She Killed Me at Christmas. I Came Back. Chapter 09

She Killed Me at Christmas. I Came Back. Chapter 09

Stay with me. Look at me-stay with me. You don’t get to die like this.

The last voice I ever heard in my first life belonged to a paramedic with steady hands and furious eyes,

fighting for me on a farmhouse floor long after everyone else had decided I wasn’t worth saving.

I met Dr. Nathan Reyes at a coffee shop two days later, hands wrapped around a cup I couldn’t taste.

He was exactly as I remembered, which should have been impossible-I’d only ever seen him through a film of blood and darkness. Tall, tired-eyed, a county-hospital badge still clipped to his jacket like he’d come straight

off shift.

He sat down, didn’t touch his coffee, and stared at me for a long moment.

“This is going to sound insane,” he said again.

“Try me. I have a high bar for insane.”

He exhaled. “I worked a Christmas shift three weeks ago and treated a peanut anaphylaxis-your ex, apparently. But the moment I saw you in that waiting room, I-” He rubbed his jaw. “I remembered you. From a call that never happened. A farmhouse. A woman beaten so badly we- His voice frayed. “I did CPR for forty minutes. The family stood there saying she’d brought it on herself, and I wanted to burn the place down. I’ve had that dream every night for a year. Then you walked into my ER. Alive. Same face. Same name on the

intake form.”

The coffee shop noise faded to a hum.

He remembered. Some echo of my first life had followed him through, the way it had followed me-and, I was beginning to suspect, the way it had followed Grant into his nightmares.

“It wasn’t a dream,” I said quietly.

I told him everything. The shrimp. The fire. The wine. The locked door that wasn’t. I watched a doctor with a

decade of emergency medicine behind him turn gray, then furious, then very, very still.

“The people who did that,” he said finally. “Where are they now?”

“Married.” I smiled thinly. “To,each other. I arranged the venue, in a sense.”

“And?”

“And nothing illegal,” I said. “I don’t break laws, Dr. Reyes. I just… remove safety nets. People fall all on their

own.”

→ ·43 Coy’ He studied me for a long moment. I waited for the judgment, the let it go, the speech I’d heard from every”. well-meaning person in two lifetimes.

Instead he said: “Forty minutes of CPR. I held your heart in rhythm with my own hands and lost you anyway.” He pushed his coffee aside and leaned forward. “Whatever you’re doing-do I get to watch?”

Something in my chest, some frozen machinery two lifetimes old, clicked and turned over.

“You can buy me dinner first,” I heard myself say.

Meanwhile, across town, the dominoes I’d set in motion were tipping in beautiful sequence.

Grant, unemployable and drowning in loan payments, had been “discovered” by a friendly new acquaintance- a charming man who knew a poker game where a guy with Grant’s obvious talent could make back everything he’d lost. The first three nights, Grant won. He won big.

He was meant to.

By February, he’d stopped winning. By March, he owed the table more than he’d ever owed the bank, and the

table did not send polite letters.

Brynn, who had married a “Meridian executive” and woken up next to a blacklisted gambler in a condo facing foreclosure, adjusted with the elegance I’d come to expect from her. My investigator’s photos arrived weekly: Brynn at a bar downtown, laughing with a man who wore a better watch than Grant ever had. Brynn letting the man drive her home. Brynn, three weeks later, quietly visiting a clinic-and walking out with prenatal vitamins.

One month pregnant. The math on the calendar was… flexible.

I spread the photos across my desk like tarot cards and felt nothing but a vast, clean patience.

In my last life, no one had investigated my death. No one had checked the wine glass, questioned the locked

door, doubted the grieving “little sister” with her perfect tears.

This life, I documented everything.

Then my investigator called, voice tight.

“Ms. Calloway-you wanted alerts on the wife’s movements. She just emptied the last of Whitlock’s accounts.

Eight grand-all he’s got left. She’s got a bag packed and a bus ticket.”

I looked out my office window at the city lights for a long, quiet moment.

“Has Grant been told?”

“Not yet. Should he be?”

In my last life, Brynn told a room full of people I’d invited my killers into my bed. She watched my parents/ collapse and smiled through her tears.

“Yes,” I said. “Tell him exactly where to find her.”