The light that filtered through the floor-to-ceiling windows in Mahatta was not warm and inviting, but a cold clarity that underscored every crack in my exhaustion.

I looked in the mirror and barely recognized the haggard, puffy, and disfigured woman who stared back at me, a worn-out version of who she had been just a few months ago.

My name is Appa Vape, I am twenty-eight years old, but my body and mind feel decades older after giving birth to triplets exactly six weeks ago.

Leo, Sam, and Noah are beautiful, tiny, fragile; three newborn babies who breathe in fits and starts while I try to sustain their lives with coffee, clean diapers, and a patience that is running out.

My body is uncharted territory: soft where it was once firm, stretched by silvery stretch marks, marked by an emergency cesarean scar that saved three lives and shattered my energy.

The lack of sleep was so brutal that if I turned my head too fast, the room tilted, the walls shook, and the world seemed like a ship about to sink.

She lived in a barely controlled calm, trapped in the impossible logistics of feeding, changing and comforting three babies at once, amid overlapping cries and schedules that never coincided.

The nannies lasted two weeks at most; they would leave with nervous apologies, muttering that caring for triplets was too much even for a professional, leaving me alone to face the domestic chaos.

Our house, four hundred square meters of impeccable luxury, felt small, saturated with cribs, bottle warmers, piles of diapers and mountains of unfolded baby clothes.

I was there, in pajamas stained with milk, my hair tied up in a crooked bun, holding a crying baby in my arms and two others in the stroller, when he came in.

Mark, my husband, CEO of Apex Dynamics, showed up in a perfectly pressed charcoal-colored Tom Ford suit, smelling of expensive cologne, success, and a contempt that was almost palpable.

He didn’t look at the sleeping triplets, didn’t ask how I was, didn’t offer any help; he looked at me as if he were evaluating an asset that had irretrievably lost value.

Without a kind word, he threw a thick folder onto the quilt; the thud sounded like a judge’s gavel, and the letters PETITION FOR DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE shone like a sentence.

He didn’t talk about irreconcilable differences or therapeutic processes; he talked about aesthetics, image, appearance, with such cold cruelty that it took my breath away and left me paralyzed.

Her gaze slowly wandered over my dark circles, the saliva stain on my shoulder, the postpartum girdle visible under my pajamas, the extra weight of having carried three babies.

“Look at you, Appa,” he said with disgust; “you look like a human scarecrow, slovenly, unkempt, repulsive; you’re ruining my image, and a CEO of my caliber needs a wife who represents power and sophistication.”

I blinked, too tired to cry, and whispered that I had given birth to her three children six weeks ago, that my body was just now learning to stand up again.

He shrugged, adjusting his platinum cufflinks, and replied that if I had let myself “go” in the process, it was not his problem, but my personal decision.

Then, as if she had been rehearsing it for weeks, she announced her affair with indifferent superiority: “I am seeing someone else, someone who does understand the demands of my public position.”

Chloe appeared in the doorway as if responding to a signal; her twenty-two-year-old assistant, impeccable in a designer dress, perfect makeup and a small, triumphant smile.

He looked at me the way one looks at someone else’s defeat, observing his wife in pajamas with a diaper in her hand, while she showed off every inch of the future she believed was secure.

“We’ll go to the office together,” Mark said, speaking to me as if I were a domestic servant; “my lawyers will take care of the agreement, you can keep the house and the garden.”

He added that he was fed up with the noise, the hormones and the chaos, with seeing me dragging my feet, dressed in spilled milk, as if I had given up on life forever.

He put his arm around Chloe’s waist, displaying her as his official upgrade, the new trophy that was supposed to reflect the success and vitality that his corporate ambition demanded.

The message was brutally clear: my value, to him, was reduced to my appearance and social utility; by becoming an exhausted mother, I had become discarded and replaceable.

They left together; Chloe’s heels clicked on the marble floor, the front door closed with a final click, and the house was plunged into a thick, sharp silence.

Mark believed he had executed a perfect exit: a broken wife, three babies, lawyers controlling everything, and a settlement I would accept, too exhausted to fight or claim anything.

He was painfully wrong.

Before Mark, I was a promising writer with a degree from Columbia and published stories; he reduced my vocation to a “nice hobby” and turned me into an event organizer for his ego.

For seven years I sacrificed my creative career to be Mrs. Mark Vape: corporate parties, client dinners, perfect photos at galas, always behind his carefully manufactured shine.

The divorce papers on my bed weren’t just a condemnation; they were a document of emancipation, a crooked key that unlocked the door to the woman I had buried.

The nighttime hours, when the babies slept between feedings, became my secret refuge; I placed the laptop next to the bottle sterilizer and went back to writing like a madwoman.

I didn’t write a lament, nor a memoir to ask for compassion; I wrote a sharp, dark novel entitled “The CEO’s Scarecrow,” designed like a scalpel against Mark’s image.

I changed names for legal protection, but I kept every detail: the layout of the house, her tailored suits, her favorite whisky, her narcissistic tics, and above all, her postpartum neglect.

I added the financial shortcuts he boasted about, the regulatory gray areas, the cruel layoffs, the private humiliations; all transformed into the actions of Victor Stope, my fictional CEO.

Each page was an emotional autopsy of seven years of veiled abuse; some scenes I wrote crying, others with an almost clinical coldness, as if I were dissecting a moral corpse.

When I finished the manuscript, I didn’t just have a story; I had a precision weapon loaded with truth wrapped in fiction, ready to aim at the heart of his empire.

While his lawyers negotiated custody and assets, I sent the manuscript to a respected independent publisher, less interested in scandals and more in the devastating power of the text.

They agreed to publish it on an accelerated schedule; my lawyer consolidated legal layers of protection, ensuring that no one could easily accuse me of outright defamation even though everyone recognized the monster portrayed.

“The CEO Scarecrow” was released quietly on a Tuesday; at first it was a modest success, praised by critics as a devastating feminist thriller about emotional abuse and predatory capitalism.

Everything changed when a Forbes investigative journalist read the book on a flight, recognized addresses, dates, patterns, and decided to investigate how far this disturbing coincidence went.

He compared the novel to Mark Vape’s public life, his recent divorce, the triplets, the Apex headquarters; he published a scathing article titled “Fiction or confession disguised as a corporate novel?”

The reaction was explosive: in three days, the book jumped to the top of the best-seller list, becoming the most morbid and talked-about scandal in the business world that year.

Social media was flooded with hashtags like #ScarecrowWife and #CEOFails; TikTok recreated scenes from the book, podcasts analyzed Victor Stope’s narcissism as a manual of toxic behavior.

Customers, partners, and shareholders began abandoning Apex Dynamics as if it were on fire; no one wanted to associate their brand with a CEO portrayed as a symbol of misogyny and corporate cruelty.

The company’s value plummeted for a week, shares crashed, investment funds sold positions, and its reputation as an innovative leader became a national joke.

Mark tried to downplay it on television, calling the fantasy book by a “bitter ex-wife,” but his smug smile only confirmed to the audience that the novel’s villain really existed.

The board of directors, terrified by the hemorrhaging, held an emergency meeting and ultimately dismissed him for cause, citing extreme reputational risk and a total loss of confidence in his leadership.

Financial regulators began investigations inspired by the book’s “fictions”; the SEC and other agencies found enough irregularities to impose multimillion-dollar fines and ban Mark from trading.

Meanwhile, my lawyer used the public climate and his own statements as ammunition in the divorce; I obtained full custody of the triplets and a substantial financial settlement.

When the company wanted to buy my silence, I accepted only because it meant another written confirmation of everything they had tried to deny while turning me into a disposable scarecrow.

As my final gesture, I sent Mark a signed copy of the first edition, just as security was escorting him out of Apex with his belongings in a box.

“Thanks for the plot of my best-selling novel,” I wrote; “you were right, it was a scarecrow, but this scarecrow just burned down your field while you looked the other way.”

Months later, I publicly revealed that I was the author behind the pseudonym; I appeared on magazine covers, not as a perfect wife, but as a writer who turned pain into power.

I spoke about emotional abuse, invisible postpartum, and women treated like scenery; my story became a megaphone for thousands of messages from women who recognized their own reflection in my book.

The film rights were sold for a fortune, securing my children’s education and the financial independence he always believed I would never achieve without his last name.

I returned to writing pure fiction, in a bright office overlooking the garden where Leo, Sam, and Noah played, knowing that they saw me as more than just “the CEO’s ex.”

I would think of Mark sometimes when I read new news about his legal troubles, but sympathy never came; he chose every step of the road to his own downfall.

I too finally chose mine: to tell the truth with the tool it always underestimated, my written voice, and to become the protagonist of my story, not its footnote.