Chapter 2 - The Flashback
The screen of Marissa’s phone seemed to freeze time itself.
For three agonizing seconds, nobody breathed. The wind died down completely, leaving only the distant hum of traffic and the crackle of burning coals. Derek’s massive fingers were still clamped around my wrist, his thick knuckles white from exertion, but the arrogant smirk on his face had begun to flicker, replaced by a sudden, creeping confusion.
He glanced from the glowing screen in Marissa’s trembling hands back down to my face.
“What... what is this garbage?” Derek scoffed, though his voice lacked its previous thunderous conviction. He gave my wrist a rough little shake to reassert his authority. “Marissa, what kind of stupid prank are you trying to pull? Turn that off.”
Marissa didn’t turn it off. In fact, she backed away another step, pressing her spine flat against the sliding glass door as if she wanted to melt right through the glass. Her face was completely drained of color, her eyes wide with a mixture of absolute terror and vindication.
“It’s... it’s not a prank,” Marissa whispered, her voice cracking. She pointed a trembling finger directly at me. “Derek... you idiot. That’s not Claire. That’s... that’s Evelyn Carter.”
Diane finally lowered her oversized sunglasses, her impeccably manicured brow furrowing in irritation. “Marissa, stop shouting nonsense. What on earth are you talking about? Claire is an accountant’s wife. She designs wedding invitations and helps out at the animal shelter. What is this ridiculous little video?”
“Mom, look at the face!” Marissa shrieked, finally finding some volume. She pressed play on the video.
The patio speakers of the phone erupted with the thunderous roar of an arena crowd. The video leaped into motion: my younger self, leaner, sharper, stripped of makeup, circling a towering opponent inside a chain-link octagon. In the footage, a massive heavyweight named Viktorija “The Butcher” Petrov lunged at me with a brutal overhand right. I ducked underneath the blow with fractional precision, swept her standing leg out from under her with a devastating low kick, and followed up with three lightning-fast ground-and-pound strikes before slapping on a tight armbar that forced an immediate tap-out.
The referee in the video ripped me off my opponent, holding my gloved hand high in the air while the commentator's voice boomed through the tiny speaker:
“And still! Undefeated, undisputed, the bantamweight queen of the world... Evelyn ‘The Quiet Storm’ Carter!”
The backyard remained dead silent. Every head slowly turned away from the phone and back toward me.
Derek stared at the screen, then down at me, his brain visibly glitching as he tried to reconcile the image of a blood-spattered cage fighter with the quiet woman standing in front of him wearing a soggy white sundress.
“That... that’s CGI,” Derek stammered, his face flushing a mottled, angry red. “That’s deepfake garbage. People can make anything on the internet nowadays. Ryan! Is your wife out of her damn mind? What is this fake news?”
Ryan slowly stood up from the spilled ice, brushing wood chips off his slacks. He didn't look angry anymore; instead, a slow, calm, almost terrifyingly proud smile spread across his face. He walked over, gently pulled my wet wrist out of Derek’s loosening grip, and stepped protectively in front of me—not because I needed protection, but because he knew what was about to happen and wanted to give his brother one last chance to save his own skin.
“It’s not CGI, Derek,” Ryan said smoothly, his voice carrying an icy edge. “That’s why I told you to apologize.”
“You’re lying,” Derek snarled, though he took an involuntary half-step backward. He looked around the patio for backup, but his mother was staring at me as if I were a venomous snake that had just slithered out of the grass, and Uncle Gary was busily pretending to inspect a paper plate. “She’s a graphic designer! She works on a laptop! She cries when she watches sad movies!”
“I design logos on Tuesday mornings,” I said softly, my voice cutting through the humid afternoon air like a razor blade. I stepped out from behind Ryan, looking Derek dead in the eye. “And on Friday nights, back when I was twenty-four, I fought for world titles in front of twenty thousand screaming fans. I retired five years ago with a clean record, a championship belt, and a fused vertebrae that still acts up when it rains.”
I slowly raised my right hand—the one he had just shoved and degraded—and flexed my fingers, testing the joints.
“And right now,” I continued, my tone dropping to a quiet, conversational register, “your hand is still touching my wrist. And you have two seconds left on that three-second warning.”
Derek’s ego screamed louder than his common sense. The humiliation of being backed down by a woman—and his despised younger brother’s wife, no less—triggered every drop of toxic machismo in his system. He puffed his chest back out, his face turning the color of a bruised plum.
“You think you’re tough because of some staged movie garbage?” Derek roared, his voice cracking with rage. He lunged forward, abandoning all technique, winding up a massive, haymaker right hook designed to knock my head clean off my shoulders. “I’m gonna show you what a real punch feels like, you crazy bitch!”
It was the slowest, most telegraphed punch I had seen in a decade.
To an untrained eye like Derek’s, it probably looked fast and terrifying. To me, it looked like a slow-motion training video from 2014.
I didn't panic. I didn't step back.
I simply pivoted on my left heel, ducked underneath the wild arc of his swinging fist, and stepped deep inside his guard where his massive arms were completely useless.
Before Derek realized his punch had missed, I drove my left palm upward into the base of his sternum with a sharp, explosive pop of core torque, followed instantly by a lightning-fast sweep of my right foot behind his ankle.
The laws of physics did the rest.
Derek let out a strangled, air-expelling gasp—a loud “Ugh!”—as his center of gravity vanished. His massive two-hundred-and-forty-pound frame crashed backward off the wooden deck, carrying the metal patio table, four chairs, and a massive glass bowl of potato salad down with him in a deafening explosion of shattering glass, splintering wood, and flying food.
The entire backyard erupted into absolute pandemonium.
Diane shrieked, leaping out of her lounge chair and clutching her pearls. Aunt Linda dropped her iced tea, shattering it on the concrete. Uncle Gary stood up, his jaw hitting the floor as Derek lay flat on his back amid the wreckage of the patio table, gasping desperately for oxygen like a fish hauled onto dry land, completely immobilized by the wind knocked entirely out of his lungs.
May you like
I stood over him, smoothing down the front of my wet sundress with a calm, unbothered motion, looking down at my brother-in-law as he stared up at the sky with wide, terrified eyes.
“Next time,” I said quietly, “buy a better brand of beer.”
