Rebirth18 min read
I Cheated Death Once — This Time I’ll Inherit Everything
ButterPicks16 views
I died.
"I died," I said aloud to the white ceiling, as if speaking it could make sense of how the heavy dark had taken me.
A bar, glitter lights, a hand I thought was mine. His face sideways under colored bulbs. The red-lipped girl across him laughing. I remember the phone in my hand — "I want to see you" — and his thumb on the screen, then his laugh and the way he buried his face in someone else's neck.
"I called you," I whispered in the ambulance, the pavement bleeding color under the wheels.
"I called you," I repeated now, but the ceiling was a high school infirmary's. The lamps were too bright. A boy's voice, hoarse: "Ginevra, you’re awake."
"Ginevra?" His voice clipped the air like a short breath. I stared at him. He had thin, restless hands and eyes that had been up all night. He sat on a stool by the bed.
"Orlando," I managed, then stopped. The name felt new and old. "Orlando Brennan?"
He blinked. "Yeah. You gave me the same look when you fell out of the cafeteria window freshman year."
"I fell out of the cafeteria window?"
"You did," he said. "You were dramatic."
I coughed. My tongue tasted of metal. When I looked down at my hands, they were small again, school uniform cuffed, pencil marks on my fingers. The world rearranged itself into the impossible.
"I'm in high school," I said. "I died. Then—"
"Then you woke up in first year," Orlando finished for me. He smiled like sunshine that didn't quite belong to me. "Welcome back, Ginevra."
I pressed my palm to the cotton blanket, feeling the past like a bruise. In the life I'd just left, I had given everything to a boy named Fidel Dean. I had loved him with a foolish, relentless tenderness that had scraped the edges off my life. I had followed him into bars, into silence, into humiliations. I had found him once—found his betrayal—and the air had gone out of me. I had watched him smile into another woman's mouth and then I had been swept away in a sudden traffic tide.
"Why am I back?" I asked Orlando. "Why am I here?"
He looked at me like a man who'd been holding back an ocean. "Because you have a chance to fix it."
"Fix it?"
"You promised to stop being reckless," he said. "And you promised you'd study. You're going to inherit your father's company someday, right? So—study."
"You know my father?" I said, incredulous.
"Everyone knows Forbes Smith," Orlando replied. "But that's not why I'm here. Because you—we—wanted you to live. Just... promise me you won't lose yourself this time."
I did something I had never done in any life I remembered: I laughed out loud. "Promise," I said, but it sounded small. "I'm going to study. I'm going to inherit everything. And I won't be a doormat for Fidel Dean."
He watched me, and his mouth softened. "Good. Then sleep. I'll stay for a while."
*
School felt like someone had rearranged the same furniture but with the cushions flipped. Everything was familiar in outline and different in color. Old enemies sat in their same corners but dressed new. The smell of paper and chalk and late spring glued my breaths to a calendar I knew by heart.
I learned quickly: I was back in first year, not near the end, with all the time that made a future feel heavy and ripe. Orlando walked to class with me. He carried my books without complaint. The math teacher, Mr. Xu — the same Mr. Xu with the tired smile — called me "Ginevra" with a strange new gentleness.
"Study," Orlando told me again, his hand on the locker door as if anchoring all my wavering decisions.
"Study," I said, and meant it. This was not just for college or for the company. It was a neat, stainless plan for revenge and self-preservation: study hard, become indispensable, inherit the money, never be the idiot who dies for a liar again.
But life had other plans. The boy I had loved and who had killed me once, Fidel Dean, stood three lockers down.
He was the same: lean, a face carved with a kind of careless symmetry, a look that had been sharp enough once to cut me. He walked like he had practiced being too uninterested, and a group of other boys folded around him like a cloth around a stone.
He had bruises. A messy tear at his eyebrow. He didn't glance at me straight on; he let his gaze brush by me like something dusty it didn't need to disturb.
I had sworn off him, yet my heart clenched in a memory of all I had thrown away for him.
"Will you leave him alone?" Orlando asked gently, watching me. He was kind in a way that felt like a shelter.
"I will not touch him." I said it like armor. "I'll watch. I'll make sure he doesn't hurt anyone else."
Orlando's hand tightened on my shoulder. "You can't carry everyone's pain, Ginevra," he said. "Not even his."
"I know," I answered. "But I won't ignore it."
*
The first week ended with the first crisis — the kind that felt lifted from a bad repeat. Fidel was cornered in a narrow alley by a pair of boys with hair bleach-bright and teeth ready to laugh. They were tired of him crossing some invisible line. He had done something in the earlier months that made others think themselves justified in swinging at him.
I saw it through the classroom window just when the bell rang. He was on the ground, hands over his head, one of the boys kicking at his ribs.
"Go," Orlando said.
I didn't need telling twice. I ran.
I had always been the type to run toward chaos. This life made me want to make different choices, but certain instincts were stitched in. I shoved. I screamed. I grabbed the nearest foot and twisted. Orlando launced forward, calm as storm. He landed a push to the offender's shoulder that made him stagger.
"Hey!" Mr. Xu's voice came from the doorway of the school office. Soon the watchful eyes of other students and a few teachers were on the alley.
The beatings stopped when the crowd gathered. Fidel lay on the pavement, chest heaving. His shirt had a dark spread where blood had taken it.
I knelt beside him. "Are you okay?" I asked, but my voice was soft.
Fidel looked at me like a man seeing a familiar ruin. His eyes did strange things: a flicker of gratitude, a flash of something sharper like hunger, a clouded distance.
"Thanks," he said. "You didn't have to do that."
"I didn't," I agreed. "But I did."
He swallowed. "You always did."
Orlando set his hand on my shoulder, protective in a way that went beyond simple chivalry. "You should let the office handle this," he said. "We can get him looked at."
"I'll come too," I said, more firmly than I felt.
The office looked at the three of us with an adult glance of suspicion and pity. When I lifted Fidel's sleeve — he had a bruise that swelled purple — my chest tightened. He didn't complain, not really. He just let me clean the wound with the saintly patience of people used to forgiving pain.
"Why do you protect him?" Mr. Xu asked me quietly after I had bandaged him.
"Because someone did for me once," I said.
He nodded, but the look he gave me was complicated. "Be careful, Ginevra," he said. "Some debts are not about honor. They're about hurting yourself."
"I know," I told him. "I'll be careful."
But there are two kinds of being careful. One keeps you safe. The other plans a trap.
*
At night, I thought of my death in the bar and the laugh that had been for someone else. I thought of the way Fidel had kissed the other woman without looking at me, and how easy it had been to fall into pain again and again.
I decided on a careful kind of plan: I would move my heart away from him. I would let school and grades and college and eventual corporate meetings become a net. Orlando became my confidant and teacher; he taught me calculus like a man translating a foreign country into a home.
"You're really serious," he said once, handing me a pen.
"I am," I said. "I have one life. I will earn it back."
He looked at me like he wanted to say more, but he opened his mouth and closed it. Instead he smiled and put his pen to paper to correct my math.
In the background, there was always Brigitte Serra.
She arrived like a perfect storm: a new girl whose smile was varnished and whose vocabulary for cruelty was surgical. She was pretty in a way that made people defer to her. She sat near the front, swapped seats like a chess player, and kept an eye on Fidel as if she collected weather reports.
She introduced herself to me one day with a hand and a quiet charm that smelled faintly of vanilla and strategy.
"Hello, Ginevra. I'm Brigitte. We haven't properly met."
"We have, in a way," I said, forcing my voice light.
"Then let's make it real." She smiled. "I like being real."
Her charm hid teeth. I kept my distance, but my guard dropped in stupid places. Brigitte was very good at being someone you trusted; she was excellent at being a mirror that showed you the person you wanted to be, and then breaking that reflection.
She asked questions in a way that put people in a narrow room. "So who do you love, Ginevra?" she asked once, tilting her head. "People are interesting when they love one another."
"That's a personal question," I said, because the truth felt like a loaded gun.
She laughed. "I like dangerous people. They make stories."
I wanted to tell her: dangerous people killed my last life. But I didn't. I was learning how to keep the scars inside until they hardened into something useful.
*
Months passed. The math became less like a foe and more like a friend. My ranking climbed. Orlando's presence was steady like a tide. He taught me not only math but how to breathe correctly when everything wanted to drown you. He had secrets I couldn't touch, but he shared small things: his favorite book, the way he folded sleeves, the way he hummed before sleep.
"Why are you helping me so much?" I asked him one evening, walking home under leftover summer heat.
"Because you fell out of a cafeteria window," he said, and I wanted to laugh at the memory of it. "And because you cried once on the third floor when you thought you lost a small dog."
"You remember that?" I asked.
"Of course." He paused. "Also... because I wanted someone to notice me when I was small."
"Notice?" I said.
"Yeah," he said, and then he was quiet, as if he had given me a piece of something he didn't usually show.
The world kept turning. I kept studying. Fidel and Brigitte circled like two dangerous planets, their gravity pulling at things that could be dragged off-course.
Then the day came when the truth snapped like a brittle bone.
I had sent a message to Fidel: "Meet me at the bar tonight. Please." It was my conscious test of mortality. Would he come if I asked? Would he answer if I dared to ask him again after all he had done?
He did come. He arrived with a smile that didn't reach his eyes, and with another woman on his arm — not Brigitte, this one a newer shade of pretty — and the two of them glowed like a lamp set to "for show."
I arrived at the bar and watched.
He kissed her in exactly the same lean, practiced way he had kissed the other. I felt the first life peel off me like an old coat.
I did not run into traffic that night. I did not throw myself into the river. I walked out of the bar and went home. I slept.
When I woke, there were two messages I didn't expect. One was from Fidel, drunken and short: "Can we talk?" The other was from Orlando: "Meet me. Please. I need to tell you something."
I chose Orlando's message.
We met in the small, private room at the back of the campus café. He looked worse for sleep. His jaw was set.
"Ginevra," he said. "I told you not to chase ghosts. But if it's about Fidel, I need you to understand—"
"You mean the bar?" I cut in.
He swallowed. "Yes. But also, there's something you need to know about... about why you're back."
I sat very still. "Why?"
"Because someone sacrificed himself so you could return." His voice was a thread. "He arranged — he traded his future in a way none of us can fully explain. He went to prison to make this possible."
"You mean—" The idea of someone being jailed so I could have another chance felt obscene and holy at the same time.
"Orlando," I said, and he put his palms flat on the table, the way people do when they try to make a promise physical.
"No," he said. "Listen. I did it. I made the deal because I couldn't bear to lose you. I made a choice—" He stopped. The words broke.
I stared at him. Orlando's face had a look I'd never seen: vulnerability so raw it scared me. "You went to prison?"
He nodded. "I paid a price. My freedom. It was my choice. I don't regret it."
My throat tightened. "You gave your life for mine?"
"It's not that dramatic," he said, quick to correct. "I gave years. I stepped away from a life I might have had to make you whole. I couldn't bear the thought I had lost you forever, so I made a deal with—" He swallowed again. "With people who made trade-offs."
"You didn't have to," I said.
He reached for my hand. "I had to. Because I love you."
My chest heaved. Love. In the weeks since my rebirth, Orlando had been steady as the ground after an earthquake. I had tried to make myself feel only gratitude and strategic friendship; my heart, however, was a traitor.
"I know what you did," I said, and my voice was smaller than I meant. "I won't waste it. I promise."
He squeezed my hand so hard I felt it. "Good," he said simply. "Now we deal with Brigitte and Fidel. One at a time."
"One at a time," I echoed.
*
The first public reckoning was for Brigitte Serra.
It unfolded on a humid autumn afternoon during an assembly that had been called "a student conduct seminar." The auditorium smelled like wax polish and old voices. Parents filled the back rows. A slide projected the school crest and a neutral title: Addressing Campus Safety.
I sat in the third row. Orlando sat next to me. I had insisted he come; he insisted on holding my hand the whole time.
When the principal's speech ran into its polite plateau, I stood.
"What are you doing?" Orlando hissed.
"Listen," I mouthed back. "Trust me."
The principal noticed my movement. "Miss Daniel?"
I walked to the stage. My legs felt thin as glass. The room quieted like the sea at night. Headlights of phone cameras glared.
"I have something to say," I told the auditorium. "I have an experience I need to share."
"What experience?" a mother called out, loud and sharp.
"About a girl," I said. "A girl named Brigitte Serra."
Every head turned. Brigitte sat three rows behind me, eyes placid. She smiled like a woman in a painting. The murmurs rose like small waves.
"I was held against my will," I said. "I was threatened. And someone — someone here — knew and did nothing."
Gasps. The principal's face tightened. "Ginevra, this is not the place—"
"Yes, it is," I shot back. "Because the place where these things happen is the school, and the place where we rebuild trust is in front of each other."
Phones were lifted. Recordings began.
"I have proof," I said. I clicked a file on the tablet I had brought. The auditorium filled with the raw footage: wait-light in a basement, a narrow door, a younger me small and frightened, Brigitte's silhouette, a man's voice in the dark. The images were clumsy but clear. The footage showed confinement, threats thinly veiled as 'teaching lessons.' Brigitte's laughter echoed, crisp and clinical.
The silence after was a blade.
"What is this?" Brigitte's voice, when it broke free, was a practiced sugar. "You forged this, Ginevra. You want attention."
"Forged?" I repeated. "You made a record for yourself. You left traces. You taught me how to taste fear. You taught me how to survive."
I looked at the parents in the audience. At the teachers. I saw hands rise to faces. Someone in the back whispered, "My niece."
Brigitte stood. "This is slander," she said. "You are trying to ruin me."
I leaned forward. "Tell that to the judge," I said. "Or better—listen to the crowd."
Voices rose, at first bubbling, then focused. Students who had once smiled for Brigitte's jokes were quiet. Others nodded slowly. A girl in the front row lifted her phone, tears falling. "She did this to me, too," the girl said. "She said I owed her because she gave me a place to stay."
"What do you want?" the principal demanded, but his voice was thin now.
"For Brigitte to answer," I said. "To tell the truth here, in public, because truth in private never reached me."
Brigitte's face changed. The smirk dropped. There was a moment where she looked exactly like someone who had been surprised to find there were no mirrors left.
"You are lying," she spat. "I never—"
"Stop," Orlando said. He stepped onto the stage. His voice was a quiet hammer. "Stop lying."
I felt the room tilt toward him. He had the kind of face a crowd trusts because it belongs to someone who doesn't ask for permission to be human.
"I have reports," he continued. "Older students who have evidence. Witnesses who've come forward because they're tired." He looked at Brigitte with a hard, fair gaze. "We have a lawyer here willing to take this as pro bono."
Brigitte's eyes went wide. The color left her cheeks. She tried to wrap words in a net. "You can't—"
"She can," a chorus of voices answered.
Phones streamed live. The record of truth, once private, began to shine under a light that cannot be smudged. Brigitte's charm cracked like a thin shell. Her voice shifted from honey to gravel.
"You're going to regret this," she hissed. "I'll sue. I'll—"
The auditorium turned into an ocean of sound: outraged, condemning. A cluster of mothers stood up, their faces like flint. "How could you, teacher? How could you?" someone demanded.
Brigitte began to back away, small and fast. A teacher who had once smiled at her now blocked her path. "Police?" someone suggested. Someone else said, "Call the hotline."
She was escorted out, not in cuffs, but in something worse: the beginnings of total social collapse. Parents were taking videos; the press that often found fodder in small scandals would have this like a bonfire.
When she reached the doors, Brigitte turned and looked at me. Her mouth made a shape like a plea. "You'll pay for this," she said.
"I will be happy," I answered. "I will be happy if no one else has to fear you."
She left, and a terrible cheering rose — not the cheer of joy, but the thin relief of survivors reclaiming air.
The punishment was public, immediate, and perfect in its cruelty for a girl built on reputation: she had lost it, and everyone who had once courted her favor had seen the hollow.
But the school punishment was only the beginning. The law would follow in slower steps, and the rumor-mill would grind down her defenses. That evening, videos from the assembly flooded the network. Friends texted us like tides; some said thank you, some called me reckless. Among the messages, a short one blinked from a number I had learned to despise: Fidel.
"Are you okay?" it read.
I breathed. Then I folded my answer into a promise: "Yes. But everything has to change."
*
Fidel's punishment would be quieter and more precise.
He tried to find me two weeks after Brigitte's fall from grace. He came with new apologies, a public attempt at humility done in tones he thought would make me forgive him. He wanted to tug at the threads of the past and pull me back like a puppet.
We met at a shareholders' dinner for Smith Enterprises — my father's company — where I had been invited as a tentative member of the board's youth advisory. The event was gilded and loud, people with small star-power and large watches. I arrived with Orlando at my side; my father's careful nod greeted me like an endorsement.
Fidel stood beneath the crystal lights with a borrowed suit and a practiced regret. He caught my eye and walked over. "Ginevra," he said, and the name came like a flint over stone. "Can we talk? Please. Just—outside."
I let him lead me into a corridor lined with art whose price tags could feed a family for a year. He stopped, turned to me with the old worn softness in his eyes.
"You don't have to pretend you're angry," he said. "I know I hurt you. I made a mistake."
"You made many," I said. "Do you think saying sorry will fix it? A sorrow tattoo isn't currency."
He reached for me. "I love you," he said plainly.
"Then speak the truth." I released my hand and walked backward until my back leaned against the marble like a sheet.
He looked startled now. "What truth?"
"That you were the one who left at the bar," I said. "That you chose someone else. That you lied. That you planned it. That the lies were a habit."
He paled. "I—"
"Admit it, Fidel." My voice cut clean. "And tell them why. Tell the people who will listen to you at that table what you did."
"I can't," he said. He flinched like something inside him had been asked to die.
"Then I will." I stepped away and took out my phone. "I have messages. I have recordings. I have witnesses. You can either say it yourself now or wait for what will come when people hear what you let happen to me. Which is it?"
His face went through a set of small deaths — denial, then panic, then the thin realization that something larger had been set into motion. "You'd ruin me," he hissed.
"Maybe I would," I said. "Or maybe I'd save other girls who would have believed you."
He lunged forward and slapped my phone out of my hand. The device hit the marble and flashed one more time, screen showing a lobby camera where his silhouette bent over another woman's head.
At that sound, Orlando appeared: silent, like a tide rising. He hadn't come with me into the corridor but he had already closed the distance.
"Stop," he said to Fidel. "Step away."
Fidel's bravado crumpled. He tried to claw for the fledging dignity that remained. "I'm sorry," he said, trembling. "Ginevra, please. I was stupid. I was—"
"You're a liar," I said. "You tested me to see if I'd learn to love your lies. You used people like props. You used me like I was a mirror."
The corridor had become a stage and news of the confrontation leaked like a river. Within minutes, my phone had recorded audio and had been shared by a security guard who'd seen the scene. My father's board members — men who loved power more than pity — were at the doorway. The chairwoman looked as if she'd seen a cockroach on her tea. "What is happening?" she asked, but her voice didn't hide the thrill: scandal invites attention.
Fidel tried to speak. "I—"
"You will leave now," Orlando said. "You will go home. You will not come near her again unless you are ready to face every consequence. And if you ever hurt her—"
"If I ever hurt her again—" Fidel began, and he crumpled like a man who had been told to step into a grave and found it empty.
"—you will lose everything," Orlando finished.
He meant it. In the weeks that followed, evidence surfaced. Messages. Witness statements. Fidel's old friends began to distance themselves — not because he'd been exposed as cruel, but because association with scandal is economically unwise. Contracts were quietly rescinded. Offers disappeared. A man whose charm had been his currency found the bank closed.
The most public hit came a month later. A charity gala where Fidel was set to be the evening's guest of honor — a place he'd intended to strut his reformation — turned into a tribunal. A woman took the mic and told her story. Another held up a phone and played a recording. The audience sat in a stunned hush. Reporters leaned forward. The video of Fidel at the corridor went viral. Sponsors who pretended to believe in rehabilitation froze.
When Fidel left that night, cameras followed. He tried to explain. He tried to apologize, this time with shaking hands and a voice that pleaded. But the economy of social trust is precise: once you withdraw the trust, people bank their solidarity elsewhere. He lost opportunities one by one like a man watching his currency drain.
He tried to beg the board of Smith Enterprises for a role — a chance to rebuild with money he did not have the right to. My father refused on principle for a while, and then, later, on advice. "Forbes," I said quietly one evening in his study, "this isn't vengeance. This is fairness."
He looked at me the way a titan might regard a sparrow. "You could take his life from him," he said. "That usually ruins people."
"I don't want his life," I said. "I want him to stop hurting others. Let him rebuild only if he can show he's learned the work."
He sighed. "You're very wise for someone who fell out of a cafeteria window."
We both smiled at that, and something in the house felt like a promise finally kept.
*
There were storms after. Lawsuits. Statements. Brigitte fought hard and lost harder; she faced criminal charges that made headlines. Fidel's reputation hemorrhaged into smaller, meaner things: late-night call-outs, the rude "he used to be..." people say. He disappeared from parties. He paused and then tried to apply for a job at a firm that had once courted him; HR turned him away. He called me once, voice small and almost human.
"Can we at least be friends?" he asked.
"Not this time," I said.
"Will you forgive me?" he asked.
"I will not waste my mercy on you," I answered. "I will save it for people who ask for it without entitlement."
He was silent. Then he said, quietly, "I'm sorry I hurt you. I hope you're happier."
"Me and Orlando," I said. "We are good."
He didn't reply after that.
*
As the three of us — me, Orlando, and the man who'd given his years to make mine possible — leaned into the small new world we were building, things began to settle into their own honest patterns.
One night, after the trial and the press and the messy victories, Orlando and I sat on the old school roof where I'd once nearly fallen through windows.
"You paid a price I can never repay," I said.
"You can't repay what never asked for payback," he said, then he cradled my face. "You can keep living."
I pressed my forehead to his. He smelt of the kind of clean sweat you get when you've worked with your hands at something that matters. "Will you stay?" I asked.
He kissed me then — not a flash of flame, but a slow gathering of sun. "Always," he said, and the word folded into something soft and perfect.
Later, on the day I walked into entrance interviews for a scholarship I had worked hard to deserve, my father sat across from me. He placed a watch on the table — an old, brass thing he used to wear.
"It's stopped at June 7th, 2014," he said.
I remembered that date with a sudden, cold clarity. "That was the day," I said.
Forbes regarded me with a slow, grave smile. "Your second chance didn't come free. But I trust you."
I nodded. "I will inherit the company one day," I said. "Not to live in a gilded cage, but to make sure other people arn't beaten into silence."
He put his hand over mine. "Then make sure you don't give away that hand to anyone who wants to take it."
*
We married under a low sky and bright lights. Orlando wore a suit that made him look like the man he had always wanted to be. I wore a dress that moved the way hope does when you decide not to hide it. Fidel watched from a long way off, smaller in the crowd than any of his old allies.
Brigitte watched from a courtroom window as her sentence was handed down. A twisted irony: she had spent years building a persona of perfection — of being someone untouchable — and she fell in public. The law punished her with months and a registry, but the social storm had already taken more.
I stood at the altar and placed my hand in Orlando’s. He lifted my fingers to his lips.
"You paid for me," I whispered.
"You paid with me," he corrected. "We paid together."
That last part was important. Sacrifice wasn't a one-way street in the end. We had both given, and both had been gifted.
At the reception, Fidel approached. He looked older, or maybe it was the way he carried himself that had shrunk to fit the consequences. He stopped before me.
"Ginevra," he said. "I'm sorry."
"You're forgiven if you mean it," I said. "But you must understand forgiveness isn't a return ticket. It is a direction."
He bowed just enough and walked away.
Later, when the visitors had thinned and the last of the lights were packed away, Orlando and I sat under the same low sky. He put the brass watch — the one with 2014.6.7 — into my palm.
"Keep it," he said. "So you remember the exact hour you chose to live differently."
I held it like a talisman. The hands were frozen, but time was not. Time had given me another chance, and I had used it.
"Do you ever regret the price?" I asked him.
He looked at the watch, then at me. "Only that I couldn't have done more," he said softly. "But look at what we built."
We built a life that held space for schooling and justice and patience. We built a family that knew the value of second chances and also of consequences. We taught the company to fund shelters and counselors; we set up anonymous help-lines and learning funds. We turned money into something that could catch people rather than crush them.
And sometimes, in the quiet, I would pull out a video from the case, or reread the messages that had once been weapons, and I would see how thin a line we had walked.
"Did you ever think you'd be the kind of person who fights in public for other people?" Orlando asked once, fingers busy on a ledger for a charity fund.
"No," I said. "But I thought I'd be the kind of person who died for love."
He huffed. "You were dramatic."
"I still am," I admitted. "But now I'm dramatic for better reasons."
He kissed the side of my head. "Good," he said. "Because I liked seeing you dramatic and alive."
At the far end of our life, when people ask what changed everything for me, I will say the same thing I said on that stage: truth matters, and the only way to stop someone like Brigitte or someone like Fidel from hurting again is to make the world watch when the lie breaks.
I will also say one more, small thing: there was a watch set to June 7th, 2014. It stopped then, but I rewound it. I set it again and again, and this time, it kept going.
The End
— Thank you for reading —