第三章

"I see you as a sister."

A harsh, jagged laugh ripped its way up my throat. It echoed in the dark, empty apartment. The sheer absurdity of the lie snapped something tight inside my chest.

"A sister?" I choked out, wiping a tear of pure angry amusement from the corner of my eye. "You slept with your sister for thirty years?"

Liam lunged forward. He clamped his hand over my mouth.

His palm was freezing. The icy temperature shot a violent shiver down my spine. It was the exact same temperature his hands were on the day of the car crash, right before the windshield shattered into a million pieces.

My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic mix of panic and pure, acidic disgust. I grabbed his wrist and tried to wrench it away, but his grip was iron.

"Keep your voice down," Liam hissed. He leaned in close. I could smell the stale beer from the frat party on his breath. "You want the truth, Maya? Fine. I'm bored. We spent thirty years together. Kissing you is like kissing my own arm. There's zero spark left."

He finally dropped his hand. I took a step back, my chest heaving.

Liam dragged a hand through his hair. He looked at me with cold, clinical calculation. "Look at yourself. You have an average brain. You have zero ambition. You were perfectly happy settling for a state school and playing the stay-at-home wife while I built an empire. I carried you."

The absolute audacity of his words hit me like a physical strike. He carried me? I wrote the foundational code for his first three tech platforms. I spent a decade debugging his messes while he drank scotch with investors.

He didn't stop. He paced the narrow kitchen. "Chloe’s father owns half of Silicon Valley. Her family name opens doors that would take me ten years of grinding to unlock. With her, I skip the struggle. I get the funding, the network, the power. Tomorrow."

He stopped and looked at me. His expression shifted into something horrifyingly earnest. "You aren't good enough for where I need to go, Maya. It’s not your fault. It’s just a fact."

He stepped forward and grabbed my right hand. His thumb rubbed across my knuckles.

"But I’m not abandoning you," Liam said smoothly. "Here is the deal. You play nice. You act like my sister. You take care of Chloe, help her with her classes, keep her happy. If you do that, I’ll take care of you. When I make it big, I’ll give you a trust fund. I’ll give you a better life than the one we had before."

He wanted it all. The billionaire heiress for the money, and the loyal genius dog on a leash to do his homework.

A tidal wave of revulsion crashed over me. I stared at his earnest, handsome face. He didn't love me. He didn't even respect me. He just refused to let go of a useful tool.

I remembered throwing myself in front of Chloe to protect him. I remembered spending my twenties in cheap, unheated apartments so he could buy server space. Maya, you absolute fool. I built a shrine to a man who saw me as stepping stone.

I looked at his mouth. I thought about telling him the truth. I thought about screaming that Chloe’s father goes bankrupt in five years. I thought about telling him that his precious heiress dies in a car crash.

I swallowed the words. The truth tasted like ash, but I kept it down. He didn't deserve a warning.

I ripped my hand out of his grip. I wiped my fingers on my jeans.

"Have a long, healthy life together, Liam," I said, my voice dangerously soft. "You deserve each other."

I turned on my heel and walked out. I slammed his front door so hard the doorframe rattled.

I marched straight into my bedroom and locked the door. I threw myself into my desk chair and flipped open my laptop. The screen illuminated the dark room.

I pulled up my college application portal.

In my past life, I followed Liam to a local state university to save money. I gave up my dreams of the Ivy League to help him pay rent. I didn't reach my full potential as a developer until I was forty-five years old.

Not this time.

I clicked the withdrawal button on the state school application. I opened a new tab. MIT. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The number one computer science program in the country. Three thousand miles away from Liam Carter and his toxic circus.

I refreshed my email inbox. My official SAT scores dropped an hour ago.

Perfect score. Math, reading, writing. Flawless.

My phone vibrated on the desk. Three voicemails sat in my queue. Two from Ivy League recruiters, one from the MIT admissions office offering an expedited interview and a guaranteed full-ride scholarship.

Chloe didn't know this. Liam certainly didn't know this. He still thought I was the "average" girl who needed his charity.

My phone buzzed again. A text message lit up the screen.

[Liam: You did good tonight. Keep that energy. Remember where you come from. Play nice with Chloe’s friends, they can help you out later.]

I scoffed. The sheer arrogance radiated through the screen.

Three new notifications popped up on my social media. Friend requests. I clicked the profiles. They were Chloe’s frat house orbiters. One of them immediately sent a direct message.

[Hey scholarship girl. Chloe says you need a tutor. I charge by the hour, but we can work out a trade. 😉]

Bile rose in my throat. I hit block. I blocked all of them.

Another text from Liam came through.

[Liam: I’m coming over tomorrow. I’ll bring that New York cheesecake you like so much.]

It was a blatant trap. He didn't care about my favorite dessert. He wanted an excuse to bring Chloe into my parents' house. He wanted to parade his shiny new prize in front of the people who fed him for ten years, just to establish his dominance.

My fingers flew across the keyboard.

[Maya: The Sterling family secret recipe. Not for sale. Don't bother.]

I stared at the blinking cursor. A furious, venomous paragraph spilled out of my fingers. I typed out every insult, every ounce of betrayal, every shred of hatred I held for him. I wanted to burn his ego to the ground.

I stared at the block of text for five seconds.

Then, I held down the backspace key. I deleted the entire paragraph.

Silence is a weapon. Arguing with a deaf man is a waste of breath.

I tossed the phone onto my bed. I pulled a large cardboard box from under my desk. I started ripping through my room.

I grabbed the cheap plastic pens he bought me from the campus bookstore. I grabbed the faded bookmarks. I snatched the tacky glass crystal ball he won at a carnival when we were sixteen. I threw it all into the box.

These things used to be my treasures. I polished that stupid crystal ball every week in my past life. Now, looking at the pile of junk, I felt nothing but intense, burning embarrassment.

How did you become so unrecognizable, Liam? Or were you always this monster, and I was just too blinded by love to see the fangs?

I picked up the heavy box. I walked out of my room, down the hall, and pushed open the door to the dusty storage closet we shared with Liam’s side of the duplex.

I shoved the box into the darkest corner, right next to a stack of Liam’s old high school textbooks.

As I dropped the box, a draft from the cracked window caught a stack of loose papers sitting on top of his old chemistry book. The papers fluttered to the dirty floor.

I sighed in annoyance. I crouched down to sweep them up.

My fingers brushed against a familiar black leather cover. Liam’s old brainstorming notebook. He used to carry it everywhere to write down app ideas.

I picked it up. It fell open to a random page near the back.

The page was completely blank. But the light from the hallway hit the paper at a sharp angle, catching deep grooves pressed into the surface. Someone wrote on the previous page with immense, violent pressure, leaving indented scars on the paper underneath.

My breath caught.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a sketching pencil. I knelt on the dusty floorboards. I held the pencil at an angle and began to lightly shade over the blank page.

The graphite caught the raised edges of the indentations. Dark gray letters slowly emerged from the white paper.

My blood turned to ice.

Pacific Coast Highway.

Sacrifice the heart.

Start over.

I dropped the pencil. My hands shook violently.

The Pacific Coast Highway. That was the exact stretch of road where our Tesla swerved into the concrete barrier. That was where the airbags failed. That was where my chest was crushed, and my life ended.

Sacrifice the heart.

A deafening ringing filled my ears. The air in the tiny closet vanished.

Our reincarnation wasn't a cosmic miracle. It wasn't a glitch in the universe.

It was a protocol.

Liam didn't just break my heart. He murdered me to trigger a reset.