Reborn For Revenge: 150 Days With The Billionaire

The dress was secondhand. I want you to know that first, before anything else. Before the penthouse and the fairy lights and the way Manhattan looked that night like someone had spilled a jar of gold across the dark. Before all of it — I want you to know about the dress. It was ivory, off the shoulder, with a small tear along the left seam that I'd sewn back together with thread that was two shades too white. I'd found it at a consignment store on Junction Boulevard for fourteen dollars and I'd spent three evenings at the kitchen table remaking it until my mother stood in the doorway of our tiny Queens apartment and pressed both hands to her mouth. "Elena," she said. Just that. Just my name broken in half by feeling. That was four hours before I died. Dale sent a car. Of course he did. That was the thing about Dale Harrington — he didn't do anything small. The car was black and long and the driver held the door open without making me feel like he was doing me a favor, which was the kind of detail that Dale understood mattered. He'd grown up around people who made other people feel small without even trying. He'd decided early, I think, that he wasn't going to be one of them. That was what I loved first about him. Not the face — though God, the face — and not the money, which I'd actively tried to be suspicious of. It was the way he noticed things. The way he remembered that I took my coffee with too much sugar and that I hated when people used speakerphone in public and that the one time someone at school made a comment about my uniform he'd gone very quiet in a way that had made that person deeply regret existing. He noticed me. In a school full of people who had been noticed their whole lives, Dale Harrington looked at me like I was the first interesting thing he'd seen in years. I know how that sounds now. I know. But I was eighteen and I loved him and it was prom night and the car smelled like leather and cold air and I sat in the back with my repaired dress pooled around me like something precious and I thought — I actually thought — this is the beginning of everything. This is the begining of something new. Atleast this time I would have enough time for myself and him. The penthouse was on the thirty-eighth floor of a building on Central Park West that had a name and a doorman and an elevator that required a key. Dale was waiting when I stepped out. Black suit, no tie, hair pushed back from his face. He looked at me the way he sometimes did — like he was trying to figure out how I existed — and then he crossed to me and took my hand and said, "You look incredible." "Fourteen dollars," I told him. He laughed. "What?" "The dress. Fourteen dollars and three evenings with a needle and thread." He shook his head and looked at me again, differently. "Elena." "Dale." "You're the only person I know who would tell me that." "You should know more people like me." He kissed my cheek and led me out to the terrace and for a little while — maybe forty minutes, maybe a lifetime, it's hard to know now — everything was exactly what I'd wanted it to be. The terrace wrapped around the top of the building like a crown. The skyline doing what the New York skyline does at night — showing off. A small group of classmates with champagne glasses. Music low enough to talk over. The kind of night that feels like a movie while you're in it. I remember standing at the east railing with a glass of sparkling water — I didn't drink, another thing that made me different in that crowd — looking out at the city and thinking about my mother. Which is why I stepped away to call her. I moved to the far end of the terrace, away from the music and the voices, to a quieter stretch of railing where I could hear. She picked up on the second ring. "Mija. How is it?" "Beautiful, Mami. It's really beautiful." "And the dress?" "They don't know it's fourteen dollars." She laughed — that big, full Rosa Voss laugh that came from somewhere deep and took up the whole room even over a phone. "Dale? He is treating you good?" "He's treating me good." "You tell him I said he better." "I'll tell him." A pause. Warm and quiet. Then: "I'm proud of you, baby. You know that? You walked into that school and you didn't let it change what you are. That's harder than it sounds." My throat pulled tight. "I know, Mami." "Okay. Go enjoy. Call me when you're on your way home." "I will. I love you." "I love you more. Always more." I hung up and stood for a moment with the phone pressed to my chest, looking at the city, feeling full in the way you only feel when someone who loves you says the right thing at the right time. Then I heard footsteps behind me. I turned, expecting Dale. It was Mia. Mia Santos, who I had known since we were eleven years old. Who sat beside me in seventh grade when I was the new kid and nobody wanted to share a lunch table. Who cried at my grandmother's funeral even though she'd only met her twice. Who I had told everything — every secret, every fear, every feeling I'd ever had about Dale from the very first moment I noticed him noticing me. My best friend. She was wearing red. Her hair was up. She looked beautiful and she looked — different. That's the word I keep coming back to. Different. The face I had known for seven years was arranged into an expression I had never seen on it before. All the warmth was gone. The performance of warmth was gone. What was underneath it was flat and cold and decided. "Mia." I smiled, confused. "Hey, what are you — you okay?" She didn't answer right away. She walked toward me slowly and stopped about three feet away and looked at me the way you look at a problem you've finally decided how to solve. "He doesn't love you," she said. I blinked. "What?" "Dale." Her voice was completely even. "He doesn't love you. He never did. You were something to do. A curiosity. A girl from Queens who was different enough to be interesting for a while." She tilted her head. "That while is over." I stared at her. "Mia, what is happening right now?" "He asked me to handle it." She cut through me like she hadn't heard me speak. "Make you understand that you don't belong here. That this world isn't yours and it was never going to be." A small pause. "I'm handling it." My stomach immediately tightened. Not because I believed her, I didn't, not about Dale, not yet, my brain wasn't moving fast enough for that. But because of her face. Because of the way she was spilling the words. I took a step back. My hip hit the railing. "Mia." My voice was careful now. "Let's go inside and talk, okay? Whatever this is—" "There's nothing to talk about." She took one step forward. "You were never supposed to be here, Elena. You were never supposed to be any of this." I opened my mouth. Her hands hit my back. I want to tell you there was more time. That I had a moment to grab the railing, to scream, to do something. I want to tell you the fall was slow. It wasn't. One second I was standing on a terrace in a secondhand ivory dress. The next second the railing was behind me and the city was in front of me and the only thing between me and thirty-eight floors of Manhattan air was nothing at all. I didn't scream. There wasn't time. What I remember and I know this sounds impossible but it is the precise truth is sound. From above me, from the terrace I was no longer on, I heard laughter. Two voices tangled together, high and low. Mia's voice. And Dale's. That was the last thing I knew before the dark took me. His laugh. The dark was not nothing. I want to be clear about that because nothing would have been easier. Nothing would have been a straight line from the railing to the end and that would have been the whole story. This was not nothing. This was a space — thick and lightless but present, with a texture to it, like the moment between sleeping and waking stretched out to an impossible length. No pain. No sound. No edges. Just a dim awareness that I existed somewhere even though I had no body to exist in. I don't know how long I was there. Long enough to forget what my own hands looked like. Long enough to forget, in pieces, what my own name sounded like. And then. I felt the harsh cold against my skin. The smell of something clean and expensive. A heartbeat. Loud and insistent and not mine. I gasped. Not a gentle waking-up gasp. My chest heaved. My eyes shot open.