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When I was born, the look in my mother’s eyes was full of sorrow.
She didn’t hold me. She didn’t feed me.
She let me scream until I was hoarse.
I carried memory with me-memories from my last life-so I knew that once, she had loved me more than
anything.
But when I was three, I had fallen from the balcony and died.
That loss had shattered her completely; she had never recovered.
She had lived the rest of her life hollowed out by that pain.
I had been given a second chance at life, and my mother, it seemed, preferred a quick pain to a slow one.
Rather than let me become someone she couldn’t live without, she intended to stage my death as a harmless
accident.
What she didn’t know was that in my last life I had not fallen by accident.
I had been pushed-by the nanny. And this time, that nanny had come back.
I was born in winter.
The delivery room had the heater on, but I felt cold anyway-cold that seeped from the marrow of my bones.
My mother, Charlotte Harrington, looked at me with nothing but pain and grief.
The nurse cleaned me up, wrapped me into a snug little bundle, and carried me cheerfully to Charlotte. “Congratulations it’s a beautiful baby girl. Come on, hold her.”
–
Charlotte jerked her hand back as if she’d been burned and turned her face away.
“I don’t have the strength,” she whispered, her voice ragged with weariness.
The nurse’s smile faltered for a moment, then she recovered. “Of course-giving birth is exhausting.”
She glanced toward the delivery-room door where a man waited anxiously-my father, Michael Lawson.
He rushed in, his grin giddy and proud.
He took me from the nurse with the careful, awkward reverence of someone holding a rare treasure. Chapter1
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“Honey, you did great! Look-our daughter is so like you. Especially the eyes.”
He raised me toward Charlotte, overflowing with hope for her reaction.
Charlotte only glanced at me, faintly, then closed her eyes.
Tears slid from the corner of them so quickly it almost looked unreal.
My father’s smile froze.
He looked between me and Charlotte, clearly at a loss.
He lowered his voice. “Charlotte, are you okay? Do you feel unwell?”
“Tired. I want to sleep,” she replied without any emotion.
My father fell silent and tightened his hold on the sheet draped around me.
I lay in his arms and watched my mother on the bed. I knew-she wasn’t merely tired.
She was dead inside.
In my previous life, she had loved me above all else.
She had given up a promising career to stay by my side.
She told me the most beautiful bedtime stories, made the fanciest little meals, and would beam with delight over every tiny milestone I hit.
Her love had been fierce enough to have given her the world.
Then, on a bright afternoon when I was three, I had fallen from the balcony and died.
That day marked the beginning of her tragedy.
She stopped eating, stopped living-clutching my tiny clothes and crying through endless nights.
They took her to countless doctors, medicated her, tried therapies; nothing healed the hollow inside her.
In the end, after years of suffering and torment, she faded away.
Now she was back at the start of that same day, carrying those memories like a wound.
She was terrified.
She feared reliving that shattering agony.
She feared pouring out every ounce of love again, then watching me slip away, as if it were fate.
But Charlotte didn’t know the truth.
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I hadn’t fallen by accident last time.
I had been pushed by a nanny who had looked so harmless and loyal.
