Elara's POV
"Elara, are you with us?"
I kept here my name but wasn't sure.
"Elara, are you okay? Are you with us?"
The voice came louder this time. And it came from somewhere across the table, the kind of voice that had practiced sounding reasonable for a very long time.
I blinked.
The boardroom of Hart Industries stretched out around me, a mahogany table gleaming under the kind of sunlight that had no business existing when I was supposed to be dead. People sat in chairs along both sides, shuffling papers, murmuring quietly to each other. Nobody was even looking at me strangely. Nobody thought anything was wrong.
Everything was wrong.
I quickly pressed my fingers flat against the table to be sure this was all really. To be sure I wasn't dreaming.
But then, No pain. I didn't feel any pain at all. No IV pulled at my arm. No antiseptic taste at the back of my throat. I turned my hands over slowly and stared at them like they belonged to someone else steady, unmarked, nails painted a deep burgundy that I hadn't bothered with in over a year because dying women don't think about manicures.
I was breathing. Easily. Without effort.
Without that horrible wet heaviness in my chest that had become so normal I'd stopped noticing it until right now, feeling its complete absence.
I'm alive.
I was really happy being alive after everything that just happened.
The thought hit me so hard my vision blurred. I pressed my fingernails into my palm, sharp and deliberate, and felt it real, immediate, wonderful. I almost made a sound. But I swallowed it down.
Don't. Not here. Not yet. Think.
My hand moved to my pocket, I pulled out my phone, unlocked it with fingers that wouldn't stay completely still, and looked at the date.
Three years ago. To the month.
I was twenty-four years old. I had died at twenty-seven in a hospital room that smelled like antiseptic, alone, with eleven percent battery and no missed calls. And somehow, impossibly, I was sitting in this boardroom at twenty-four with the memory of every single thing that came after.
I looked up slowly. Looking at everyone in the boardroom.
And then I saw the document.
It sat in front of me on the table, positioned exactly where I remembered it was. I didn't need to read it. There was no need reading it. Why? Because I knew every clause, every carefully worded paragraph, every trap my uncle had spent three months engineering into language that sounded like protection. I knew the signature line at the bottom of page four, the one I'd signed with shaking hands and desperate hope and the catastrophic stupidity of a girl who still believed family was real.
I knew what this document did. I knew exactly where it led.
A hospital bed. Eleven percent battery. Nobody is coming. Just the beep of the machine connected to me.
"Elara." I heard my name again.
I raised my eyes.
Victor Hart sat directly across from me, and the sight of him after everything after the office floor, after the housekeeper, after his watch, after "Finally" said to a dark window with a scotch in his hand sent something cold and focused moving through my chest.
He was handsome for his age, distinguished in the way that inherited wealth tends to manufacture. Silver at his temples. A smile his face seemed genuinely comfortable wearing. He looked like someone's favorite uncle.
He looked like a man who had never once done anything wrong.
"You seemed distracted," he said warmly. "I was saying that your father would have wanted this arrangement. It protects the company during a difficult transition. It protects you, Elara. That's all any of us want here."
Around the table, heads nodded. His people. I understood that now in a way I hadn't the first time.
He slid the document slightly closer to me.
Subtle. Practiced. "The pen is right there whenever you're ready."
I looked at the document. I looked at the pen. I looked at his smile.
"I need to think about it," I said.
The room went completely quiet.
Not dramatically just a half-second pause, the kind that happens when something doesn't go according to a script everyone except one person was given. Victor's smile stayed exactly where it was. But something behind his eyes shifted, a small, precise recalibration.
"Of course," he said. "Take all the…"
"Elara, with respect." The man to Victor's left leaned forward, one of the board members whose name I remembered and whose loyalty I now understood completely. "The company needs stable leadership immediately. Every day without a clear structure costs us. Your father built something extraordinary and right now it's vulnerable. Signing today isn't just good for you, it protects his legacy."
"Thomas is right," Victor added, his voice gentle again. "This isn't pressure, sweetheart. This is urgent. There's a difference. The longer we wait, the more exposure the company has. I'm trying to protect what your father left you."
Sweetheart. He used to call me that. He called me on the office floor too, right before he told his assistant to see me out.
I folded my hands in my lap under the table where nobody could see them shaking. "I understand the urgency," I said. "And I'll give you my answer tomorrow."
"Tomorrow…"
"Tomorrow." I stood. My legs held. They felt miraculous, these legs. Three years of memories told me they'd been rotting in a hospital bed twelve minutes ago, subjectively. "Excuse me."
I walked out of the boardroom before anyone could say another word.
*********
The hallway hit me like cold water.
I made it six steps from the door before I had to stop. I pressed my back against the wall and put the back of my hand against my mouth and stood there breathing, just breathing, in and out, because the alternative was collapsing and I didn't have time to collapse.
It wasn't crying exactly. The sound I almost made wasn't grief or relief. It was something in between, the specific sound of someone who just got a second chance and is absolutely terrified of wasting it.
I pushed off the wall and started walking.
The building moved around me, familiar and strange at the same time. I knew every corridor. I knew which elevator ran slow and which board member kept a bottle in his bottom drawer and which assistant was loyal to Victor and had been feeding him information for two years before I ever suspected it.
I catalogued everything as I walked. Who was here? What hadn't happened yet.
Caleb. I'd broken up with him two days ago, the stupid pointless fight about nothing that became something, and right now he was probably at his apartment thinking we'd make up by the weekend the way we always did. He hadn't left me yet. He hadn't sent the text yet. He hadn't met Mara yet or rather, Mara hadn't come back yet. I had time there.
Not that I wanted it.
Damian Frost. My childhood best friend. The boy who used to steal cookies from my mother's kitchen and swear it wasn't him with crumbs on his shirt. Right now he was performing the role he'd been performing my whole life, the loyal friend, the safe person. I knew what was underneath it now. I knew what he was planning and who he was planning it with.
The illness. That one sat differently. Quiet and certain, ticking somewhere in my bloodstream right now, undiagnosed but already there. I had three years before it became what it became in my first life. Less, if I wasn't careful.
And the inheritance. The clause my father had written with good intentions and terrible execution: majority shares and full access to his estate, locked behind a marriage certificate. One legal marriage and everything transferred to me. Without it, Victor would take everything, the same way he took everything the first time, just slower and with more paperwork.
I stopped at the elevator and pressed the button.
I had no fiancé. The man I thought might eventually become one had just watched me walk out of a coffee shop two days ago over an argument I barely remembered the details of now. I had no time to date someone. I had no time to build something real. I needed someone controllable, unconnected, someone nobody would look at twice.
I needed a solution that was fast and clean and cheap enough to not draw questions.
The elevator opened. I stepped in. The doors slid closed and gave me my reflection, twenty-four years old, whole, alive, staring back at me with the eyes of a woman who had already died once and was not doing it again.
I need a husband, I thought. I need one now.
The elevator opened on the finance floor.
I stepped out and scanned the room the way I'd learned to scan rooms, cataloguing faces, cross-referencing names with everything three extra years of memory had given me. Most of them I knew. Most of them were exactly what they appeared to be.
Then my eyes landed on the far end of the room.
Cheap suit. Dark hair that needed cutting.
Bent over a report with the kind of focus that blocked out everything around him. There was something oddly still about him, like a stone sitting in the middle of moving water, like a person who existed in a room without needing it to notice him.
My memory produced the name before I'd consciously asked for it.
Ethan Vale. Finance department. Five thousand a month. No social media presence. No known associations outside the company. Two years of clean employment history and, before that, almost nothing.
Nobody who mattered would look at him twice.
My brain assembled the logic before I'd made the decision. Clean profile. No complications. Controllable. Affordable.
Temporary.
My feet were already moving.