REBORN TO RUIN HIM: The CEO Thought He Buried Me

The last thing I remember from my first life is the sound of a pen scratching paper. Not a scream. Not a prayer. Not even the beeping of a monitor flatlining. Just the quiet, bureaucratic scratch of Damien Cole signing our divorce papers on the other side of a hospital door while I lay in the bed where I had just been told that our son — our small, barely-formed, never-took-a-single-breath son — was gone. That is how my first life ended. Not with a bang. With a pen. And then I woke up here. The first thing I notice is the smell of rain on hot pavement. I know this smell. I have stood in this exact spot before — not in any spiritual, metaphorical sense, but literally, physically, on this particular cracked square of sidewalk outside St. Agnes Church on the corner of Meridian and Fifth, in the city of Crestholm, on a Thursday afternoon in late October — and I have breathed in this exact combination of wet concrete and chrysanthemums from the florist across the street and exhaled it back out again. I know this moment. I am twenty-three years old. The wedding is in three years. The divorce is in eight. The grief is five years and one hospital bed away — and I am standing in the rain with my purse held over my head like a very small and deeply inadequate umbrella, and I am alive. For a full thirty seconds I just stand there. Getting rained on. Processing. Okay, I think. Okay. This is happening. My internal monologue, I should warn you, has never been particularly calm. In my first life it was a low-frequency hum of anxiety and self-doubt. Apparently death and rebirth have upgraded it to something more like a talk radio station where every host is me and all the shows are about chaos management. You died, the Radio says. You came back. You are standing outside a church which is relevant because you are going to want to thank someone or yell at someone, probably both. What are we doing? "I have no idea," I say out loud. A woman walking past with a small dog gives me the look that Crestholm residents reserve for people talking to themselves on public streets — not unkind, just deeply unsurprised, the way you look at something that is someone else's problem. The dog, at least, seems interested. I appreciate the dog. I lower my purse from over my head. My curls are soaked. My blouse is the pale yellow one I bought from the discount rack at Marta's on Fifth in the autumn of my twenty-third year because it was three dollars and I was surviving on barista wages and dignity — and I remember this blouse. I remember the small thread pulling at the left shoulder seam. I remember that I wore it to the church because Crystal said yellow was my color and I believed her because in my first life I believed almost everything Crystal told me. In my first life. I turn that phrase over in my head. In my first life. Past tense. Completed. Filed. First — which implies there is a second. There is, apparently, a second. A slow, extremely strange thing happens inside my chest. It feels like the moment before you laugh at something that is not entirely funny — a pressure, a release. I press both hands flat against my sternum like I'm checking that my heart is still in the right place. It is. It is beating very fast, and it is in the right place, and I am twenty-three years old with a second life opened up in front of me like a blank document, and I have the memory of every mistake I ever made and the exact knowledge of every catastrophe that is coming — and something in me decides, very cleanly, very quietly, the way big decisions sometimes land: Not this time. Not the marriage that wasn't really a marriage. Not the five years of quietly swallowing humiliation in a house that was never mine. Not the mother-in-law who smiled while she sharpened her words. Not the best friend who held my hand with one hand and passed my secrets to my husband with the other. Not the baby. I breathe. In and out. The rain is slowing. Not the baby, I tell myself again, and I let the weight of that rest on me for exactly thirty seconds — I count them — because I am allowed to feel it. I am allowed to carry it. What I am not allowed to do is let it make me small again. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty. Done. File it. Move. I am standing outside St. Agnes because, in my original timeline, I was here to attend the engagement party of an old university acquaintance — a forgettable event I was invited to because Crystal knew the bride and dragged me along, and it was at this engagement party that I first saw Damien Cole in a social context rather than the two business-adjacent encounters we'd had before, and something inside my idiotic twenty-three-year-old heart had decided that his distant, complicated stare meant depth rather than, you know, emotional unavailability. He is inside that church right now. He is wearing the charcoal suit — the one that costs more than three months of my rent. His hair is doing the thing it always does which is everything it wants without asking anyone's permission. He is standing by the east window holding a glass of sparkling water he has not touched, watching the room with those grey eyes that I spent five years trying to get to look at me the way they apparently looked at everybody else. I know this because I lived it. I walked in, Crystal introduced us, Damien looked at me, and I thought: Oh. Oh no. The Oh no was warranted. I just misread the reason. What I thought was: Oh no, I might be falling for this man. What it actually was: Oh no, this man is going to break something in you that takes years to fix. I was right both times. I just didn't know it yet. I do now. I take a breath of rain-scrubbed October air. I do a very quick mental inventory: Things I have right now: A second life. A memory that covers the next eight years in significant detail. The yellow blouse with the pulling seam. My purse, which contains my bank card (eleven dollars and some change — we were broke in my first life, I will not pretend otherwise), my house keys, my phone, and a lip balm I found in the pocket lining that I had genuinely forgotten existed. Things I need: A plan. Possibly dry clothes. Coffee. Immediately. Things I am walking into that building to do: Nothing that my first-life self did. That last one is important. The engagement party is not what matters tonight. What matters is that Damien Cole is in that building, and the very first moment of our very first real interaction is about to happen, and I have the extraordinary gift of knowing — unlike every other twenty-three-year-old who has ever stood outside a venue convincing herself she's fine — exactly what comes next. In my first life, I walked in nervous. I let Crystal lead. I smiled too eagerly when Damien looked at me. I leaned in when I should have leaned back, and I gave away the first advantage before I even knew I was playing a game. This time. I straighten. I pull my soaking curls up into something that my mother would call "intentional disarray" and everyone else would call "woman who chose this look on purpose." I take the lip balm out of my purse and apply it. I square my shoulders. I walk in.