Chapter Three:

Aurora's POV

"You look tired."

That is the first thing Damien says when I open the door.

I almost laugh.

Not because it is funny, but because in my first life, those exact words used to send me straight back to the mirror. He said it with concern. He wore it like control. A quiet way of reminding me that even my face was something he had opinions about.

"Come in," I say, and step aside.

He walks past me, and something in his cologne, familiar, expensive, and deliberately chosen, makes my stomach turn in a way I don't let reach my face. He is smiling. That warm, easy smile that took me three years to see through.

I see through it now. "I made tea," I say, moving to the kitchen.

"Since when do you make tea at night?" "Since I felt like it."

I feel him pause behind me. Good.

I pour two cups and sit across from him and let him look at me. He is doing the thing he always does when something is slightly off; he gets softer. Shoulders drop. Voice drops. He leans in like he is letting me into a secret.

"I feel like I haven't really seen you lately," he says. "Like you've been somewhere else."

"I've been right here."

"You know what I mean."

I do.

He means the Aurora who made herself small so he could feel large. The one who handed over her designs without reading the contracts because he said, "Trust me," and she did. The one who watched her own name disappear from everything she created and told herself it was a partnership.

I pick up my cup. Take a slow sip. Set it down.

"Tell me about Friday," I say.

He talks.

I listen to everything underneath the words. The way he skips over the guest list too quickly. The way he drops one name like it is nothing, buried in the middle of a sentence, is casual, almost an afterthought.

Sebastian Reed.

My hand tightens slightly around my cup.

Sebastian Reed is not an afterthought. He is the CEO of Reed Global Enterprises. One of the most powerful men in this city. Damien dropping his name like a passing detail means Friday is not just a dinner.

It is a move.

And I am the piece he is planning to use.

In my first life, Megan convinced me to skip that dinner. I stayed home while she walked into every room I should have been standing in. By the time I understood what that one night cost me, everything was already gone.

"I'll come," I say.

Something flashes across Damien's face. Relief fast, involuntary, and immediately covered.

He reaches across the table and covers my hand with his.

"I'm glad." His thumb moves across my knuckles. "I want you there with me."

His hand is warm. Familiar. I remember when that warmth was the thing I built my whole sense of safety around. I remember what it felt like to believe it was real.

I turn my hand over under his and squeeze once gently, the way the old Aurora would, and watch the relief settle all the way into his face. Watch him decide that whatever was different about me tonight was temporary.

Manageable.

Already correcting itself.

Let him think that.

He stays another hour. When he leaves, he kisses my forehead and calls me his girl, and I close the door behind him and stand in the silence and count to ten before I move.

Then I go straight to my desk.

I pull out the notebook I started this morning, the one no one knows about, the one where I have been writing every name, every date, every move I remember from my first life with the precision of someone who already knows how the story ends.

I open it to Friday's page.

Write Sebastian Reed's name at the top. Stare at it.

In my first life, that name came to me too late. In this one, it keeps surfacing before everything else does, not like a memory, more like a direction. Like something the story is already moving toward, whether I plan for it or not.

I don't understand it yet.

But I am going to be in that room on Friday.

My phone buzzes.

I reach for it, expecting Damien to follow up with a text, warm and calculated, designed to close whatever distance he felt tonight.

Same unknown number, new message.

Friday. Don't be late, Aurora. I put the phone down.

Pick it back up and read it again.

This morning, they told me they could see me. They told me I looked like someone. They told me to go to Friday's dinner like they already knew I needed to be there before I knew it myself.

Now this.

They are not warning me.

They are not threatening me.

They are directing me with the calm, specific confidence of someone who already knows exactly how Friday ends and wants to make sure I show up for it.

My hands are flat on the desk.

My breathing is steady.

But my mind is moving fast now, faster than I can organize, because there is a thought sitting at the edge of everything that I have been trying not to look at directly since this morning.

What if this person isn't watching my second life unfold? What if they are the reason I got one? I look at the phone. I wrote Sebastian Reed's name in my notebook. At the door Damien just walked out of.

Three separate things that are starting to feel like they belong to the same sentence. I just don't know what the sentence says yet. Someone directed Aurora back to Friday's dinner before she decided to go herself.

Someone knew about Sebastian Reed before Aurora understood why his name mattered, and Aurora, who came back believing she was the one holding all the answers, is beginning to think that someone else wrote the questions.