Rebirth18 min read
I Came Back — I Would Never Be Anyone's Bargain Again
ButterPicks13 views
I woke to rain on glass and a sound like a body giving up.
"Camilla, don't be dramatic," a fat man's whisper crawled across the dark room like mold. "You've been a good sport. Why make trouble now?"
I tasted metal and old fear. I knew that voice. Dirk Christian. I knew every greasy inch of his courtesy smile, the way he called favors "investments." I knew the grip on my wrist, the way he mapped my face with the same hunger he used to map contracts.
"Eric promised he'd be here," I said, and my voice cracked like a bad recording. "He promised—"
"Promises don't put you on stage," Dirk said with a delighted chuckle. "What you have, darling, is what matters."
They had sold me like stock—my boyfriend Eric Holmes, my parents Gatlin Ayala and Marie Yamashita, the smiling snakes who wore fatigue like perfume. I had thought I could survive by smiling. I had thought survival meant obeying.
"Play a game," Dirk coaxed. "A hide-and-seek. When I find you, you... you know. No regrets, no fuss. Simple."
I closed my eyes and let the lie finish. I let Dirk's hand slide and the lights dim.
My phone was the last thing I had. I opened a hidden app and hit "LIVE."
"Hello," I breathed, and the chat already spun like a hive. "I'm Camilla. I'm—"
"You have a million viewers," a man’s voice said, not far away. Dirk laughed like he owned the sky.
"Cut the feed," he barked. "Cut it now."
"No," I whispered into the camera. "Tell them why I'm here."
He slammed me into the sofa and his hand found the place where a different life had once lived inside me. I turned his hand, found his wrist, held it like a witness.
"Eric—what did you get in return for me?" I asked. "What did you take so I'd be gone?"
Eric Holmes's face slid into view like a joke. He'd been sold to protect his career too, or so he said. He'd promised loyalty, but the ledger had different entries.
"He wanted Jia's role," Dirk said, chest heaving. "He wanted someone new for the old play. He traded you for her."
"I never existed to them," I said, and laughed, a thin, terrible sound. "Of course."
Dirk's face melted from pleased to cold. "Who gave you the right—"
My phone chimed with a string of notifications. The studio lights mirrored a red, growing number: viewers, shares, screenshots.
"Stop that feed," Dirk hissed as if the internet were a tiny pest that could be stomped with shoes.
He kicked me. The breath left me. Everything in me felt like dagger thrust through old bones and new grief.
"You ungrateful whore," his voice roared. "You want to ruin everyone? Do you know what you are doing?"
"Tell them," I whispered against his thigh. "Tell them they used me as currency. Tell them I lived so others could buy roles."
He slapped my phone away, but the chat had already birthed a storm. "Don't—" Dirk lunged, and then the world would not stop moving.
My body gave up.
The next thing I felt was a pressure like hands lifting me out of ash. My eyes opened on a ceiling I recognized but could not place.
I blinked. A threadbare lampshade. The smell of instant coffee. My small apartment, the one I'd been forced into so many years ago when they "couldn't cover payroll." This was my home—from a different time. Ninety square meters of everything I had ever been allowed.
I touched my face. The skin was my skin, but cleaner, softer, newly stitched. My head hurt like someone had hammered a bell through it, and then memory—sharp and flooding—spilled in and filled me up to bursting.
They had tried to buy and sell me. They had succeeded once. I had died remembering betrayal, then waked into an earlier hour like a thief returned with a ledger and a list.
I sat up and laughed, a small, dangerous sound. "So this is a second hand at living," I said aloud, and the apartment answered with silence.
The plan had to be surgical.
"You're awake." Beverly Gross, my manager, knocked and let herself in. Her face was all business. "Camilla, you look terrible. News—there's chatter. But don't say anything yet. For the audition—Edric Arroyo wants a look."
"Edric Arroyo?" I breathed. "The director people whisper about."
"Yes. And there's a program—Actors, Take Your Place—Paolo Schmidt's new season. They're scouting for an honest actress. Don't tell them everything. Tell them nothing. Get better."
I watched Beverly close the door. The old fear wanted to sit back down. The old me—soft and hungry to be loved—wanted to appease. Instead something else walked up behind me like a modest ghost: memory of all the times I had lied low while they burned me.
"No more," I told the empty air. "No more being currency."
I logged into an old account and pulled up a file I had once been too afraid to touch: deleted surveillance footage from the show where they'd called me spoiled. It had been scrubbed by my father's friends. It had always been scrubbed. My fingers moved, faster than panic, and pulled out the raw file.
I held the file under my breath like a confession and sent it anonymously out into the noisy world: a title that screamed for attention, a short description, and then the clip.
"Exclusive," I wrote in the account. "They set me up."
The internet, of course, was an army always ready to march. The clip spread faster than a rumor. People saw the tea splatter, the staged moments, the camera angle that proved the wrongdoer had planned it. Comments bloomed like a field on fire.
"She's been set up!" one wrote. "That's disgusting."
"How could they—did you see her sleeve?" another typed. "It was totally planted."
"Is this a setup? Is this the real Camilla?"
My phone vibrated with a hundred thousand opinions. I smiled like a woman who had found a weapon at her feet.
Two nights later the knock on my door was frantic.
"Open up!" someone cried. It was Lucas Cole—tireless, quiet, the name people hummed like an incantation. He was wild-haired and real, a presence you could not ignore. He'd been my teammate on a past reality show; then we'd drifted. In my first life he'd been an echo of something I never had. In this one he thundered back into the hallway like a storm.
"I need to hide here," he said, the words tumbling like leaves. "Please. If the fans find me—"
I let him in, because his fear sounded like my own. He was shaking, smaller than his famous face suggested, like a dog that had been left in the rain.
"You can't stay long," I said, practical as the grocery list I could have been. "Tell me everything."
He told me a story about a crowd and a phone and a collapse of traffic near the outskirts because someone saw his car and panicked. He had come here because this forgotten neighborhood made him invisible.
"Don't put this on me," he said with a crooked smile. "But—why are you here?"
"I'm living more carefully," I said. "Or trying to."
Lucas looked at me with a glance that read something: not pity, not hunger, but the strange softness of someone who knows the value of survival.
"You're in Actors, Take Your Place, right?" he asked. "You're doing the audition?"
"Yes," I said. "And I will not lose this."
He smiled, and everything in the room tuned to his grin. He moved like a man who had been trained to carry things gently through glass. "You will," he said. "I'll help."
"Don't make promises you can't keep," I teased.
"You won't let me," he said softly. "You won't let me do nothing."
I didn't need a lover. I needed an ally. I needed one who wouldn't price me.
The show became a stage for the sort of warfare the industry keeps in the dark.
"Welcome to Actors, Take Your Place," Paolo Schmidt intoned on opening night. It was a set with lights like a city sky and cameras chewing up breath. The crowd lurching in the studio smelled like cologne and applause. There were faces I knew and many I didn't.
When I walked out in a red dress the room changed pitch.
"Who's that?" someone whispered.
"She's luminous," another said.
My sister Carter George—sharp, practiced, the kind of prettier that sat on money—smiled like a blade. "How funny," she said later when she drifted too close. "We're paired for the first round."
"Is that intentional?" Lucid-faced Lucas asked, leaning in. "You didn't ask for it."
"No," I told him. "Lucky draw."
Carter's smile was all courtesy. "We're on the same team," she said. "I'll help you shine."
I knew what help cost. I accepted it like a woman accepting poison with a steady hand.
The game of pairing cut our skin and left tracks. Our scene was from an old film—an aching thing with a woman who would not be owned and a neighbor who did all he could.
We were live, and the world was chewing sugar. I found my moments and pried them open. When I looked over at Lucas while he watched from the judges' box, his face had softened like an old photograph left in sunlight.
"You're good," he whispered when I left the stage. "I wasn't ready for that."
"You're easy to surprise," I said, and we both laughed, a small collusion.
My manager Beverly pushed me toward auditions and trials while I collected proofs like coins. I took a small role in Paolo Schmidt's film—a three-day arc as a minor sister—because the contact would be a rope I could pull later. Meanwhile, I cultivated a presence on social feeds and the quiet internet that noticed craft and not scandals.
But the world had players who were larger and crueler.
Dirk Christian's face was a magazine feature and a courtroom rumor. He was the kind of man who thought favors returned interest. He had claimed me once. The memory of his hands on my face still tasted like iron.
My father Gatlin Ayala was a slow-burning type—a businessman who said all the right things when cameras were on. My mother Marie Yamashita had learned flattery as a God-ordained craft. They sold me once to keep the company's lights burning. Their ledger read: profit>daughter. I remembered.
I also remembered someone else: Birgitta Flynn, the housekeeper in my childhood house, who had loved my father through the years like a stick of steady heat. I planted a tiny camera in my father's library, where men who were not supposed to be lovers often came to whisper policy and power.
"You've started something you can't control," Birgitta warned once when we stood in the kitchen like co-conspirators. "Be careful what you sip from."
"I've drunk it before," I told her. "I'm done swallowing whole."
My career steps were small, deliberate, and noisy enough to force attention. Edric Arroyo called me in for a film audition—Paolo Schmidt's teams watched. I gave them a scene where my character died and came back in the same hour to haunt the courtroom of a village. I let my body do what the words could only hint. I was raw like a wound and clean like a blade.
"One take," Edric said afterward, quietly stunned. "You took it all."
"Thank you," I said. I meant only the performance, but I also meant the day my heart started to hold something sharp.
News, of course, is its own weapon. Someone—Carter? Dirk?—no, Carter was too busy smiling. It must have been hands who feared losing their leverage. Social accounts raged with accusations: "No skill", "Resource kid", "Who made her famous?" They were cheap nails someone used to build a coffin for me. I was not surprised. I was prepared.
Beverly Gross—my manager, sturdy and cunning—had the PR game mapped out. She let the noise climb like a storm, then she offered a counter:
"Let their lies blow up," she said. "When they burn, we put out the truth."
So I staged a small set of truths: clips from my film trial, a director's acknowledgement, the original footage from that show where I had been set up. Little sparks became fires.
"You're fighting a fire with oil," Ivy Burgess, my assistant, whispered. She was young and fervent and convinced my plan was righteous.
"I am," I said. "Either way, we bring light."
The second round on Actors, Take Your Place was a full-on battlefield. We had to select parts in a group play: a daughter accused, a stern grandmother, a jealous sister, a loyal hand. Carter prided herself on being the one who could use a false tear better than anyone.
"You're taking tea-seller?" Carter said with a smile that never reached her eyes. "That's a strange choice for someone with your face."
"It fits," I said. "Sometimes the person with a pretty face should break the mold."
Her smile flattened; she had expected me to be an apologetic mirror and found instead a woman with a hammer.
Lucas watched everything with a quiet ferocity. He was my secret ally and my visible scapegoat for a thousand internet threads. People read our every glance and spun myths. I let them. My strategy did not forbid harmless misunderstandings.
During rehearsal, a small accident turned into lampoons and cheap laughs. Carter, in her haste, snagged an ornate hairpin and the tip cut the forehead of another actress, pool of drama making an easy story for gossip.
"You did it on purpose!" the wounded actress cried, the studio filling with the delicious sound of scandal.
"Accidents happen," I said, but the cameras were already primed to film guilt in my model face.
Someone started a rumor: "She stands too close to trouble," a whispered comment on social media read. Carter's people seeded the idea I would sabotage.
That evening, the voting was announced and the room hummed like an oven. The numbers were close. My voice was static in the waiting.
"Everyone here gave everything," Edric told me, clasping my hand for a single moment. "You did well."
"That's what we do," I said.
The numbers fell my way. I advanced. Carter did not. Her face—slick, cold, furious—told stories of its own.
"You're not done," she hissed as we passed in the hall. "You think you can upend us? We're inside the network."
"I know everything that runs through the network," I said. "And tonight someone will get burned by it."
When I walked into my dressing room later Lucas poked his head in and handed me a small velvet box.
"Open it," he said.
Inside was a bracelet—clear beads, simple, beautiful. "He gave you this?" I asked.
"Not me," he said. "I thought you might want something shiny."
"It suits you," I said. "Thank you."
He leaned in, dangerously close, and for a heartbeat his breath was a promise: "Keep it. As a talisman."
I did. I wore it like the old world had given me a small new thing.
Then the finale arrived: a live gala where Paolo Schmidt would announce the final lead and where many of the producers, agents, and curious cameras converged. Dirk Christian, as expected, wore his usual coat of charm. He walked like a man who expected to be beloved.
I had two things in my hand that night: proof and timing.
"Everything will be calm," Beverly said, low voice like a lit match. "At the end, you speak. You won't scream. Keep to the facts."
I had prepared what I would say, but real courage does not come from a script. It comes from memory hammered into action.
When Dirk rose at the gala to accept an award for "industry contribution," the lights blinked too bright.
"Thank you," he said, voice smooth like oil. "It's an honor to have supported so much talent."
He gathered applause like a man who believed he had purchased applause. He scanned the room and smiled at my parents.
"Let's bring up Camilla Dillon for a toast," the host said. "She has had—"
"I don't think so," I said, stepping forward before anyone else could place me. The cameras found me like moths.
"What are you doing?" my father hissed from his seat, red-faced.
I didn't answer him.
Dirk's gaze sharpened like a blade. "This is not the time—"
"It is the time," I said to the room and the feed sent my words into millions of homes.
I had my footage ready and a laptop with a stream I had set up through contacts. "I want everyone here—and everyone watching—to see how my life was traded."
Dirk's smile slipped. "You will not sully my stage," he insisted.
"Watch," I said.
I clicked. The screen behind him lit up with a clip: my earlier live, Dirk's voice, Eric's face, the kitchen where my parents had whispered to Dirk about loans and "a girl who was expendable." The room inhaled as the public saw what I had been given: a seat, an insult, a sale.
Dirk went from a smug host to a man whose speech had been swallowed by the sudden roar of a thousand phone cameras.
"This is—this is a lie!" he blurted, then smoothed his collar and said, "They're doctored. Fraud!"
"Doctored?" I repeated. My voice didn't wobble. "Then answer this." I played another clip—an audio of a meeting where my father negotiated payment schedules in exchange for 'quiet assistance' to a production.
Gatlin rose. "This is defamation!" he shouted. "I am shocked."
"I told you to keep your hands out of it," Marie wailed. "Camilla, this is embarrassing!"
Dirk's face went through the stages they teach in crisis PR: denial, bluster, then a crack of sorrow that pretended humility.
"My friends, this is slander," Dirk cried, turning to cameras he still believed would shield him. "She... she is a storm."
And then the real sound began: a thousand phones clicking, live streams sprouting like weeds. People in the audience leaned forward. A woman in the front row brought her hands to her mouth.
"Look at the text messages," my voice said. I had prepared a paste of chat logs Dirk had used arrogantly to brag about deals. The messages clicked onto the screen. The room shifted toward the smell of betrayal.
Dirk's posture collapsed as if someone had pulled ropes. He went from powerful to a small animal.
"It isn't real!" he said, almost pleading. "We made arrangements—"
"We made you promises," my father tried to say, and his cheeks were pale. "We were desperate."
"You're the ones who sold her!" I threw the phrase like a net. "You sold your daughter to a man in a suit. You turned my life into a ledger."
Someone in the crowd shouted, "Shame!" and then millions typed the same.
Dirk's face changed again: smugness, confusion, denial, and then an animal panic. He tried to turn his charm into plausibility. "No, no—this is a misunderstanding—"
My brotherly anger—there is a special breed of cold in a woman who was almost dead—rose, and I let it be seen.
"Beg," I said simply.
He laughed at first, a brittle sound. "Beg? For what? For forgiveness? For my reputation?"
The cameras zoomed. Dirk's mouth opened and closed like a man trying to undo a knot.
"Look at him," someone recorded, their voice trembling. "He's crying."
"You're the one who sold me," I said. "Say it. Say it in the open."
Dirk looked around, and for the first time a semblance of humanity flickered. "I didn't think—" he started, then his voice fell.
The audience's reaction was immediate: a surge of phones up, streams and commentaries. A woman stage-manager whispered, "Security—"
"Stop!" Dirk's plea ascended into the microphone. "Please, I can explain."
Explain. That word hung and tasted like used glass.
Someone had already posted a clip of my childhood house; another person had logged my father's little ledger; yet another had scanned the "donation" emails.
Dirk's change from command to collapse was now a performance everyone could watch: his shoulders dropped; his face drained; he whispered, "Please—"
He dropped to his knees before the cameras, and the entire internet had a front row seat.
"Please," he said, voice trembling into an ugly, guttural sound. "I—I'm sorry. I will fix this. Please, forgive me."
His suit crumpled under him and his tie hung like a noose. He looked so small.
There was a raw, physical silence—an intake of breath—that rolled through the room. Some people cried. A man in the back held his hands over his head and laughed in shock. Voices rose: "He deserves this!" "No way did he—" "He's ruined—"
Picketers in the crowd—the kind of people who had watched and waited—cheered. Someone filmed the scene and uploaded it as "Dirk Christian kneels," and it had millions of views inside hours. Camera lenses morphed the gala into the court of public opinion.
My father tried to stand and approach him, but the other guests recoiled, as if his movement would resurrect a transaction.
Dirk's face was now a map of panic. He had been smug, then shamed, then exposed. He was pleading. He was begging. He was, in those exact human terms, reduced.
"I didn't mean to—" he sobbed. "People told me—investors—there were loans—"
"Your hands are stained," I said. "You traded a life."
Cameras kept filming. People took pictures. A group of assistants started to clap, a slow, cruel rhythm that spread into applause like a contagion. The crowd's mood turned from shock to a kind of hungry satisfaction.
Dirk stood and then collapsed again, overwhelmed, then rose to his knees a second time. "Please—"
"Say you're sorry. Say you paid for her," shouted someone. "Say you paid for her life."
He croaked something like an apology. It was not enough. People recorded him, body shaking, asking for mercy. His entourage left in drips like water.
Gatlin tried to say something that would save him. "The man—" he began, his voice small. "We helped—"
"No," I said. "You sold me."
He had no words that would absolve him in public. He sank into his chair with the look of a politician who had been found out.
Phones multiplied. The hashtags grew: #Exposed #CamillaTellsTruth #StopSellingPeople. Comment sections filled with outrage and sorrow. Clips of Dirk's plea top trending. The network called lawyers, but the damage had left the ledger swung.
Dirk's begging became a spectacle. He crawled toward those he thought might aid him, but cameras preferred the sight of a man with power turned brittle.
He tried to justify with the same old line: "We didn't know—" But the internet's memory is long and hungry.
After that night, everything changed.
The police took statements. The company launched an internal probe. The gala host released a statement: "We regret to have been associated with actions that harm artists." The PR agencies scurried. Dirk's contracts evaporated like ice in a bonfire; his social calendars emptied.
"People took photos," one gossip account gushed, "and they cheered. It was like watching a pharaoh finally fall."
Eric Holmes, my old boyfriend, withdrew from events, his face appearing on the feeds as he went to explain himself with the sort of interviews that crack people.
Carter's phone filled with messages from sponsors who preferred less scandal and more "safe investments." My parents—well, the cameras found them in their small living room, faces washed white.
"You're going too far," my mother said at our first public family hearing, a small room with lawyers and an empty chair for mercy. "You're humiliating us."
"Why didn't you think of me then?" I asked. "Why did you sell your daughter?"
The priestlike quiet at that public hearing had more people watching than the gala. Reporters took pictures, legal papers rustled, and a crowd formed outside.
Some of my father's old business partners turned their backs. He, who had once been a man of men, found himself without a market.
As for Dirk, his public fall was long. He tried for denials, for deniability, for legal teams, for reputation managers. He tried to claim "misunderstanding" and "business necessity". He wrote notes that looked like apologies and gave cameras statements that read like contracts. He sought forgiveness and found only the echo of his own voice.
The punishments were not all of one kind. Some were smaller and precise: his favorite project lost funding, his advertisers put their banners away, and his name earned a new prefix—"accused." But the night he knelt was the one the internet returned to again and again. The slow humiliation—smug to shocked to denial to collapse to begging—unfolded public and unedited, and that change, that visible human failure, is what made people whisper, "Yes. Finally."
I did not clap. I listened, and I let the record be its own sound.
Afterwards, Lucas sat beside me in the quiet of the dressing room. He offered no small speeches. He simply put his hand over mine.
"You did it," he said.
"I didn't do all of it," I said. "They helped. People recorded. The internet lit."
He smiled like a small relief. "You made them human."
Over the next months everything shifted like tectonic plates. Jobs came for truth tellers and for those who had the courage to speak. Directors—Edric Arroyo especially—took notice. He offered me a part in a film that would change the arc of my career.
Carter George fumed and tried to keep her footing but found doors closing and sponsors considering "threshold of association." My parents retreated into small, guarded lives. The company my father had run was placed under investigation; it did not die immediately, but it could not stand untouched.
Dirk moved through his days like a man whose life had become a series of empty apologies. I humored few of his attempts at reconciliation.
"Camilla," he managed to say once at a controlled meeting, "I can make amends."
"Make amends?" I repeated. "You cannot buy back a life."
He knelt again in the private room, but the cameras were off and the internet had turned its gaze to other scandals. It was humanly pathetic and mundanely pitiful.
"Beverly, what do you want me to do now?" I asked her one evening when the adrenaline had subsided and real planning—film schedules, press circuits—began.
"Keep acting," she said. "Keep telling truth when it's needed. And keep your distance from those who price you. You're selling tickets now, not yourself."
Lucas and I—if someone called it "us" it would have been a mistake. We had something closer to a partnership, threaded with warmth and a mutual guarding. He showed up at sets, sometimes, early in the morning with coffee and the kind of company a person uses to anchor their days.
"Promise?" he asked once, as I sat under a blanket on a windy night, watching the city drink light.
"No promises," I said. "I live by actions now."
He nodded. "Actions are better."
The film with Paolo Schmidt and Edric Arroyo blossomed. Audiences said my work was "quiet and devastating." Critics argued over whether I was "manufactured" by scandal or "forged" by craft. I let them argue. We were making art, and art chooses the parts it wants to keep for itself.
At night, after shoots, I would walk home with YaoYao—our small cat that had once been a stray near the studio. She was white and clever, and she had the unblinking serenity of the small creatures who know how to survive. She would rub herself against my calves and yowl for more food. The bell on her collar tinkled like a tiny metronome.
"She's mine now," I told Lucas one evening when he had come to sit with me on the worn couch and count the stars through the window. "Not anyone else's."
He took my hand and squeezed, and for a while everything was only warmth.
Months later, when the lawsuits had begun winding down and when the industry had started to reassemble itself around new rules and warnings and a quieter, stronger consensus, there came a day when I stood on a stage to collect an award.
"To those who turned on their lights when my world was dark," I said into the microphone. "To those who filmed and believed and made public what had been hidden."
I wore the simple bracelet Lucas had given me. It had no starry diamonds, no arguments. It was a small thing—proof that someone had believed I was worth a talisman.
"To YaoYao," I laughed, and the room obliged with a ripple. "To the small things that watch us and ask nothing."
I walked off stage and felt something like a quiet settling: the world would still take risks, still sell things for profit, still look away. But everywhere, there would be a camera and a hand and someone to push back.
I have not forgiven everyone. I will not pretend I have. Forgiveness is not my business plan.
I rewired my life. I made allies. I let the bracelet be a small promise not to barter myself away.
At night, when the city baths in sodium light and YaoYao curls into a ring on the rug and purrs like a motor, I sometimes think of the sound my phone made the night I went live the first time, the sound of a million windows opening.
I wind the bracelet once—two fingers, gently. It is small and cool. I tuck it under my pillow like a compass.
"Will you stay?" Lucas asks sometimes.
"I can't promise tomorrow," I tell him. "But tonight—"
"Tonight," he answers.
And I loop the bracelet close and sleep, with the bell of YaoYao ringing softly, the tiny music of a life that will be mine to live.
The End
— Thank you for reading —