Part I

The halls at North Ridge High smelled like pencil shavings, old radiators, and cafeteria pizza—exactly the perfume you’d expect for a building that had outlived three principals and a roof replacement. Kids were already crowding the doorway to AP Calc, jockeying for the middle rows where it was easy to disappear into the slope of the room. I didn’t bother. I cut a line to the far back corner, where the chipped paint curled from the cinderblock and one fluorescent tube buzzed like a hornet that had lost its way.

On the way in, Hannah Voss—hair in a practiced messy bun, voice just loud enough to carry—blocked the threshold with a smile that didn’t touch her eyes.

“You look pale, Lily,” she sang. “If you’re ill, go get treatment.”

I walked past her without breaking stride. The door clicked behind me, closing out whatever punchline she’d hoped would trail me to my seat. It was eight in the morning, and I was already done playing nice.

Juniper “June” Chen was already at her desk three rows up. She turned and studied me the way a hawk studies something it hopes is both small and alive—her gaze flicking, measuring, hunting meaning in a blink. She’d done that since elementary school, as if she could force me to flinch with her eyes. Today I gave her nothing, just the flat look you give a hallway mirror.

No one in that room knew the corner seat was the safest place to hold a life together. You face the door. You keep walls at your back. You count the breaths between the flicker and the hum of the bad light and pretend that sound is a kind of company. You make the room choose whether to come to you.

I pulled my hoodie tighter and slid into the desk. The wood had been carved with generations of panic: initials, hearts, a crude rocket ship. My fingers found the grooves automatically. My brain did what it always does when a room closes around me: it left.

In my first life, I was the miracle kid. The Chen family adopted me at seven and paraded me through church, through the neighborhood, through back-to-school night with the modest pride of people who wanted very much to be seen doing right. “Two teachers,” everyone would say, warm with envy. “A house full of books. Think of the opportunities.”

In the daylight, the Chens were a brochure. At night, the house wrote its real brochure in small print and hid it in the pantry.

I learned the inventory by heart: workbooks stacked like bricks, word problems from a grade I hadn’t reached, red ink that bled through pages and into skin. If I solved all the extras, I ate. If I didn’t, I didn’t. That rule was whispered, never spoken, and it worked better than any shouted threat. Under my shirts, I wore a quiet country of bruises that never finished healing. When their days went bad, I went to the storage room—five feet by eight, no window, the bulb always unscrewed because darkness teaches faster than light. The longest stretch I ever timed by the sound of the neighbor’s dryer vent came to two days and a night.

That room taught me to love a sliver of light the way thirsty people love rain. It taught my body to stand awake when lights went out. It taught me to study because my stomach learned math faster than my head.

I didn’t fight much in those years. At nine, you don’t have a vocabulary for injustice. You have a forked choice: comply or disappear. I complied. I made their charts glow with stars. I learned where to stand during dinner so their anger found each other before it found me. I promised myself that if I ever got free, I’d leave nothing left for them to own.

I made good on that promise the first life’s senior fall. I gathered proof—grades doctored where they wanted their names on my work, emails with colleagues laughing about “drill sergeant parenting,” a furious text from Mrs. Chen about the “pitiful” dinner she refused me because my test percentile dipped to a ninety-two. I waited for the right moment, lined up my dates, booked a time with a pro bono attorney who said words like “viable” and “statute.” One day before I planned to file, June Chen caught me in the crosswalk and didn’t touch the brakes.

By then she’d learned to weaponize a pretty face and a trembling lip. “I didn’t see you,” she said from behind the steering wheel, eyes filming with a practiced shine. “Oh my God, Lily, I didn’t see you.” In the ambulance I could hear her crying. Somewhere beneath that, I could hear her laughing.

People like to say time is a flat circle. I can tell you: sometimes it’s a trapdoor.

The second life dropped me into the world like a coin into a new machine. I came to in a bed with white sheets that smelled like lemon and heat—at the Lowell house, south of town where the map rolls into farms and the sky finally remembers it’s bigger than rooflines. They’d adopted me. They were not saints. They were not cinematic. They were better: practical, tired, good at showing up. Mr. Lowell ran the warehouse for a mid-size shipping company and used jokes the way some men use hammers. Mrs. Lowell taught nursing at the community college, hands always warm from the sanitizer that slicked between classes. Their son, Cole, was a year older, a quiet light in a quiet boy with a stare that read rooms the way weather reads trees.

There’s a rumor that rich families buy children like rugs to soften their floors. The Lowells did not do that. They gave me a bed and a shelf and asked if I liked toast. At first I waited for the rules—solve pages, earn protein—and studied their eyes for the disappointment that means you remind them of their worst days. It never came. Mrs. Lowell asked if AP Bio looked fun. Mr. Lowell asked if I minded dogs. Cole asked if the overhead light bothered me at night. I told him yes, and we left the hall lamp on with the door cracked just enough to paint a line onto my carpet. That sliver of light made a room into a world.

Living with Cole was like learning a language my heart already knew. He had the kind of face that made boys say “stoic” and girls say “beautiful” and the rest of the world say “indifferent.” The diagnosis came later: alexithymia—trouble recognizing and describing emotions. “Emotional apathy,” someone called it once, like he’d been born in a coat he couldn’t take off. The doctor told his parents, “Routine will be his friend. So will medication. So will companionship.” The Lowells had one child. Biology said there’d be no more. The orphanage was the next good idea.

Mrs. Lowell admitted later she’d gone to that room intending to meet a different girl—the one with the pink barrettes and a personality like confetti. “But when I looked at her,” she told me one night over a sink full of dishes, “there was a wall in her eyes. A hard no. When I looked at you, there was a window. And I thought: I can work with a window.”

We didn’t become a family fast. We did it the slow way, like you season a skillet and one day realize nothing sticks anymore. Cole went from “don’t call me your brother” to “try it and see what happens” to, finally, “From now on, you can only call me your brother.” When he said it, it wasn’t a command. It was a vow he’d trained his mouth a year to make.

If this were a simple story, the Chens would fade into the rearview and the worst thing that would happen at North Ridge would be a parking ticket. But evil doesn’t give up because you moved. It rebrands.

June watched me in class the way she’d watched me since kindergarten—jealousy welded to desperation. Elementary school never made her sweat. Middle school turned up the heat. High school baked what was left. People blamed hormones, attitude, the internet. I blame hunger—the kind that isn’t for food.

By junior year, she’d gone gray around the edges, the healthy roundness of a child traded for the sharp angles of a clenched jaw. She scraped Cs and looked at my As like a person looks at window displays when the store is closed. The Chens loosened their grip just enough to keep the neighbors from calling anyone. People say teachers are kinder to their own. I say nothing saves you from people who need you to vindicate their worldview.

I didn’t plan to see June after graduation. The world is big. The future is bigger. The Lowells stood with me at the entrance to the testing site in June, the whole family—a wall of denim and sincerity—and wished me the kind of luck you give to people who don’t need it but merit it anyway. I finished the last math section with time to spare and the kind of clarity that feels like oxygen. When I stepped into the sun, reporters were there—local paper, station with the smiling meteorologist. “Top scorer,” someone was saying into a camera, “headed to State with a full ride.” The Lowells pulled me into a photo they’d frame whether it ran or not. Through the crowd, I saw June lift her hand. Not a wave. A flare.

Given her transcript, her path and mine shouldn’t ever cross again. But cruelty is ambitious. I told the Lowells I’d meet them at the car and walked back toward June.

She looked like a bad night had met a worse morning: dark moons under her eyes, cheeks hollowed by either stress or performance. For a brittle second, her face doubled—in my memory behind a wheel and in front of me now, both versions twisted by a venom she thought was power.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, level as a carpenter’s tool.

“How dare you live so happily?” she hissed. “You should have died with Mom and Dad. How dare you steal my life? Those are my Dad Lowell and my Mom Lowell.”

She lifted her arm, the slap cocked like a promise. My body remembered the storage room. I covered my forearm where the old scar hid like a country on a faded map. I didn’t flinch. I was ready to wear the mark and show it to the camera.

Her hand didn’t land. A taller shadow slipped between us—straight-backed, green-eyed, hair like a field cut clean. Cole. He took her wrist in a grip so gentle it humiliated the force of her swing. His voice, when it came, was cold enough to freeze a fire.

“What are you doing?”

She wrenched free, shock cutting through her mask. “You—Brother—you’re taking her side?”

Cole let out a sound that might have been a laugh in a different life. “She’s my sister,” he said, and the word settled in the courtyard like snow. “If I don’t help her, am I supposed to help you?”

June’s face folded into itself, scrambling. “I’m your sister,” she said. “Cole, I’m June—”

That name rattled him. For a second, something memory-dark crossed his face. Even shaken, he didn’t let go of me. He turned, angled his shoulder so I was behind it, and said, “Lily, let’s go. There’s something dirty here.”

We walked. The sun was brutal in the best way. It made every lie sweat.

June’s “Mom and Dad” were my biological parents. Back before the storage room, before the orphanage, before the other names, there had been a small house with linoleum that curled at the corners and a front step Dad had promised to fix every Sunday but never did. They were shift workers, but they came home with cake sometimes—a small box, two slices balanced in tissue. Mom braided our hair on the couch, two mirrors on our laps so we could watch the braids appear like ropes of magic. There were two yellow dresses that were really one yellow dress twice—mine first, then, when I grew, hers.

The shift started slow, the way anything awful starts when it wants gloved hands. June had a sugar tongue and a talent for flattery that doesn’t look like flattery until you’re counting what you gave away. “Make her cake,” Mom would say, pinning me with a look that made the kitchen into a test. “Be a good big sister.” Dad would come home with two slices and let both fall into June’s lap like a favor she’d already earned. “She’s little,” he’d say when I stood in the doorway learning how not to cry. “What’s wrong with giving in a little? She’s adorable.” The way he said adorable made plain he believed I was not.

One afternoon when I was five, June wanted to play “princess and maid.” It was her favorite. It requires a monarch, a servant, and a kitchen that isn’t built for either. “The maid must bake for the princess,” she declared, waving a bald doll like a scepter. Mom and Dad liked games that taught me to obey. I climbed onto a stool to reach the stove. The gas complained. The smell crawled into my throat. I stood there a long time, afraid of a knob. June came in, doll tucked under her arm, a mist of Mom’s perfume in the air like she was trying to baptize the room into sweetness.

I didn’t know how to light the burner. That was the truth and I said it out loud. “Mom,” I called, carefully. “I don’t know how.”

She rolled her eyes the way exhaustion learns to roll. “We’ve shown you. Don’t be dramatic.” Dad wandered in, muttering, “Kitchen’s dangerous,” looking for June so she wouldn’t be the one to get burned.

So they knew. They knew and they let me stand on the stool anyway.

I stepped out to breathe. As I turned, I saw a glow in the microwave window—one of those kids’ sticker dolls inside, ugly dress, hair wrecked, a little note taped to it where letters were trying to be my name. I took three steps toward the living room to say the thing that might save us and that’s when the kitchen exploded.

Later, I would replay that second, slowing it until every molecule had a motive. Dad lunged for June, his shirt becoming fire. He shoved her through the doorway and it was my hand that found hers and tugged, and together we ran until the neighbor sprayed the black and the sirens carried the rest. Mom didn’t come out. Dad didn’t either.

People tell you shock is like a wall. For me, it felt like the first clean breath after a summer of heat. I was six and my future had swallowed its tongue. I am not a good child, I told myself, and half believed it.

At the orphanage, June said the line she’d say for years: “You killed them.” She said it with the conviction of someone who had learned early that insistence can pass as truth. I believed her. I didn’t eat so she could. I gave her coats that would be too big on me and watched them fit her fine. I braided her hair first. I learned to be an older sister the way you learn to be gravity: by holding the weight no one else wants.

Then the Lowells came. And everything rerouted.

The celebration the Lowells threw the summer the test results came out was small and perfect. Not a yard full of strangers. Not a circus. Just four people who’d earned the right to clap for each other. They invited the Chens because they believed some ties are worth tidying, and because my file still said “sister” where June’s name lived. They imagined a moment in which June would find her pride and staple it to my success. They were wrong.

At the restaurant, with the string lights doing their best to glow like a thousand tiny moons, the Chens arrived with their Sunday faces on. My palms went damp. I didn’t need a mirror to know I’d gone pale. Cole saw it instantly. He took my hand—warm, human, solid—and led me toward his parents with a steadiness that tuned the whole room.

We’d just reached Mr. and Mrs. Lowell when a sound cut the air like a dropped brick. Everyone turned. A girl knelt three yards away, like a supplicant in a cathedral. It was June.

The cheer in the room turned fragile, then strange. Mr. Lowell’s jaw tensed. Mrs. Lowell’s smile fell and she reached for me like she could anchor me with fingers alone.

“What happened?” she whispered. “Lily, did someone hurt you?”

I shook my head, kept my voice low. “No. Cole…Cole took care of it.”

Mr. Lowell turned the full beam of a good man’s anger onto June. “Young lady,” he said, voice clean as a blade, “this is not the place to cause trouble.”

June lifted her face. She’d smoothed her hair more carefully than her story. She looked at Mr. Lowell with a practiced hope. “Dad,” she said. “I’m June. I’m your real daughter. Please save me. They’re going to beat me to death.”

The room rippled with whispers. People want to be present when blood reveals a secret. The Lowells—both parents and Cole—wore the same difficult expression people wear when an insult tries to borrow their name.

“Miss,” Mr. Lowell said, slow and careful, “you are surely Lily’s sister, June Chen. But you are not our daughter.”

Cole stepped in front of me fully now, shutting down the view like a curtain. “So you’re June,” he said, voice finding that dry valley it lives in when it needs to. “You’re the one who tried to hit your sister. And you thought you’d take her home now? That’s a new kind of daydream.”

June crumpled, then reassembled into something theatrical. The Chens came in late, sizing up the temperature like hosts who’d kept guests waiting on purpose. Mrs. Chen made a show of helping June to her feet, fingers pinching hard enough to leave crescents.

“June,” she clucked, “are the exams getting to you? Get up now. Today is your sister’s celebration.” Father Chen strode over wearing a gentleman’s apology. “This must be Lily,” he said to me with a small bow. “Our star student. We’re so proud. My daughter has caused you trouble. We’re strict, yes, but only because we want the best. What’s wrong with a little discipline? With pushing a child to her potential? If we lock a door once in a while, it’s only to keep her focused.”

Parents in the crowd nodded—complicit, relieved, choosing to hear the lie that lets them believe they’re still good.

I looked at June, and for a second I could see the storage room behind her eyes. I also saw the opening moves of a performance I’d seen before. She’d rolled her sleeves when she dropped to her knees, exposing a pale collection of bruises whose story she’d try to sell as proof. For a brief, unkind beat, I wanted to say out loud to the room that sometimes a bruise is the only way the world believes you. Then I remembered the night I’d promised myself to stop bleeding for other people’s tenderness.

I lowered my gaze and smiled the kind of smile that says you can only trick a person in the same way once.

You think a story ends because you change the names. It doesn’t. But it can bend.

By the time I unpacked at State, the Lowells had turned my dorm room into a magazine spread—lamp that cast a warm pool, quilts that made winter look like a rumor. Cole hauled boxes up three flights with me and didn’t complain. We went to different colleges but the same city. He studied Finance because numbers make sense when people don’t. I chose Physics because the universe is honest even when it’s confusing. When I told my roommates Cole was my brother, they squealed like girls who had just seen a movie star open a cafeteria door. He rolled his eyes and said he’d come back only if our mini-fridge didn’t smell like science.

I hadn’t gotten a dorm in my first life—another thing the Chens stole by moving near campus and calling it “family time.” This time I got the tiny freedoms the brochure promises: late-night noodles, the thunder of someone else’s playlist through the wall, the sacred rite of deciding with three strangers which cafeteria deserves lunch today. They brewed ginger tea for me when cramps made the world small. We traded coverage on days when class felt like a stone we couldn’t lift. We saved screenshots of the hottest senior in Engineering and pretended it didn’t matter that he didn’t know our names.

Happiness came like weather—slow, sudden, daily. Which is probably why it took me by surprise when storm found me again.

I was a sophomore when June reappeared on campus with Jason Grant’s arm looped through hers like she’d rented it for the day. I knew him from the papers—heir apparent to Grant Systems, a boy about town with a smile you could skate on and not a lot under the ice. Rumor made him a playboy; his lawyers made him bulletproof. “Long time no see, sis,” June said, voice sweet and sticky as a county fair lemonade. Jason’s eyes slid over me, cool, speculative, like someone pricing a table he might flip.

I turned away. Dignity is sometimes just not giving the performance what it craves.

“Jason helped me,” she called after me. “Termination of adoption. I’m free of the Chens.”

I paused. In my first life, I’d cut the cord with my own hands. I didn’t need a man with an unbuttoned collar to do it for me. “Congratulations,” I said, not turning. “On your next abyss.”

“Jason,” she whined behind me like a stage direction. “She’s a deadpan. I don’t want to see her on campus.”

The Grants were powerful, but power can’t bulldoze a good university without breaking its own neck. I joined the physics research team I’d drooled over in high school and earned the slot my transcript said I should. My advisor, Dr. Warren—a woman whose ponytail should have been illegal and whose brain could light a city—valued me for the thing no one had taught me to be: a thinker without fear. It would take more than a bored billionaire’s son to shake me from her lab.

Even so, one afternoon she stood in my doorway and studied me the way a senior scientist studies a result that shouldn’t be possible. “Did you offend someone?” she asked.

“Probably,” I said, and my face went cold with recognition.

She squeezed my shoulder. “You belong here. If anyone tries to make you feel otherwise, you tell me. I’m not suggesting you fight. I’m suggesting you let me.” I swallowed and nodded. Sometimes you survive alone because you have to. Sometimes you let someone else swing for you because they want to.

The day the Grant empire started to crack, campus phones lit up like a festival: Jason arrested on suspicion of organizing a prostitution ring. Hashtags stacked like cordwood: #RichKidsPlayDirty. #GrantUnderInvestigation. #NoOneUntouchable. The footage was grainy, pixelation painted morality onto a clip that needed none. In my first life, I’d been one of those blurred figures. In this one, I watched other women hide behind the mosaic and felt sick in a way no justice fixes.

Cole dropped onto the couch beside me, lazy as a cat, quiet as a freight train. “What are you looking at?” he asked, studying my face, not the screen.

“Nothing,” I lied, turning the phone over. “It’s your sister’s twentieth birthday,” he said, sliding a cake box onto the coffee table with a flourish that was only almost awkward. “Pick a wish.”

I closed my eyes. Let the stars and sea keep their promises. Let winter and summer be enough to carry us. I cut the cake into four equal pieces and handed one each to Mr. and Mrs. Lowell and to Cole. His eyes caught the candlelight and did something that made my lungs ache—a small warmth, a thaw after a long cold.

The Grants’ fall detonated across the news cycles. Then June was on the witness stand, hair glossy, voice trembling, telling the court and the world how Jason had deceived and drugged her, how she’d been swept into a club whose doors only looked like fun. The nation had not known one of the blurred women was June. Now it did.

“Victims are not at fault,” she said into a lens she’d learned to treat like a confessional. “I am a victim. But I will live in the sun.”

“Ma’am,” the judge said, face refusing the theater, “stick to what is relevant.”

June pivoted. She always does. She went live nightly, pulled millions of followers into a web woven from skillful omissions and pretty truths. Then one night she stepped into frame with a face like she’d used a hornet’s nest for a pillow.

“What happened?” comments blazed. “Did someone hit you?” She hesitated just long enough to get the money flowing in gifts, then smiled through the shimmer in her eyes. “Actually,” she said, “I have an older sister. I was cyberbullied after court. My name was trending. I get calls from strangers and messages that make me afraid. But I’m not the only one hurt. The Lowells have suffered.” She made my name a brand and my life a cautionary tale. She told our history backward and inside out. “My sister burned our parents to death at five,” she said. “She stole my adoption. I was raised like livestock. The scars you see are real. But I’m brave. I’ll live in the light.”

I watched from my bed, lights off, nausea curling my spine. She’d become smarter. That was the worst part. She’d learned that if you tell the first story well enough, the truth comes second and looks petty. If the Lowells defended me, we’d be birds of a feather. If I defended myself, I’d be a jealous sister.

Cole changed my SIM card and put a hand on my head the way he used to knock it, only softer. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

I tapped my knuckles lightly to his forehead in return. “I trust you,” I said. “But I’m keeping score. Every knock you ever gave me? It’s coming back with interest.”

When the lab’s heavy-ion project finally clicked, Dr. Warren cried. I did too. The announcement went out, and then her tweet: Proud of my student, Lily Lowell, and our team. Passion & rigor win. The Lowell Group reposted my own modest statement: If I’m guilty, let evidence speak. Their caption: We don’t allow our little princess to be slandered. Legal is ready. It was likely not authorized by the PR department. It was perfect.

The tide turned online. People with common sense kept it. Classmates of June’s spoke up—stories about locker-room tantrums, stolen homework, crying that had always seemed too loud. June shut down her accounts and went dark. The sky looked cleaner.

Cole started trailing me everywhere after that, claiming he needed steps for his watch. He’d leave the office to walk me to class, hover in the physics building lobby like a bodyguard on a budget. “Why are you following me?” I asked one afternoon, laughing despite the static in my chest.

He looked away, snorted, and didn’t answer. His feet did.

At the end of the year, the first snow came mean and sudden. It always does in our town. It was the anniversary of my first life’s end. We were two blocks from home, arms full of a grocery run we didn’t need but wanted—clementines, rosemary bread, the hot chocolate Mrs. Lowell pretends she doesn’t crave—when a car tore out of the side street with intent. I saw the driver’s face and time folded in half: June’s mouth, feral; her eyes, wrong; the world, white.

The impact was sound and light. I didn’t fly. Cole did. He wrapped me in a shape that made us both into a single thing and rolled us into the bushes so hard the breath left me like a word swallowed before it could hurt. “This time,” he said in my ear, voice low and even as a winter river, “I saved you.”

There will be other parts of this story—courtrooms that smell like old books, a glass partition in a county jail where June finally remembers a doll and a microwave and a note with my misspelled name, a conference room where the Lowells teach me how to hold a company’s weight without letting it crush me, a lab where I make stars in miniature because I can’t make them in the sky. There will be versions told by those of us who remember and those of us who refuse.

But for today, all you need to know is this: the corner seat will always be mine. Not because I’m hiding. Because I like to see the door. Because some lights hum and flicker and still count as light. Because I’m not afraid of the dark anymore, but I haven’t forgotten what it asks.

I used to measure time by the distance between the click of a lock and the turn of a knob. Now I measure it in inches of cake handed to people who clap when I cut it. In the slow delivery of a word like sister from a boy who took a year to say it. In the way a family can start as a routine and become a reason. In a sliver of light under a door that says you can sleep, I’ll keep watch.

I held that light for years. Now it holds me back.

Part III

The night of the banquet, the Lowell house buzzed with an energy I’d never felt in my first life. Strings of white lights had been hung across the living room windows, and Mrs. Lowell had insisted on baking three cakes “just in case.” Mr. Lowell had opened a bottle of wine older than I was, raising his glass to me before the first guest even walked through the door.

“This,” he said proudly, “is what happens when hard work meets opportunity.”

I smiled, but inside, my chest tightened. I knew celebration could draw shadows.

And sure enough, the shadows walked through the door an hour later.

The Chen family.

I hadn’t seen them since the adoption had been finalized years ago. Their faces were older, sharper, as though bitterness had been carved into their features. They walked in with the stiff politeness of people pretending at normalcy.

Mrs. Lowell had invited them, out of kindness. She still believed family ties, no matter how twisted, deserved some acknowledgement.

I wanted to argue, to beg her not to. But I didn’t. Because part of me wanted them to see what they could never break.

I stood near the piano, Cole at my side. He noticed my shoulders stiffen when the Chens entered. Without a word, he took my hand, his grip warm and grounding.

“Don’t let them steal this night,” he murmured.

I nodded, though my heart pounded like a drum.

The banquet went smoothly at first. Neighbors congratulated me, classmates gushed about State University, and reporters snapped photos. The Lowells introduced me proudly, each word another thread weaving me firmly into their family.

Then came the sound that cut through everything: a dull thud against the hardwood.

The room stilled. Heads turned.

And there, on her knees three yards away, was June.

The chatter died, replaced by an uneasy hum of whispers. Some guests looked amused, others uncomfortable, but all of them were watching.

Cole narrowed his eyes. “Is this the filthy thing that tried to hit you that day?” he asked, loud enough for the Lowells to hear.

My throat went dry. I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.

Mrs. Lowell hurried to me, pulling me close, her eyes sweeping over me as if to check for invisible injuries. “Lily, what happened? Were you hurt?”

I shook my head quickly. “No. Cole…he protected me.”

Mr. Lowell turned his glare on June. “Young lady,” he said sternly, “this is not the place for you to cause trouble.”

June lifted her head, hair falling messily across her face. Her eyes glistened with something between desperation and calculation.

“Dad,” she cried. “I’m June. I’m your real daughter. Please save me. They’re going to beat me to death.”

Gasps rippled through the crowd.

Mr. and Mrs. Lowell froze, disbelief hardening their expressions. Cole’s grip on my hand tightened until it almost hurt.

“Miss,” Mr. Lowell said firmly, “you are Lily’s sister. That much is true. But you are not our daughter.”

The words fell heavy, a door slamming shut.

June’s face twisted. She pushed herself to her feet, her knees wobbling. “Brother Cole,” she pleaded, stumbling forward. “I’m your sister! I’m June!”

Cole’s expression flickered, but he didn’t falter. He stepped forward, blocking me completely from view. “Lily is my sister. That’s all that matters.”

The venom in June’s glare could have poisoned the air.

The Chen couple entered then, their faces darkening at the scene. Mrs. Chen rushed to June’s side, fingers digging into her arm with more force than affection.

“June, the exams have been stressful,” she said loudly, smiling weakly at the crowd. “Come now, don’t make a scene. This is your sister’s celebration.”

June yanked her arm free, voice breaking as she shouted, “They adopted me and forced me to study! If I failed, they wouldn’t feed me. They hit me, locked me in the storage room with cockroaches! They’re not my parents! Lily, please—switch back with me. Please!”

Her tears fell in heavy drops, her thin frame trembling pitifully. Gasps filled the room again. For a moment, she almost looked convincing.

But I could see through it. Her hatred burned just beneath the mask, too strong to hide.

Father Chen’s apologetic smile spread like oil. “This must be Lily, our star student. Such an impressive young woman.” He turned to the crowd, his voice oily and smooth. “My daughter June has caused trouble. We’re strict, yes, but only because we want her to excel. Sometimes discipline must be firm. What’s wrong with a little correction when a child disobeys?”

The words settled over the guests like a justification they wanted to believe. Heads nodded. Some murmured agreement.

“Exactly,” someone whispered near the back. “Kids need discipline.”

I lowered my gaze, my lips curving into the faintest smile.

Foolish, June. If it were that easy, I would have exposed them long ago in my first life.

In that life, I had waited until I was in college, until I had gathered enough evidence to drag the Chens into the light. I’d hidden pinhole cameras in their home, recorded their cruelty, collected every scrap of proof. But when I brought it to the police, they told me it was worthless. “Illegally obtained,” they said. “Inadmissible.”

I’d walked out of that station with the world crumbling around me. Until Jason Grant had appeared. The infamous playboy, the one who later pursued June with the fervor of a man seeking a trophy.

But I knew better. Jason wasn’t a savior. He was a black hole. And June was already circling too close.

Back in the banquet hall, the crowd shifted uncomfortably, sympathy sliding toward the Chens. Compared to my shining scores and the Lowells’ warmth, June’s sob story seemed exaggerated, melodramatic.

Cole leaned down, his voice low and certain in my ear. “Don’t let them in. Not this time.”

I nodded, squeezing his hand.

The rest of the night blurred. The Chens ushered June away, her sobs echoing down the hall. The Lowells stayed close, protective, unwilling to let even shadows brush against me. Guests eventually relaxed again, laughter returning in cautious waves.

But the image of June on her knees lingered. Her pitiful tears, her accusations, her desperate attempt to claim what was never hers.

I knew then she wouldn’t stop. Not until she burned herself down entirely.

And when she did, I would be there—not with pity, but with the clarity of someone who had already lived through the fire once.

That night, as I lay in bed, Cole knocked softly before pushing my door open.

“You’re safe,” he said simply.

“I know,” I whispered.

He hesitated, then added, “You don’t have to cry alone. Not anymore.”

I smiled faintly. “You’ve gotten better at this, you know. Caring.”

His lips twitched into the ghost of a smirk. “Don’t get used to it.”

But I already had.

Part IV

College felt like a different planet compared to everything before.
The Lowell family made sure my dorm was stacked with essentials—lamps, quilts, even a little electric kettle for tea. Cole hauled boxes up three flights of stairs without complaint, though he muttered every step about how “Physics majors should pack lighter.”

I laughed. I had never had a dorm before. In my first life, the Chens had dragged me out of university housing and made me live with them, suffocating me under their roof again.
This time, I swore nothing would take away the life I’d earned.

The rhythm of campus life wrapped around me like a song I’d finally learned the melody to. My roommates were the kind of girls I once thought only existed in novels. They brewed brown sugar tea when cramps bent me in half. They covered for me when I skipped lecture. We had late-night debates about cafeteria food and whispered over phone screens about which senior was the best-looking.

For the first time, I belonged.

I buried myself in the Physics research group, working under Dr. Warren—one of the top minds in the field. She valued me, not for how many problems I could solve for her, but for how I thought. “You’re not just chasing answers,” she told me once. “You’re building them.”

Her words became fuel. Every late night in the lab, every line of code, every messy calculation scribbled on whiteboards—I chased more than grades. I chased a future that belonged entirely to me.

Of course, shadows never stay buried.

It was early spring when I saw June again.

I was leaving the library, notes tucked under my arm, when her voice sliced through the chatter of campus.

“Long time no see, sis.”

I turned.

There she was, arm looped through Jason Grant’s, smiling as if the past hadn’t happened. She looked healthier than the last time I’d seen her—rounder cheeks, glossy hair, clothes too polished to have come from the Chens.

Jason’s eyes skimmed over me like I was a product on a shelf, calculating price versus value. My skin crawled.

I turned to leave. I wasn’t interested in theater.

But June called after me, loud enough for heads to turn.
“Brother Jason helped me terminate the adoption with the Chens. I’m free now!”

I froze mid-step.

She’d found him. Jason Grant. The notorious heir, the man with too much charm and too little conscience. In my first life, I’d met him too late to avoid his pull. This time, June had run to him first, thinking he was salvation.

I looked over my shoulder and said coldly, “Congratulations, little sister. You’ve stepped into your next abyss.”

Her lips twisted. She pressed herself closer to Jason, whining loudly enough for me to hear, “Jason, my sister’s such a deadpan. I don’t want to see her around campus.”

Jason didn’t reply, but I caught the flicker in his eyes—calculation, curiosity. He was already weighing what I was worth.

I walked away without another word.

Campus isn’t as easily swayed by money as the outside world. Professors don’t bend for bribes, not the ones who’ve built careers on reputation. Still, power is power, and the Grants had plenty of it.

Two weeks later, Dr. Warren pulled me aside.
“Lily, did you offend someone?”

My stomach dropped. “Why?”

She studied my face, then put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. I know you wouldn’t go looking for trouble. But I’ve heard whispers. Someone’s trying to shake your place here. If you’re wronged, don’t hide it. You tell me.”

I blinked back the sting in my eyes. “Thank you, Dr. Warren.”

In my first life, I had no one. This time, I had allies.

The Grants’ scandal broke like a thunderclap in midsummer.

Headlines plastered across every feed:
Grant Heir Arrested for Orchestrating Prostitution Ring.
#RichKidsPlayDirty
#NoOneUntouchable

I watched the news in silence, stomach turning as heavily pixelated videos scrolled across the screen. In my first life, I’d been one of those blurred-out figures. This time, I wasn’t. But that didn’t make it easier to watch.

Cole sat beside me, dropping onto the couch with his usual careless weight. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” I lied, locking the phone.

He didn’t press, but I caught the way he studied my face, the tension in his jaw. Then he set down a cake box in front of me.

“It’s your twentieth birthday. Make a wish.”

I stared at him, then at the cake—frosted perfectly, decorated with tiny stars. A cake just for me.

I closed my eyes. Let the stars and the sea never betray our youth. Let spring and winter pass without breaking us.

When I opened them, Cole was watching me with a rare softness in his eyes, the candlelight making his gaze warmer than I’d ever seen it.

But the Grants weren’t finished dragging shadows into the light.

During Jason’s trial, June appeared in court. She looked every inch the tragic heroine—voice trembling, tears streaking her face—as she described how Jason had deceived her, drugged her, forced her into that private club.

The nation gasped.

The public hadn’t known she was one of the blurred-out women in the videos. Now they did.

Her voice cracked as she cried, “Victims are not at fault. I will live in the sunlight.”

The judge cut her off, unimpressed. But it didn’t matter. June knew how to wield pity.

She turned her tears into a brand. Overnight, she became an internet celebrity. Millions followed her live streams. She painted herself as a survivor, bravely standing in the sun.

And then, one evening, she went live with a face swollen and red.

“What happened?” fans demanded in the chat.

She hesitated, then whispered, “Actually…I have an older sister.”

I froze.

She spun the story like thread into a net: I had burned our parents. I had stolen her adoption. I had lived a charmed life while she was treated like livestock. She cried on camera, twisting every truth until it became a weapon.

The comments filled with sympathy—for her. Hatred—for me.

Death wishes. Slurs. Phone calls at midnight. My inbox flooded with bile.

Even the Lowells weren’t spared.

I sat in the lab the next day, phone buzzing endlessly, and felt the old darkness trying to creep back. The storage room. The bruises. The guilt.

But then Cole appeared, holding out a new SIM card. He dropped a big hand on my head, not knocking this time, just resting it gently.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

I stared up at him. “I’ve always trusted you,” I whispered. “But I’m keeping score. Every time you knocked me on the head? I’ll pay you back, one day.”

His mouth twitched into the faintest smile. “Good luck catching up.”

That week, I buried myself in the lab until Dr. Warren announced through tears that our project had succeeded. I blinked back my own tears. I’d finished what I hadn’t in my first life.

The day the news broke, I posted my first update online:

I won’t argue when slandered. If I am guilty, let evidence speak.

Within minutes, the Lowell Corporation reposted:

We won’t allow our little princess to be slandered. Legal action has begun.

Then Dr. Warren herself posted:

Congratulations to our team and especially my student Lily Lowell for her extraordinary contribution to the heavy-ion accelerator breakthrough. The nation is proud of you.

The tide shifted. The slander dwindled. June’s followers turned on her, classmates exposed her manipulations, and eventually, she shut down her accounts and vanished from the internet.

I should have felt relief.

Instead, I felt the cold certainty that June wasn’t finished.

Late one December afternoon, snow began to fall. Cole and I had just finished shopping, arms full of groceries. The street was alive with holiday lights, music spilling from shopfronts.

And then—a roar of an engine. A car hurtling toward us.

I saw the driver’s face, twisted with hate. June.

It was the same moment from my first life. The same expression. The same screech of tires.

I froze.

But this time, Cole moved.

He grabbed me, arms tight, shielding me as we rolled into the bushes. The car slammed into the gate where we’d been standing, metal twisting with the impact.

His voice was low in my ear. “This time…I saved you.”

Part V

The county jail smelled of bleach and stale air. The kind of place where time stood still, where even voices sounded like they’d been drained of color.

I hadn’t planned on coming. Cole argued against it. Mr. and Mrs. Lowell looked at me like I’d lost my mind when I told them I needed to see June one last time.

But I had to.

Because in my first life, she had been the last face I’d seen before the windshield shattered. And in this life, I needed to be the one who chose the ending.

The guard led me through metal doors and into the visitation room. Plexiglass separated the tables into two worlds. Phones hung from cords on either side.

She was already there.

Her hair had lost its shine, limp against her shoulders. The prison jumpsuit hung loose on her frame. But her eyes—those eyes still burned, still sharp enough to cut.

When she saw me, her mouth curled into a bitter smile.

“Come to gloat, Lily?” she sneered as she picked up the phone.

I sat down, lifted the receiver, and met her gaze with steady calm. “No. I came to ask you something.”

She rolled her eyes. “Make it quick. I’ve heard enough sermons to last me a lifetime.”

I leaned closer. My voice was quiet, even. “Do you remember putting a doll in the microwave?”

For the first time since I’d known her, June’s mask slipped.

Her face went pale. Her eyes widened. She froze, mouth slightly open, breath caught in her throat.

“You—” she stammered. “You saw—”

I didn’t speak. I let the silence do its work.

Her composure cracked like glass under pressure. She shook her head violently, fingers clawing at the edge of the table. “No, no, no! That wasn’t— I didn’t mean—”

Her voice rose into a scream, echoing through the room. Guards rushed forward, calling her name, but she was lost to her own terror.

“I didn’t mean to! I just wanted her gone! I just wanted Mom and Dad to love me more!”

Her words tore from her throat in ragged bursts. She slammed the receiver down and clawed at her hair, sobbing and shouting until the guards dragged her away.

The heavy steel door slammed shut behind her screams.

I sat there, staring at the empty chair across from me.

The doll. The note with my name. The microwave light.

All those years, I’d carried guilt like a brand across my skin. All those years, I’d believed maybe, just maybe, I was the reason my parents had burned.

But the truth was there, shrieking from June’s own mouth.

She had done it.

She had put her malice into that doll, taped my name to it, and lit the fire that consumed us all.

And she had spent two lives blaming me for her crime.

When I left the jail, the winter air cut into me like ice. Cole was waiting in the car, arms crossed, his jaw tight with worry.

“What did she say?” he asked.

I slid into the passenger seat, closing the door softly. For a moment, I just stared out at the snow.

“She admitted it,” I whispered.

He frowned. “Admitted what?”

“That she started the fire. That she killed them.”

The silence stretched between us, heavy and final.

Then, slowly, Cole reached over and rested his hand on top of mine. No words. Just weight. Warmth. A promise that I wasn’t carrying this alone anymore.

I turned my hand over and threaded my fingers through his. “It’s over,” I said quietly. “Really over this time.”

But even as I said it, I knew some scars don’t fade. They live in you, reshaping who you are.

I had spent too long in the dark to ever forget what it taught me.

But I had also learned how to choose the light.

When spring came, the world looked different.

The Lowell company weathered the storm of rumors and rose stronger, with Cole stepping firmly into leadership. His quiet steadiness had become something more—a fire banked carefully, glowing hotter the more responsibility was laid on him.

I finished my project under Dr. Warren’s guidance, publishing research that made its way into journals I had once only dreamed of reading. My name stood alone, not stolen, not twisted. Mine.

The Lowells—my parents, my brother—celebrated each milestone with me. Cakes. Photos. Small, imperfect rituals that stitched themselves into memory.

I still carried the past. The storage room. The bruises. The fire.

But I carried them differently now. Not as weights dragging me down, but as reminders of what I had survived.

June remained behind bars, her story fading from headlines, her face no longer trending on screens. She had burned every bridge she’d ever been offered. And in the end, she had only ashes left.

On the night of my twenty-first birthday, snow fell again. I stood on the porch of the Lowell house, looking out at the quiet street, the glow of the streetlamps painting halos in the flakes.

Cole came to stand beside me, holding two mugs of cocoa. He handed me one.

“What did you wish for last year?” he asked suddenly.

I smiled faintly, watching the snow drift down. “I wished that the stars and the sea would never betray our youth.”

“Did it come true?” he asked.

I turned to him, my brother, my protector, the one who had shielded me with his own body when the past came roaring back in the form of headlights.

“Yes,” I said softly. “It did.”

We stood there in the snow, hands wrapped around warm mugs, the night folding gently around us.

And for the first time in both my lives, I felt whole.

The End