Sweet Romance15 min read
I Died at My Wedding, Woke Up in His Twenties — And Met Him Again
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I married a man for money.
"I did it for the money," I told myself in the mirror the night before the wedding, as if repeating it would make the lie lighter. The gown fit too perfectly. The ring was heavy and warm on my finger. I tasted luxury and a thread of guilt, and then I tasted a pain so sudden none of it mattered anymore.
I died on my wedding day.
When I opened my eyes again, the air smelled different — cooking oil, wet concrete, cheap soap. My head throbbed with a kind of disorientation I had never known. When I looked at the face bending over me, the world folded in on itself.
"Give me ten bucks and I'll let you go home," said the boy pressing me against a cracked wall.
He was handsome in a common way: thick lashes, a straight nose, the kind of face I've seen in photos of my future husband. It was smaller, younger, but the expression, the tilt of the mouth, the coldness in his eyes — it could only be him. Denali Olson, I thought, and I laughed out loud, not because it was funny but because everything had become absurd.
"Denali?" I said before I could stop myself.
He frowned. "I don't want people. I want money."
He was not the suave older man I had married; he was a rough, street-smart kid. The wall was chipped behind him. The concrete under my fingers was cold. I was in his twenties. I was standing in his past, clutching a future that had already ended.
"You're me— you're my husband," I wanted to say. Instead, I fumbled in my pockets and produced a handful of coins. "Take it. Take it and let me go."
He counted them with an exaggerated slowness, like he didn't trust anything that moved. "Your number," he said finally. "You give me your number, I give this back."
"I'm not—" I said, and the word fizzed out. "I'm not asking for money. I mean—" I kissed him instead.
I didn't mean to. The world had shifted so violently that kissing a young Denali while pinned to a wall felt like a lifeline. My mouth landed on his and for one outrageous second I tasted both my old life and my last breath.
He shoved me off. "Don't be ridiculous."
He walked away like I'd splashed him with mud. It was infuriating. He was both the one I had married and a stranger who thought I was begging on a street. I gathered myself and followed at a distance. If the universe gave me a second chance, I wasn't going to waste it.
At the bathhouse, the woman at the counter looked like she had built half her face from rollers and cigarettes. She wagged a finger at me. "Two bucks."
I laid my coins down. The woman scoffed. "These are dime-store coins. They're from the two-thousand set. You trying to cheat me?"
"I—" I hadn't known coins had years stamped on them. "Please, listen. I can pay. I can—"
"Enough talking," the woman said and grabbed my collar. "If you don't pay, I'll call the cops."
"Denali!" I cried. He had finished sweeping and stood with a broom across his shoulders like an exasperated statue.
"Do you know her?" the owner said.
Denali looked at me with a face that hurt. "No."
She yanked me toward the door. If she handed me to the police, then what? Where would I even go? I was someone without papers, without a past in this decade. Then Denali did the last thing I expected.
He took two coins from his pocket and dropped them on the counter. "I paid for her. She can go."
My knees folded. Then he turned and started to leave. "Wait," I said, scrambling to follow. "You can't just—"
"Don't follow me," he said without looking back.
"You're being dramatic," I told the retreating figure. "Give your mother my number. You can pay me back later."
He stopped like I had cut him. He turned, and his eyes studied me the way a man studies a complicated machine he doesn't fully trust. "What do you want?"
"Your help," I said, and in a second the absurdity of my situation came into focus. "You're Denali Olson, aren't you? The man I married in my other life. I'm Erin Flores." I put the name out like a surrender flag. "Give me a place to sleep for a night. I have nowhere to go."
He looked at me like the name was a rumor. "Don't get attached to people based on names."
I wanted to cry. I wanted to smash my head into the wall until the past and present stopped arguing with each other. Instead I followed him.
He led me through alleys I had never seen in travel brochures. "Don't talk too much," he said. "And don't hang around people who make trouble."
"Trouble is my middle name," I said lightly. He didn't smile.
His building was a box of bricks with balconies that sagged under laundry. Inside, a small woman with eyes like dried raisins sat on a rough bed. She coughed, thin and hard. Denali called her "Ma." Her name, I learned later, was Lennon Robertson.
"You heard me," he said softly. "You stay out."
She coughed harder, then her eyes softened when they rested on me. "You can stay," she said. "If you're his friend."
"I'm not his—" I hesitated. "I'm Erin. I'm... here."
"You better not be a bad influence," Lennon said. She had a kindness that looked like patience carved out of granite.
I knew what I had to do then. Twenty-four hours after arriving in a past that smelled like fried oil, I sold the gold bracelet the older Denali had once given me — the heavy wedding piece I had prized in my previous life — and paid for Lennon’s first round of treatment. The hospital smelled like disinfectant and hope. Denali didn't like me doing it.
"I won't take money from a woman," he said as if refusing was an art form.
"Not your money," I said, tapping the box with the letters E.R. inside. "You're welcome."
His jaw worked. "That bracelet—"
"Is mine," I said. "You bought it once. Consider this me paying you back. And consider it me choosing to stay."
He exhaled. Then an expression I had never seen on his face surfaced — a worry so large it made the room feel small. "You're talking too much."
"I like talking," I said. "And I have a plan."
In those days, Shenzhen was a distant bright city in my memory, a place where fortunes were made and lost like coins dropped in fountains. Denali sounded the note of reason: his mother, the health bills, the offers that came from men who smelled faintly of oil and louder of influence. A man named Bastian Sullivan hovered on the edges of our small life. Big, loud, sharp with a grin that suggested he swallowed matches for breakfast. He ran local clubs, the kind of cheap bright places that promised fun and took it in payments.
One night, Bastian walked into the bathhouse.
"Erin," he said with too much affection, "you've made this place clever with your oils. I could make it bigger. I could make it pay."
I wanted to like him because my first instinct had always been to like people who could hand me doors. But Denali tensed like a wire pulled taut.
"He's dangerous," Denali said later when he thought I couldn't hear. "He forces people into things. He pretends to be your friend and counts your teeth while you sleep."
"You're being melodramatic," I said.
"You come from a world of gilded edges," he said with a sharp look. "This is not that. You will get burned."
The first time Bastian proved himself a burn, it was a slow one. He came to the small bathhouse with his crew and a polite smile and asked for one of my "special" treatments. He didn't want oils; he wanted me. I told him to leave. He laughed and said, "You think I'm joking?"
"You think I'm offering," I shot back. He snapped his fingers; two of his men closed in. I felt a circle close. The bathhouse owner, Giselle Boyd, struck up her cigarette and cursed. "Don't make trouble," she hissed, but the men were already on top of me.
"Call the cops," I pleaded to the empty space above them. The men ignored me. I was small in their scheme, a thing to be moved.
Bastian slapped one of his men who hesitated. "Finish her," he said casually.
My life, this life, had been a string of choices that put me in rooms I wasn't ready for. I had loved the ease of money, the comfort of a man whose name commanded rooms. I had died on my wedding day for that life. Standing beneath Bastian's hand, I realized how little protection a name offered when the world decided to be cruel.
Then Denali came back.
He'd been away. He came in like a storm, carrying a metal shovel that clanged against the floor, carrying an anger I had never seen. He swung, and in the chaos — the yells, the crash of bodies — something terrible unfolded. Bastian was hit. He fell and the men fled or were stunned into inaction. The owner, Giselle Boyd, protected me and bled and swore until her voice was rough.
When I woke up in a hospital bed later, Denali sat by the window, hair cropped too short like some penance. He had a scar forming above his eyebrow. "You okay?" he asked me like a question that mattered more than his future.
"Did he—" I tried to ask. "Is he—"
"He'll be okay," Denali said. The truth was more complicated. Bastian had not been just a brute; he had connections. Charges were filed. Denali, in a moment of blind and clumsy heroism, had hit him hard enough to maim him for life. Bastian survived but would not walk right again. It was then the police came. Denali was picked up for assault.
In those months Denali disappeared from pride and presence. He came back thinner, his shoulders narrower. He had been sentenced for assault; not a long term, but enough. It was one of those stupid legal things: out of anger, out of a desperate attempt to stop a monster.
I went to see him at the facility that smelled like coffee and sullen metal. He was waiting for me when I arrived, wearing a cotton sweater and a look like a man who'd had time to make decisions and had not wanted any of them.
"Why did you do it?" I asked. My voice was steady as a pond.
"Because someone had to stop him," he said. "Because I couldn't stand listening to you scream."
"You could have called the police," I said. "You could have run."
He smiled at me — the smallest smile, like he was tasting something he didn't want to swallow. "You sold me one of your rings the first day. You told me it would keep me warm. I thought you deserved to be warm."
I laughed despite myself. "You did that for me? You silly man."
We took the train south when he got out. The green fields blurred past like memories. We packed as much as we had into two bags. Lennon squeezed my hand and told me to take care. Giselle said something blunt that sounded like a blessing: "Don't forget to send money."
On the train, Denali told me about the dream.
"When I'm old," he said quietly, "I dream I'm sitting in a room and someone older than me — a man I don't know at first — tells me, 'If you see my wife at twenty, take care of her.' I used to think dreams meant nothing. But the first time I saw you, I felt like I'd been waiting my whole life to be forgiven."
"You're ridiculous," I said, leaning my head against the window.
"Don't be," he whispered. "Promise me something."
He would never be a man who asked for promises lightly. But he did ask for one small thing: "If we go south and it gets hard, stay with me. Don't run back for the easy life."
"I won't," I promised, and the promise wasn't an empty coin. It was a decision. I had lost a life and been given another. This time I would not gamble it on the taste of money alone.
Shenzhen was a fever. The air smelled of solder and ambition. Denali's hands flew over circuit boards; he was brilliant with things that blinked. Men tried to buy him, to seduce him, to threaten him. Once, a representative from a company made a thin-lipped offer with numbers that made our eyes widen. He refused.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because I don't want money that makes me small," he said. "I want money I can sleep with at night."
I couldn't argue with that.
We worked long days. I learned to wire a small board. I learned to pitch events to investors who drank cheap tea and swallowed our hopes without chewing. We made a little money. We started to breathe.
Bastian retreated from our lives, a ghost with a limp and a grudge. I thought him done.
That was the moment I was wrong.
Months later Bastian resurfaced in a place full of lights — the exhibition hall where dozens of tiny companies showed off cheap electronics. Denali had a booth with boards he'd soldered himself. I stood by him like a decorative sign. People swarmed. Cameras clicked. Investors asked questions about chipsets and flow rates. Denali was in his element, in that holy flow where his mind made things that sang.
Bastian walked past like a landmine. He stopped and his eyes found me.
"Erin," he said. "Nice to see you. You look... prosperous."
Denali stiffened.
"You're not going to ruin us," Bastian whispered to me, but his voice carried and someone else heard.
"Is that Bastian Sullivan?" a reporter asked.
He was arrogant enough to try to bluff. "I'm here as a visitor. Congratulations to the young man."
"That voice," someone said. "Isn't he the man from the bathhouse trouble?"
A crowd gathered like a storm. The world has a taste for stories that pit the small and brave against the loud and cruel. Bastian felt the pull of all the heads turning. He tried to use his old tricks, offering bribes and soft compliments. Denali answered every attack with calm numbers and the mechanical football of facts.
Then an event happened that felt like it had been brewing from the first time he shoved me against a wall.
A woman — one of Bastian's former partners — stepped forward. "You cheated us," she said. "You sold us fake equipment, Bastian. You took our money and left us with void boxes."
He turned his face toward her like a dog caught lifting its leg. "You're lying," he spat.
"Then why are the receipts here?" she said. "Why do the recordings show you saying those exact words?"
People pulled out phones. The ring of proof echoed. Bastian's face froze. Then it melted: first disbelief, then rage, then the kind of panic that lives in men who never learned how to lose.
"You're accusing me," he hissed. "You little—"
"Look at him," I said, louder than I had intended. "He lied. He hurt people. He thought he could keep us all quiet by scaring us."
The room was no longer a fair booth; it had turned into a stage. Cameras rolled. People clustered. Denali didn't move; he let me speak. Words came out of me smooth and hot and full of all the times he had tried to corner me in a bathhouse and the nights when I had sold my jewelry for hospital bills. I named every wound. I named where my money had gone and how he had tried to claim me like a prize. I named his attempts to control us.
There is a cruelty in public shame, the way a man can be stripped of the costumes he used to hide behind. Bastian's grin cracked and fell in front of dozens of witnesses. He clawed for denials, for the white collar of an old ally. He made to reach for a security guard like he owned the room.
Then another man — one of the women he'd cheated — walked up, took his arm, and slapped him hard.
"You coward," she said. "You made people pay for your lies. You ruined lives."
The slap echoed like a verdict. People began to hiss. Some began recording. Others who had hated him for years came forward, listing their losses. Investors who had been deciding whether to sign with Bastian's network stepped back; the smell of scandal was too pungent.
He first looked around with a grin that tried to be arrogance. Then the grin fell. He began to shout, to threaten. "I'll sue you," he said. "I'll—"
"Go on," someone answered. "Show us how you sue us now, Bastian."
A camera trained on his face. The sound of a hundred phones clicking was like applause, but the wrong kind. His men melted back into the crowd. No one wanted to be near a burning man. The press smelled blood and didn't flinch.
He walked off the booth with the same arrogance, then stopped as a group clustered before the stage. "You ruined us," a small man said, and a chorus of quiet accusation rose.
The punishment wasn't a single blow. It was an unspooling. He was exposed: receipts, messages, recordings. His sponsors withdrew. One by one people stood and told how he had cheated them: deals gone sour, promises unfulfilled. The press began to feed. The company's legal team called. The investors canceled meetings.
Once he had been a man with access and swagger. He walked out of the exhibition with his head down. Once he had swaggered through doors; now doors closed. A crowd followed him out, not to attack but to see the fall of a figure they'd heard about. The humiliation was public: people whispered, took photos, shoved their accusations into his face. He couldn't even convince the surrounding taxi drivers to take him immediately; someone spotted his name and refused. A surveillance clip of him leaving the hall — hands shaking, face pale — turned viral within hours.
Denali and I stayed at our booth while the story spread. He put a hand on my shoulder. I turned to him. "You didn't have to stand up," I said.
"I couldn't watch," he said. "I knew who he was when I was twenty. I didn't know then that standing up would cost me. But I won't live a life of regret."
"Do you feel satisfied?" I asked.
"No," he said simply. "Justice is complicated. But I feel lighter."
The next weeks were chaos in a gentle way. Bastian's business crumbled as more people came forward. The law took its slow steps. He was no longer the man with access; he was a spectacle. People pointed. He tried to maintain bluster at a public hearing. He was challenged on camera and on stage and his reactions gradually bore the pattern everyone feared: anger, denial, then a small, pathetic attempt to crawl back.
I watched him from a courtroom gallery when things came to a head. There were dozens of witnesses and his face took on a new color — the color of someone learning that networks can be dismantled. At one point he looked right at me with eyes full of accusation and then with the hollowed look of someone who realized all his masks had been cataloged.
When the verdict included compensation for many of his victims, the courtroom erupted in a way I had not expected. People clapped, some wept. Bastian's expression ran through all the stages the rulebook demanded — disbelief, rage, bargaining. He tried to make a speech, a plea, then his voice cracked. Camera phones recorded his fall. Men who had once followed him stood by with sheepish faces and left. His influence dissolved as his hands reached for things that no longer belonged to him.
There was a scene I will not forget. Outside the courthouse, a group of people had assembled — women whose businesses had been siphoned, men whose names he had used to purchase pride. They had brought banners. Bastian came out guarded by some grim hires. He raised his chin and tried to retake his dignity.
One of the women stepped forward. "You thought you could stand on our faces," she shouted. "You thought we'd be afraid. Look at you now."
"Please," he begged suddenly, voice small. "I never meant—"
"You meant to take," she said. "And you did."
He crumpled partly on his knees for a second and was helped up by security. People recorded, shouted, took his photos. Someone spat. A man in the crowd pushed him; security intervened. He was humiliated in the most modern way: his deeds uploaded into the memory of a thousand devices. It was a slow, public falling apart. For once the powerful man was small.
After that, Bastian was a cautionary tale. He tried to rebuild, but the cracks were too many. Investors cut ties. Sponsors avoided him. Some of the men who had once been his allies publicly criticized him to salvage their own reputations. The humiliation followed him across business circles; attempts to wield influence were met with murmured reminders of court transcripts and recorded messages. His final attempts to regain position led to a public hearing where he was fined and ordered to compensate victims. He issued a statement that sounded like a confession and an apology, but the apology carried the flat tone of someone reading a script. He tried to sue a reporter for defamation; the reporter produced documents. Time and public memory did the rest.
By then I had learned how to live with the oddness of being someone who'd died once and somehow been given a second chance. Denali and I grew into the idea of husband and wife not by ceremonies but in the small, constant ways of life: sharing a bowl of soup at midnight, waking early to fix a circuit, holding each other when the world seemed too big. We were clumsy with affection at first. He would hand me his jacket in the cold and then look away quickly, embarrassed at such softness. I would watch him fix a board and feel my heart pinch like a child noticing its first firework.
"Do you remember wedding day?" I asked once, casually, as we sat on the cramped balcony watching liner trains blink.
He laughed. "What would I remember from twenty years from now? That you were beautiful and you died? That's a bizarre memory."
"You looked at me once," I said. "In the office picture. You said it was my face of the future asking for help."
He took my hand — calloused and warm. "You helped me," he said. "You kept me from making the worst choices. You kept your promise."
We never repeated the exact vows that had taken my last breath in my previous life. Instead we made small, stubborn choices: to answer each other's calls in the night; to buy a hot soup and share it on a freezing day; to fight over trivial things and then apologize because neither of us liked silence.
Years later, when the company Denali helped start was doing better — the boards selling for fair prices, the clients honest and repeat customers — we found a quiet moment on a field outside the city. Someone had given us a small pocket watch as a joke, an old thing that clicked like a metronome. We held it between us and listened.
"This is the one thing that keeps ticking," Denali said. "Reminds me to stay present."
I put the watch in my palm and felt the small, steady beat.
"Do you ever think about the life you left?" he asked.
"Sometimes," I said. "But there is a strange comfort in knowing that this is the life I'm choosing now. It's messy, imperfect, but it's ours."
He smiled that private smile that had first bloomed in the hospital. "Then stay."
I leaned into him. Behind us, the green fields stretched like an ocean of small hands waving at the sky. There was no grand ending. There was only a pocket watch's steady tick, the smell of solder and olive oil in the evening air, the memory of a bathhouse that taught me to bargain, and a man who had once been my reason for a darker choice and who had grown into something worth keeping.
"You remember that night at the bathhouse?" I whispered.
He squeezed my hand. "How could I forget?"
"I thought you'd always be cruel," I said. "But you turned out to be the kind of man I could follow."
"And you?" he asked. "Are you the kind of woman who won't leave?"
"No," I said. "I'm the kind of woman who will sell everything she has to fix the people she loves. I will be loud and stupid like that."
He laughed, and the sound folded into the field. "Good," he said. "Because I might be the kind of man who gets arrested for saving someone. Someone has to be loud with me."
We sat there a long time, watching the sun make the small things gold. The pocket watch clicked on and on. It was not the beginning and not an end. It was a stubborn, honest middle where I had been given a chance to rewrite not only what I had taken but also who I wanted to be.
The End
— Thank you for reading —