Sweet Romance16 min read
I Was Given One Second Chance
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I woke up with the taste of rain and metal in my mouth, and for a terrible second I thought the roof had finally taken me.
"Where am I?" I whispered, fingers fumbling the quilt as if it could stitch the night back into safety.
Outside, the city was quiet at dawn, but my heart was not. My palms remembered a windless night, a rooftop, the sound of men's boots, and a hand that pushed. The memory slid away like someone drawing a curtain, but then the other memory came—the one I had begged not to return.
"This time," I told the mirror, "you get to live."
My name is India Rahman. When I was twenty-two the first time, my life bent into a dark line: an accident that looked like fate, a man who looked like a savior and moved like a trap, a house where doors were watchful, and relatives who bartered me like a thing. I died on a rooftop, and I woke up on my bed ten years younger with the same name and one impossible gift—time.
"You're really awake," Jayla Morozov said, sitting cross-legged on my bed with her hair in a messy knot. Her favorite word for me was "serious" in that teasing, protective way friends have. "Do you remember everything?"
"I remember enough," I said. "I remember the roof, the boots, his voice. I remember my uncle selling me like property. I remember the taste of being worthless in a room full of money."
Jayla's face changed. "Then we plan."
Plan we did. I packed the clothes I loved, the notebook of songs I had almost written but never finished, and the stubbornness I had carried into all the wrong places. At six-thirty I left the city I had known a lifetime and boarded a plane to soar away from the place where the worst of me had happened.
It was supposed to be a small break, a new start. I applied for a local audition for a music show called "The Singer King"—call it a whim, call it a plan—but when my voice left my lungs under the studio lights, something in the room listened.
"Who wrote this?" the judge beside the host asked after silence.
"It was one of my pieces," I said.
Valentina Finley, a living legend onstage and a judge by habit, smiled with a softness I had not seen in her photos. "You wrote this? You have my attention."
The show had a rule: unanimous approval from three judges could give a contestant an S-card—a golden card that bypassed eliminations and took them straight to the finals. I had sung "Rebirth" like it was an exhale, and when the cards flipped, all three lit. I held an S-card in my hand and a future in my chest.
"Congratulations, India," Valentina said, pressing my hand in front of the cameras. "You're going to be dangerous."
That night the internet shifted. People I had never met called me "the voice that came back." My manager—Kenzie Wallin, who had been introduced to me through Valentina—sent me messages that read like confetti.
"You must sign with Atlas," Kenzie said in person, leaning on the studio couch as if she had always carried companies in her pocket. "They can turn the S-card into a life."
"I don't want to be sold again," I said, my fingers folding the S-card like a fragile memory.
"Nobody here will sell you," Kenzie promised. "Not while I'm breathing."
There was a silence that tasted like future plans. "Okay," I said.
Later, back in my cheap hotel that smelled faintly of coffee, I let myself breathe. I had won, but I also had reason to be careful. The man who had pushed me to the edge once had not yet slid completely from my life. Gideon Moreau had been like a shadow at the edge of my earlier days: handsome, grave, and cold enough to break things with a look. He had owned the rooftop memory.
"Why can't I keep him out of my life?" I asked my reflection.
"Because he doesn't know how to leave something he believes is his," Jayla said, standing in the doorway. "Let him try. We'll be ready."
A month later I was used to the rhythm. I recorded a song with Claus Pierce, a composer whose hands were soft but relentless. "You added that last run," Claus said, eyes shining behind thick glasses. "I didn't think of it—then you sang, and suddenly the bar exists. Keep it."
"Claus," I said, laughing, "you're dangerous."
"Only you can handle it," he replied.
There were small moments that made the price worth it. Edison Mathieu, a performer who had once been my quiet friend and once my boyfriend, surprised me with small kindnesses I had not asked for. "You look cold," he said one morning in the studio elevator and took off his jacket.
"Thanks," I said, and his jacket smelled like coffee and rainy afternoons. For a moment his hand lingered on my shoulder, a small bravery.
"Don't let anyone dim you," Edison whispered the day I received the official S-card notice to my mailbox. "You earned this, India."
I kept my distance from him after my rebirth. Edison had been gentle in college, and gentle had not been what I needed when my life was falling apart. He had not been the one who sold me, but he had not been the one who kept me safe. He still loved words, and on some nights when I was too brave, his eyes carried regret like a ready apology.
"You don't have to decide anything now," he said one evening as the hallway lights flicked through the blinds. "I'll be here."
"That might be the problem," I said. "That you are here."
When Gideon Moreau finally reentered the frame of my life, it was at the worst possible place: the back of a limo, near the exit of a stadium after the "Singer King" final. He stepped out like a photograph with the edges of the world blurred.
"India," he said, smiling that cold, precise smile. "Hello."
I kept walking. Fame had a sound like applause and a weight like a crown. I refused to give him the small comforts of my fear.
"India," he said again, placing himself across my path. "You are different. That's good."
"Don't touch me," I said.
"Why not?" Gideon asked. "You were always very useful when you were desperate."
I felt my hand close into a fist.
"You don't want to do this," Valentina said from behind me, suddenly there like a shield. "Not here."
Gideon gave a shallow bow, and his smile was a knife. "Then we'll make it elsewhere," he said, lighter than electricity.
After that, the pressure began. My uncle—Tomas Christensen—who I had trusted with family affairs, appeared somber one evening and confessed everything like he had already apologized to the empty walls.
"I couldn't keep the company," he said. "They pushed; they dug; I tried..."
"You sold me, Tomas," I said. "You sold me for money you thought would save the rest. Do you have any idea what you sold me into?"
His hands trembled. "It was the only way."
"Only way to be a coward," I answered.
In front of him I felt the part of myself that had been soft break into hard shapes. I could not pity him. I had to act.
I used the small weapon I had: my voice, my songs, the S-card that moved me from obscurity into the floodlight. Atlas Entertainment—Valentina's company, the team of Kenzie and Claus and many gentle people—built me back piece by piece. Kenzie was a fortress with a smile. "We will be loud. We will be legal. We will be exact," she said, as she arranged meetings and calls.
"People who make money off pain forget pain when the cameras turn," Kenzie said, lighting a cigarette with the fierce composure of someone who had seen worse.
That was how we began to strike. I sang on stages until my name was a hashtag. I released songs that were not cheap versions of silence but confessionals. "Rebirth" became my anchor. People connected to it and carried it like paper boats sent down a river.
Edison reappeared like a gentle current. He had not been involved in my selling, and his apologetic, slow-hearted texts had turned into helpful messages: tips on interviews, a contact who could get me a quiet rehearsal space. There were moments where I felt my guard slip.
"Remember when we used to walk by the river?" he asked me once, reaching for my sleeve to stop me from leaving a party early. "You used to hum off-key and the ducks would drown out the rest of the world."
"I remember," I said, and because the world had been cruel, that memory hurt sweetly. Edison was not a villain. But he was not the man I needed to trust with everything. I had learned that dependency could cost you your life.
And then came the biggest move: the S-card didn't only buy me fame; it bought me a chance to make the truth public.
"We'll expose him," Kenzie told me in a conference room stacked with files. "He paid for silence with money and threats. He used your uncle and a chain of people. If we pull the thread, the entire design comes down."
"How do we do it in public?" I asked.
"We hold a press conference," Kenzie said. "We bring witnesses. We bring records. We bring the music—your music, your story—and most importantly, we bring people who remember."
We prepared for weeks. Claus stitched together a track that played on loop as proof: voice memos I had recorded while detained, tremors and pleas and Gideon's voice layered over manipulative promises. Valentina used her connections to find a lawyer who did not flinch. Edison offered to testify about what he had overheard when he had followed a lead as a friend. Jayla scoured the past and found records, messages, and proof of transactions.
The day we chose was a public one: an auditorium in the city's center, open to press, to the public, to the cameras. Gideon Moreau had been careful for years—wealthy donors, a company board that obeyed, clothes that were armor. He arrived in a car with tinted windows, as if a man could hide in the shadow of his own money.
"You're sure you want to do this now?" Edison asked me as we stood backstage.
"It's time," I said. "He made me an exhibit. It's time to turn the gallery into a courtroom."
The lights were bright, and the microphones began to collect themselves like stars. I stood at a podium. Valentina sat to my right, Gideon's assistant—who had a file on him—sat to my left, and the lawyer sat with a stack of papers that weighed like truth.
"Good afternoon," I said, and my voice did not falter. "My name is India Rahman. I was once called many things I never asked to be. Today I will tell you who I am and what I was forced to face."
Gideon entered and took his seat in the back row. He looked at me with a smile that said this was theatre he owned. Then Kenzie walked forward and pressed play.
The audio began with small things: a voice in a dark room, my voice whispering, Gideon's voice commanding. He was softer than his public face, his words sliding into threats like oil on water. The room went quiet. Cameras were live. The stream had thousands watching.
"This is what he did," Kenzie said afterward. "These are his words. We have bank transfers, messaging logs, and the witness testimony of staff he forced to remain quiet. We have the records of my client's uncle taking payments and of the auction where he tried to sell family inheritance."
A woman who had been Gideon's housekeeper took the stage. "He threatened me," she said. "He told me to do it for his reputation. He told me to keep quiet."
"Why did you decide to speak now?" a reporter asked.
"She asked me to," the woman said, and the noise that swelled was not applause but a great rush of people waking up.
One by one we lined up the evidence. Bank records. Text exchanges. Photos from inside a house taken by a frightened maid who had survived and wanted to be free. A video of Tom—my uncle—accepting money with his head bowed like a broken man. His eyes met mine when he walked by the stage, and he fell to his knees not in pain but in surrender.
Gideon stood when the lights pointed to him. The arrogance that had been his shield began to chip.
"You shouldn't have done this in public," he said in a voice that had been schooled to be velvet.
"But you did," I replied. "You did it when you pushed me and thought I would vanish. You thought you could own me because you had clothes and power and stories. You forgot two things: the truth exists, and people will listen to truth."
"You're making false accusations," Gideon said. "These are lies."
"Are they lies?" I asked, and the screen behind me played the messages again. "This is you telling a guard how to keep someone quiet. You told my uncle to take the money and you promised to 'help' him. You told my friend that she was 'replaceable'."
I could see the moment in Gideon's eyes when he realized the ledger of witnesses did not have an eraser. He paced. He looked at the cameras, thinking maybe he could turn them to his benefit. He had always been a man who believed public opinion could be bought. But Kenzie had done more than collect evidence—she had built a chorus of people who could no longer be silenced.
"How do you plead?" the lawyer asked, his voice steady.
Gideon's mask began to tremble. "I deny everything," he said.
"Then explain this," Kenzie said, sliding a folder across the table. "Every account your company used to move money, the contracts to buy my client's jewelry at auctions, the threats in that file that ask house staff to 'keep the girl in line.' Explain this."
Gideon flipped through the documents. His fingers were not made for trembling, but they trembled anyway. For a moment he looked like a man who had been plucked out of a crowd and found naked.
"No," he said softly. "This is a lie. You are lying."
"Nobody is lying," Valentina said from her seat. "People are telling what they remember. People who were afraid now have a voice. People who were paid to be silent are speaking their truth. You have been given every chance to speak. You chose silence until now."
The cameras changed angles and found faces—the housekeeper, the driver who had carried messages, my uncle who had been paid, the lawyer who had chased the money trails. Each person told a small story of a piece of the machine Gideon had built. Crowds murmured. Reporters wrote notes.
"Call your board," Gideon said suddenly, and I watched the last of his power unravel.
Phones buzzed. Men who had believed a man could insulate them from consequence had to answer a question they had not asked: Do you stand with money or with truth? The board that had once watched him like a solved puzzle now watched him with blanching faces. Sponsors he had charmed for years sent terse messages and one by one withdrew. The live feed showed thousands of comments like a rising tide.
"Gideon," the lawyer said, palm flat on a page. "These are serious allegations. If you do not cooperate, this is going to court."
"I will not cooperate," Gideon said, but the strength in his words was less of a cat and more of a trapped animal.
At that point the room shifted. A tech reporter stood and began to read messages Gideon had sent to a supposed confidant—messages calling people 'necessary sacrifices', quoting prices like inventory. The live commenters began to post, and the screen began to fill with threads of his life, a patchwork now hung up for anyone to see.
"What will you say now?" a reporter asked.
Gideon's jaw tight. For a second he tried to charm the cameras, the grin, the practiced apathy that had once softened consequences. But people had seen the housekeeper cry in public, had seen a man who had profited from someone else's fear, and money could not buy compassion back. Gideon's board released a statement: "Pending investigation, Mr. Moreau is on administrative leave." A sponsor withdrew a campaign. Valentina's fans—millions strong—produced a thousand outraged notes like a storm.
Gideon sat down. The light in the auditorium, which had been designed to flatter, now sharpened every line in his face. He looked small.
"My life," he said finally, "is being destroyed over lies."
"Your life," I said, "is being destroyed for what you did, not over lies."
"You have no right—" he began, but the crowd shouted back, and a woman near the front stood up and held a picture of a young girl with a torn dress. "You took our child," she cried. "You took what she had and bought our silence with fear."
Gideon had no answer. The twitch in his hands showed a man losing a faith he'd always had: that power could shelter. Phone cameras were out, and the room that had once belonged to him turned into a courtroom and a stage and a public reckoning.
He tried to stagger away, moving through the press like a small animal. Reporters blocked him. They asked him one question after another until his words turned to a thin incense of excuses. He said, "I will investigate myself."
"You're investigating yourself?" a reporter asked, incredulous.
An employee of his company walked out of the back and told a story about being instructed to shred documents. The crowd's anger changed tone: it was no longer merely accusing; it was hungry for accountability.
"Do you see how people look at you now?" I asked quietly as he faltered past me. The voice was small, but it landed.
He looked at me, and something like shame flickered, but it was gone within a heartbeat. He reached out like he had in our past—and I stepped away. I had been thirty different kinds of brave in the last months, but this was not for me alone now. It was for all the people who had been silenced.
Gideon dropped to his knees when the housekeeper stepped forward and put a witness statement into the hands of the police who had been called in by the lawyer. The camera caught the moment and sent it into a thousand feeds. He begged. The begging was not persuasive.
"Please," he mouthed, but the audience twisted. Kids streamed a clip with comments of accusation. Sponsors wrote statements of concern. His board resigned publicly in fragmented statements. The company's stock fell. The social networks had already done what a courtroom would take years to do: they refused him.
It was public. It was messy. It was not pretty. It was necessary.
After the storm, Gideon was escorted out by officers to a private van. He turned one last time to face the auditorium, where dozens of cameras had captured the day, and his face was a study of loss: power, pretense, a life of carefully purchased obedience undone in a single, relentless morning.
"Justice is slow," the lawyer said when the lights dimmed. "But it has started."
People applauded—not for me, not for Valentina, but for the truth. For once, that felt like enough.
Days later I watched the coverage from a small studio room. Edison sat beside me with coffee that went cold. "You did it," he said softly.
"We did it," I corrected.
He gave me a small, tired smile. "You were luminous," he said.
"We all were," I said, because it had taken a village and a song and a million small acts of courage.
After Gideon's fall, the world shifted into a new rhythm. My uncle faced prison hearings and public shame. He came to me, hands wrung with regret.
"You saved me from what I'd become," he said in a voice that had been humbled to a reed.
"You could have saved me once," I answered, and the silence that followed was not gentle.
Love, for me, did not happen in a single cinematic moment. It arrived in fragments—Edison's warm hand finding mine in a crowd, Orion Russell's quiet laugh over a late-night studio run (he was a director who had come to film a documentary about the show and found himself staying), Claus's steady presence during long nights of rewrites, Valentina's protective arm over my shoulder like a lighthouse.
Orion was a different kind of man than Gideon—open, curious, not wanting to own anything. He came to the studio with a camera and left with plans for a song film about survival.
"You write like you fight," he said once, watching me edit a music video. "You're meticulous about what you leave out."
"That's because the omissions taught me things," I said.
He looked at me and took my hand without asking. "Then I want to be careful with what's left."
There were small moments that made my ribs ache in the best way. Once Orion refused to let me do an interview I hated.
"You're not doing this charade," he told my publicist when a talk show wanted to shape a narrative that would make me look vulnerable for ratings.
"Who are you to tell my team?" I asked.
"Someone who doesn't like seeing you used," he said. "And someone who will fight for you."
He moved on stage without being asked and, in the middle of a press conference, smiled at me in a way that made my knees forget to hold me. That was one. Another time, during a cold rain outside a tiny theater, he took off his scarf and wrapped it around my shoulders, fingers brushing my ear as he tucked it in.
"You're freezing," he said quietly.
"Thank you," I whispered.
"We're partners in all the small things," he said, temperament bare.
The third one was later, when I was tired in a dressing room and he sat beside me and hummed the melody of a song I had almost forgotten I wrote. He had learned it by heart.
"You learned this for me?" I asked.
"You're the only person who should hear it without a mic," he said.
Those were my heart moments—small, honest, more valuable than any gala photograph.
There were consequences after the big public fall. Gideon tried to start over and found doors closed. His public humiliation rippled like a stone thrown at glass. The people who had once gathered around him dispersed in various ways: loyalists became apologizers, board members became absent, friendships dissolved into press releases. He had to watch his world shrink. For a man who had believed he could buy an orbit, losing that orbit was the cruelest punishment.
One evening, months later, at a charity event I declined to attend, I watched a clip where Gideon stood alone in a hallway with a single reporter. He tried to apologize to the camera.
"I'm sorry," he said, voice small, a husk of the man who had been thunder.
"I'm sorry isn't enough," the reporter said.
"Nothing is ever enough," he replied. His face crumpled and he had no audience.
I thought of the rooftop, of the way the sky had swallowed me, and I was grateful that the second time, I had chosen to fly. I had turned my voice into an unbreakable thing and kept it from being sold again.
"Will you ever forgive him?" Edison asked me on a night when the city was quiet and we were too tired for noise.
"If forgiveness means erasing what happened, then no," I said. "If it means I can let go so I don't carry his weight every second, maybe. But he has to live with what he did. That is not revenge—it is accountability."
My songs after that were not revenge in the loud, cheap sense. They were precise, like a surgeon's hand. They were full of light and shade, of small mercies and the brilliance of people who listen. I traveled. I sang at benefit concerts. I took a role in a film Orion directed—a story of a girl who survived the storm and became a lighthouse for others like her. Edison and I rebuilt a safe friendship. Jayla and I shared the same jokes like safety blankets.
One night in a small studio, after a long day of recording, I sat by the window listening to the city breathe and Valentina came in with two cups of tea. She sat beside me and handed me one, then shrank into the quiet with a contented smile.
"You changed," she said.
"So did you," I replied. "You were fierce before. Now you are fierce with soft things."
She laughed. "I always had soft things. I was just afraid to let them out."
We watched the city lights like static constellations. My phone chimed. A headline. Gideon Moreau had been convicted on multiple counts—an outcome of a process begun in that auditorium. It was not an instant erasure of pain, but a public step toward justice.
I put down my cup.
"Do you ever think about the rooftop?" Jayla asked me once over coffee, the memory tucked in her eyes.
"Every time it rains," I said. "But rain has a different taste now. Sometimes I write about it."
"And the music?"
"It saved me," I said. "And it freed some of us."
Life after that was not perfect. I had scars that did not always show but were real. Some people who had once called themselves friends left; others arrived with whole hearts. I grew used to being referred to as "the champion who spoke." I grew more used to being kind to myself.
The last time I saw Gideon was years after the press conference, in a quiet courtroom where the world had decided his fate. He was a man with a small alibi of pity. He met my eyes and bowed, a little. I nodded. That was public humiliation and something more—removal of power.
"What would you say if I asked why?" he asked me once, though not that day.
"Because you thought I was a thing you could own," I said. "Because you made choices that cost people their dignity. Because you used fear like a currency."
He had nothing to say to that.
I did not want him to be erased from history—erasure is different from accountability. I wanted the world to remember that what he did could happen in any white-collar room where fear is silent. I wanted people to see the consequences.
So we used the stage we had—music, evidence, public testimony—to show a path. We did it not for spectacle but for those who would otherwise fall into silence. If anyone asked me later what it felt like to stand on stage that day and watch a man once beyond consequence fall, I would say it felt like writing a long overdue chorus. It felt like finally finishing a song I had started in a dark room.
"Do you regret speaking out?" people still asked.
"No," I said. "It hurt, but it also healed in ways I could not have planned."
Lately, Orion and I live quiet days between tours. He's gentle where Gideon was sharp. He is patient where some men were impulsive. Edison is still kind and tells me jokes about coffee stains we will never remove. Jayla sends late-night texts that are always terrible, perfect jokes. Claus still hums melodies like a man who never stopped making the world sing.
I learned to stitch a life back together. I found out that second chances were not magic, but a lot of hard work, and help, and small brave steps. I found out that songs could be engines of truth. I found out that public punishments—ugly as they were—could also be necessary without being vindictive.
And every so often, when the rain comes and I stand under it and let it soak me, I sing a new line and remember that once I stepped off a roof and was almost gone—and then I came back and chose to sing the rest of the world awake.
The End
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