rebirth

My husband sends me a photo of our obedient daughter holding a plate of food. He writes, "Thanks to my patient guidance, our sweetheart has finally made her first dish! We're waiting for you to come home and taste it!" The exhaustion I feel from work is swept away when I see that. No one expects that I'll reach home half an hour later and kill him.

I jump off the seventh floor on my wedding day. Why? Because everyone has abandoned me to pick up a fake heiress from the airport, my fiancé included. I expect to see them riddled with heartbreak and regret after my death. However, my father merely shakes his head stoically and looks at my body while saying I was too willful. My mother bites her lip and sighs in relief. My fiancé, Magnus Gilmore, shields the fake heiress. He's afraid she'll see the horrible state of my body. The fake heiress is scared to tears at this, and everyone crowds around her to console her. No one cares whether I'm still breathing while lying in a pool of blood. I'm stunned when I see this, but I soon laugh self-deprecatingly. When I open my eyes again, I've been brought back seven years in the past. It's the day I've just stepped foot at home.

My parents used the compensation money from my sister's car accident to buy a four-room house, but they only let me stay in the bathroom. My twin brothers, who were not even a year old, each had their own room. When the twins grew up, they got into a car accident. One of them needed a corneal transplant, the other needed a heart. My parents begged me to donate and save them. When I tried to escape, they betrayed me. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself back to the time just after my sister's death. I sought justice for my sister and myself, and made my parents pay for what they had done.

My husband and I spend 50 loving years together. On the day of our golden wedding anniversary, someone pushes me down a flight of stairs. As I drift in and out of consciousness, I miraculously regain my hearing. I lost it in the process of saving my husband when we were younger. I hear my husband say to my son, "You shouldn't have dirtied your hands." "How long more are you going to put up with her, Dad? Calista doesn't have much longer to wait." My husband sighs heavily. After a moment, I feel someone remove my oxygen tube. I descend into boundless darkness. When I open my eyes again, I've been taken back to the 80s—before I married my husband. The only difference is that I can hear this time.

The maid's daughter, who grew up in my home, had the nerve to act like an heiress. On her birthday, she invited every kid from school for a full-on rager at my family's villa. When I suggested they take it to a hotel, she lost it. "You don't get to tell me what to do! My friends can party wherever they want!" She added, "The ten-layer cake my parents ordered for me is on the way. Why don't you park yourself by the door and wait for it, huh?" Her crew circled up, laughing and pointing at me. But I'd lived through this before. Nothing about her little act rattled me. I turned to the butler and told him to lock the gate. Then, I went to Rambo's cage. "Hey, buddy," I said, opening it up. "See those trespassers?" I pointed at the crowd. "I'm counting to three. If they're still here, don't let a single one get away."

After receiving the report for an STD test, I went back to the barbeque restaurant, and there I ran into a young woman who was about three months pregnant. She asked me to let her cut in line, and, feeling sorry for her, I agreed to help her out. I quickly made arrangements for her and made sure she had a seat. But to my shock, after she finished her meal, she had a miscarriage. The girl posted about the incident online, and before I knew it, I was trending on social media, facing a wave of cyberbullying. The internet users went even further, digging up my health records and finding that everything came back positive. [She's positive for everything—she's clearly a woman with a messy private life!] [No wonder she caused the woman's miscarriage just by being near her—she's a biological hazard!] The cyberbullying got so bad that it pushed me into depression. Even my fiancé turned against me, accusing me of being filthy and breaking up with me. The emotional weight became too much, and in my pain, I drove straight into a reservoir. Meanwhile, the girl gained millions of followers online and skyrocketed to fame as a popular influencer. It was only after I died that I learned the shocking truth—this girl was my fiancé's first love. To boost her own popularity, she and my fiancé had come up with this entire scheme together. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself back on the day when she asked me to let her cut in line.

I hid behind a thick tree trunk and watched silently as a grizzly bear attacked my husband. In my previous life, I was a guide. I led my husband—an environmental photographer—and his female colleague into a nature reserve to film wildlife. While scouting the route, I discovered a nursing grizzly bear and immediately warned them not to take any photos and to retreat slowly. To my shock, they intentionally bumped into me, causing my right leg to be cut and bleed. The scent of blood enraged the bear, and it charged straight at me, sinking its massive jaws into my abdomen. After the bear left, my husband calmly stripped me of all my equipment. Then, wrapping his arms around his female colleague, he kissed her. He turned to me with a sinister smile creeping across his face. "Kate," he said, "I'll be honest. I never loved you. You're dying. Now, all your assets will be mine." I bled out and died. When I opened my eyes again, it was the morning of the day we entered the mountains.

I was reborn. Right back to the day I adopted Peter. The wind cut sharp, baby cries slicing through the cold. That's when it hit me—this was the day Stuart Pete, my oh-so-loving husband, dumped his illegitimate child right in my path after work. He knew me too well. The second I picked the kid up, he'd spin it into an adoption, making the boy ours. Last time, I fell for it. This time? I walked away without a second thought. Later, I heard the kid got pneumonia from being left out in the freezing cold—fever so bad, it wrecked him for life. I laughed until my stomach hurt. What I didn't see coming? Peter was reborn too—about to experience the life he was meant to have.

My mother-in-law could not understand me. Before my business trip, I repeatedly told her not to touch anything in my study, but she mixed up the contract I needed. As a result, I lost a million-dollar order and was fired from my company. To make up for her mistake, she promised she would take care of my child and help me find another job. I froze my milk, labeled everything with notes, and gave her detailed instructions on timing and measurements. However, when my baby ended up in the hospital, I found out that she had thrown out all the milk and fed my baby expired formula instead. Even worse, she fed my baby peanuts behind my back, causing my baby to suffocate and die. Afterward, she wailed, "That was my granddaughter! How could I not care? If I could, I'd die with her..." My husband slapped me, shouting, "My mom worked so hard to take care of the child, and you want to drive her to her death? She's an old woman. It's not easy for her!" My sister-in-law came over too, calling me ungrateful and blaming me for treating an elderly woman badly. She claimed I deserved to be childless and alone. However, they did not know how many times I had stopped my mother-in-law from causing trouble and harm to them. I was driven to depression by them and eventually sent to a mental institution, where I was tortured to death. If I had the chance to do it again, I would protect my child and myself and stop preventing my mother-in-law from causing chaos for others. I would watch her bring equal destruction to each one of them!

Despite a decade of marriage, Simon never once shared my bed, claiming that he had pledged himself to ascetic practices and that it was beneath him. I thought that he suffered from some shameful ailment and guarded his secret like a devoted fool, until my birthday, when I came home to find him entangled with a brothel worker before the floor-length mirror. When I lunged forward in rage, he drove a shard of that broken mirror straight through my heart. When I awoke, I was gripping my phone, its screen illuminating a message Simon had just sent: [I’ll still give you a lavish wedding, but the marriage certificate? That belongs to her.]