Rebirth12 min read
I Woke Up from the Nightmare and Stole Back My Life
ButterPicks17 views
I never expected a nap on my father’s leather desk to change my life.
"I dreamed it again," I told no one while I smoothed my suit. "Same scene. The wedding day. Same ending."
"Again?" Finnegan frowned and set down a stack of folders. "You should sleep more, Miss Hope."
"I can't," I said, and I meant it. "This isn't a normal dream."
The dream had been cruel and precise. Salvador Barlow smiling, Kimiko Price smiling, my father's empire disappearing like smoke. Me—falling, over and over, into the same pit. I opened my eyes at dawn to my enormous bedroom and felt the world's edges tremble.
"You look tired," my father, Manuel Wolf, said when I arrived at his office. He always said things like that when he worried. "You're doing too much."
"I'll be fine, Dad." I forced a smile. "I just need a plan."
"Good," he said, adjusting his glasses. "Plans win wars. Rest when you can."
My life had been a series of planned moves. Languages at five, ballet at six, world competitions at ten, Cambridge at fifteen, PhD and corporate oversight at eighteen. I knew how to map a strategy. But the dream had taught me something else: knowing the pattern is not the same as changing it.
"Miss Hope," Finnegan said when we stepped into the decrepit rental apartment later that week. "The tenants haven't paid in six months. They say they'll die before they pay."
"You know the rules," I said, sunglasses shading my eyes though we were indoors. "Pay or move."
A woman in a faded plaid skirt came forward. She looked small in the tiny room, and when she crouched at my feet a tear fell onto my shoe. The world had trained me to be sharp and indifferent. But the dream had also shown me how cruelty nurtured monsters.
"Please," she said. "We have nowhere else."
"Your rent is overdue. I can't keep giving—" I started.
"Stop." A voice behind me cut like paper. Salvador stood in the doorway, dark suit, softer than my memory wanted. His face always had gentleness for everyone but me. "Hope, don't be like this."
"Why are you always late?" I asked him, with a smile practiced for the cameras of my life. "You look tired too. Are you working too hard?"
"Not tired for you," Salvador said. He moved toward the woman, toward Kimiko later, as though warmth and exile were interchangeable.
His eyes flicked to her and then immediately away. That tilt settled in me like a stone. The dream had mapped it: his tenderness reserved for others, his words that built walls around them and hollow apologies for me.
"Give them one more month," Salvador murmured. "People need chances."
I let them have a month. I let him have chances. The dream said that every kindness I gave, every wrong I tolerated, let the story reassert itself.
"I will not be a fool," I whispered to myself as I walked back through my father's glass doors. "If I'm going to fail, I'll choose the battlefield."
Jaxson Madsen reentered my life the night I decided to play.
"Hope?" He smiled like a habit. He was the Cambridge boy who had always beaten me academically but later fell into a different orbit—gentle but stubborn, quiet but stubborn. "You look like trouble."
"Pick a verb," I said. "I married you in a dream. Do you mind if in real life you agree to it?"
He blinked, then laughed softly. "When did I become a pawn, Hope?"
"Now." I leaned close. "Tomorrow."
He looked surprised but not shocked. "Tomorrow?"
"Today I need a civilian alibi. Tomorrow, I need a husband."
"You always were dramatic." He kissed my fingertips. "Okay. We'll do it. For three reasons. One: it will stop Salvador's show. Two: it'll stop the rumor mill. Three: I like you."
"Two out of three is acceptable," I said. "But one more: I need you to promise you'll be at my side if things go wrong."
He looked at me for a long beat. "I promised once in Cambridge and failed to protect. I'm better now."
That was not all a promise—Jaxson had his secrets. He had reappeared in my life with his own scars, and later I learned those scars were maps of failure and rebirth. But at the time, I only knew that together we could change the story.
The next morning was worse than the dream. Salvador, hoping to curry favor with my father, set a film project in motion that cast a certain pale, innocent-looking girl as the darling of the public—Kimiko Price.
"She's got the look," he said. "She'll be perfect."
I agreed to play a small role in the film—on one condition. "I want the female second lead who slaps the heroine," I said, smiling. "If I play it real, the audience will remember the queen who stands up."
"Go then, reign," Salvador said. He was always so easy to bait.
On set, Kimiko trembled and then blossomed under publicity, and my presence made her performance more effortless—something the cameras adored. I fed the crew food in her name and watched the rumors slow-cook a new idol.
"You're doing her favors," a young assistant whispered. "Why?"
"Because I can," I said, and watched the world tilt.
I had more than the glamorous sets to plan. I had the hotbed of social media, rumor, and money. My secret marriage to Jaxson gave me a cushion; our contract was private, our legal certificate real. We chose to keep it out of the press. "We will be a secret blade," Jaxson joked.
"Good," I said. "Then when I pull, he won't predict it."
The pushback didn't wait. A set of photos appeared: Salvador and Kimiko together at my hotel—room 1102. My assistant brought the printouts like a dagger.
"You planted those?" I asked Finnegan.
"No," he said. "But I can plant counters."
"Don't." I smiled. "Let them hang themselves with rope they cut."
I let the rumor breathe. Salmon-colored gossip crawled across feeds, and then a new article—another knife—claimed that I had stormed into someone's hotel room drunk and made a scene. The internet loved a villain when it had a name and a soundbite.
Jaxson watched me in that swirl and was rarefied calm. "You're good at this," he said. "You play someone who never loses."
"Have you ever been in my dreams?" I asked.
"Only once," he said, and then changed the subject. "When you do your daring thing, I will stand with you."
I crafted the birthday banquet like a chessboard. I invited the usual: partners, investors, family. I made sure to sit under the old olive tree that framed the garden. I watched Salvador work the room like a man who owned easy favors.
"Tonight," I told Blair Fernandez, my secretary, "I will announce something."
"You'll hurt him," Blair said, aghast. "He is on your family's accounts."
"I will hurt the lie," I corrected. "Truth is heavier and more useful."
The lights dimmed, and a hush spread. "Thank you all for coming," I said into the microphone. "Dad can't be here, but he asked me to represent our family."
There was in me a memory of the dream's prelude: the noise, the expectation, the sudden jeer. I scanned the room until my eyes found Salvador and Kimiko. Salvador smiled like a saint.
"Tonight I have news," I said. "I am married. I have been married for two months."
The room flinched. Salvador's smile faltered. Gasps rippled like wind in a wheat field.
"To Jaxson Madsen," Jaxson stepped forward and took my hand. "We are married."
"You're joking," Salvador spat. His face had a childlike anger I had never seen—anger like a man surprised to see his empire of small lies collapse.
Kimiko's eyes filled with heat and fear. The world pivoted. People who had whispered now leaned forward.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Salvador asked, voice small.
"Because you were busy," I answered. "Busy holding hearts you didn't intend to care for."
I pressed play on a sequence I had prepared: photos, messages, evidence of Salvador's double life—phone records, receipts, hotel video scrapings—light like truth on a screen.
He protested. "Those are taken out of context!"
"You paid for them," I said. "With my money. With my father's name. You bought a tower of lies."
The public scene is a savage thing. The room became a courtroom of whispers and clicking cameras. Salvador's public composure crumbled first into denial, then into anger, then into pleading. I watched the arc with the learned eye of someone who had seen this end in a thousand dreams.
"How dare you," he said to me. "You are tearing my life apart."
"I'm finishing the chapter you started," I replied. "You wanted an advantage; you used my family's name. You wanted a story; you made it by breaking promises. Now everyone will see."
The humiliation was surgical. Friends who had once smiled began to look away. Investors I had nurtured for years sent curt text messages. The TV cameras pushed forward like bright birds, and the world watched.
Salvador's punishment at the banquet—public, full, irreversible—was only the beginning. What followed was a collapse cultivated carefully.
I had arranged that night for a private partner meeting to be recorded and distributed. It showed Salvador’s hands moving unchecked over deals he didn't have the right to make. It showed him promising the company's hotels and studio slots to shell companies. It showed the curious trail of payments into accounts that then disappeared.
After the banquet I released the evidence to a contingent of journalists I trusted—investigative types who loved the slow dismantling of power. "Do you know what this is?" one of them asked, pointing at a transfer.
"A payoff," I said. "A pattern."
They ran with it. The story hit the business pages like a storm. Salvador’s investors called an emergency board meeting. His father distanced himself in a statement that read like ice. The stock dropped. Salvador’s face, once on gala posters, began to be discussed with new words.
"He's been living on borrowed trust," a senior investor told me when I sat in the corporate room, face bright under fluorescent lights. "We didn't know it was so deep."
"I do now," I said. "And I can't ignore it."
Salvador, in those days, lived like a man on a sinking ship trying to rearrange chairs. He flew from meeting to meeting, begging for time. The board—those faceless people who had lauded him—voted. Contracts were frozen. Deals evaporated.
The public punishment at the banquet was more than spectacle; it was the fault line that broke the earth beneath his feet.
I want to write the punishment in full, because when the bad man falls, the scene must be lived.
The board meeting where Salvador's fate was sealed took place a week after my banquet. The venue was a glassed conference room that looked down over the city. The sun made everything sharp. Salvador entered holding his phone like a talisman.
"Salvador," the board chair began, and his voice was polite because he knew the script, "we have received evidence of unauthorized transfers and conflicts of interest. Please explain."
He stood, voice shaking. "It's a misunderstanding."
"Which part?" the chair asked. "The transfers to shell companies? The guarantees you wrote without authority? Or the hotel reservations you diverted for personal favors?"
"Those were investments," Salvador began.
"To whom? To people who later used the funds for private enrichment?"
He swallowed. "They were—means to an end."
"The end being?" another director asked.
"To secure partnerships."
"With whom? Shell companies?" The room hummed.
A younger director, one who had been replaced in a lunch by Salvador last year, dropped a stack of photos on the table. "We also have personal messages, Mr. Barlow. Business favors exchanged for personal intimacy. It undermines the company's governance."
He went from confident to pale. People started to look at him differently, calculating their own exposure.
"We have a vote," the chair said. "Given the evidence, we must suspend you pending a forensic audit."
Salvador's eyes darted to me from across the table. "Hope—" he pleaded.
I kept my face still. I had rehearsed peace and poise like a performance. "Make it quick," I said. "There's only so long lies can be kept lit."
The vote was unanimous. Salvador was suspended. The press smelled blood.
There was an unusual cruelty in the way people you thought were friends smiled when it became safe to. Some of his old allies cut deals with the board. A few texted, "It's for the company's good." Others avoided his calls.
He tried to regain control on social media. He uploaded a video, practiced sincerity, asked for privacy. Monsterhood flips easily. The public loves to make moral arithmetic: once a man has been shown, his sins are balanceable.
But the real punishment was watching the network of his favors and his supposed affection collapse. His managers negotiated away his future projects; sponsors issued statements; partners called on contractual clauses.
"Hope," he said one night, furtive and ragged, "You destroyed me."
"I destroyed only what you built with other people's trust," I said. "Do you not see the difference?"
At the shareholder meeting that followed, his mother stood up and said words meant to stave off shame. "We are a family," she said. "Our son made mistakes."
People laughed. Not the warm laugh of understanding; the brittle laugh of a market releasing steam. Salvador's apology could not buy him back. His public persona—the calm, generous fiancé—was gone.
He was not arrested. He was abandoned. He watched as people took their names off his projects and, more quietly than spectacle, the institutions he built distanced themselves. The fine prints were nightmares that could bankrupt a man without shouts.
He fell through firewalls both legal and social. He begged for mercy in the phone calls that were recorded and eventually leaked. He called my father, tried to sweet-talk him. Manuel Wolf's reply was cold and official: "The company will be turned over to the audit committee."
It wasn't punishment that looked like justice. It was worse: it was being rendered powerless by the people who had once profited from him.
In the weeks that followed the banquet, cameras still found him sometimes. I watched his walks through the glass doors of once-friendly venues; his lover's face, Kimiko's, went from triumph to a frightened mask. "You didn't think this through," she said once in private. "He will cut ties."
He did.
The final, public shaming was a quiet thing. At an awards dinner months later, a presenter—someone Salvador had slighted—announced a special investigative piece on corporate ethics. The monitors around the hall played clips of deception, of half-sentences that now commanded a full meaning. People applauded not to honor, but to mark distance.
When a man loses the thing he most prized—respect—he is left naked in the open air. Salvador was stripped, not of clothing or freedom, but of his place. That is a punishment deeper than jail because it leaves him small in the eyes that once inflated him.
Meanwhile, Kimiko's fall needed another form. She had been hungry, petty, and cunning in ways the law could not always measure. Her most vicious strike—kidnapping my father, orchestrating the cliff's edge scene—had been public and near catastrophic. The police arrived in time because Jaxson never blinked.
When they hauled Kimiko out in handcuffs, the crowd outside the temple had grown. There were neighbors, reporters, and those who had been watching our story online. She was placed in the back of a squad car, hair hanging like a pale curtain, and people gathered like vultures at the edges.
"Look at her," a woman said. "She stole a man and then tried to kill a family."
"She is so small," someone else murmured.
Kimiko's face contorted. "I'm not a criminal," she yelled at the circle of strangers. "I was desperate!"
"You made choices," a stranger answered. "You chose."
They recorded her confession on camera lines later, a shaky admission that she had paid men who were more dangerous than she had imagined. That public confession mattered. It decoupled her from the pity she had sold herself as.
She stood before the media in custody, flanked by officers. Microphones shoved near, she spoke with a voice that shook. "I wanted a life," she said. "I won't pretend it was noble."
The cameras didn't cut her slack. The internet replayed the scene until her face was a lens for scorn; her mother called and disowned her on live stream. Her punishment was precisely what the rule-book didn't always provide: she lost the currency of sympathy she had so carefully cultivated. People recorded her when she left the courthouse for the cell. Strangers spit words at her in public.
I watched it all with a hollow in my chest. The dream had wanted her humiliation. Real life delivered it. Watching her tallies of mistakes pile, I felt nothing like triumph; only a cold, careful acceptance that the world was a place where choices had consequences.
After the violent end at the cliff—after the gunshots and the sirens—there was quiet. My father recovered, fragile but alive. Jaxson had bandages over his shoulder; we'd rolled under stone and still laughed at his absurd clumsiness. The hospital wards filled for a night and emptied, and life, like a vessel, settled.
"Why did you keep fighting?" my father asked me while we ate a small, medicinal porridge Jaxson had insisted on making.
"Because someone had to," I said. "Because I wanted to stop being the woman who dreamed endings."
"Did you win?" he asked.
"Not in some fairytale way," I answered. "I won because I own my story now. Because I stepped into the scenes I feared. Because Jaxson stood with me."
Jaxson put his hand over mine, warm and scarred. "You taught me how to persist," he said. "You taught me how to choose to stand."
"Maybe we both taught each other," I said.
Months later, Salvador's name was still a cautionary tale in business lunches. Kimiko remained in custody. My father's company stabilized and then thrived under careful, honest governance. People who had been loud in their applause for my fall had quiet compliance to their consciences.
The little bear keychain—the trinket Kimiko had used as a prop in her story—hung on my desk. It was ridiculous and small. It was also a reminder that petty things could catalyze large storms.
Sometimes when I wake at night, the old dream returns: the hotel room, the fall, the crowd. I don't jump anymore. I breathe.
"Will I ever stop dreaming?" I asked Jaxson once on the balcony.
"Maybe not," he answered, turning the small keychain between his fingers. "But now you wake up and change the script."
"Good," I said. "Because I like writing the ending."
The End
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