Prologue
Scarlett O'Hara wasn't the type of person to crumble under pressure. She triumphed in the face of hunger, devastation, and Sherman's armies. Like Gerald O'Hara she was childish and stubborn. Once the bell of three counties, the women who once lived under the serene shelter of Tara was anything but happy and carefree.
"That Scarlett is gone," she whispered to her deteriorating reflection, her eyes empty. "Gone and a woman named Scarlett Butler stands here in her place." She held back a sob as memories flooded her. She hadn't always been this broken, defeated.
It isn't just my last name that's changed throughout the years, she thought as she turned from her mirror to stare at her dilapidated bed. She hadn't been truly happy since the war-if she was honest with herself, and she really couldn't stand to be, she had been happy with Rhett those first years. She'd become consumed with the fear of losing. Always losing.
She may have been an open book. She'd been called a child; a shrewd, intelligent business woman, and ignorant of many things. She was many things to many people. To the Old Guard she was a traitor, a filthy and unladylike villain. To the Yankees and carpetbaggers she was a breath of fresh air. To Melly, dear Melly, she was a loyal friend. To her children, she was a frightening authority figure. To Rhett...to Rhett she was an enigma. She was a child that needed protecting. A strong woman that needed her space. A frightened animal to be feared. A pet that he could coddle. The love of his life.
She sat down at her now crumbling desk and pulled out a sheet of paper smudged in dirt, dabbing a feather quill in the almost empty ink well. "Who am I?" the woman asked aloud, to herself, to no one, "What am I?"
For a moment, she allowed herself to look back. To remember the moments, bittersweet and strange, that had led her to this moment. "Who am I?" she whispered again. She began to shake with tears as she thought about the person she'd become, always so certain she had been making the right choices.
She had seen herself as the woman who silently went without food so that her family could live another day. The woman who picked cotton and sold her body to men so she could never love to keep a roof over her ungrateful sister's head. She was the woman who feared too much, who didn't know how to stop being afraid. That is, until Rhett had come and wiped away her tears and saved her from herself and an ever judgemental restoration society.
The tears she shed today weren't for the late Rhett Butler-late, because by now, he was dead to her. They fell in shame of the person she had become.
It had been two years since Rhett left. Two years since she has seen or heard from him. Everything had changed in those years. She'd given up the Peachtree Street home four months after he left. She used the money to pack up Wade and Ella and move far away. She didn't care where they moved, just that they were away from Atlanta and the ghosts that haunted it.
She spent the better part of that first year alone connecting with her children. For a while, it seemed as if there had been real progress. The children were happy, eager, to have a loving mother. Loving insofar as Scarlett could ever be.
After moving to New York City, Scarlett thought she would never have to think or face the memories that threatened to surface when she thought of the old south. Choosing to live in relative anonymity, she and the children shared the penthouse suite of an exceedingly modern apartment building. So, it came as a surprise when one Monday afternoon she received a package from Charleston.
She opened it, hoping it was merely a backlog of letters from her silly aunts in Savannah. However, after unravelling the packaging, she found a thick stack of legal papers and she focused on the only two things she could. Divorce and Rhett Butler.
She wasn't the same after that. She never signed the papers, never acknowledged that she had received them. She couldn't. She couldn't let herself lose her one tie to the man who'd been her rock for so long.
It was the divorce papers that sent her spiraling into depression and oftentimes, madness. She could no longer go on as a happy mother when she was nothing more than the shell of human. She stopped eating. Stopped looking after the children. She left what few servants she had to care for them. Everything she had accomplished in the last year since Rhett's departure and Melanie's death vanished within a week of receiving the papers.
Two months passed and Scarlett hadn't left her room. She had the children sent away; Ella to a young ladies' finishing school and Wade to a small school in Athens to prepare him for the University of Georgia. Neither wanted to leave their mother in her current state, but Scarlett couldn't bear to look at them and know that once again she was failing and she sunk deeper and deeper into herself.
Eventually the money Scarlett had taken with her began to run out. She let the servants go and moved to a small boarding house. She began to receive numerous, worried letters from Uncle Henry, her lawyer, asking where she was and why she hadn't touched her other bank accounts. She never responded, instead opting to toss each one in the fire without so much as a glance.
She was finally ready to give up...