Chapter 1

1: 1

At my birthday party, my daughter showed up in mourning clothes, cradling Camille Sullivan's funeral portrait, and came to wreck the whole thing.

She looked at me with a face twisted by hatred, and through sobs that seemed to bleed she said, "I wish I'd crawled out of Aunt Camille's belly instead of being your daughter!"

My best friend, Camille Sullivan, had lost her husband and come to stay at my house, and somewhere in there she'd gotten her hooks into my husband.

When I found out, Giles Sanchez flew into a rage and threw both me and our three-year-old daughter out of the house.

After that, I raised the child alone, scraping by through everything, and then Giles came crawling back, begging me to take him back.

When she saw her father, my daughter's eyes were full of longing.

"Mom, why won't you remarry Dad? Dad's clearly a good man."

She'd forgotten that one winter, wearing nothing but a thin nightgown, she'd been thrown out the window by Giles.

1

The day my daughter tore apart the birthday party, she knocked over a candlestick by accident.

The flames climbed the curtains, spreading fast, and I didn't make it out.

When I opened my eyes again, I'd been reborn back into my mid-twenties.

Sadie Abbott was only three that year.

The way Sadie looked at me was exactly the same as in that final moment of my last life.

"I'm not a little kid anymore. There's no way I'll let my life turn out as awful as it did before!"

So she'd been reborn along with me.

I'd thought I'd given her all the love I had, yet she kept clinging to endless fantasies about a father's love she'd never actually had.

I let out a tired sigh.

"Suit yourself. This time, the choice is in your own hands."

When Sadie saw Camille Sullivan, the tears finally broke loose, and she threw her arms around the woman's leg and wailed.

In my last life, she'd quietly taken Camille as her godmother.

Camille and I had grown up together from childhood, in the same class at school, at the same company at work.

Anyone I knew, she knew too.

The day Camille died in my last life happened to be my birthday.

I'd thrown a birthday party, and all my friends had come.

Camille lay dying, sick in bed with no one to look in on her, and it was Sadie who put on mourning clothes for her, who saw her off on her final journey.

In Sadie's heart, Camille mattered far more than I did.

Now that she could see her beloved godmother again, she was too overcome to know what to say.

She wanted to pull her preschool perfect-score test and a little gold star out of her pocket, but before she could get them out, someone kicked her aside.

"Oh? Crying and howling all over my mom—are you trying to smear her again, saying she secretly abused you?"