Rebirth14 min read
"I woke up strangled — and married to a stranger"
ButterPicks16 views
“He’s trying to kill me.”
“He what?” Fox said, but his face had already told me everything.
I wasn’t dead. I was sitting on his office floor with fingers clawing at a throat that was not mine and a hand—big, white-knuckled—still around my neck.
“Elliot,” Fox said, rushing to pry the hand away. “Let go of her!”
Elliot Bush let go. He stepped back as if my skin burned him.
“You lied,” he said, voice low, dangerous. “You used poison. You pretended to be Hannah Winter.”
My lungs screamed. My head thundered. I clawed at myself and discovered someone else’s arm—longer, stronger, ringless. The arm had calluses, quick scars, a faint bruise high near the wrist.
“I—” My voice came out wrong. I searched for my name and found another in my throat. “I’m Hannah. I’m Hannah Winter.”
Elliot’s eyes went flat and empty. “Don’t say that name here,” he said. “If you call yourself Hannah, I will break this thin neck myself.”
I had no idea what had happened. I thought I was Hannah Winter—tender, sick for twenty-four years, wrapped in warm hospital blankets, loved by a man who had arranged a world funeral for me when I died. I died, right? The funeral had been on every channel. Elliot had buried me.
And then: I woke up strangled, in a different body, in a house whose wallpaper I recognized from a memory that wasn’t mine.
“Get her out,” Elliot told the two housemaids who had just burst in.
They picked me up with practiced hands. I smelled cigarette smoke and stale perfume. My new fingers were thin and stained around the nails. I saw my face in a hallway mirror and met a stranger—Brigitte Roussel’s face: bold makeup, a careless mouth, a body I had never owned.
My breath left me.
“Who are you?” I demanded. My old voice would have been smaller, but this body gave me a raw edge.
“You’re Brigitte,” one maid said. “Stop making trouble.”
I fought the fear down, because panic would kill me again. Brigitte had a strength in her, and Hannah’s stubborn heart was still beating inside me. I closed my eyes and decided.
“I’ll play along,” I told myself. “For now.”
I washed off Brigitte’s heavy makeup until my cheeks felt naked, until the skin in the mirror looked like a page with a name I could learn to sign. I pulled on a sports set and walked to the room where Elliot sat behind a glass desk, looking like a guilty statue.
“You hurt my throat,” I said, trying for the same casual tone Brigitte used when she came to taunt him. “Are we done?”
“Are you trying to be clever?” Elliot snapped. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not lying.” My voice shook. “I’m sorry if I scared you. I’ll be better.”
He watched me. His mouth was a thin line.
“Fine,” he said finally. “Prove it.”
The days after that became a practice in small truths. I learned Brigitte’s walk, Brigitte’s laugh, the way she rolled a cigarette and chewed the unlit end. I learned the family photographs and how to take the stairs without stumbling on the gossip of staff. But the hardest was learning what Hannah had left behind—what Elliot had loved and what I had to live up to.
“You look different,” he said once at dinner. He shoved a plate with chicken toward me without emotion. “Dress properly.”
“Why?” I said, surprised by my own small rebellion.
“You’re mine,” he said.
Those three words landed like a coat of ice on me. He said them like a warning and a possession both. I began to understand the rules here: Brigitte had lived like fire—nightclubs, men, trouble. Hannah had been the opposite: soft, sick, loved purely. Elliot treated Hannah with a religion’s care. He hated Brigitte.
“You’re not Hannah,” he told me in the hospital hallway when I fell ill one night. He placed his hand on my forehead with a touch that remembered a wife. “Don’t call her name.”
“I dreamed I was her,” I said, and the truth came out in my throat like a confession. “I don’t know why I woke up like this. I woke up in Brigitte’s body, Elliot. I—”
“Shut up.” He pushed me away. “Never say her name again.”
But I did say it. I said, “I’m Hannah. I remember—”
He pressed his palm to his mouth and left without another word. The door slammed and a cold hollowness opened up inside me. I had hoped he would hear me, truly hear Hannah speaking through me and let something melt.
I learned to be quiet. I learned to be Brigitte on the surface and Hannah underneath.
When I was quiet, I had time to read. Brigitte left a messy laptop full of emails, videos, a folder labeled “PULL ELLIOT” and, tucked behind a nonsense document, dozens of pieces of jewelry she had sketched—elegant, bold lines that somehow felt like my own hands had drawn them.
“You can draw?” Fox asked one night when he found me hunched over the desk.
“Yes,” I said. “I used to. Hannah used to. I—” I stopped because saying it loud felt like opening a wound.
Fox nodded. He was Elliot’s doctor and friend and the cleanest person in the house. He was also the first person, besides the house staff, who treated me like a person who might survive.
“You’re saying you’re Hannah,” he said carefully. “I don’t know about that, but you’ve changed.”
“Change,” I repeated, tasting the word. “Can change the story.”
Fox listened. He didn’t say the word “reincarnation” or “rebirth.” He simply handed me a cup of water and sat while I told him about the funeral, the damp black casket, Elliot’s hands shaking.
“You need proof,” he said eventually. “If you want to be believed, you need proof.”
The chance came like a splinter. Brigitte had enemies. In a nightclub she’d once drugged Elliot—she had confessed to it once, brash and proud—and the house had a hidden rage for it. The staff watched my every move, the house like a court where I had already been judged.
When Brigitte’s old friends demanded a loyalty test—three shots in the door and a stupid game of dare—I stood up and smashed the bottle on the threshold. I kept my back to the wall and swallowed the liquor in three cups the way Brigitte would have: loud, reckless, and resolute. My body protested. My mind counted. Then I walked out, unafraid.
“Enough,” Elliot said afterward. His patience cracked and something like tenderness slipped out between his anger.
I tasted his softness and almost fell into it. I wanted to tell him everything, to wrap Hannah’s history around him and hold him, but I remembered he had promised Hannah a sky of snow in Hokkaido once, a foolish, tender promise he had never fulfilled. That memory changed me. I wanted his love to be honest and earned.
The first big test came when Brigitte’s laptop—my laptop now—refused to boot. I took it to Elliot’s study where he always worked long hours. I told him the truth: I needed to prepare for a design contest. “They want me to go to Paris,” I said.
“Paris?” Elliot’s hand tightened on the mouse. “You can’t even keep your laptop safe. Why do you want to go?”
“Because this is my chance,” I said. “Please let me go.”
He looked at me, really looked, and for a long time I saw nothing but the funeral and the woman who used to die in his arms. Then he shrugged like a man giving himself a small mercy.
“Go,” he said. “But you behave.”
I boarded the plane with Julian Marino—my teacher, the only person who believed when I told him I’d been another woman—and two burly men Elliot had insisted sit in the row behind us. He’d been suspicious all along; he had not trusted me fully. But he let me go, and in that allowance I felt the fragile seeds of possibility.
Paris was a fever dream of light and work. Julian called himself Jayson now and we laughed at little things. He was kind and sharp and old enough to be my father, but he treated me like an artist.
“Stop calling me teacher in public,” he said, smiling as we walked the Champs-Élysées. “Call me Jayson. Or Julian. Your choice.”
“You said call you Jayson,” I told him. “So I will.”
“You’re terrible,” he said, but his eyes were steady.
The industry people were a blur of compliments, a hard-handed craftsman who made my renderings into small, perfect things, and a room full of judges. My chest pounded as they unveiled my necklace—a warm ribbon of gold with a small, unexpected blue stone in the center. The judges nodded. I held my breath. The applause felt like oxygen.
Then a storm hit. Elliot’s men had sent a file: my designs matched two old sketches that had belonged to Hannah Winter. Someone had dug up Hannah’s old files and found the same language, the same curves. The accusation was simple and sharp: theft.
“Did you steal them?” a judge asked during a private backstage confrontation. “Or did you fake the work?”
“I made these,” I said. “I can show you the emails. Jayson and I have been emailing drafts for years.”
“Your files show three years,” a voice said coldly.
“Three?” I whispered. “No, four. Five—” My mind raced, because the truth did not fit the boxed timeline Elliot and the house had thought. Julian grabbed my hands and watched me with a puzzled, alarmed look.
On the plane back to Paris after an inspection by Elliot’s people, I realized I was running out of time. My only proof was an old chain of emails Julian and I had that began years ago, older than the files Elliot had. I opened my email and scrolled. The threads jumped like a heartbeat.
“Jour—” Julian said softly. “These are ours.”
“But why do their timestamps only show three years?” I asked.
Julian’s jaw clenched. He was not a man who played with tech, but he was a man who could stare at a problem until it broke. “Someone scrubbed them,” he announced. “She—or he—modified the header dates.”
My stomach fell. “Who? Who would want to make me look like a thief?”
“Ask Elliot,” Julian said slowly. “If someone wanted to keep you out of his life, they could plant doubt.”
I called Elliot. The line went straight to a cold silence. When he answered, the words were short and sharp.
“Stay,” he said. “Don’t come back until we talk.”
I waited on the hotel bed, watching my designs and old drafts stream across the screen. I loved them. I had drawn them late at night in Brigitte’s room, when the house was loud with music and the world was careless. They were my hands’ language, and now someone had tried to make those hands look like a thief’s.
Julian moved fast. He knew how to get around tech. He pulled back the email headers, traced IP addresses like a detective. The reply came as the evening lit up: the emails had been altered, not written anew. The original messages existed on distant servers, dated earlier, with Julian’s handwriting in the send stamp.
“You have to present this evidence,” Julian said. “Right now.”
I stood on the stage again the next day. The hall smelled like polished wood and nervous perfume. A camera caught my face as I walked to the podium. I looked into it and saw Elliot’s face on a small screen in his study back home, impossible and distant. I lifted my chin.
“I want to say two things,” I told the room. “One, I did not steal Hannah Winter’s designs. Two, if anyone here thinks I faked my work, I invite a full audit.”
There was silence. Then a judge whispered. Then a murmur.
Julian stood in the wings and handed me a flash drive. “This holds raw header data,” he said. “It proves the emails existed before anyone could have stolen Hannah’s files.”
I played the data. The screen in the hall filled with dates, server metadata, IP logs. My hands shook, but my voice did not.
“Those files are mine,” I said. “I have been designing in secret for years. The timestamps were changed. Someone wanted to stop me.”
The tech judge frowned and tapped keys. The lead judge, who had watched me with a kind, tired look, said slowly, “We will withhold judgment until this is verified.”
I left the stage with my heart moving in a way I had not felt since Hannah’s funeral: hope.
Elliot arrived in Paris the next morning. He was a storm of white shirts and apologies that were heavier than he intended. He pulled me aside in the quiet of a back corridor and said one word.
“Why?”
“Because I wanted you to see me,” I said. “I wanted to earn your eyes.”
His hand closed on my wrist. “You could have told me. You could have told me you draw.”
“I did,” I lied, and my throat hurt with the memory of all the times I’d said Hannah’s name and been pushed away. “You did not listen.”
He looked at me then—the man who had once promised Hokkaido snow—and something in him broke.
“Don’t make me choose,” he said. “Don’t make me punish the people I care about to prove my point.”
I raised my chin. “Then believe me the first time.”
We went back to the hotel and waited for the verification. While we waited, Elliot did something that shocked me. He apologized, quietly, for the way he had handled me. He did not take my hand, but he sat with his arm across a chair and kept his eyes on the TV screen like a man afraid of a storm. I watched him like someone watching the last tree on a cliff.
The tech team verified the metadata. The timestamps were genuine: Julian’s server, a trace to remote archives; the deletion and rewrite attempts were traced to an internal IP at Elliot’s house—the house’s own internal network. Someone inside had altered the dates.
“You can’t be serious,” Elliot whispered when we saw the trace.
“It was not me,” I said.
Elliot’s face went white. “Then who?”
The answer arrived in a private meeting back in our city, where Mateo Larsen—Hannah’s father—appeared to demand compensation and to play grieving father to the cameras. He had been close to Brigitte’s scandalous friendships, too. But the one who had the quietest hand in the manipulation was his second daughter—Corinne Castro—who had just been introduced to the family as a long-hidden relative and stood to gain if Hannah’s name were discredited.
I confronted them. I stood in the middle of a drawing room with Elliot and the household staff and the entire guard of family lawyers.
“Why change the dates?” I asked. “Why make what I did a crime?”
Corinne looked young, polished, like a woman built to make polite demands. Mateo’s eyes were wet with a practiced grief.
“You don’t deserve this house,” Corinne said sweetly. “You never did. Hannah did everything for this family.”
“How?” I said. “By dying? By being loved?”
“Shut up,” Mateo snarled. “This is family business.”
“You altered server logs,” I said. “You tried to frame me.”
Corinne’s pretty face cracked. “You ruined everything. You were the scapegoat, the staple of pity. No one paid attention to us while we were behind you.”
I felt something hot and bright bloom in my chest. This was not the moment for Hannah’s grief. This was my revenge, my chance to put an end to the lies that had stolen hers and almost stole mine.
“You put my life on the line for your greed,” I said. My voice was calm, Ice-smooth. “You lured suspicion onto me so you could step into sympathy. You used death as your ladder.”
Someone in the room gasped. Mateo tried to lunge. Elliot stopped him with a hand that was not the same as the hand he used to choke me—his fingers were trembling with something like regret.
“You installed a backdoor into your own household system,” I said. “You changed dates and blamed another person. Technology doesn’t lie, but people can be cruel enough to make it seem so. You’ve made a career of it.”
Corinne’s hands fluttered. “You’re mad. I—”
“You lied to a man who buried his wife,” I said, and the room went very quiet. “You lied to a town that mourned. You used my death as a way to sneak into life.”
Then the phones lit up. Fox had been thorough and quiet. He had been in the background of our life for weeks, tracing, connecting, compiling. He released his evidence to the press: server archives, copies of the altered headers, emails showing conversations about “press redirections” and “clean names.”
The cameras came like a tide. Family lawyers collapsed into whispers. Corinne’s face, which had been carefully washed and made up for publicity, leaked makeup like defeat.
“How could you—” Mateo cried, but nobody was listening.
“That’s enough,” Elliot said to me later, in a voice that was softer than it had any right to be. He forced himself to look up at me like a man who had been wronged and had found his way home. “I’m sorry. For everything.”
I felt the old Hannah ache inside of me. “You love her,” I said. “You still love her.”
Elliot swallowed. “Yes,” he said. “But I don’t hate you for it.”
I wanted him to say so much else—say he’d forgiven me for Brigitte’s ghosts, say he’d let me be who I was—but the truth we had was raw and honest enough.
Corinne and Mateo were publicly denounced. The press had a feast. Corinne’s manufactured story of victimhood turned to scandal. Her friends evaporated. Mateo’s house lost donors and face. The family business took a hit for three months; Corinne’s social accounts were closed, her name tarnished publicly. They were not stripped of everything, but they were convicted in the court of public attention.
Elliot did not parade me. He just came over one evening and folded me into his arms like a man who had been taught how to be gentle but had never practiced. He did not promise me Hokkaido snow, but he told me he would try to take me there—some day when winter swallowed the world and the sky meant clean things.
“I want you to be yourself,” he said, voice low. “Not Hannah. Not Brigitte. Yourself.”
“I don’t know who that is,” I said honestly.
“You will,” he said.
The contest awards went my way. I did not stand on stage and shout about vindication. I let the applause swim over me while Elliot watched from the back row, a man gone quiet. Julian took me out to celebrate and put a hand on my shoulder like a benediction.
“You did well,” he said. “You kept your dignity and your work.”
“Did I? Or did everyone else finally see?” I asked.
He smiled. “Same thing.”
When I returned, the house felt like a stage where every actor had to learn new lines. Elliot had shaken up the staff and the family. Fox remained close. Julian kept a small, amused distance. The house’s rumors quieted.
One evening I found myself in the garden where a small cherry sapling grew, planted by a tiny girl’s hands decades ago. I thought of my mother—her hair gone gray, the quiet in her throat—and of the life she had lost. I thought of Hannah and her brief, rare joys.
“Plant it deeper,” Elliot said behind me.
I turned. He held a bag of soil. He had stopped wearing his wedding ring. The sight made my heart lurch—not because I wanted to claim it back quickly, but because it meant he was making space for a new kind of garden.
“Are you alright with this?” I asked.
“With you?” he hesitated. “I am starting to learn how.”
“Then help me plant it.”
He did. We knelt in the dirt together, hands cold and greedy, and patted earth over a fragile future.
“Tell me your real name,” he said suddenly, and the request felt like a small treaty.
“My name is Hannah,” I said, then paused. “No. My name is Hannah and something else. I was Hannah, and now I am all these names. Call me—call me what you want.”
He smiled finally, slow and true. “Call you my wife,” he said.
My hands froze on the sapling. “If you say that, you must mean it.”
“I do,” he said.
I laughed, a single bright sound in the garden. “I won’t be Hannah again,” I said. “And I won’t be Brigitte either. I will be me.”
Elliot drew me into his arms. “Good,” he said. “I like your version.”
The cameras came back for a family gathering later that year—an official dinner where Elliot announced a foundation for health care and art scholarships in Hannah’s name and mine. Mateo and Corinne watched on the dais with bowed heads. The staff applauded. I stood beside Elliot and felt solid under his arm.
A journalist asked the first question: “How did you forgive them?”
“I didn’t,” I said, and the hall whispered. “I held them accountable. Forgiveness is different. It’s a choice we get to make if and when we want to.”
Elliot squeezed my hand. “We kept the garden,” he added. “We planted it ourselves.”
After the speech the banquet drifted away like confetti. Elliot and I went back to the garden and stood under the small cherry tree.
“I promised you snow,” he said.
“You’ll owe me,” I told him.
He rubbed his forehead. “Then I will buy you an ocean of snow.”
“You’d better,” I said. “And one day, when the sapling is tall enough, remind me where we planted it.”
He smiled, and the smile was mine to collect. Later, when the house quieted and I sat at the desk where Brigitte used to plan mischief, I opened a new file and signed it with my own name—not Hannah, not Brigitte—just the one I chose that day: Hannah Winter Bush.
I kept Julian’s emails and Fox’s steady presence. I kept Elliot’s promise to try. I kept the sapling.
When winter came, Elliot booked a small cabin in a white place and kept his promise, but that is a small ending and a big beginning. The sky was full of the ordinary miracle of snow, and I pressed my face against Elliot’s chest and listened to the beating of a heart that had learned to hold two lives without breaking.
“Do you still remember the funeral?” he asked once, when the snow had melted into silver streams.
“Yes,” I said. “I remember everything. I remember being Hannah and wishing for one more day. I remember coming back and being scared. But I also remember choosing.”
“You chose me,” he said.
“I chose myself,” I corrected. “But choosing you is part of that.”
He kissed my forehead. “Then let’s keep choosing.”
I planted the sapling deeper that spring. It was small and stubborn and terribly alive.
When people later asked me whether I had been Hannah or Brigitte or some other name, I would say two things.
“I was Hannah at one time, and Brigitte at another,” I’d tell them, keeping my voice clear. “But here—now—I am simply me. And I am staying.”
Elliot squeezed my hand. The cherry leaves shivered. The house behind us hummed with ordinary life: staff jokes, Fox’s low radio, Julian’s thoughtful silence. My mother called from the old house one afternoon and I spoke to her with a voice that had both grief and light in it.
“Don’t ever call me a coward,” Elliot told me once when I doubted the choice I’d made. “You didn’t run from your life; you reclaimed it.”
“I was reborn into danger,” I said. “I could have died again.”
“You didn’t,” he replied.
“And I’m tired.”
“So sleep,” he said.
I did. I slept. When I woke, the cherry tree had a single bud. I reached out and touched it, feeling the promise like a warm stone.
“Good,” I said to the bud, to Elliot, to myself. “Grow.”
He laughed softly. “You always talk to plants.”
“Plants answer,” I said. “If you listen.”
He listened. I listened.
There was a long road of building trust ahead. There were letters to Hannah’s memory and laws to sort through and enemies who wanted their names cleaned and people who needed me to prove myself again and again. But when I woke that next morning and found Elliot’s hand waiting for mine, I knew I would begin again every day and risk loving him every time.
“Will you marry me properly?” he asked one night, playful and certain, as if he’d learned the right way to ask.
I smiled. “Yes,” I said. “But only if you promise to keep planting things with me.”
“I promise,” he said.
The sapling grew. So did we.
The End
— Thank you for reading —