Sweet Romance14 min read
I Died, I Returned — And I Chose Him Over the Lie
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I remember the sun that wouldn't stop burning.
"I can't believe I'm still in these heels," I muttered, fanning my face with a stray receipt as I hurried under the trees.
Someone called, "Jaelynn?" and my phone buzzed like a trapped insect.
"It’s Aurelio?" I said, trying to steady the umbrella with my neck and fishing my phone out of my bag.
"Jaelynn, I'm sorry. Work ran late. Dinner—I'll make it up to you," his voice came, polite and rushing like a train pulling away.
I smiled even though my stomach reminded me it was dinner time.
"Okay. Just—please, next time," I said, and we said the small things lovers say before the small mercies wear thin.
I shoved the phone into my bag and stepped into the subway, thinking about cake and cheap dinners and how our red marriage booklet lay on the coffee table like a paper promise.
The carriage rocked.
"Someone's phone is ringing," a woman complained in the row behind me.
I scrolled mindlessly and stopped at a name I didn't expect: Orion Christensen.
Orion—pale, serious, the boy with the broken leg I'd known in school.
"I know that face," I told myself.
I tapped his momentary corporate post, then deleted the chat that had appeared like a stray ghost in my contacts.
At home the room looked too empty.
"The certificate is still there," I told myself, looking at the small red book on the coffee table.
My phone vibrated again.
"Aurelio? Still not home?"
"Coming," he said. "There’s cake in the fridge. Sleep if you're tired."
I opened the fridge to close it, but a sharp lancing pain exploded behind my eyes and the world became red and then black.
I woke into sound—a terrible clang—then silence.
"She's gone," someone said clinically.
"Call the family," another voice said.
I hovered above the stretcher, feeling my body like a place I no longer inhabited.
"Hello?" I tried. My lips moved but nothing came out.
"Her phone's still working. Husband calling," a nurse said as she took my phone.
On the screen: "Husband."
They pressed answer.
"Aurelio? Have you seen the news?" the doctor asked into my borrowed phone.
"Jaelynn? Are you there?" Aurelio's voice tore through the ambulance like a knife.
I stretched my hands toward him. "I'm here," I wanted to say. "I'm here, I'm—"
But they saw only the flatline. They pronounced me dead. They closed the monitor and then they packed up my body like something done with.
Then I drifted. I watched them wheel the stretcher away and talk in that small, efficient language of people who preserve surface order.
"They couldn't save her," they said.
And I watched myself being covered by white linen and felt, for the first honest moment, betrayed and very, very small.
At the funeral I hovered, a weightless, furious presence.
"Where's Aurelio?" I asked the air.
"He's with the lawyers," my mother sobbed, and then there was the buzz of condolences and cameras.
I followed him to the car because I couldn't help it. He got in with someone who looked like luxury and taste all wrapped in a tailored suit—Leon Larsson, I later understood.
"Everything's handled," Leon said, smiling like a man who arranges accidents in the dark.
Aurelio's face was calm. Not a single tear fell.
I watched them at a rooftop dinner the night after the funeral.
"I told you, we took care of the problem," Leon said, passing a menu like it was trivial.
Aurelio laughed the way men laugh after they’ve paid someone to silence a thing. "Good. Clean and tidy."
I hovered over their shoulders and felt the neat, surgical cruelty of their words.
Later, in a parking garage, a man arrived—tangled, angry, desperate. Orion Christensen.
"How could you?" he said in his sudden, rough voice.
Orion's eyes were dark and wet. He moved like someone who keeps himself together only because he has to.
Aurelio shrugged. "Who are you?" he said, as if the humiliation of me, burning, meant nothing.
"I know what you did," Orion said. "You two—this is wrong."
"What do you know, cripple?" a man sneered nearby.
"Shut up," Orion told him, and then something broke in him. He struck out—not hard, a blur of motion, and the chaos came. Guards, a boss named Ignacio Camacho, threats and power. They bound Orion, beat him down, underestimated him. They left him on the floor and walked away.
I hovered. I listened. I felt something like shame and something like the cold logic of a new choice forming.
Then I woke up in a body that breathed.
"Mom?" I sat bolt upright. I was small. My room was smaller. My mother laughed like the spiral memory of someone who has never gone cold.
"You're up early, testing nerves?" she said. "You had a bad dream."
I staggered to the mirror. My face—my hands—were younger. Ten years. Ten years ago.
This is where the story changes the world.
"I traveled back," I wrote in a notebook because memory slips like water and I needed to pin this new life down. "I have what I had before, minus the exact edges of my past. I remember the fire. I remember the lies. I remember Orion."
My pen scratched. I had to make decisions I should have made if time were an honest thing.
School came in the heat.
"You're in B group," the boy in the elevator said. "Me too."
He was polite and sharp-featured. His name tag read Cormac Evans. He would be a small kindness in a long season.
At my grandmother's, the neighbor's gate creaked and a chicken scratched. Orion's mother—Mabel Coleman—opened the door.
"Jaelynn, come in," she said warmly, and then Orion himself slipped into view—softer, younger, his leg whole, his face hungry with life. He limped away in fluster at the sight of me. He vanished.
I followed, because this time I could.
"I know you," I said later when we both ended up in the same prep-class building.
He looked up from the weathered coding book that lived in his hands. "Jaelynn?" he said, like name as question.
Sometimes gratitude is a quiet thing.
"You don't remember me," I said, because the old me had left scars and I wanted new stories.
"Yes, I do," he said, and I felt it—the sense that he remembered better than I could have guessed. He didn't speak it aloud, but I could feel the vague, open ache in him.
Days rewound themselves into a different rhythm. I could choose differently.
"Mom, can I enroll in a different school?" I asked one evening, thinking of who I'd become and who he might be without the dark hands that had reached for me.
"Why would you," she said, puzzled. "You did so well."
"Because I want to," I said, and that sounded like the smallest revolution. She agreed—hesitantly, but she agreed.
At school our lives brushed. Orion sat near the back, like a shelter of distance. He wore a pencil tablet close to his chest like armor.
"Are you okay with the group change?" he asked once, handing me back a biology worksheet.
"Yes," I said, because this time I would study, and not leave my future to a man who smiled with someone else's hand.
Time in this life was a smaller, far more dangerous thing. People left traces—messages on computers, careless phone calls, a restaurant reservation logged in the wrong app. I hunted for a clue about what had really killed me.
Orion's life had hidden scorch marks. At home his mother's new partner, Lucas Giordano, treated him like a temporary blemish on a smooth life. Lucas spoke to him with that polite, soft condescension that lives in luxurious houses.
"Make yourself at home," Lucas said once, to me as well, and I felt the house breathe a guarded breath.
I saw Orion memorize those words and hide from them. He learned early to be small. I learned early to be fierce.
We circled each other for weeks. Conversation was our currency: small, direct, honest, because neither of us had time for theater.
"You're dangerous with code, aren't you?" I said the night he helped me when my grandmother's old PC caught a virus.
He smiled, eyes narrowing. "I won't make your life explode," he said, almost a promise.
We spent time—small accidental touches. One day I knocked his hand while handing him a cup; we both froze.
"Like this? Is this how you start romances?" he teased, though his face burned.
"You started it," I said. "You were the one who wrote me help messages."
"You were the one who let me," he answered, and there it was, the easy warmth that grows only out of two people choosing each other again.
Meanwhile the edges of the conspiracy scratched at my ribs. I learned how these things happen—power, greed, and the willingness to make an unlovable thing vanish. My old life was a web of appointments, payments, and secrets—all of which pointed to the same center: Aurelio Black and Leon Larsson, men who formed neat deals in luxury.
I watched Aurelio in the news—hands folded, a voice that never trembled. He had worn kindness like a uniform to get me into safety and then worn it off like he had never cared. Leon Larsson's face was on the same glossy pages as investor events and private jets. Ignacio Camacho came through like a rumor—someone who made things happen for the right price. I kept lists. I changed schedules. I told no one that the quiet student Orion was the one who had tried to stop them.
We built small defenses: moving to a safer route, switching accounts, changing passwords.
"You're becoming paranoid," my mother told me once.
"No," I answered. "I'm becoming cautious."
Orion and I learned to read each other's quiet. He silently started staying at the library until I finished classes. I started leaving a light on in the window that faced his building. Small gestures—coat over my shoulders when the wind changed, a textbook left where I knew he'd find it—became the frames of our day.
As we grew closer, I saw his edges soften. Once he laughed and then quickly frowned like he had surprised himself. "You're… different," he said once. "From what I expected."
"From what you deserved?" I asked. He blinked. "You deserve a person who holds you like a lighthouse, not a mask," I said, because I had seen men who wore masks.
But the past never relinquishes its claws so easily. Leon and Aurelio made mistakes—men of their size often do. They began leaving sloppy traces of success: payments, overheard arguments, a slick man named Ignacio who showed up to clarify arrangements. I began to collect proof.
One night I walked into a restaurant where Aurelio was seated with LeOn and Ignacio. I was invisible in the crowd, but not invisible to the world—because cell phones are faithless saints. I heard the words they never meant to say aloud.
"We burned that problem package," Leon said. "Clean, fast."
"Excellent," Ignacio replied. "No loose ends."
Aurelio sipped his wine and smiled like a man who had already rehearsed his grief.
I left and sent Orion everything. He stayed awake for three nights and then gave me a list: dates, places, recordings. He had a method I loved—so quiet, so damned efficient. He started to plan how we could unmask men who thought they were untouchable.
Then I made a decision I had never believed I would make: I would drag them into daylight.
We gathered evidence—audios of the phone calls; receipts; a private message Leon had forgotten to delete that incriminated Ignacio; a ledger Aurelio kept in his safe that matched payments to a company Ignacio controlled. The little things that disclosed big crimes. We fed the evidence to a trusted journalist who had a grudge against corruption; he agreed to broadcast, if we could make the story undeniable.
"I can't have you implicated," Orion said. "If they find you first—"
"I'd rather be alive to fight than to be a martyr and silent," I answered. "They must be stopped in public."
When the story broke, it was like a lightning bolt. The headline read: "Beneath the Candles: How a Private Deal Became Deadly." It named Aurelio Black, Leon Larsson, and Ignacio Camacho. The phone chirped with the sound of every life we had touched. The city opened its eyes.
There was a hearing—public, loud, ugly with witnesses and lights. I sat in the second row. Orion sat beside me, his hand warm where it rested on my wrist. Cameras flashed like an angry rain. People who had once applauded Aurelio's charity came to gape. Leon's investors called their lawyers and went pale. Ignacio's name became a story parents clutched to their children like a warning.
They thought they could maintain dignity. They thought a suit could make the smoke wash off.
The punishment scene had to be public. The law would be slow; people's scorn would be immediate.
We organized a public meeting in the square outside Aurelio's foundation gala—where he would be expected to stand tall and smile. We gathered witnesses, survivors of other small cruelties, journalists, and the families of those he had hurt. The square filled like a bowl of murmuring tension. Officials took their places. I stood in the crowd, chest trembling like raw fruit. Orion's fingers squeezed mine.
"Tonight," the lead reporter said into a microphone, "we bring the truth to the place where false virtue was paraded."
The first to speak was the woman who had lost a brother to an unsafe demolition Aurelio had funded. Her voice was small and precise. "You offered a ribbon, we offered our lives," she said. People gasped. She laid down a ribbon. The crowd's murmur turned to a low, hungry hum.
Aurelio arrived, oiled smile in place, Leon behind him wearing a watch that flashed like a small sun. Ignacio moved with the measured steps of a man who thought he was covered. People pointed. Phones rose.
"Explain the ledger," the reporter demanded, thrusting a photocopy of the evidence toward Aurelio. "Explain the money trail to Ignacio Camacho's firm."
Aurelio's smile twisted. "This is slander," he said, voice like silk. "These allegations are baseless."
"Why did you tell your partner to 'handle' a problem last year?" another voice called from the crowd.
They tried to laugh it off. They tried to speak in “procedural” tones. Then we played the call—clear as a bell—where Leon joked about 'cleaning up' and Ignacio said "no loose ends." The recording filled the square like a rattling chain.
Aurelio's face drained. Leon's hand trembled as someone played the ledger entry, the exact dollar amounts matching the ledger in the bank statement we obtained. The crowd went still, then loudly incredulous. People began to shout accusations and demand answers. Their attitudes changed like light through glass.
"You told me to get rid of the problem," a woman in the audience shouted, pointed at Aurelio. She held up a faded photograph of the woman she had lost. "You told me 'we can fix this,' and now I'm here."
"Aurelio, you lied," yelled a man who used to smile at Aurelio at charitable events. "We gave for the cause. We didn't give for murder."
The public, once docile, became a jury of feeling. Cameras streamed. On social feeds, the clip went viral. People who had loved the sheen of Aurelio's charity now saw its rust. Leon tried to step forward, to bargain, but his voice was tiny under the crowd. Ignacio's swagger vanished like smoke. He slunk backwards, because swagger cannot keep hold under the weight of the live-onfeed anger.
People who once called Aurelio generous now approached with knives in words. He looked like a man who had been castrated by his own image. He stuttered, mumbled legal lines. Leon began to argue that he had been acting on misinformation. Ignacio's face, that had always been blank, now quivered; he began the sequence of denials, the pale dance of "I didn't know, I didn't order, I will cooperate."
Their demeanor changed in front of us. The arrogance was replaced by fluster. Aurelio's sentencing wouldn't be decided that day, but the court of public opinion already took its toll.
They tried to walk out. Someone shouted, "No, stop them." A reporter followed and caught Aurelio's face as his investors returned calls—one by one—cutting their ties. Leon was recorded seeking the cameras with his hands trembling, then being ignored. Ignacio's aides deserted him. A small crowd pressed in, and for the first time the men who thought they owned the night looked very small indeed.
And then, amid the roar, came a different sound: the mutters of people recording, the whispering of truth. A woman spat in Aurelio's direction and a hundred voices cried shame. People circled Leon; someone pulled his expensive coat down the stair while a volunteer held up a printed ledger for everyone to see. Ignacio was forced to answer questions in front of phones and witnesses. The humiliation was not a single act—it was a slow burn: his projects suspended, his name blackened, his calls unanswered. Without the velvet that formerly hid him, he was pecked apart by the truth.
They begged, somewhere between denial and the beginning of despair. Their faces moved through the stages: arrogance, incredulity, denial, anger, then a blank, startled helplessness that felt like a living fall. They tried legal deflection. Lawyers arrived like crabs. But before even law could work its slow gears, the world had seen, and the public's revulsion marched like weather.
Witnesses recounted the sequence publicly. A chorus of broken people told what had been done. The crowd's reaction ranged from stunned silence to loud applause when a truth landed. Phones flashed, and someone handed my name to a camera. I held Orion's hand so tight my knuckles went white.
"Why?" a reporter asked Aurelio finally. He looked at me coldly and answered with a courtesy so thin it almost shredded. "It was business. I am devastated."
"She was my wife," I said into camera tone, and it went beyond staged grief. "I am here to make them answer."
Aurelio's face crumpled in a way I had not expected. He had always been the man who practiced grief. Now grief was his costume and the costume was tearing. He tried to form sentences. He asked for mercy from those he had wronged by looking like he had been wronged first. People who had once called him friend walked away. Leon stared at his hands as if expecting them to produce a different future. Ignacio's denial muttered into the phone as the city leaned in.
The humiliation was not finished when the cameras left. Weeks later, court filings cited the ledger, the call. Investors withdrew. Sponsors requested refunds. Leon lost board seats. Ignacio found himself cut off from clients. Aurelio was accused of funding the wrong things and an investigation began. The public punishment was the worst: loss of status, of myth, of the comfortable applause they had become used to. They watched as the things they'd built teetered on the edge. The men who thought they could buy silence learned to watch their reputations erode in the public sun.
Orion and I sat in the pressroom for a long time after, hands joined, a small island.
"You were brave," he said simply.
"I had help," I said. "And I had you."
When the dust settled, legal wheels turned. There would be trials, and lawyers would fight, and sentences would come in their slow, deliberate way. But the public punishment—worse than any sentence—had been a quick, merciless unroofing of their lives. They had to look into eyes they could no longer charm. They had to watch the hands that used to applaud them now accuse them.
Aurelio tried to come to me once in the chaos. He begged on a camera, "Jaelynn, come talk to me."
I looked at him like a woman viewing a too-familiar painting of betrayal. "You never came when I was alive, Aurelio," I said. "Why should I come now?"
He sank into apology; he tried to grasp my hand. Cameras were close, even the feed from the first row recorded everything. He went from smug to stunned to a man with nothing left but explanation. The crowd hissed. Someone laughed. I walked away.
Orion pulled me into the quiet after the storm. "You did what we needed."
"You did the thing even before I could," I said, and then we both laughed in the small way that keeps people whole.
We rebuilt our small life from the shards. The world had shifted by my choice, by evidence and exposure. People who witnessed our trials of truth came forward with small thanks. I volunteered at a fire-prevention charity, not for redemption but because awareness mattered. He came with me sometimes, more often he would sit at home and write code until the world dimmed and then he would smile when I returned.
Romance grew slow and indelible. We had the moments they said mattered—the first time he took off my coat because I was cold, the first time he deliberately caught my hand and held it like proof he intended to stay. He changed, too. The boy who had once hidden his limp began to show me how to stand with him. He taught me quiet things: how to read code like poetry, how to see a small kindness and call it brave. I taught him to laugh at himself in ways that did not hurt.
One evening, months after the scandal, we stood at the same rooftop where I had first seen Aurelio with Leon. The skyline was a soft cutout of light. Leon's empire had lost some gloss. Aurelio was being tried. Ignacio's firm was reorganizing around a different face. The public record existed now.
"I should have known earlier," he said quietly. "That you would choose to come back and fix things."
"I didn't come back to play savior," I told him. "I came back to live. I came back to find what was real."
He traced my jaw with a thumb like someone memorizing a map. "You found it."
Sometimes, when I'm honest, I tell people the worst moment was not the fire or the lying or the humiliation—but the realization that I'd almost let myself be quietly consumed by the polished cruelty of someone who wasn't brave enough to be honest.
"I won't let you go," Orion murmured one winter morning as a thin dusting of snow powdered the city.
"Good," I said. "Because I like the way you look when you laugh."
We didn't end with fanfare or a final promise. We ended with small proof: a borrowed umbrella left outside his door, the way he always saved me the good pen, the way he learned to speak my mother's name with tenderness. The life I'd stolen back from a burning night was not perfect, but it was mine, and his, and honest.
The End
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