Chapter 1

My last memory of my first life was the smell of cheap whiskey and old takeout containers.

The television flickered in the corner of my rundown apartment, showing highlights of some college football game I couldn't care less about. My leg, a roadmap of surgical scars, ached with a familiar, deep throb.

I was alone, broke, and dying. My wife, Sabrina, had left years ago, taking the kids with her. She told them I was a failure, a man who ruined her life by saving it.

They believed her. My phone rang, a number I didn't recognize. It was a nurse from a hospice. Matthew Clark, the golden boy quarterback Sabrina had loved her whole life, had passed away peacefully, surrounded by his family.

He' d had a good life, a successful one, funded by the scholarship that should have been mine. The irony was so bitter it made me laugh, a dry, rattling sound that turned into a cough I couldn't stop. Then, darkness.

I woke up to the roar of a crowd.

The sun was hot on my face, the air thick with the smell of popcorn and cheap perfume. I was nineteen again, standing in my football uniform on the side of the road.

It was the homecoming parade. The day my life ended.

I looked down at my hands, strong and unblemished. I flexed my leg, feeling the powerful muscles, no pain, no scars. It was real. I was back.

The marching band played a loud, off-key version of the school fight song.

Ahead of me, the senior class float, a ridiculous papier-mâché monstrosity of our mascot, a hornet, wobbled precariously. And standing right under it, laughing and waving to the crowd, was Sabrina Johns.

Her blonde hair shone in the Texas sun. She was perfect, the town' s golden girl, my childhood neighbor, and the woman who would grow to despise me.

My heart didn't leap like it used to. There was no boyish crush, no naive hope.

Just a cold, hard knot of ice in my stomach. I remembered the decades of her cold shoulder, the way she flinched when I touched her, the venom in her voice when she spoke to me.

I remembered her telling our son that his father was a cripple who trapped her.

The float lurched. The giant hornet head tilted. In my first life, this was my cue.

I was the hero.

I would sprint forward, shove her out of the way, and let the structure crush my leg, my future, my entire existence.

The town would call me a hero.

Sabrina would be forced to marry me out of guilt. A lifetime of misery would begin.

Not this time.