Sweet Romance13 min read
I Was Drowned, Woke Up Married — Then I Opened a Cake Shop
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I woke to mud in my hair and the riverbank suckling at my clothes.
"She deserves it!" someone sneered.
"Why don't you get a factory job and earn your keep?" another voice spat.
I opened my eyes and the world I knew—zombies and neon—slid away like wet paint.
"Where am I?" I whispered, stunned.
"She woke up," a woman in pink said with a nasty laugh. "Well, that's rich. No one will save you this time."
I sat up. My head throbbed. People around me watched me like I was an awkward animal. I had no memory of them—then a memory that wasn't mine flooded in like cold water.
I was somewhere else. 1990. A small coastal town. I—Juliette Bennett—was married to a man named Draven Knudsen. In the life I had stolen, the body I'd woken in had been called a fool, pitied, and shoved away by everyone. Her husband, they said, had been a handsome, steady former soldier who never left her side. Everyone expected a soft bride. Instead, the original woman had been clumsy, loved the wrong man, and had been pushed into the river.
"She tried to jump again," the pink-dress woman mocked. "If you had guts, do it again!"
I blinked. The memory that wasn't mine: being shoved. Not a suicide. Pushing hands. A face I now wanted to burn into memory—Susana Harper's. The woman in pink was her.
"You pushed me," I said, before thinking. The words tasted foreign and sharp.
Susana flinched. "I—what are you talking about?"
"You shoved me into the river. You wanted me gone."
A hush fell. People murmured. The woman who had guided the crowd to scorn opened her mouth—then cut it shut when a voice like low thunder said, "Juliette, stop."
He filled the space. Tall, black coat, and that soldier's posture someone had told me about in the memory. Draven Knudsen.
He took off his coat and wrapped it around me like armor. "Are you hurt?" he asked softly.
"No," I said, and lied. I had been soaked, but I was still alive. That alone felt like a miracle.
"She pushed you?" Draven demanded.
"Shut up," Susana flapped, lips thin. "You're being ridiculous, Draven. She knows how to cause trouble."
Draven's eyes went cold. "Apologize," he said.
Susana, cornered, muttered, "Sorry."
The town breathed. There was a small, private thrill inside me—Draven had stood up for me. The body I used to inhabit had loved someone else once, and that man had not loved her; yet somehow he had become hers in paper and name. I could finish the wish the original had: live happily with him. I decided then, ridiculous as it sounded, that I would try.
We walked home through flags and faded movie posters pasted to walls. Draven's hands were steady at my back. The apartment—thin-walled, lived-in—smelled of warm broth. He made me ginger soup and said, "Don't catch cold."
"Okay," I said. "Thank you."
He smiled once, then left for work like a midnight star retreating behind clouds.
I changed into dry clothes—clothes that fit a woman in a simpler era—and something inside me buzzed. A machine voice, sterile and impossible, piped into my mind.
{A billion supplies activated. Please claim resources, host.}
I froze. Then curiosity pushed me to the place the voice had shown me: a translucent doorway, then a room like a storeroom in my dreams. Shelves of canned food, seeds, a thrum of clean water, and books—cookbooks—lined a shelf. A small stream glittered at the threshold.
A system. Copies of the future's survival gifts, now in 1990's small-town quiet. My heart hammered.
I took inventory like a thief stealing safety: eggs, flour, a small oven—an actual oven—and baking books. The stream hummed—a spring that promised beauty, healing, brightness. A cat lay on the edge of the stream and blinked at me like a person in fur.
"Don't pet me until you name me," it said in a small childish voice.
I nearly dropped the flour bag. "You talk?"
"Of course. I'm Round," it declared. "I am not ordinary pet. I will help, and I will boss you."
"Great," I breathed. "I'm Juliette."
"Juliette Bennett. Got it."
The system gave rules: Rationing, mission tasks, the promise that completing tasks would upgrade the space. I closed my eyes and imagined what I could do with these tools. Cake, then a business, then a life that no one could spit on.
The next morning Draven fixed shirts and left as he always did. He kissed my forehead with a gravity I did not expect. "I'll be back early," he said.
"You promise?" I teased.
"I promise," he said, and left with the kind of quiet that makes you trust someone.
I crawled into the hidden storeroom and took out an oven and supplies. With the system's recipes and my hands—hands that had learned to fight monsters and mend skin—I made the first cupcakes. They came out soft, a little foreign to this past world's tongue, but perfect to my hands.
"Try one," I offered the neighbor down the street, Eleanor Gonzalez, who ran the corner shop.
Eleanor raised an eyebrow, then tried, and then grinned in a way that made me dizzy. "Young lady," she said, "This is magic."
I sold the rest at the small counter of Eleanor's store for two dimes each, and people like taste and novelty. People like flavor.
"How do you do it?" Eleanor asked. "Where did you learn?"
"Somewhere else," I said, and left it at that. The truth felt too strange for daylight.
Business grew. My little experiments morphed into best-selling treats. For the first time in a long time, I understood leverage: food gives warmth, money, a voice. I would buy my independence one cake at a time.
But the past kept its own dangers. The woman who had tried to murder me—Susana Harper—did not disappear quietly. She schemed. Her father, Bruno Herrmann, was loud and rotten with his temper. A small-time thug named Baltasar Mendez was waiting in the wings, greased by cash and appetite. Susana's guilt curdled into vindictiveness.
"She goes and opens a shop," Susana said one afternoon when the courtyard filled with whispers. "She wants to be pretty now. She wants to take what was mine."
"She'll be exposed," Bruno told her. "You play it clever. Make them see you as the victim."
Susana smiled, false as a rotten apple. "I will. Leave it to me."
I learned to listen. Spies were everywhere in small towns—ears, whispers, the thin spiderweb that fed rumors. I quietly set traps of my own. Round, the cat, became my little spy, slinking and sliding into people and relaying secrets with the system's help.
One night I found Susana whispering in a back alley with Baltasar. They planned to drug a tub of popcorn and make it appear that I had tried to take Draven away—that I had assaulted Susana in a lie so big it would devour me.
I smiled once, to myself, and did not confront them. Instead, I prepared.
"Plan A," I said aloud to Round. "Swap the popcorn. Plan B: get proof."
"Round will... assist," murmured Round, tail flicking.
On the night of the movie I walked into the theater arm in arm with Draven. I felt my stomach do acrobatics—this life was fragile and luxurious. Susana sat in the back, fingers white around a bucket of popcorn. When she slipped her hand into it to lace it, my fingers brushed the other bucket invisibly.
"Mrs. Harper," I said, softly, and bumped her elbow when we went out for air. She reeled as expected.
"Help!" Susana sang when we left. "Help, they've assaulted me!"
"Stay here," Draven told me, voice taut.
I stepped into darkness, exchanged the buckets, and watched.
A while later the crowd roared. Susana had collapsed on the floor; a man from the alley, Baltasar, was there as planned, and the town had an instant of scandal.
But the truth, like light cutting fog, can be driven home.
"She put something in the popcorn," someone shouted. "She wanted to frame Juliette."
"She bought the bucket from a vendor," another neighbor said.
Draven's face hardened. He bore down on Susana. "You tried to poison her," he said.
"No!" Susana wept. "No, I didn't—"
"Yes you did," said Baltasar, but his voice had a tremor. He had been promised anonymity and a payoff. Now faces turned. Faces take sides quickly.
Within hours police were called. Susana and Baltasar were cuffed. The man who had been waiting for revenge watched Slapstick Justice roll toward him like an old wagon. But their punishment would not end in a closed police report. People needed to see the truth burn slow and bright.
I had promised myself—no quiet endings. If they wanted to ruin my life, I would give the town a spectacle they could not unsee.
I arranged it to be public.
"Tonight," I told Round. "They will see what fear looks like."
Round purred, approving.
The community gathered in the square because the town was small and its gossip needed feeding. I stood on a crate, Draven at my side, faces pressing in, cameras—small town people with their cheap little cameras—flicking red eyes in my direction.
"Everyone," I said, loud enough that the mouths fell silent, "you've all heard versions. You've all seen one side. Tonight you will see two truths."
A hush so thick I could taste it fell. Susana arrived in handcuffs, cheeks splotched from crying, with Bruno pacing like a caged bear behind the officers. Baltasar stumbled beside her, posture twitchy, guilt cooling his bravado.
"You will watch," I said. "We are going to replay the events. We will show how she tried to frame me. The popcorn, the notes, everything."
"You're mad," Susana hissed. "You can't—"
"Listen," I said. "You told Baltasar to do this tonight. You thought the darkness would help. You thought the town would swallow the lie. But if someone records a plan, it can be unrecorded."
"You're bluffing!" Bruno barked. He was a man used to breaking smaller lives. He had no courtly patience for spectacle.
"Am I?" I held up the small radio recorder the system had taught me to build. I set it on the crate. "Play."
An officer, skeptical until curiosity pried him, pressed play. Susana's whisper bled out of the speaker, thin and wavering: "Just the bucket. He will be there to drag Juliette away—don't let her touch me. I want Draven. Make it look like she tried to ruin me."
Gasps fluttered like birds. Old Mrs. Hayes began to weep. The grocery boy's jaw dropped.
"You—" Bruno's face went an unhealthy purple, and his jaw worked like an animal trawling in its throat.
"Susana," Draven said quietly, and I watched the way his voice cut through town sound like a blade. "Why?"
"Shut up," Susana snarled, but the sound was small.
I stepped off the crate and walked through the crowd until I faced Susana. She stared at me like a hunted animal. People closed in; neighbor faces blurred; a dozen phones recorded it all.
"You thought," I said softly, "if you made me look like I assaulted you, you'd be crowned wronged and I would be hated."
"Why shouldn't I be?" she spat. "He could have chosen me."
"Because you choose ugliness," I said. "You chose to ruin lives."
It was not enough for me to shout. I wanted them to feel the depth of her betrayal, to watch her fall like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
"Release her," I called to the officer.
He hesitated. "We will process it at the station."
"No." I turned to the crowd. "You will decide."
Murmurs rose—uncertainty, but hunger for a visible end. Town justice has always been passionate and immediate. I laid out the proofs: the vendor's testimony, the swap of the bucket, the recorded plan, Baltasar's confession. A woman in the back, who had seen Susana buy the drug from a traveling peddler, told her story into a public mic I had insisted a neighbor bring.
Susana's face morphed. Her smugness dissolved into wild fear, then brittle fury, then a small, animal pleading. She began to stammer denials and then contradictions. Her father, Bruno, cursed and declared her innocent, then his voice cracked as the neighbors retold details he had tried to bury.
People began to react like a single organism unmasking rot. A schoolteacher who had once been kind to Susana turned away. A baker who had previously supplied her with petty favors spat, "You did it for your vanity."
A cousin who had stood by her never questioned her guilt but could not stomach it in public; he went to the edge of the crowd, turned his back, and refused to meet her eyes. An aunt sobbed and pulled her shawl over her face. The neighbors took out their phones. They took pictures. A young man who used to flirt with Susana stepped forward to give testimony about the money exchange she had arranged to pay Baltasar.
Soon the square became a chorus of voices. The police, carried by the town's pressure, led Susana and Baltasar away. Susana's face was streaked with mascara and humiliation. She looked smaller than she'd ever been in my memory. People spat, half in disgust and half in triumph.
"Take her," someone shouted. "No, make sure she apologizes first!" another demanded.
The police, constrained by law but guided by ordinance and community complaints, escorted them to the station. The town would watch the legal outcome. But the real punishment unfolded that night and the next days: news traveled in a small town faster than rain. Susana's employer—rumored to be already twitchy—fired her. The factory supervisor closed the door on her, saying, "We cannot have our name tied to a criminal." Her friends counted noses and turned away. Bruno spent long nights shamed by whispers.
"Why did you do it?" Draven asked me later, when the square had emptied and the town began to sleep.
"Revenge is a slow hand," I answered. "But the point isn't punishment as cruelty. The point is: if someone throws a stone at you, you should not hide. You show them the stone, you point where it came from, and you teach the crowd to look."
Draven took my hands. His eyes were tired but not unkind. "You did all this by yourself."
"I had help," I said. "Round and the system. And you."
He smiled, briefly. "I didn't think you were helpless."
We built my bakery slowly. I rented the little storefront on South Harmony Street with the help of Carlos Ferguson, who had been grateful and generous after I had saved his father, Edsel Giordano, at the market. I painted the walls a warm cream and pale yellow, drew cakes on them with childish, bright strokes, and hung a sign that said simply: Round Cakes.
Business boomed. I typed flyers, bargained with Blake Johnson for cheap prints, and made free milk tea to lure customers. The copying bracelet the system gifted me let me duplicate products until the shelves gleamed. Pasteboard boxes multiplied like blessings. The town had never seen such novelties. I hired local kids to hand out flyers; Colby Hofmann—my brother in that life—helped as an apprentice.
Rumors of the "smart woman who was once a fool" curled like smoke and then settled. Some people still refused to come. Some refused to speak to me. Others lined up. Men who had called me names now winked and bought three cupcakes. Children clung to my skirts.
Meanwhile Susana's collapse continued. The law did what it would, and the factory's official statement came: termination for cause. But the social punishment was worse. At the market one woman refused to sell her vegetables to Susana's family. At the sewing shop, the owner locked the door in her face. Bruno, once loud, sat smoking and seemed smaller, the town's shrill whispers nipping him.
I could have stopped there. The system offered more power if I wanted it—skills to replicate, to propagate. But I wanted to be more clever in my retributions: public, varied, and exact.
Susana Harper's punishment day—a show the town would not forget—was organized by the victims and observers. I insisted on it. The police agreed to allow a supervised public arraignment: a reading of the facts, witnesses, and community statements on the town square stage. I did not ask for blood nor revenge through cruelty. I wanted visibility.
The square filled under an indifferent sun. The old, the young, mothers with children, workers on lunch break—none wanted to miss the spectacle. They packed in. Cameras clicked. The small newsman from the regional paper arrived, breathless. Susana, pale and in a faded dress, came shuffling with Bruno and a string of relatives.
I spoke first.
"You tried to bury me alive once," I said, voice steady. "You chose a lie over life to get what you wanted."
There were gasps. Susana's face bruised into fury.
"Then you tried to poison me. Then frame me." I paused. "You thought no one would notice. I'm here to say: you were wrong."
I walked the crowd through the proof: the peddler who had sold the drug to Susana, Baltasar's recordings, the vendor's testimony about her bucket, the little recorder I had hidden that captured her instructions. Each witness told their truth. Each truth slid like a pull of light on a stained glass. Susana tried to speak, to rip the stage with her voice, but she had already painted herself into a corner.
"Why did you do it?" a woman asked.
"Because she had what I wanted," Susana cried, and the words fell empty.
Then I added a small twist. "This town is my life now. If someone attempts to kill or ruin a neighbor, that neighbor deserves a chance to speak. If you would ruin someone, the town should know all your debts. So I present to you not only facts but the cost you will pay."
I displayed receipts of donations to the victims Susana had slandered, the banknotes she had given to Baltasar, the false testimony she had promised. Her father, Bruno, heard the numbers, and his expression broke like thin glass.
"Public censure," I said, "means the loss of trust. It means no favors, no positions, no warm smiles. It means you will be spoken of quietly and watched openly."
Susana tried to beg, then to cry, then to rage, then to deny. The crowd huddled between pity and judgment. The baker who once flirted with her spat and said, "Leave town. We'll forgive you somewhere else, but here, you must not stay."
Her punishment entered the everyday. Employers refused her. The factory that had tolerated petty scandal now issued a press release severing ties. Old friends washed their hands of her name. Bruno, stripped of a veneer of pride, sat in the crowd with his hands folded and no words.
Baltasar's fate was different. He had been foolish and craven. The town did not need to humiliate him long—he had to answer to law and to his own conscience; publicly he was made to apologize on the square and ordered to work repairing public fixtures for the next season, while the police investigated his other debts. Each day his shame was visible: the bakery refused him, the cinema barred him, the handshakes he once expected were gone.
Susana's fall, though, lingered like a stain you can't wash with water. She faced the station, the judge, and the people. The town's reaction was layered: anger, pity, relief, and the small triumphant pleasure of justice seen. Her face, once used to commands, now learned the humility of curtained corners and angry stares.
Through it all I stayed focused on my path: cake by cake, neighbor by neighbor, each small kindness and small stubbornness stitched me into the town's fabric. Draven and I grew closer, not because I had won him by showy conquest but because he saw me stand up when it counted, because I did what the original could not.
One evening, as drizzle kissed the bakery's windows, Draven came in with a careful grin. "Your wings got me into trouble at work," he said.
"What?" I laughed.
"You got people talking," he said. "They all say the baker is a miracle."
"Good gossip," I teased.
He came closer, and the world seemed small and warm. "Juliette."
"Yes?"
He leaned in and kissed me, gentle and real.
"Don't promise anything," I whispered after we broke apart. "Except to be honest."
"I wouldn't have it any other way."
I had crossed oceans of time to get second chances. I had rights to myself now: a small storefront, a partner whose steadiness surprised me, a system that gave me tools, and a cat that demanded both food and affection. Susana's punishment closed like a book on a chapter of me that had been forcefully ended. The town watched and learned a lesson about greed and consequence.
And every night, when the oven cooled and the lights dimmed, someone would knock on the bakery door—an old woman with thanks, a child with sticky hands, or Draven returning from his late shift—and I would remember two lives braided together by a single, stubborn thread: the choice to live differently this time.
The End
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