Rebirth10 min read
"I asked her to come. I watched her die. Then I got a second life to fix it."
ButterPicks10 views
“Will you come tomorrow?” I asked.
There was a long, careful silence on the line. Then Mai Boyle’s voice, small and steady: “Important?”
“Very,” I said. “You’re the only friend I’ve had for twenty years. I want you there.”
“Okay.” She said it like someone closing a door.
I should have heard the catch in her breath. I didn’t.
The next morning at nine I stood in my tuxedo ready to walk down an aisle I’d planned for months. The garden was full of flowers in the way diplomats prefer—clean, perfect, formal. Guests arrived. My parents arrived. Mai’s parents were there, and still she was not.
I stepped away and dialed her number.
A man answered instead. “Hello, are you a family member of Mai Boyle?”
“My—” My mind fogged. “I’m her husband.” The lie came out of habit. We had a paper marriage; we had crossed that boundary easily.
“I’m a doctor at Third City Hospital,” the man said. “I’m sorry. Your wife, Mai Boyle, had a sudden collapse this morning. She was rushed here. We couldn’t revive her. She passed at 8:23 a.m.”
The world slid off its axis.
“Impossible.” I ran. I ran past guests. I ran past my own ceremony. I ran until I could no longer tell the path from the air wheezing in my chest.
At the hospital I saw her: pale, wrists thin beneath the sheet, the small curve of her mouth that used to smile only at private jokes. I touched her hand and it was ice.
I knelt and begged. I answered for promises I had never meant. “Wake up. Wake up.” I said it until the words were raw.
Everyone asked questions I couldn’t answer. Why hadn’t she told us she was sick? Why had she kept away from treatment? Why had she told me she’d come to the wedding?
On the gurney she looked like the pictures of people who had been waiting to be rescued for a long time. I saw fragments: the way she folded napkins at my family dinners, the careful way she carried my briefcase when I was too busy, the night she kissed my collarbone and whispered, “I have two months,” and then lied that she was fine.
That lie was the worst of it. She let me go on. She let me marry someone else. She planned my wedding from the inside out because she could not bear the idea of anything less than perfect for me. I butchered the truth with my indifference. I called her “friend.” I told myself she was fine.
The funeral felt like a stage. People murmured. Her video played. In the clip she laughed and then, to the camera, confessed in a small voice, “I loved you since I was six.” I had never heard those words directly before. The sound of them cut deeper than any stone.
I left the hospital and the smell of antiseptic followed me. I remember the bathtub. I remember the blade. I remember thinking that if the world had ended for me, it would be fair. I remember sinking into hot water and feeling nothing else matter, because she was gone.
I woke up to the shock of being seventeen again.
I woke in a dorm room that smelled like old textbooks. I woke with a thin body and the echo of memory like a film that had slipped over my eyes. I had returned to high school. I had a teenage face. I had my old notebook where once, in another life, I had scrawled a list of things I tended to forget.
At first I thought I was dreaming. Then I remembered the hospital, the funeral, the confession. The bright, hard fact sat in my mind: I had been given something impossible, a rerun of a life.
The first thing I did was look for her name on the school's roster.
Mai Boyle.
She was here. She was seventeen. She was messy—hair in a quick braid, a hooded jacket that smelled faintly of the cheap detergent she could afford. She moved through the school as if she owned every step. I watched her from the stairwell and every old regret rose up like a storm.
I had twenty years of failure to fix.
“Who are you?” a boy asked as I stared.
“Phoenix Henry.” I answered. I said it without thinking. The name felt foreign and mine at once.
He snorted. “New transfer?”
“Yes.” I lied. “Just transferred.”
It was the realest lie I had told since a life ago.
They told me where she sat. I walked to the cafeteria and I saw her—Mai Boyle, dark eyes like a constant question. Someone tried to mock her, and she snapped back with words that had always been hers—fast, clever, a guard. She didn’t know me. Of course she didn’t. She had never been mine.
“Hey.” I stepped in front of her. “You okay?”
Her friends looked at me like I had interrupted a show. She looked at me like I was in the wrong scene.
“Who are you?” she asked.
I prepared myself for a thousand ways to beg her for trust. I had spent two decades letting her teach me everything and never learning the one thing that mattered when it came to loving someone: to show up.
“You don’t know me,” I said. “I do. I’m just… I’m Phoenix. I just transferred.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Good. Don’t clutter my day.”
She walked off. She left a small friction on my skin, like a match that had been struck and not yet fired. I had expected something else—tears or recognition. I had none of that. I had only time.
I followed the thread. For days I learned her routine: she overslept, she skipped breakfast, she sold small crafts to pay for books, she refused help like a broken shield. Word reached me of her father—a drunk who sometimes returned and smashed the house. I found her bruises under her sleeves and heard the way she said, “It’s fine,” when it was not.
One evening I waited outside the small building where she lived. She came out carrying a faded backpack and a carton of milk. Her steps were quick. I walked beside her and said nothing. She shoved her hands into her pockets and kept her eyes straight ahead.
“You know,” I said, “you’re the only person I’ve ever wanted to do the same stupid things with for the rest of my life.”
She jerked. For a second she looked like she might smile.
“Who says I want the same stupid things?” she shot back.
“You didn’t have to write me on the roof when you were six,” I said. I kept my voice low. “You didn’t have to practice tying a bow for twenty years. You didn’t have to hold my hand through family fights where I vanished. You didn’t have to keep my plans in your pocket.”
She looked at me. “You sound like you know me.”
“I know the things I wish I had said.” I kept it simple. “I want to be the one who notices you now.”
She stopped. I saw her shoulders relax like someone finally dropping a sack they’d carried too long.
“Why would I trust you?” she asked.
“Because I will show up.” I said. “Every day.”
She snorted. “We’ll see.”
Day after day I waited at the gate. I brought her soup when she looked like she hadn’t slept. I sat through her planning meetings, pretending to be school council, learning the details of the wedding she would never have to plan this time. I learned what she loved—jasmine tea, cheap cassette-recorded fantasies of Paris, and how she read the same sentence three times and never got tired. I learned how to be small around her and how to be large when she needed a hand.
One night she woke in the dorm with a thorned cough. I took her to the clinic, where a nurse frowned and asked about previous symptoms. I lied. I said she had a history of stomach pain and black stools. I told the truth with the wrong voice. The nurse blinked and referred us to a specialist.
“Why did you do that?” Mai asked later, voice sharp.
“Because I will not let you keep a secret that will kill you.” I said. “Not this time.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” she accused.
“I will learn.” I held my ground. “I will learn every hospital code, every whispered time, every thing a person needs to stay alive.”
She laughed, unexpected and hot. “You’re full of nonsense.”
“Good nonsense?” I asked.
“You’re full of something.” She reached out and smacked my arm. “Stop talking.”
I did. I handed her my jacket. She took it. A small thing. The world tilted.
The doctor they sent us to was a man named Dimitri Richter. He was blunt and kind to the point of being painful.
“Early staging,” he said, after tests. “But—if we act now, the odds are good. She needs surgery and chemo.”
I watched her face. This time she didn’t sink into the little lie. She listened. For the first time since I had returned to her life, she let me make a decision for her.
“We do it,” I said.
Her eyes locked on mine. “You’re sure?”
“As sure as a man can be.” I reached for the small hand that used to iron my ties. She did not pull away.
The surgery was a long white line. I sat in the waiting room, sweating like a man who had never sweated before. I thought of the day she had smiled into a camera and said she loved me since she was six. I thought of the funeral, of the bath, and of waking up in a world that offered one mistake to undo everything.
When the surgeon came out, he was tired but he nodded. “We got it in time. She’s worse than she let on, but we have a clear margin. We can remove the tumors. She will need chemo, yes, and it will be hard. But I have seen this outcome turn.”
I could not stop myself. I ran to her room. She was pale, wired to a bed, hair thin on the pillow. But her eyes had focus now that was fierce and direct.
“You kept things from me before,” I whispered. “You can’t do that again.”
She opened her mouth like she would speak and then closed it. Finally: “I’m sorry.”
It was not the end. Chemo took its toll. There were days she could not stand. There were nights the world narrowed to a single breath. I learned how to count pills, how to talk through nausea, how to hold bones that had been hollowed by fear.
“Phoenix?” she said once, after a night of vomiting. “If this works, what then?”
“Then I make you the stupidest, most loved version of yourself,” I said.
She snorted. “I don’t want the stupidest version.”
“You get whatever you want.” I said. “And I want you alive.”
She studied my face. “You want me.”
“I do.” I did not mean to be brave. The truth had become the only safe place.
She bit her lip and laughed wetly. “You always did pick the right words last.”
There are things people don’t tell you about love. Love can be patient and reckless at once. It can be a line of small-duty days: fetching soup, driving to appointments, sitting through loud chemo suite music when you would rather be anywhere else. It can be a thousand tiny acts that, put together, become proof.
I watched her hair fall during chemo and then come back. I learned the thickness of her silence and the notes where she would break into song for no reason. She taught me to make small plans again: a bakery in the morning, a cheap movie night, and the reckless idea of taking a train to a place she once saw in a photograph of Paris.
Near the end of treatment we walked into a small chapel she had always wanted to visit, not because we were religious but because she loved the hush the light made on the wooden pews.
“Why here?” she asked, cold fingers curled in mine.
“Because you said once you found a church you liked the light and you’d like to marry someone under calm light.” I answered. My voice trembled.
“Who says I want to marry you?” she said, the old guard rising.
“Who says I want to marry you?” I asked back.
She looked at me with sudden, fierce softness. “I don’t want you to make promises to get me to live.”
“I won’t,” I promised. “I wanted to save you because I love you. I wanted to be the person you can rely on. I don’t need you to say yes to anything except that you will let me try.”
She was quiet for a long time. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out a tiny red rabbit—one of those childish plush toys—and handed it to me.
“You kept mine the first time,” she said.
I had, in the other life. I had kept things for her because she didn’t trust the world. I took the rabbit now and held it like a small altar.
“Will you come tomorrow?” I heard myself say, and it was the same words as the day that started my grief.
“I will,” she answered. “If you promise to be stupid and present.” She grinned for the first time in weeks. The light in the chapel softened.
We married three months later. It was small and messy and not at all like the diplomatic vow I had nearly spoken before. No white tents, no perfect roses—only a little ring she insisted on buying from a thrift shop and a cake from a baker who made the best cheap chocolate in the city.
At the reception I played a video I had found in a box of old recordings she had once made and never sent. On the screen she stood before a camera and confessed, voice small: “I loved you since I was six.”
I watched her mouth the words with honest grace. I watched her laugh with me. I watched the room look at her like they had only just seen a new color. I watched her, and I watched myself as someone who had learned.
In the years that followed, we did not forget the other life. Nor did we pretend it had not left a scar. I carried the weight of every day I had ignored her before. She carried the memory of how she had once chosen to die alone rather than be a burden. We spoke of those days with crude humor and blunt honesty.
One night much later, when the city was a scatter of orange lights and the world felt very near and ordinary, Mai asked me, quietly: “If you could go back even further, would you still try to save me?”
I thought of the bathtub, of the blade, of the pain I had tried to flee.
“Yes,” I said. “Even if I failed, I would still try.”
She folded into my chest and said, “Good. Because I can’t imagine you not trying.”
Sometimes people ask why I changed my life. If they want a simple answer: I was given the chance to be the man I should have been. That much guilt will either crush you or fuel you. I chose the latter.
We had hard years. Chemo came back as a scar in our conversations. There were nights when we argued over small things until the dawn came. But the big things were clear. If any of us had to be brave, it would be me.
Years later, we stood in a small square in Paris—not because diplomats love Paris, but because Mai had once filmed a video of the Eiffel Tower and said she wanted to see it for real. She put on a coat her hands had mended and smiled like a woman who had watched a whole life reassemble.
“Do you remember the first time you said you loved me?” she asked.
“Yes.” I did.
“And what did you say?”
“I said I will show up,” I told her.
She wrapped a careful hand in mine. “You did,” she said. “You showed up every single day. You even stuck around when I was hard to love.”
“You were always worth loving,” I said.
We kissed under the small rain like two people who kept their promises. The red rabbit was in my jacket pocket—worn, but faithful.
In the end, the second chance never felt like lightning or miracle. It was ordinary things: learning to make her coffee the way she liked, hearing her stupid jokes and laughing, calling the doctor when she downplayed a pain, staying up through the nights where the chemo woke her in the dark. It was showing up.
I married her properly, with my whole self this time, the man who had remembered every mistake and refused to repeat any of them.
The last secret she kept from me was small and childish. One night she pulled the old wedding video from the drawer and watched it with a crooked smile.
“You watched this before?” I asked.
She nodded. “I used to say things in private when I was afraid I’d never be brave. I used to practice what I would say. That video… it was me practicing being seen.”
“Will you still practice?” I teased.
She smiled with moon in her eyes. “I’ll practice as long as you’ll stand there listening.”
I did. I listened to her, to the small, imperfect human who once planned my wedding while keeping her own death secret. I listened and I learned and I loved.
When people ask what changed me, I answer simply: I learned that an honest love is worth more than a tidy life of perfection. I am not the same man who let a woman die twice—once by disease and once by company indifference. I am the man who took every chance to keep her.
On our mantle sits a small red rabbit. It has one ear flopped. On it is a pin we bought in Paris the day she said she’d finally stopped practicing her courage and decided to live in it.
“I asked you to come,” I tell it sometimes, mock-serious.
Mai nudges my shoulder and laughs. “You did,” she says. “And you came.”
I smile and pull her close.
The past taught me the sharp edges of regret. The present taught me how to be brave in small ways. The future—our future—taught me patience.
I am present now.
The End
— Thank you for reading —