Chapter 1

The first call from the collection agency came on a Tuesday.

I let it go to voicemail.

The second, third, and fourth calls came before noon. By the end of the day, my call log was a graveyard of numbers I didn't recognize, all from lenders wanting their money back.

One hundred and fifty-two thousand, four hundred and eighty-one dollars and sixty-two cents.

That was the price of my stupidity.

It started a month ago. I ran into Jennifer Chavez, my ex-colleague, in the parking lot of our old office building. She was frantically loading boxes into a U-Haul, her usually perfect makeup smeared with sweat.

"Maria? Oh my god, you' re still here?"

She looked at me like I was a ghost.

"You have to get out. Now."

I just stood there, confused.

"My uncle, he' s in the government, a high-level official. He told us to leave the city. The grid is going down, Maria. The whole country. It' s going to be chaos. Riots, looting, everything."

Her voice was tight with panic, and for a second, I saw past the charismatic influencer she was online. I saw real fear.

And because I was already primed by the hundreds of hours I' d spent on prepper forums and doom-scrolling through conspiracy theories, I believed her.

I went home and the panic set in. I saw the future Jennifer described: darkness, sirens, desperate people in the streets. I wasn't just anxious; I was terrified.

So I acted.

I applied for every credit card I could find online. I took out high-interest personal loans, lying about my freelance income. The approvals came in one after another. Ten thousand here, twenty thousand there.

The money went straight into survival gear. Freeze-dried food that tasted like cardboard, water purifiers, solar generators, first-aid kits, even a crossbow I had no idea how to use. My tiny Portland apartment became a fortress of cardboard boxes and plastic containers, a monument to my debt.

A month passed.

The lights stayed on. The internet worked. Society, annoyingly, did not collapse.

Jennifer posted a picture from a beach in Bali a week later. The caption read: "Needed a digital detox! Sometimes you just have to unplug from all the negativity, you know? #blessed #selfcare"

There was no grid collapse. There was only my crushing, self-inflicted financial ruin. The eviction notice taped to my door was the final, brutal confirmation.