The Day I Died Twice Chapter 01

The Day I Died Twice Chapter 01

They said I drowned my own daughter.

My husband wept on national television. My mother collapsed at the funeral and never opened her eyes again. My father drove off a bridge trying to reach her.

And I died in a prison cell, screaming a truth that not one person believed.

Then my eyes opened—and it was the morning of the day it all began.

I was standing in my own kitchen. Sunlight streamed through the window I’d later watched them board up after they seized my house. My hands were young again, smooth, no prison ink, none of the scars from the nights I’d raked my nails down the walls.

I’d been reborn.

“Mommy, can we go to the lake today?” My daughter’s voice.

I turned, and there she was. Mabel. Six years old, gap-toothed, alive, dangling her stuffed rabbit by one ear.

In my last life, she drowned at that lake.

In my last life, the police said I’d held her under the water.

I sank to my knees and crushed her against me until she squeaked. I breathed in her smell of shampoo and grass stains and felt my whole chest split open.

“No, baby,” I whispered into her hair. “We are not going anywhere near that lake. Not today. Not ever.”

—

“But Daddy already said—”

I went cold.

Daddy already said.

There it was. This was the morning. The morning my husband, Nathaniel, had insisted we drive Mabel to the family lake house for a “fresh start.” The morning every piece was already moving.

In my previous life, I’d been so thankful that he wanted to mend our marriage that I never thought to ask why he’d booked the trip out of nowhere. Never asked why his assistant, Marissa, just happened to be staying at the cabin next door. Never asked why the nanny had been given the day off.

I’d spent a year in a courtroom and the rest of my short life behind bars asking those very questions.

Now I had the answers before the questions were ever spoken.

“Mabel,” I said carefully. “Where’s Daddy right now?”

“On the phone.” She pointed toward his study. “He’s been on the phone the whole morning. He used his quiet voice.”

His quiet voice. The one he saved for Marissa.

I rose, smoothed my daughter’s hair, and made myself smile a smile that didn’t tremble. “Go watch your cartoons, okay? Mommy needs to talk to Daddy.”

—

She skipped away, and I walked toward the study on legs that still remembered how to run from this man.

The door stood ajar. His voice slid through the gap, low and warm—a tenderness he hadn’t aimed at me in years.

“Don’t worry. By tonight it’ll be done. She won’t see it coming.”

My blood turned to ice water.

He wasn’t talking about a business deal.

He was talking about me.

I flattened my back against the wall, my heart hammering, and a single thought cut through the fear:

This time, I know how the story ends. And this time, I’m going to rewrite it.

The study door swung open.

Nathaniel stood there, smiling his perfect, expensive smile.

“Morning, sweetheart,” he said. “All packed for the lake?”