in five years.
Julio and I did not become a pair overnight. We had a lot to talk around and even more to walk through. We built a cushion of small, respectful things: coffee on a bad day, a ride when Corbin got a fever, a hand that appeared to steer my bag up a curb.
There were moments when he surprised me—looking at me across a dinner table and suddenly laughing, a softness in his voice that was nearly shameful.
"You're serious about being my ex," he said once, at the coffee cart, when Corbin was toddling with a paper cup.
"I was a foolish, scared woman," I said. "And you were a man who didn't see."
He nodded. "I didn't see. I should have. I regret what that did to you."
"Regret doesn't buy you back five years," I said.
"I know," he said quietly.
There were heart moments too, small and soft. He would lift the blanket over Corbin and tuck it to his chin. He would take the bottle from my trembling hands and feed Corbin when I was too close to tears. A touch, a look, a single small action—each made my heart stutter the way an unpracticed muscle might.
"Why did you keep showing up?" I asked one wet night when we shared an umbrella and the light fell soft on the wet pavement.
"Because I couldn't stand the thought that you thought I was an awful person," he said.
I laughed. "I already thought you were cruel."
"I was cruel by omission," he said. "That’s different."
"You spend a lot on lawyers then," I said.
He smiled. "I spend a lot on admitting things."
We were clumsy. We were awkward. We had a boy between us who sometimes called Julio "uncle" and sometimes "July" and sometimes just "big man who brings me gummy bears."
Once, when Corbin stuck his head into Julio's lap and said, "You are not my daddy. But sometimes you're like a nice big brother," Julio looked at me with such sharp relief I thought his face might crack.
Our arguments were not clean. We fought about privacy and what to tell Corbin. We fought about pride and whom to trust. But we never stopped speaking.
When Kaylie's public punishment had settled into consequence, a quieter reckoning began.
Benito lost his position as organizer of the city's charity circuit because he'd used Kaylie's shadow to lubricate deals. His editorial column became less popular. People noticed.
Kaylie tried to re-enter society, but society had a memory. She came to a small panel a month later to "explain herself" and the room yawned. She practiced contrition for cameras and discovered it fit her like a borrowed coat.
"What did you expect?" Julio asked me once, reading a long chain of comments aloud.
"A lot of things," I said. "Mostly, I just want Corbin to have a stable life."
"You will give him that," Julio promised.
And he meant it.
One afternoon I found myself sitting on the back steps of the community center, Corbin playing with his toy truck, and I realized I could breathe. The black car with tail 88 had become a symbol: it had been danger and then it had become a doorway. He had been a man who could crush me with a rumor and instead had stepped forward and broken it.
We were not perfect. Every now and then, a memory would slip and I would want to slam doors or throw away cards. But then Corbin would laugh and the sound would fold around us like someone knitting comfort.
There were three small heart stutters I remember:
1) When Julio, who never smiled in public, laughed at Corbin's crooked drawing and then, on impulse, taped the crooked sun to his office wall. "It's honest," he said.
2) When he removed his blazer and draped it over my shoulders when I was shivering at a press event. "I'm a CEO," he said. "I can afford to be warm for you."
3) The evening he showed up at my door in a rainstorm, holding an umbrella and a stale worry; he smelled faintly of citrus and steadiness. He was not a rescue. He was an offer.
We had set the rules: no lies, no silence. Corbin had a place to be safe. Kaylie had her consequences. Benito had to rearrange his life.
The last scene that changes everything is neither a kiss nor a declaration but a quiet recognition. I stood at the back gate one morning, looking at Corbin as he chased a pigeon, and Julio drove up. The black car with tail 88 pulled in, and for a second I thought my heart might stop.
He got out, holding a small paper bag.
"For Corbin," he said. "And for you, a coffee. No strings."
"No strings," I echoed.
He handed me the coffee and looked at me like he wanted to ask something heavy but was afraid to frighten the moment.
"Will you let me stay?" he asked.
"I will let you try," I said.
He laughed a soft laugh. "That's a very conditional yes."
"Do it my way," I said. "No drama, fewer secrets, and always, always tell the truth to Corbin."
"I can do that," he promised.
The door to my house closed behind me. Corbin was chewing on a cookie, his cheeks full, and Julio sat on the floor to help him finish.
"Uncle Julio, you can't be my dad," Corbin announced, between mouthfuls.
Julio smiled. "I never wanted to be your dad except when you needed someone."
We both looked at him. The promise was small and enormous.
I slid the crumpled business card from my bag. It had been wet once. It had been thrown in a drawer. I smoothed it with my thumb and looked at Julio.
"You gave me a business card and I threw it away," I said.
He watched me. "Yes."
"Yet here we are."
He reached and took my hand. "We are. We'll keep cleaning up the mess."
Outside, the black car idled, tail 88 glinting like an old secret kept finally enough.
The End
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