The Oscar for a Ghost

Damon went insane.

The night he ascended to the throne of Hollywoodthe night the world crowned him Best Actorhe didn't thank the Academy.

He ignored the stunned silence of the A-listers in the front row. He just smiled. A broken, devastating smile.

He asked the internet to help him find his fiance. He said shed "run away."

But Sadie didn't run away.

Sadie was brutally killed five years ago.

She was a victim in a rampage orchestrated by a psychopath named Victor. No body left to bury. Just ash and memory.

The very day his manager, Doug, announced Damons indefinite retirement, a new headline shattered the internet.

Damon found dead.

Suicide.

He left a single note behind.

"Sadie can't find her way home. I have to go pick her up."

Chapter 1

Damon and I are trending again.

It started at the Academy Awards.

Damon, thirty-two years old, looking like a god in a bespoke suit, finally won Best Actor for Daylight Madness.

He stood at the podium, gripping the statue. He talked about the grind. The sleepless nights.

Then, the script flipped.

Right in front of millions of viewers, he pulled a photo out of his breast pocket. It was yellowed. Creased at the corners.

He stared straight down the barrel of the camera.

His face was flawless, but his eyes? They held a helpless, doting look.

"Hey guys. Quick favor," he said. His voice was steady. Too steady. "My girl shes sulking. Ran off about a month ago and I can't find her. If you see her, tell her to come home? Her name is Sadie."

He sounded like he was talking about a toddler playing hide-and-seek.

It sounded sweet.

It sounded like the ultimate public display of affection.

But inside the Dolby Theatre? The room temperature dropped ten degrees. The guests froze.

Because everyone knew.

2018. LAX. Terminal 4.

The massacre.

Victorthat twisted, antisocial psychopathwent on a stabbing rampage. And me?

I didn't run.

I shielded a kid who got separated from his parents.

I died on the cold tile floor.

After it happened, my name stayed on the Twitter trends for a solid month.

Naturally, Damons name was right there next to mine.

The internet sleuths dug up everything.

They found out we had been together for twenty-five years. Next-door neighbors since diapers. Childhood sweethearts.

They raided Damons old vlogs. They found the sugar-sweet clips of us falling in love, the little moments, the inside jokes.

Suddenly, the whole world missed Sadie.

But time is a cruel eraser. It blurs the edges of tragedy.

Five years passed.

Everyone thought Damon was healed.

They didn't see the thirty pounds he dropped in the first month. He looked like a walking skeleton.

They didn't see the crushing depression that swallowed him whole.

They didn't know that Doug had to physically wrestle a bottle of pills or a knife away from him.

Six times.

To the public, he was better.

Spring came around in the second year.

Damon broke his social media silence. A single selfie. It took him thirty minutes to type sixteen words.

I'm Damon. Doug told me I'm well enough to see the sun.

The fandom exploded.

Damon! Youre finally back.

Please eat something, baby. We love you.

You need a double-double from In-N-Out, stat! Let's see you gain some weight!

Then came the trolls. The buzzkills.

Guess the A-lister ran out of cash. Needs a new paycheck.

And the knife in the heart:

What about Sadie? Still playing the grieving Romeo, or did you forget her already?

Chapter 2

That comment disappeared in seconds.

The fandom swarmed it, burying the hate under a landslide of defense. But the damage was done.

Damon saw it.

He typed a reply. Six words.

Why wouldnt I remember Sadie?

On the screen, it looked sharp. Defensive. A clapback from a protective fianc shutting down a troll.

But behind the screen?

The phone slipped from his fingers. Damon looked at Doug. His eyes weren't angry. They were hollow. Confused. A lost child standing in the middle of a crowded mall.

"Doug?" He asked. "Why would they say that?"

Doug felt his throat close up. He forced a laugh, but it sounded like gravel.

"Internet trolls, kid. Theyre bottom feeders. They just make things up for attention."

He lied. He had to.

Dr. Lowe had explained it to Doug in clinical terms, but the reality was simpler and crueler. Damons depression hadnt healed; it had mutated. It was a trauma-induced defense mechanism, similar to dissociative amnesia.

When the pain became too loud, Damons brain simply pulled the plug. He would reset.

Sometimes he was lucid. Sometimes, he forgot the blood.

Right now, the sadness had triggered the reset.

Doug looked at the man hed raised from nothing to a legend. He remembered asking Dr. Lowe, desperate, "How do I fix him? How do I make him happy?"

"Give him a script," the doctor had said. "Let him be someone else."

So, they went back to work.

For the most part, it worked. Damon was a machine. He would step onto a set, slip into a characters skin, and the pain would vanish behind the mask. Professional. Perfect.

Except for two times.

The first incident was three years ago.

Damon was cast as a contract killer. Cold. Ruthless.

The scene called for him to corner a witnessa young boy. The child actor was good. Too good. He huddled in the corner, trembling, eyes wide with terror.

Damon froze.

The camera was rolling, but the mask slipped. He didn't say his line.

He collapsed.

He didnt just cry; he howled. A raw, animalistic sound that stopped the entire production cold.

Doug had to drag him into the trailer.

Damon was vibrating. Sweat soaked through his costume. His eyes were unfocused, seeing ghosts in the corners of the room. He bit down on his lip so hard a rivulet of blood traced down his chin.

It was a physical replay of that day at the airport.

Doug couldn't fix it. He just sat there, guarding the door.

Three hours passed.

A single beam of sunlight cut through the trailer's blinds, dancing with dust motes. Damon reached out, his fingers trembling as he tried to catch the light.

Doug braced himself for the confusion. He expected Damon to ask for water, or the script.

Instead, Damon whispered, "Doug. The kid. The one Sadie saved. Is he okay?"

Doug knew who he meant. Wyatt. The survivors kept in touch.

"Yeah," Doug said softly. "He's good. He's in middle school now. Plays soccer."

Damon lowered his hand. His eyelashes fluttered, heavy with exhaustion.

"Good," he rasped. "That's good."

Then, the dam broke.

The man who had been holding himself together with scotch tape and denial shattered. His shoulders heaved. The sound was wet and jagged.

He gripped Doug's arm, his fingers digging into the flesh.

"But where is my Sadie?"

His voice cracked, dropping to a desperate whisper.

"The kid is safe she saved him but where is she, Doug?"

I stood there, a ghost in the corner of the trailer. Watching him break.

I was more helpless than he was.

Chapter 3

That second incidentthe meltdown at the awards ceremonydidn't just make headlines. It broke the internet.

Twitter was a war zone. Over a dozen hashtags related to Damon and me were trending worldwide.

DamonMeltdown WhoIsSadie JusticeForDamon

It brought everything back.

Damon has been in the game for twelve years. From the day he signed his first contract, he refused to play the single bachelor. He pinned my name to the top of his Instagram bio.

Sadie.

Doug, ever the pragmatist, practically begged him to hide it. "It's career suicide, kid. You're selling a fantasy. If you're taken, the fantasy dies."

Damon didn't blink. He stubbornly refused.

A year later, he landed a lead role in a low-budget TV drama. It was supposed to be a sleeper, but it exploded. Overnight, he went from nobody to Hollywood's Golden Boy.

His follower count jumped by hundreds of thousands in twenty-four hours.

But then, the new fans clicked his profile. They saw the pinned post.

My love, Sadie.

The numbers dropped just as fast as they rose. Comments turned nasty. He has a girlfriend? Unfollow.

I panicked. I was young, stupid, and terrified I was the anchor dragging him down.

I sent him a breakup text. A long, rambling wall of text explaining that I loved him too much to ruin his future. I sat on my bed, snot-nosed and sobbing, waiting for him to agree.

He didn't text back.

The door to my apartment slammed open.

Damon stood there, holding a vintage Polaroid camera. He didn't hug me. He didn't comfort me. He started snapping photos.

Click. Whir.

"Damon!" I shrieked, wiping my swollen eyes. "Stop it! I look hideous!"

"You look real," he teased, snapping another one.

I chased him around the living room, barefoot, swinging a throw pillow, screaming at him to give them to me. We ran until our lungs burned, finally collapsing onto the rug in a tangled heap of limbs.

He rolled onto his side, pinning me with that intense, dark gaze.

"Listen to me, Sadie," he said, his voice dropping an octave. "You don't get to decide what's good for me. Im famous because Im damn good at my job. Not because Im single."

I called him arrogant. I called him a narcissist.

But the next morning, my notifications blew up.

Damon had updated his pinned post.

It was an essay. A long, heartfelt manifesto.

He laid it all bare. He told the world we had known each other for twenty-five years.

He wrote about the darkness. About Buckhis biological father, the alcoholic monster who used his fists as punctuation.

He described the night he finally ran away to the police station, battered and bruised, fainting halfway there. And he described the little girl who had shadowed him in the dark, terrified but determined to save him.

Me.

His parents went to prison. Damons grandfather didnt want a "broken" kid. So, my parents, Tom and Martha, took him in.

They raised us under the same roof. For over a decade, I looked at him with sisterly affection. My heart was clear as water.

But Damon? Damons water ran deep, and it ran dark.

He had been planning this for a long time.

It happened the night of our high school graduation. His birthday.

Tom and Martha were out of town. We had the house to ourselves.

I went all out. Balloons, streamers, a homemade cake that leaned a little to the left. I killed the lights and lit the candles.

"Make a wish," I whispered.

The candlelight danced across his face. He was eighteen, but he already had that bone structure that would one day make directors weep. He closed his eyes.

I stared at him.

Really stared.

The way his lashes brushed his cheekbones. The sharp line of his jaw. The silence in the room grew heavy, charged with something electric.

My heart slammed against my ribs. Thump. Thump.

He blew out the candles. The smoke curled between us, smelling of burnt sugar and vanilla.

His eyes snapped open. He caught me staring.

"Did you wish for something good?" I stammered, my voice sounding breathy and foreign to my own ears.

"Yeah," he murmured. "I did."

I felt like a lamb wandering into a wolf's den, but I couldn't look away. "What was it?"

Damon didn't answer immediately.

I watched his throat work as he swallowed. His Adam's apple bobbed. The air between us suddenly felt hot, suffocatingly close.

He looked at me with a hunger that terrified and thrilled me. It was the look of a starving man finally allowed to sit at the table.

"Sadie," he rasped, his voice rough with suppressed need. "Can I be with you?"

...

Chapter 4

I panicked.

I was eighteen, stupid, and overwhelmed. So, I rejected him.

We picked colleges in different area codes on purpose. I wanted to kill the spark, to let the distance do the dirty work of unloving him.

It didn't work.

Sophomore year. Damon was in a car accident.

It happened right before the holidays. Tom and Martha were stuck at an out-of-town conference. The responsibility of keeping him alive fell on me and a hired nurse.

Then came New Year's Eve. The nurse clocked out to be with her family.

Just me and the patient.

Fireworks started popping off in the distance. I got excited. I snuck out to the balcony to watch the sky catch fire, leaving him in the dark living room.

I didn't hear the wheelchair tires on the hardwood.

"Why are you hiding the view?"

His voice was low. Wounded.

I jumped. "Oh! I just"

Boom. A massive gold chrysanthemum exploded overhead, illuminating the sharp angles of his face. I bounced on my toes, eyes glued to the light.

But Damon? He wasn't watching the fireworks. He was watching me.

When the finale ended, silence rushed back in. I felt his gaze burning into my back. I scuffed my toe against the concrete, studying the floor like it was fascinating.

"Sadie."

He reached out. His fingers, cool and rough, tilted my chin up.

In the shadows, he looked wrecked. Not physically. Emotionally.

"Do you hate me that much?"

My heart stuttered. "No! No, God, no. It's just awkward."

He didn't blink. "You never said yes."

I wanted to melt into the floorboards.

We didn't see each other again until Junior year.

My dorm was a nightmare. All my roommates were scrambling to couple up. They treated my singleness like a terminal illness. They set up PowerPoint presentations of their brothers, cousins, and random guys from their hometowns.

"Sadie, just look at his jawline!"

Social anxiety hell.

Then came the long weekend. I was hiding in my room when Damon showed up. He had a care package from MarthaTupperware containers of home-cooked food.

I saw my opening.

I dragged him into the common room by his jacket sleeve.

"Hey guys!" I plastered on a fake smile. "Look! My boyfriend is finally here."

I pinched his bicep hard. Play along or die.

Damon didn't even flinch. He is, after all, a born actor.

He slid his arm around my waist, pulling me flush against his side. The smile he gave my roommates was dazzling. Weaponized charm.

"Sorry I've been hiding her," he said smoothly. "Let me make it up to you. Dinner's on me."

My roommates ditched their own boyfriends to stare at him.

For three days, we played house. We held hands. He walked us through the theater department. He bought rounds of drinks.

On the last night, he took everyone out for a feast.

He played the protective boyfriend card, stopping me from having that third glass of wine. "She's a lightweight," he told them with a smirk.

By the time we got back to the dorms, my roommates were gone.

Damonwho had been perfectly sober ten minutes agosuddenly stumbled. He collapsed against me, a dead weight of muscle and cologne.

Clatter.

His apartment keys hit the pavement.

"You're faking it," I huffed, trying to hold him up. "You're not that drunk."

He cracked one eye open. His lashes fluttered. His eyes were red-rimmed, misty, and unfairly beautiful.

"You gonna leave me on the street, Sadie?" he slurred. "Create a scene?"

I groaned. He knew I wouldn't.

I took him home.

We were officially together by Senior year.

After graduation, reality hit. Damon pounded the pavement. Audition after audition. Rejection after rejection.

Year three of the grind, he landed a role. A walk-on part with five scenes.

We celebrated like hed won an Oscar. We got cheap takeout and danced in the living room.

"You're gonna make it," I told him, gripping his face. "You're gonna be huge."

Year four. Doug found him.

He got cast in a low-budget indie film. It was supposed to flop. Instead, it went viral. Damon became the internet's new obsession overnight.

And that brings us back to the post. The essay that broke the internet.

He ended it with this:

I won't throw away the shoes that carried me through the mud just because I'm walking on red carpets now. I won't forget who cleaned the dirt off them when no one else was watching. Fame is just noise. Sadie is the music.

Chapter 5

My compass points to Sadie. Always has. Ive loved her since I was tall enough to reach the door handle.

With that post, Damon became the first star in Hollywood history to launch a career by tanking his bachelor appeal.

He was dubbed "The King of Devotion."

I read his statement and felt the sting of tears. I reposted it to my close friends' story with a caption:

Nice writing. But am I the dirty shoe in this metaphor?

Damon replied instantly.

No. Youre the ground I walk on.

For years, he kept that energy. He loved the camera, so he turned it on us. He posted vlogs of our messy cooking attempts, our road trips, our lazy Sunday mornings.

The internet crowned me "The Lucky One." We were their proof that love wasn't dead in the industry.

One fan dug through our entire timelineevery photo, every mention since 2012and left a comment that haunted me:

Sadie, if you guys ever break up, Im never believing in love again.

I was typing a reply. Something witty. Something reassuring.

Then the phone rang.

Damon was in the ER.

I left my phone on the counter. I drove 90 mph to Cedars-Sinai.

Doug met me in the hallway. "It's fine, Sadie. Don't panic. He just he went too deep into the role. He hasn't eaten in three days. It's just gastritis."

Just gastritis. Just method acting. Just starving himself for art.

We had fought about this. A dozen times.

Usually, I screamed, and he nodded. He would agree to everything, promise the moon, and then do it again. It felt like placating a child.

So, when the IV drip finished and the color returned to his cheeks at 3:00 AM, I didn't yell.

I went home. I packed a bag.

I sent one text.

Im not forgiving you this time. Do not follow me.

Damon replied in ten seconds.

Where are you going?

He knew the drill. When I was mad, I traveled. I ran.

Milan is nice this time of year, he texted again. I booked the suite at the Bulgari. The one with the terrace. Go. Relax. I wrap filming in two days. Ill come find you.

I texted back: Im not going.

I screenshotted my boarding pass to Milan and sent it to him.

Flight lands at 7:00 PM.

I stepped off the plane.

And then the world tilted.

The dream dissolved into a nightmare.

A scream. High-pitched. Primal.

It was a kid.

Wyatt.

He was standing alone in the arrivals hall, frozen.

And running toward him was a man with dead eyes and a knife that was already wet.

Victor.

The airport turned into a blur of panic. People scrambling. Screaming.

I didn't think.

I didn't weigh the options.

I lunged.

I grabbed Wyatt and spun him around, shielding his small body with mine.

Silence.

Absolute, deafening silence.

Then, the impact.

Thud.

It didn't hurt at first. It felt like being punched. Hard.

Then came the burn. A white-hot line of fire slicing through my stomach.

Once.

Twice.

Again and again.

My knees hit the floor.

Wyatt was staring up at me. Giant, terrified tears rolled down his cheeks.

"Miss?" he whimpered.

I tried to speak. I tried to say run.

But my mouth filled with copper.

I reached out, my hand trembling, and patted his head.

Its okay.

The floor rushed up to meet me.

Somewhere far away, I heard sirens. I saw police tackling Victor, pinning him to the linoleum.

But the edges of my vision were turning black.

That night, Twitter melted down. The hashtags changed from CoupleGoals to RIPSadie.

Millions of strangers cried for a woman they never knew.

And Damon?

Damon arrived at the morgue.

He stood over the gurney. His face was gray. A muscle in his jaw jumped, the only sign of life in a statue of grief.

The coroner reached for the white sheet covering my face.

Damon flinched.

His hand hovered in the air, shaking violently.

He couldn't do it.

He couldn't open the final chapter.

Chapter 6