The girl who books junk removal at ten PM on a weeknight and doesn't spiral about it for three days first.
The girl who's done performing poverty like it's a personality.
I'm fuckinghere.
The next dayI do my regular run routine, but skip the coffee shop. Instead I drive over to my old apartment.
When I open the door, it smells stale. Like old laundry—which, fair. There are piles of it everywhere.
And I'm… embarrassed.
Absolutely fucking mortified.
I close the door behind me and walk into the small living space. How did I get to be such a slob?
But it's not really a mystery, is it? And the answer comes right out of my mouth before I can stop it. "You were depressed, Scarletta. For probably—hell, your whole damn life."
The words hang there in the stale air of the apartment.
It's true.
I've been depressed for so long—years and years of it, this low-grade fog that settled over everything—that it took me six full months of structured routines and forced normalcy to evenbegin to recognize what happiness might look like. What it might feel like if I ever let myself reach for it.
But now… I know what this place really was.
It wasn't a home. It wasn't even a proper living space. This cramped, cluttered studio with its piles of unwashed clothes, and dishes crusted in the sink, and that futon I never bothered to make—it was a holding cell. A place I retreated to when the world got too loud, too demanding, tooreal.
It was where I came to disappear.
This apartment was my desperate, failing attempt to hold on to whatever threads of sanity I had left. To maintain some illusion that I was a functional adult with a life, even as I let everything—my body, my space, my finances, my relationships—rot around me.
And I want it to go away. I want this entire chapter of my existence erased.
I want to never think about the girl who lived here again.
But I'm not leaving my laptop behind. There are forty-seven complete stories saved in its hard drive. Plus another dozen I never finished. Stories I poured myself into during the worst nights, when writing was the only thing that kept me tethered to something resembling purpose.
Those stories were written by a mentally ill woman who lived in darkness and filth and couldn't see a way out. But they're still mine. They still matter. The words themselves—the characters, the scenes, the twisted beautiful connections I built between broken people—those are real, even if the person who wrote them was barely holding on.
I'm taking them with me. They get to survive, even if she doesn't.
I crawl inside the glamping tent and there it is, right in the center of the space. The lid is open, screen dark and lifeless aftermonths of neglect, battery long since drained. But it's positioned deliberately, waiting for me to find it.
I lie back on the soft rug that came with the tent and stare up at the canopy of fairy lights strung overhead. They're dead too, just dim bulbs hanging limp against white fabric.
But I can see where Caleb strung them, how carefully he arranged them to create the illusion of stars. The same way he arranged everything else in this bizarre, thoughtful, completely unhinged gesture.
He saw me—actually saw me, beneath the performance and the desperate scrambling for normalcy.
And yes, the methods were... unconventional doesn't even begin to cover it. He orchestrated a fake auction where I thought I was selling myself to the highest bidder.
He made me come so hard I blacked out, over and over until I forgot my own name.
He sent me into that goddamn maze—my own twisted creation made flesh—where masked men were supposed to hunt me through bamboo corridors while his voice guided me deeper into manufactured terror.
I still don't fully understand what happened that day. Who that Russian man was or why he was there.
It's all very fucked up.
