Reborn

“He can see me later.”

I muttered it under my breath, slipping out of the hospital before Xavier came back with food. Whatever he needed to tell me could wait. I had questions only Jeremy could answer, and I was done letting another hour pass without asking them.

The penthouse looked different the second I walked in. New furniture. New art on the walls where our photographs used to hang, replaced now by a woman’s smiling face in frames that used to hold mine. Even the air smelled different, some new perfume layered over the space I used to call home.

“Oh. You’re here.”

Brittany’s voice, behind me, way too comfortable in a home that wasn’t hers yet.

“I see you’ve moved in,” I said, keeping my voice flat even though my chest had gone tight and wouldn’t let go.

“Where I belong.” She stepped closer, studying me like she was deciding how much I already knew, and how much fun it might be to make me find out the rest myself.

Her eyes moved over my dress, my hair, my face, cataloguing every place I’d started to fall apart since the party. She wanted me to see her notice. That was the whole point of her walking so slowly across the room, drawing it out, letting the silence stretch until it hurt more than words would have.

“You’re so easy,” she said, almost sweetly, “to move around.”

“What does that mean?”

She only smiled, the kind of smile that promises an answer eventually, on her own schedule, for her own reasons. “You’ll figure it out. You were always clever. Just never when it mattered.”

I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake the truth out of her. I didn’t. Something told me that whatever she wanted to reveal, she wanted to reveal on her own terms, and forcing it now would only cost me later, in a currency I didn’t understand yet but already sensed I couldn’t afford to spend.

“Where’s Jeremy?” I asked instead.

“Not here for you.” She turned to leave, then paused in the doorway, glancing back at me over her shoulder like she’d almost forgotten one last thing. “Ask him about your parents sometime. See what he says.”

She was gone before I could ask what that meant. My parents. Dead more than a decade, buried and grieved, and somehow, apparently, not separate from any of this at all.

I didn’t get the chance to find Jeremy. I didn’t get the chance to do anything else.

I felt the wall before I understood the blow was coming. Pain exploded through the side of my head, bright and total, and my vision splintered into white for a second before the room tilted sideways. The last thing I heard was Jeremy’s voice, far away, shouting a name that wasn’t mine.

Then nothing.

The alarm on my phone dragged me awake, and for one full second the ceiling above me made no sense at all.

I sat up too fast. The room tilted hard. For a moment I thought I was still in the hospital, still bleeding, still somewhere on the losing end of dying. Then the pain hit, low in my chest, exactly where it always started, and something inside me went very still. I recognized this ache. I’d felt it before.

Days ago. A lifetime ago.

My sheets were the wrong color. My pillow smelled like the detergent I used two years ago, not the one I switched to after the wedding. My own bedroom looked like a photograph of itself, familiar and wrong at the exact same time.

I grabbed my phone before I let myself think too hard about why my hands were already moving.

The date on the screen didn’t make sense. I stared at it until it did.

Three days. I had gone backward three entire days, into a morning I had already lived once, into a life that hadn’t happened yet and had also, somehow, already happened. My hands trembled around the phone, not from fear this time, but from something closer to disbelief clawing its way into certainty.

The door opened. Jeremy walked in on his phone, wearing the same suit he’d worn the morning he handed me divorce papers I hadn’t even received yet in this version of things.

None of it had happened. Not the papers. Not the party. Not Brittany, not Victoria, not whatever thread connected all three of them back to two dead parents I’d spent a decade believing had nothing to do with my life anymore. It was all still ahead of me, unwritten, and for the first time since I woke up in a stranger’s bed two years ago, I would be the one holding the pen. Every move he made from this point forward, I would already know it was coming before he did.

“You okay?” he asked, not lifting his eyes from the screen.

I looked at him. Really looked, in a way I never once let myself do across two years of marriage. My pulse slowed instead of racing. My hands went steady instead of shaking. Something in my chest settled into a kind of quiet I didn’t have a name for yet.

“I’m better,” I said, “than I’ve been in a long time.”

He almost smiled at that, already turning back to his phone, already forgetting I’d spoken at all.

“You’re being weird,” he said, not looking up. “Did something happen?”

“Nothing happened,” I said. “Not yet.”

I let him. Let him believe this morning would look exactly like the one he remembered living through the first time.

Because three days from now, he was going to hand me divorce papers over an orange I hadn’t even finished cutting. And this time, when he did, I already knew exactly which locked drawer in his office held the documents that would end him first.

I thought of Xavier too, of his hand curled around mine in that hospital room, warm in a way that had nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with something neither of us had said out loud yet. He was out there somewhere right now, three days younger in this version of the world, carrying the same secret I was carrying.

Jeremy’s phone buzzed against the nightstand. He glanced at it, and that same soft, unguarded look crossed his face, the one I used to think was meant for me.

It wasn’t. It had never been.

I watched him get dressed like nothing in the world had changed, humming under his breath, already halfway through a day he thought he understood completely.

He had no idea I’d already lived this morning once and died three days later. He had no idea I was about to spend every single hour between now and then making sure it never happened again.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​