Chapter 7
Scarletta
My new closet is insane.
Like, objectively ridiculous for someone who spent most of her adult life living in blanket forts and wearing her dead dad's hoodie for a week straight without showering.
But here I am, standing in front of it like I'm admiring art or something, staring at all my Vegas purchases hanging in perfect color-coordinated rows. The image consultant taught me that—organize by color family, then by occasion. Casual to formal. Light to dark.
I actually did it when I got home.
Unpacked everything immediately instead of leaving the suitcases on the floor for three weeks like I normally would. Hung every dress. Folded every shirt. Arranged my new shoes on the bottom rack like I'm some kind of functioning adult who has their shit together.
The Golden Goose sneakers next to the Balenciagas. Combat boots lined up with the heeled booties. My statement LBD hanging next to the vintage leather jacket like they're a power couple.
It's giving girl who plans outfits the night before energy.
It's giving person who owns a lint roller and uses it vibes.
Honestly? It's giving not me at all.
But I kind of... love it?
I reach out and touch the sleeve of the leather jacket. A statement piece I paid real money for instead of scrolling past longingly on Pinterest before closing the tab and eating Lucky Charms standing over the sink.
My platinum hair catches in the closet's LED strip lighting and I barely recognize my own reflection in the full-length mirror.
Trophy wife hair. Designer clothes. Abs I never noticed before.
Who the fuck am I?
I stare at my reflection and the answer slams into me with unexpected force.
I'm Scarletta fucking Desmond.
ScarletSins.
That's who I am. That's who I've always been, underneath all the self-sabotage, and unwashed hoodies, and three-day-old coffee mugs.
This closet—this whole apartment, this whole life—it proves it. This is what the writer looks like when she stops hiding. When she stops performing poverty and dysfunction like they're personality traits.
I'm... cool.
The thought is so foreign it almost makes me laugh. But it's true, isn't it? I'm cool now. I have my shit together. I wake up at 5 AM and go for runs and drink lattes I don't finish because I can afford to waste six dollars on a beverage I'm using as a prop.
But even as I'm standing here having this moment of self-actualization—this look at me being a whole-ass person epiphany—something else crashes into my brain.
A character flaw. A major one.
The old apartment.
I just... walked away from it. Packed two suitcases and left everything else sitting there like a crime scene I couldn't bear to process.
All of it still there, waiting. Like some kind of horrible museum exhibit of who I used to be.
The Girl Who Gave Up: A Retrospective.
I left it because... what? Some fucked-up part of me thought maybe I'd go back one day? That I'd need an escape hatch back into dysfunction if this whole "being okay" thing didn't work out?
Why the fuck would I ever go back?
I need to get rid of it. All of it. Every last piece of that life I've been dragging around like dead weight.
Like, right now. Tonight. This minute.
I grab my laptop and flip it open with more force than necessary. The screen glows to life and I navigate to Google with shaking hands.
Junk removal Idaho Falls.
A dozen results appear and I click the first one with a functioning website. There's an online booking form and I fill it out rapid-fire, barely reading the questions.
Address. Date. Time. Special instructions.
Take everything. I don't care where it goes. Just get it out.
I hit submit before I can second-guess myself.
It's late and I'm tired, so I'm putting this day to bed. But tomorrow I'm going over there to grab the two things I still want and burn the past down so I can never crawl back into it again.
Holy shit. I have a goal.
The realization makes me pause, laptop still warm on my thighs, cursor blinking on the confirmation screen.
I have a goal. An actual, concrete, "I'm going to do this thing tomorrow" goal that isn't just "survive" or "try not to implode."
A smile tugs at the corner of my mouth. Small at first, then wider.
After six months of aimless wandering and depression, the new me is... here.
I'm here.
I'm her.
The girl in the mirror with the platinum hair, and the statement pieces, and the abs she didn't know she had.
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 fucking here.
The next day I 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 even begin 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, too real.
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 after months 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.
Top to bottom insane.
Certifiably unhinged by any reasonable metric.
But… if you read between the lines and see the subtext underneath… it makes sense.
He didn't actually buy me. The auction was theater, carefully staged to make me feel something—anything—again.
The hunt wasn't real either. That maze was a retelling of something I loved dearly, but had to throw away because it broke all the rules and filled me with shame.
He didn't call me his good little slut because he thinks I'm some disposable fucktoy. He said it because he knew—somehow knew—that I needed someone to see the darkness I'd been hiding and call it beautiful instead of broken.
He did all that batshit crazy stuff because he... believed in me.
The man is sick. Absolutely fucked in the head to a degree that probably requires institutionalization and medication.
But he saw me.
He replaced my pathetic blanket fort, a literal representation of my own deteriorating mental health, with a luxury glamping tent.
He put up an actual Christmas tree and filled it with ornaments I chose and desperately wanted, but could never afford.
He left cookies and milk out for Santa, then took a bite and sip so I'd understand exactly what this was.
Not a cage.
Not a trap.
A gift.
And that's all before he started filling bank accounts with endless millions of dollars. So many fucking dollars, I'm probably going to prison for tax evasion because I just keep ignoring it.
I came here for two things and now it's time to go.
I push the laptop out of the tent as I scramble out, then go over to the little tree—completely brown and dead—and pick off all the ornaments, shoving them into my massive purse.