She Killed Me at Christmas. I Came Back. Chapter 08

She Killed Me at Christmas. I Came Back. Chapter 08

Grant found out he was fired the day after Christmas-via email, copied to HR, effective immediately, citing “restructuring.”

I know because he called me forty-one times that day.

I know because on day three, he showed up at my building, unshaven, wild-eyed, and got exactly as far as the lobby before security-who had his photo, courtesy of me-walked him back out into the cold.

On day seven, he caught me outside my office, having clearly rehearsed in the mirror.

“Sloane.” Contrite voice. Calculating eyes-he never could fix the eyes. “I was confused over the holidays. The

money, the stress-I wasn’t myself. I made mistakes.” He reached for my hand. “Let’s start over. Let’s get back

together.”

I stepped back and looked at him the way you look at gum on your shoe.

“No.”

“Babe-”

“Let me be precise, since precision seems hard for your family.” I kept my voice flat, pleasant, HR-friendly.

“You’re trash, Grant. You were trash when I met you; I was just too in love to smell it. You let that woman hurt

me over and over and called it my fault every time. You’re not getting the job back. You’re not getting me back.

Contact me again and I file a harassment report, and given who my lawyers are, you really, really don’t want

that.”

His mask slid off all at once, and underneath was something ugly that I recognized-the face from my last

life, the face that had stood at my memorial and called me a liar.

“The firing was you,” he hissed. “Wasn’t it? You vindictive-you’ll regret this, Sloane. I swear to God you’ll

regret this.”

“Send my regards to Brynn,” I said, and walked inside.

That afternoon, I made a few calls. The Calloway name opens doors; it closes them even faster. By Friday. Grant Whitlock’s résumé was radioactive at every firm in the city worth working for. The interviews he’d lined up evaporated, one by one, with polite form rejections.

No job. No references. Four hundred thousand in debt, with the bank circling his condo.

Then it got better.

A month later, my assistant slid her phone across my desk, eyebrows raised. “You’ll want to see this.”

A wedding announcement. Grant Whitlock and Brynn Hadley. Courthouse ceremony.

The story filtered back through Whitlock family gossip, which travels faster than light: Patty had demanded Brynn’s family compensate for the burned cash. Brynn’s mother, never one to miss an angle, had offered her daughter instead-she burned your son’s bride money, so she comes free. And Grant, broke, blacklisted, and desperate for one single human being who still looked at him like he mattered, agreed within the week.

The arsonist married the ashes. There was a kind of poetry to it.

On their wedding day, Brynn sent me a photo. Her in a courthouse hallway in a white sundress, Grant’s arm

around her, both grinning like lottery winners.

“Thanks SO much, Sloane!! If it weren’t for you I never could’ve married a wonderful man like Grant. Some

women just don’t know what they have ”

I looked at that photo for a long moment.

In my last life, this woman drugged my wine. Reminded me-sweetly-to get some rest. And sent men into my room while my fiancé slept down the hall.

I typed back a single line:

“You’re so welcome. You two deserve each other-completely, totally, until death.”

Then I deleted the thread, blocked the number, and opened a different contact list. The quiet one. The one

with my family’s fixer, a private investigator, and an old acquaintance who ran a very friendly, very predatory poker game out of a back room downtown.

Brynn thought the game was over. Grant thought the worst had happened.

Neither of them understood that I hadn’t come back from the dead to break up with a man.

I’d come back to collect a debt.

Two lives’ worth.

My phone buzzed one more time-an unknown number, a voice message. I pressed play, expecting Grant.

It wasn’t.

“Ms. Calloway? This is Dr. Nathan Reyes-county hospital, from Christmas. You left something in the ER waiting room. I’ve… actually been trying to find you for a month. There’s something I need to tell you, and it’s going to sound insane.”

My blood went cold.

That voice.

I knew that voice-not from this life.

From the night I died.