Almost Perfect Novels & Stories

A week before our wedding, my fiancee announces that she is pregnant using my younger brother's frozen sperm. "I'm grateful that our love can carry on in another way," she gushes on social media, showing off the test results. My brother replies, "Meeting you was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me." Then Mom chimes in. "Jenny, you've been through so much. Nathan's apartment should be under your name alone." I don't argue and simply reply with a single word—"Congratulations". My phone rings almost seconds later. "Your brother can't have kids anymore. It's just one child, and it's still related to you. Why are you being so petty?" she snaps. I laugh under my breath, hang up, and dial another number. "Want to get married?"

On the day of my birthday, my best friend, Bella Johnson, gifted me a polaroid camera. I took that to the zoo. I took some photos of the animals in the zoo. In my past life, I took the polaroid camera she had gifted me and happily took photos for my whole family. Unexpectedly, after a week, my mother got into a car accident and passed away. My father suffered from a stroke, which left half his body paralyzed even after treatment at the hospital. The company that I was managing ran into problems and almost went bankrupt. In merely a month, my hair had gone gray. There were wrinkles and red marks on my face. I gained a lot of weight due to the stress. My boyfriend felt that I was jinxed. He claimed that it was my bad luck that had caused my family to fall apart. He broke up with me. I was ranting to Bella when I accidentally discovered that she had suddenly become a millionaire. Her parents, who were hospitalized, suddenly became healthy again. It was as if they had not been sick to begin with. I almost lost my mind when I found out about that. On my way to the hospital, I was run over by a car and died. After I died, I found out that everything had happened because of the polaroid camera that Bella had gifted me. She had already been having an affair with my boyfriend for a long time. When I opened my eyes again, I was transported back to the day Bella gifted me the polaroid camera.

After I join a new company, I keep running into problems—not from people, but from the company's equipment. The fingerprint scanner fails to recognize me every single time, and I have to submit a manual attendance appeal almost daily. When I ask the admin to change the device, they respond with thinly veiled sarcasm. "Everyone else clocks in just fine. Why are you the only one with so many issues?" The air vent above my desk blasts cold air directly at me. My hands and feet are freezing every day. I ask to switch seats. My manager looks at me like I am making things up. "Everyone else sits there without a problem. How come the AC only blows cold air when you sit there?" One strange incident after another makes it impossible for me to function at work. When I get home, I complain to my boyfriend and say I want to quit. He shuts down the thought immediately. "You're making almost 60 thousand dollars a year before benefits, with weekends off and paid leave. Where are you going to find a job like that?" I think about it and realize he isn't wrong. Just as I decide to stick it out, the company elevator malfunctions. I fall from the 33rd floor and die. In my final moments, I can't understand it—why does every piece of equipment in the company seem to target me alone? All the devices are newly installed. All my coworkers are people I have just met. I have no grudges with anyone. There's no reason for someone to sabotage me from behind the scenes. When I open my eyes again, I am back at the company. It's my very first day on the job.

While on a business trip, I stumbled into my brother-in-law, Julian Zeller, mid-act with a male colleague in a hotel parking lot. Furious, I blew the lid off his fake marriage and helped my sister, Yvonne Sutton, escape that scumbag. But after the divorce, she lost his financial support. She spiraled, blaming me for destroying her perfect marriage. She even killed me for trying to stop her from going back to him. Then, everything resets. I wake up, and there he is—slipping into the car while hugging the same man. I pocket my phone. This time, I won't ruin Yvonne's happy ending.

When I was three and a half, the system sent me back to my dad's high school days. The good news—the brooding villain destined to destroy the world was still just a blond guy. The bad news—there were way too many blond guys at that school, and I could not tell them apart. Hence, every time I saw one, I called him 'Dad'. By the time I got to the 101st, I was robbed. He grabbed me by the collar with a fierce look on his face, like he was about to hit me at any second. The long-dormant system suddenly spoke up, "Kiddo, the one walking out of the school right now is your dad!" I sniffled and shouted, "Hey, you'd better be careful! I'm telling you, my dad's almost an adult! Right, Dad? Elliot!" Elliot Smith froze for a second and pointed at himself. "Who, me?"

On my way to work, I came across a livestream from an influencer who posted about her relationship, tagged at my company’s location. She was talking about her office romance with the CEO of a major corporation. But wasn’t the CEO of her company my husband? I clicked on her profile and saw that it was full of wedding-prep posts. The man never showed his face, but his build looked almost exactly like my husband’s. So I left a comment in the livestream: “I heard the CEO of Gibson Corporation has been married for a long time. So what does that make you...?” The streamer muted me, then instantly burst into tears. “The internet isn’t lawless. If you keep spreading rumors and calling me a mistress, I’m calling the police.” Her fans immediately swarmed me. “You’re probably the other woman yourself. That’s why your mind went there.” “I checked her profile. She’s some woman in her thirties. She’s obviously jealous because the streamer is young, pretty, and has a rich, powerful boyfriend who dotes on her.” “The account’s brand new. She’s obviously just a troll.” I tried to say more, only to realize I had already been kicked out of the livestream, and my account had been reported until I couldn’t even log back in. I stared at the proof of our marriage in the drawer for a long moment. Then I raised my hand and smacked my sleeping husband awake. “Exactly how many wives are you planning to have?”

The day cancer spread through my whole body, my family took me to court for being heartless and cruel. All because I refused to donate my kidney to the fake daughter, even though I was a perfect match. When they saw me lying in the coffin, my sister, who never liked me, said, “What a drama queen! Even got yourself a coffin this time.” Even my parents despised me and said, “If you want to die, at least cut out your kidney first and go die somewhere else. Don’t die in front of us and make us sick.” But later, when the memory extractor cut into my brain, it revealed all the times I had been tortured by that fake daughter over the years. The family that despised me went insane at that moment.

My husband and his beloved mistress died together in a car accident. They left me with a pair of illegitimate children. Eighteen years passed in a blur. I poured my heart and soul into raising those children until, at last, they earned admission to Corvell University, the country's top university. But on the very day they received their acceptance letters, my 'dead' husband returned. And beside him stood his mistress. She clutched my husband's arm and beamed at me. "Thanks to your tireless care, my two sons finally made it into Corvell. If not for you, the two of us wouldn't have been free to live so happily together all these years..." Later, my husband demanded a divorce. He wanted to marry his mistress and reunite their perfect little family of four. I didn't cry, nor did I rage. I only smiled and said, "Sure."

Both Sienna Zeller, a top-tier actress, and I went into premature labor, and my husband, hailed as the star obstetrician, pulled a deformed baby from me. The shock nearly broke me. I sank into despair, only to accidentally discover that Sienna was my husband's first love. He had deliberately caused my early labor, planning to swap my healthy baby for hers, all to protect her image. Sienna played the perfect mother in public while secretly abusing my daughter until she was left mentally impaired. Heartbroken, I went to rescue my child, only for my husband and his first love to conspire, shoving us both down the stairs to our deaths. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day I gave birth. I touched my unborn baby and vowed that this time, that cheating, cruel man and that treacherous woman would pay.

I get sent away to the countryside because my parents fear that I'll use my privileged background to lord over others. In turn, they're taking in Tina from that family to the city for her upbringing and schooling. In the countryside, I get up at 4:00 am daily to feed the pigs, then it's a grueling three-hour trek through the mountains to school. I'm also barely surviving due to constant malnutrition. I reach out to my parents for a mere 300 dollars for tuition, only for them to accuse me of spending recklessly. In the meantime, they're donating an entire building just to secure a spot for Tina at her preferred school. I finally make it into Tina's high school and earn a guaranteed university admission spot, only for my parents to order me to hand it over to her as they unleash their fury on me, yelling, "You're clearly bad to the bone, always trying to take things that belong to Tina." "Tina almost gave up on life because of what you did. You're indebted to her for the rest of your life." They, using their parental rights, forfeit my guaranteed university admission spot to fulfill Tina's wish. They then transfer all company shares and real estate to her for her future security, while the whole family makes arrangements to move abroad together. I take in everything before me, no longer feeling hurt. I calmly pack my belongings and walk away from the place where I don't belong.