Expect Delays

David Winkfield
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The Scarlett Story is the first season of Expect Delays, a raw solo memoir podcast hosted by David, tracing several months that broke his life open: a fateful encounter on a Bermuda dance floor, the collapse of a twenty-year marriage, a descent into addiction, and an obsessive, mirror-like love affair that reflected every unhealed wound back at him. The story bends into strange territory too, prophetic dreams, unexplained lights, a darkness first brushed up against as a teenager. Told from inside the wreckage, this is confession, reckoning, and a reclamation, one honest episode at a time.

  1. Season 1, Episode 23 Trailer

    Upwards and Onwards

    A short, warm farewell to Season One and a first look at what's next. David thanks listeners for sticking with him through a story that was as therapeutic to make as it was hard to live, then previews Season Two: Duke & Duchess, a fictional six-part story about a young man fighting to get sober after losing his mother, written in a single week once the real story finally demanded to be told. With a break coming to launch his Kenosis Method coaching program, David invites listeners to catch the new season early on Patreon, alongside chapters from the Expect Delays book, before it's released to everyone else. Patreon Link

  2. Sep 20

    The Spiral

    The series finale. With the Scarlett story finally closed and the marriage fully behind him, David steps back to make sense of everything: the poetic irony of an ending built from another beginning, the difference between loneliness and earned solitude, and a hard-won glimpse of detachment he knows will take years to fully live out. Between reflections on staying open to heartbreak, healing as a spiral rather than a straight line, and a childhood memory of a humble pot of Soup Beans that says more about love than anything else in the series, this is less a story than a reckoning, an honest, ungilded goodbye to one chapter and a grateful, hopeful step toward whatever comes next. Always love.

  3. Sep 20

    Kernel Panic

    Armed with the truth about Courtney's affair, David goes to war, stalking, threatening, and nearly losing himself entirely to a rage he'd never known he was capable of, before a friend's blunt intervention pulls him back from the edge. A drunken, self-destructive New Year's Eve at a friend's wedding almost kills him outright, and sends him home to face the wreckage alone. What follows is the most raw and unguarded moment in the entire series: a total psychological collapse that gives way, unexpectedly, to surrender, prayer, and the first real peace David has felt in years. By the time Scarlett calls one last time from Hawaii, there's nothing left to fight for, and nothing left to say.

  4. Sep 18

    No Villains

    Christmas without his kids for the first time in thirteen years sends David spiraling into a wry, digressive meditation on the holiday itself, before crashing into an achingly awkward lunch with Courtney, a near-fight at the movies that reveals a surprising new strength in his son, and a financial settlement that quietly guts him. Just as he starts believing 2024 might actually be his year, a call from a stranger on December 29th detonates everything he thought he understood about his marriage: Courtney has been having an affair with Henry's football coach since April, months before Bermuda ever happened. It's the episode where every story David has told himself about who was to blame collapses at once, and the truth turns out to be far more devastating than the version he'd been carrying.

  5. Sep 15

    The Long Goodbye

    A relapse timed to the exact hour his mother's plane leaves spirals into one of the darkest stretches yet, a designed collapse, an accidentally-sent confession that lands in the wrong inbox, and a holiday season spent hollowed out in circles of strangers who'd all rather be anywhere else. Then the episode pivots hard: December brings one last, doomed weekend with Scarlett, a Hamilton ticket, a Manhattan hotel room glowing with Times Square neon, and a night neither of them can bring themselves to call what it actually is, a goodbye. Tender, romantic, and quietly devastating, this episode captures the exact moment David and Scarlett stop pretending there's a future and simply let themselves have one last night instead.

  6. Sep 10

    The River of Truth

    Scarlett finally puts words to what David didn't want to hear, that she was never built for the kind of relationship he needed her to be. As that call sinks in, a film about obsession forces David to confront his own pattern of falling for the fantasy of a woman instead of the woman herself. A male therapist cracks open the self-hatred underneath it all, and when David's mother flies in for Thanksgiving, he gets a few real, unmythologized days of being loved without conditions, a breakup and a healing arriving side by side in the same handful of days.

  7. Sep 8

    Used to Be

    A near-relapse on a quiet Sunday night forces David to sit with the one thing he's spent his whole life avoiding: himself, alone, in silence. What follows is a sprawling, restless meditation on everything that fear grabs onto when there's nothing left to numb it, the true cost of trading comfort for poverty after divorce, a hard look at America's history of systemic exclusion, unlikely friendships forged at rock bottom, and a deep dive into tarot, the occult, and a pseudoscience called NLP that David convinces himself might finally save him. It's one of the most digressive episodes yet, a portrait of a mind grasping for any shortcut to healing, right up until the only thing that actually helps arrives in a much simpler form: his mom, flying in for Thanksgiving.

  8. Sep 4

    The Fork in the Road

    An airport goodbye with no tears and no drama becomes the quiet end of something David can only make sense of through a passage from The Celestine Prophecy, the idea that relationships collapse when two people stop giving each other energy and start fighting to control it instead. Between reckoning with a therapist he abandoned mid-pandemic and the discomfort of knowing his ex now sits in that same chair, David drives straight into a very different kind of crisis: his son Henry, frozen by nerves and ready to quit a wrestling meet. What follows is a tender, funny, hard-won pep talk that has nothing to do with Scarlett and everything to do with who David still gets to be, a father who shows up, even on a day defined by an ending.

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Trailer

About

The Scarlett Story is the first season of Expect Delays, a raw solo memoir podcast hosted by David, tracing several months that broke his life open: a fateful encounter on a Bermuda dance floor, the collapse of a twenty-year marriage, a descent into addiction, and an obsessive, mirror-like love affair that reflected every unhealed wound back at him. The story bends into strange territory too, prophetic dreams, unexplained lights, a darkness first brushed up against as a teenager. Told from inside the wreckage, this is confession, reckoning, and a reclamation, one honest episode at a time.

Information

  • Creator
    David Winkfield
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    23
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © David Winkfield
  • Show Website
    Expect Delays