Chapter 44 The Body Remembers
In my final year of college, Apple was expelled from Juilliard.
Anonymous tips reached the administration. Apple had drugged another student before a major competition. The girl became violently ill and never made it onstage. She had been Apple’s biggest rival.
The administration searched her dorm room.
They found what they needed and Apple was removed from the program.
Publicly, Apple told a different story.
On social media, she announced that she had chosen to leave on her own. That she wanted to “focus on building her brand.” That the conservatory environment had become too restrictive for her creativity. By then, she had already crossed a million followers across platforms.
She pivoted fast.
Violin covers of popular songs. Carefully edited reels. Lifestyle content. Get ready with me videos. Workout routines. What I eat in a day. Curated vulnerability. Curated perfection.
Marissa appeared frequently beside her.
Mother-daughter dances to trending audio. Matching outfits. Smiling into the camera like they were best friends. Those clips performed exceptionally well.
The comments flooded in.
“Your mom looks like your sister.”
“You two look like twins.”
“I love your relationship so much.”
Brands followed. Sponsorships. Paid partnerships. Growth.
From the outside, Apple looked untouchable. Like she didn't have all those skeletons in the closet.
Then came the haul videos.
Designer handbags laid out on pristine white bedsheets. Luxury shoes arranged in a perfect row. Sunglasses, jewelry, watches. She spoke about them casually, like these were normal purchases anyone could make with enough motivation.
“This one’s an investment piece.”
“I worked really hard for this.”
“You don’t need a lot, just the right things.”
The lifestyle she sold was aspiration wrapped in relatability. Rich, but not too rich. Perfect, but still “just like you.” She talked about discipline. About burnout. About stress. Manifestation. Hustle.
Occasionally, I nudged the internet in small ways. Anonymous tips to tea channels. Anonymous payments to boost those posts. Screenshots resurfaced. Old tweets. Liked posts she’d assumed were buried. Racist jokes. Cruel commentary. Mean girl behavior.
Apple responded with the standard apology video. Pale clothing. White background. Soft voice. Tears that never quite fell.
“I’ve grown.”
“I’ve learned.”
“That doesn’t reflect who I am anymore.”
Her follower count rose every time.
It turned out the saying was true. There really was no such thing as bad publicity.
She began to change physically too. Subtle work. Never acknowledged. A fuller chest. Wider hips. A smaller waist. More emphasis on fitness content. Workout plans she sold to her audience as discipline, as empowerment.
When I saw her newest photos on a luxury yacht in Dubai, I visibly cringed.
Years later, everyone would know what those yachts really meant. What those parties cost. What some girls were expected to trade for access, for money, for illusion.
Not everything that shines is gold.
And Apple had always loved things that glittered.
For four years I focused on school, brutal and rewarding in equal measure. I rarely went out, just studied, went home, and studied again. Parties and bars felt pointless, nothing but noise. Social interaction drained me faster than calculus ever could, so I kept my circle small.
I liked it that way. Silence was easier. Predictable.
During my second year, Amy had a blowup with her roommate. Screaming in the hallway. Accusations about stolen food. Snooping through messages. The usual dorm chaos that turned small annoyances into full-scale wars. I told her to move in with me instead.
My apartment had three bedrooms, solid security, controlled access, cameras in the common areas of the building. I converted the spare room into hers and bought her new computers, multiple monitors, and proper equipment. Her setup ended up looking like a small command center.
If she was going to dig, I wanted her to be comfortable. And fast.
After my rebirth, every year that passed brought me closer to the catalyst I remembered. And with each year, my paranoia grew.
I took security seriously. I never went running alone and avoided walking outside at night by myself. I planned my routes in advance, checked exits without thinking, memorized faces. Doors were locked twice, windows checked. Always.
With the lottery money, I invested and donated. Ten million went into women’s shelters and recovery programs. Anonymously.
I helped fund initiatives designed to pull trafficked women back into real life. Not just rescue, but repair. Job placement. Therapy. Legal aid. Housing assistance. Systems that stayed long enough for survival to turn into stability.
And with Amy’s help, I started searching.
The men who took me in my last life.
I told her they were traffickers I’d learned about through one of the shelters I supported. That during volunteer work, a survivor had trusted me with details she wasn’t ready to give the police yet, names, habits, fragments.
Amy leaned back in her chair and cracked her neck.
“So,” she said slowly, “we’re looking for men who operated across state lines, preferred girls under eighteen, used first names that were probably fake, and escalated over time.”
“Yes.”
“And you want to stop them before they hurt anyone else,” she said, watching me closely.
“If possible,” I replied.
She held my gaze a second longer than necessary. There was something she wanted to ask. Something she decided against.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Then we do this properly. No digital footprints leading back to you. Or me.”
“I know.”
She turned back to her screens, fingers already moving.
“Start with what you have.”
I knew exactly what faces I was looking for.
I described them carefully. A scar across a knuckle. A lazy eye that drifted when he was tired. The way one of them walked, weight pitched forward like he was always about to lunge. The other never stopped tapping his fingers. First names. Approximate ages. Accents.
I framed it all as secondhand memory. Borrowed trauma. Inherited details.
Amy typed fast, efficient, already deep in her element. Databases. Cross-referencing. Facial recognition tools. It was like watching someone try to pull a needle from a haystack.
Sometimes I had to step away.
Amy thought it was the emotional weight of the work. The cruelty of it. She thought I was overwhelmed.
She didn’t know it was memory pressing too close. The smell of stale beer. The sound of a door locking. The way time had slowed when I realized I wasn’t getting out.
When she glanced at me with concern, I redirected. Focused on logistics. On data. On process.
On the idea that if we found them now, someone else might never have to remember what I did.
Around the same time, something else began to surface. Maybe it was all the work with trafficked victims, or maybe it was the consistency, the way I kept circling the same darkness.
It started with a dream.
Nick was there, but not the careful, kind lover I remembered. He didn’t ask. He didn’t wait. He took. He held me down. There was no romance, no tenderness, no dialogue that mattered.
And my body responded. I orgasmed hard.
I woke up shaken, breath uneven, sheets twisted around my legs, my body betraying me in the most humiliating way possible. Pleasure, sharp and undeniable, still lingered when consciousness caught up.
I felt sick.
Ashamed. Disgusted. Horrified by myself.
For a long time after my rebirth, I had believed I was asexual. I felt no desire, no urges, no pull toward intimacy. I assumed that after everything that part of me had simply shut down. Permanently.
Over the next days and weeks, I tried to forget it. I told myself it meant nothing, that bodies misfire under stress, that trauma distorts everything. That it was just a fluke.
But the dreams kept coming.
Not always Nick. Sometimes men with no faces. The details shifted, but the pattern didn’t. Always force. Always control taken from me. Always rough hands, pressure. No illusion of equality.
And always my body responding.
I woke from each one unsettled, angry at myself, angry at my body, angry at the part of me that responded when I wanted nothing to do with it.
I had spent years surviving without choice. How could my body crave something that broke me before?
Months passed like that. I ignored it. I doubled down on control. Studying. Routine. Solitude. I told myself I was above all of this now.
It was a lie.
When I started touching myself intentionally, the dreams stopped. As if my mind no longer needed to ambush me in sleep. But what worked wasn’t tenderness. It wasn’t affection or imagined love.
If I tried to picture something soft, consensual, romantic, vanilla, my body stayed inert. Nothing happened.
The only way I could respond was through imagined force. Being overpowered. Controlled.
Denial became more exhausting than the shame. I needed to understand what was happening to me.
So I started researching.
At first, it was clinical. Trauma responses. PTSD and sexuality. Articles written by therapists. Studies about survivors whose arousal patterns didn’t match their values or conscious desires. Words like conditioning. Survival response. Rewiring.
Then I went deeper.
Forums. Anonymous posts. Personal essays written by women who sounded terrifyingly like me. They talked about rape fantasies, about needing imagined force to feel arousal, about hating themselves for it until someone finally named it for them.
I read kink pages. Educational ones. Boundaries. Consent frameworks. Essays dissecting fantasy versus desire.
That was where I found it.
Consensual non-consent.
Rape without it actually being rape. A controlled, negotiated illusion of powerlessness. Choice given away deliberately, not stolen. Safety built beneath the fantasy like a net.
It wasn’t about wanting to be hurt.
It was about reclaiming the moment where control had been taken and rewriting it with consent.
It took time to accept that this didn’t make me monstrous. It made me someone who adapted to what had been done to her. Five years of sexual captivity doesn’t disappear just because time resets. It embeds itself. It changes the architecture of desire at a fundamental level.
I thought about therapy. Briefly. But what would I even say?
That I remembered five years of sexual slavery from a life no one believed existed? That I was twenty-two, technically a virgin, yet carried a body shaped by violations that had never happened in this timeline?
So I stayed silent.
This was one more thing I handled alone.
My fantasies lived safely in my head, controlled, contained. No risk. No unpredictability. No one else involved.