Introduction

The last thing I remembered was Chloe's voice, sharp and gleeful, slicing through the haze of my headache: "They never loved you, Ava. Not Liam, not Noah. It was always me."

Her words were a hammer blow, each one a nail in the coffin of my life, a searing supernova of agony that exploded behind my eyes before everything faded to black.

I gasped, sitting bolt upright in my childhood bed, my unlined hands proof of a terrifying truth: I was back, the calendar on my desk screaming September 5th, senior year, before the nightmare truly began.

The reel of my first life rewound in fast-forward: Stanford, the calculated betrayals by Liam and Noah, Chloe's venomous strings, the engineered vasectomies, my promising career systematically destroyed, and the aneurysm that ended it all.

This was impossible, a future I'd already lived, a death I'd already died, yet the worn duvet felt real, the scent of my mother's pancakes too vibrant-a second chance, if I dared to seize it, to change everything.

My fingers flew across the keyboard, deleting Stanford from my early college applications and replacing it with MIT-my true dream, the one they had ruthlessly crushed.

Just then, the doorbell rang, and through the frosted glass, I saw them: Liam Walker, Noah Chen, and Chloe Jenkins, the architects of my past ruin, their bright smiles and feigned innocence an instant surge of cold dread.