Sweet Romance13 min read
Second Chance, Same Wedding, New Rules
ButterPicks14 views
I woke up to a pain that felt like being torn apart.
"Don't—Leonardo—please—" I screamed.
His face hovered over me. His handsome face, so cruel and cold last night, softened for a heartbeat when he recognized me. "Emilie," he said, and then the warning returned like winter wind. "Emilie Serra, you are my wife. You don't let anyone else touch you. If you see Hayes De Santis again, I'll ruin him."
"Leonardo..." I wrapped my arms around his neck without thinking, crying. "I'm sorry."
He did not stroke my hair like a lover. He stared like a man ready to burn a forest to save one tree.
I fell back into unconsciousness, and when I opened my eyes again the light was full and real.
"Miss Emilie, breakfast is ready," said a familiar voice at the door.
"Meredith?" Relief and confusion tangled in my throat. Meredith Dixon, my manager—no, my agent—and friend, had been the one who knocked on my door with coffee the morning after my wedding in the life that had just slid away from me.
I pushed up and the bedspread slipped; my shame from last night's memory stung like salt. But everything around me—the red wedding paper on the wall, the same embroidered duvet, the same closet full of clothes—was right where it had been. My heart knocked against my ribs with hope and a hollow ache.
"Which year is it?" I asked Meredith, my voice small.
"2020. August second," Meredith said plainly. "You really scared the household yesterday."
August 2, 2020. I let the date sit with me like something warm. I had been given the second day of my marriage. I had been given a chance.
"Where is Leonardo?" I asked, already knowing the answer, because memory sat like a map in my bones.
"In the study. You should dress. The household will talk." Meredith's tone was patient and steady, the voice of the woman who had become my anchor in the chaos of my career.
I stepped into the closet and found it half for me—dresses, skirts, garments that made me feel like I might belong. I've always hated my face more than most things—familiar strangers in photographs called my birthmark a map. But tonight I stole a dress and did something I had never done before. I stepped into Meredith's makeup room and let her teach me how to be seen.
"If you want them to notice the voice that wrote those songs," Meredith said as she worked, "you must let them see who belongs to it."
"Do you think Leonardo will—"
"He will notice you. Whether he loves you is something else."
He noticed me before I finished catching my breath. One look and his expression didn't change, but his pupils shrank like winter apples. He held something—his hand, a photograph—over a drawer and tucked it away when I came in.
"Last night was routine," Leonardo said, voice flat. "Play your part as you will. Keep your dignity."
"I want to be real," I said, suddenly braver. "I want us to be real. I want to be your wife."
He looked at me the way a man examines a machine he does not yet trust. "I don't want it," he said coldly. "Don't make me waste my patience."
I would learn later that his patience had been stretched thin by public eyes and private ghosts. He remembered me from a single lifetime where I had hated him for binding me in a marriage of survival, and then he had risked everything. He had loved in a way that broke through the night. His memory of that had burned away into suspicion. He believed a woman could not change overnight.
"I won't see Hayes De Santis again," I said. "I promise. Give me a chance to repair what I broke."
"You decided quickly," Leonardo said, a curl of disdain on his lip. "Fine. But don't pretend for me when you act for Hayes behind my back."
It felt like the old scar opening. I left, and hours later sat under fluorescent lights as the doctor marked my face for the first of a series of laser treatments. "Five to ten sessions," the doctor said. "It will take time."
I signed the forms and signed my name like someone opening a door. I wrote to Meredith in a message that felt like prayer: I am coming back. I will sing again.
At school the air prickled with the usual cruelty. "She isn't even human," one girl hissed when I walked into the cafeteria. "Do you think Hayes would look at someone like her?"
I smiled like someone carrying a secret.
"Emilie," Hayes called from across the hall later, but I did not run to him. I was learning to hold myself together. I had written every song he had used to rise like smoke over audiences' hearts—every lyric, every aching bridge—and he had eaten them as if they were bread.
He came to me with coos and clever things. "Emilie, you look off. Are you angry? We can go out—"
"Go away," I said. Politeness folded into a cold blade. "I won't write songs for you like I did before. If you wanted my music, ask properly."
"You offend me," Hayes said, and he meant it. He thought he was charming; he was not.
That night news buzzed of a surprise: Emilie Serra—me, the voice tucked into bedrooms across the country—would be a mentor on the show "Breakthrough." It was a public stage, and I planned to use it like a scalpel.
"People will recognize me," Meredith grinned. "Fans already miss you."
"I'll be careful," I said. "And I will not be used again."
Weeks passed in a dense stitch-work of small victories. My face grew new from the laser; my songs sat like jewels waiting to be worn. Leonardo continued to be a mountain of ice—polite, cold, present enough to keep the household’s rumor mill quiet, absent enough for others to try to slip themselves into the gaps.
It was at a rehearsal for Breakthrough that I saw the beginning of what would become their ruin. Hayes sang a melody that had belonged to me. He claimed it as his own new arrangement. He stood on a stage under lights, smiling the smile of the confident boy with the world in his palm.
"Hayes," I said in a backstage corridor, my voice low but carved, "that song is mine."
"What?" He blinked. The smile shifted. "You can't own songs. They belong to the world."
"Legally," I said, "I do. I own the copyright. I wrote it."
He joked and japed while someone from production walked in.
"Emilie, settle down," the assistant said. "We don't need any scandal."
"No," I said, and then—because I had been given a second life and the taste of revenge is sometimes sweet and necessary—I decided I would not settle for whispers.
The day of the live broadcast came. Cameras licked the set, lights painted the stage gold, and a million people watched. Hayes took the stage. The audience cheered. The four judges leaned forward.
"I'm performing a song I wrote as a tribute to my path," Hayes announced with the confidence of someone who had made an empire of borrowed warmth.
"Not a tribute," I murmured through the earpiece I had prepared. Meredith's fingers were ready to press the button. We had prepared the file—every contract, every draft, every demo dated and stamped in a folder sent to the network minutes before the show.
"Hayes," I said into one of the mic channels they'd wired me to, my voice soft and then clear. "This is my song."
He laughed—nervous, caught. "That's not true."
"Listen," I said. "I wrote the lyrics. I submitted them three years ago. I have emails, drafts, recording timestamps. I have the original video file." My heart pounded but my words didn't tremble. "You sang it. You used my voice as a ladder. Tonight you climb and show the world a face that isn't yours."
On the screen behind Hayes, the production director—my ally—started the roll. File timestamps. Composer notes. My voice before his. Camera shot after camera stacked the proof like bricks.
"Is this true?" the host asked, the question a blade.
Hayes went pale as the monitors showed him signing a contract on a date he claimed to have been writing. Lin Qianyu—Kara Fernandez—sat somewhere in the second row smiling like a queen of thorns. Her fingers tightened.
"What is this?" Hayes said. He tried to laugh. His laughter bounced hollow and failed.
"Is this your explanation?" I asked, stepping out to the edge of the stage, the light finding me as if it had always been waiting. "Explain to the people who gave you their hearts. Explain to my fans who have been singing my melodies for years while you wear the crown."
The show went silent the way a held breath can be the first sound of a storm. Cameras filmed faces. Fans typed faster than their pulses. The live comments stacked like small avalanches.
Hayes's face moved through panic-sputter-annoyance-lying. "I—it's complicated," he stammered. "We collaborated. She helped. We—"
"You stole," I said. "You stole without credit. You hurt the people who trusted you. You made a living on my bones."
Crowd noises rose—shock, fury, triumph. Lin stood, as if it were her cue, and made a show of shining innocence. "Hayes and I have been by each other's sides," she cooed. "If anything, we were both inspired."
I breathed. "Meredith, show them the registry."
The legal proof unspooled across screens. The songwriting registry carrying my full name, the dates I handed the demos to Hayes's manager. The public could see the truth as clearly as the stage lights.
Hayes's smile fell off in the same instant public outrage found its voice. He moved through denial, then anger, then the small, animal panic of being stripped of a lie he had built his world upon.
"You owe me—" he started, his tone thick with a suddenly ugly hunger for sympathy.
"You owe the country," I said loudly enough that the arena heard. "You owe the fans. You owe me."
Cameras zoomed in on his hands, which shook now. Lin's mascara had run in the corner as people began to shout. Judges turned their chairs to face the scandal like lighthouse beacons. Fans took phones out; audience members recorded. The show couldn't have scripted this better if it tried.
I had insisted that the show give Hayes a platform to respond. I didn't want to strip him silently. I wanted his fall to be illuminated, to be witnessed.
"Do you deny using my demos?" I asked.
Hayes stuttered. He tried the old manipulative tactics—blame someone else, say he was naive—but each sentence collapsed under the weight of evidence. For a few seconds he went through the stages: entitled arrogance, flummoxed shock, brazen lying, and finally a small, ugly shame that looked like he had swallowed salt.
People in the studio—fellow contestants, audience members—murmured. Some applauded. Some began to chant my name. Social media lit with the phrase "songs belong to their authors."
Kara—Lin Qianyu—had been complicit. She rose to defend Hayes and then, when shown a contract she had signed which mentioned performance rights and her conversations with Hayes's manager, the crowd turned on her like a sudden weather change.
"You were his echo," I said. "You took a place you didn't earn. You hurt my fans to feed your fame."
She started to cry, and the tears felt like a curtain. Her eyes were a practiced victim's. "She's making it up!"
"Why did you agree to be the face of my voice and not tell the truth?" I demanded. "Why did you let a boy stand on my songs as if he had invented the hill they grew on?"
There is a sound a crowd makes when a lie collapses. It's the breath of many people drawn in and released. For Hayes and Lin, that sound became a verdict.
They had different downfalls.
Hayes watched the journalists swarm. Companies he had deals with went quiet as their PR teams calculated. His invitations dropped like leaves. The label issuing his next single posted a statement: an internal review would take place. Sponsors called meetings. The fanbase he had curated by smiles and borrowed talent began to decide where their loyalty lay.
Kara felt the cold, immediate loss of credibility. Brands pulled endorsements; her manager arranged meetings to try and save her image. But the net had caught her: people rewatched old interviews where she praised the mysterious "voice" and questioned no credits. The internet is thorough.
I stood there breathing, letting the cameras find the moment where truth had been served.
The punishment was not a single scene of humiliation but a cascade. Hayes was unmasked on live television, pushing through a sequence of reactions: he stayed defiant, then pleading with PR, then furious, then pale, then crumbling. He went from "I didn't know" to "I didn't do anything," to "It's not my fault," to tears. People recording him captured each step. The hashtags grew.
Kara's fall was slower. Brands whispered, loyalists turned, a conference room dismissed her with soft phrases—"we need a different direction." She saw her followers drop. Once the darling replacing a missing voice, she was now the girl who took what was not hers.
When the show returned from commercial, Hayes had been escorted off the stage. The network aired a statement about the importance of intellectual property. My inbox filled with messages from fans—some desperate, some filled with old apologies from dancers or writers who had been previously dismissed. Meredith and I sat in the green room and listened as the PR world did its frantic work.
"Do you feel better?" Meredith asked, squeezing my hand.
"A little," I admitted. "It's a start."
But the public punishment hadn't just been about exposing a fraud. It was about the ripple: Hayes's manager lost clients, producers distanced themselves, his social feeds flooded with messages calling him a thief. People filmed him outside his car and asked "How could you?"—some cheering, some recording, some weeping at a betrayal they'd invested in.
Kara's reaction moved through the same arc—arrogance, denial, pleading—and then the worst silence: nobody wanted to speak for her. I watched her take an elevator alone, her phone buzzing until the battery died.
I had planned to be careful with Leonardo through all this, but in the middle of my upheaval I discovered something new in him. He moved differently now—hands more likely to rustle papers than stab; eyes more likely to search for where I needed help rather than measure me as an object.
He came to me after the show with the glint of something that had been hidden for a long time. "You did well," he said simply.
"You were at the hospital last night," I said, remembering that the night of the fire had also been the night he had run into flames for me once, years ago in my first life.
He looked like a man who had been burned and learned cold. "I stayed at the office," he said. "You did what you needed to do."
"Do you hate me?" I asked.
"Not exactly hate," he said. "Not yet."
We had many small moments after that—stolen coffees, the way he would slide me an extra scarf when the wind bit, the barest hint of a smile when I called him by mistake "my husband" in a moment of being ridiculous. We were not a storybook couple. He remained as closed as a box. But the box didn't feel like it could never be opened.
Some nights he would sit on the study couch and not speak; other nights he would bring home soups the housekeeper could not replicate. "Eat," he'd say, when I had a day of dizziness. "You need to keep your strength."
"Why do you care?" I would ask one night, fearful and blunt.
He looked at me long and let the silence answer. Then: "Because once, a runaway girl drowned in a fire, and I pulled her out. It matters."
I wanted to shout that he had died for me last life. I wanted to tell him that I owed everything. Instead I steered us carefully back to the safety of my music, to plans for an album, to protecting my voice and hiring a team of lawyers who could make industry wolves think twice before they pounced.
One night, when the house was soft with sleep, I found a folder he had left on my dresser. It was a folder of small things. Photos of me as a child taken by a pair of small, squared hands. A note: "You were always mine to protect."
He didn't say the words I wanted, and I didn't force him. Instead, I took a deep breath and began to live as if I had been entrusted with a promise that I could keep for myself.
Weeks became months. Hayes's career stumbled and then cratered, because the entertainment world hates a theft that is obvious. Industry heads moved to keep their brands clean. Lin's followers shrank. The public punishment—public apologies, dropped collaborations, recorded private calls leaked—was a tapestry of human fallout. They reacted the way anyone who had once been believed but then unmasked might—by grasping, by bargaining, by finally being left alone.
My punishment for them had been not to hurt them beyond exposure. I wanted them to be remembered as opportunists, not as monsters. I wanted people to choose truth.
Leonardo helped me through my pregnancy news when the shock arrived like thunder. I found out in the quiet of a night where the bed felt as vast as a cathedral. The first test showed two lines. My body convulsed with questions.
"You'll be a father," I finally told him as I sat in the living room with fingers pressed to my ribs.
He said nothing for a long moment. Then he did what he had done for every wound I had ever pierced—he asked quietly, "Do you want me to be?"
I had assumed I would say no—I'd swore to myself that he'd never hold the child I could call mine. But there was a hollow in me that wanted a home, a small creature who would be part of both what I had lost and what I had rebuilt.
"I want to keep it," I said. "I want to be its mother."
He reached out and touched the back of my hand, steady as the sea. "Then I will be there," he said.
The weeks that followed were fragile. I had a scare—early bleeding, a hospital night that tasted like a cliff—and a doctor who arrived like a kind stranger, perhaps the first truly kind man who drifted into my life since rebirth. Nicolas Clapp—young, steady, with patient eyes—came when I called and kept his hands gentle. He sat with me, explained risks, whispered reassurance that felt like a balm.
"He needs rest," he said. "You need calm."
"Will he be okay?" I asked, voice thin.
"Yes," he said, and his calm wore like a doctor’s coat fitting perfectly.
There were betrayals and recoveries, public punishments and private reconciliations. Hayes learned to stand before the press in humiliation. Lin learned to watch her own feed drip away. For both, the world closed with the small mercilessness of consequences; they had been seen, and then they were not.
Leonardo and I were a study in quiet negotiation. He would not say "I love you" in any clear language, but sometimes he would leave the kettle-scheme ready on the counter, or adjust the thermostat before I returned from the studio.
"Stay," I asked one evening, watching him leave the kitchen, the light catching the slope of his cheekbone.
"I am here," he said, and then added, not in the language of romance, but in the practical currency of a man who will protect what he has decided to hold: "I am not leaving."
Months later, at a small café near the river, I opened a letter—the last of Hayes's old files I'd asked the record company to send me. It was an old demo of his singing one of my early songs, done badly, with a loyalty I had once mistaken for love.
I looked up. Leonardo was watching the river. "You did the right thing," he said.
"I did," I agreed. "But it wasn't vengeance that made me happy."
He turned, finally, and the winter in his eyes had thinned to something like weather. "Then what was it?"
"Being myself," I said. "Keeping the voice that was mine."
He smiled then, a small, unreadable thing, but it was real. "Keep your voice, Emilie," he said, "and keep our child safe."
I thought of the long, strange chain of losses and everything that had twisted my life—a fire, betrayal, death, a second chance. I thought of my fans who had waited like lamps in windows, my agent Meredith who had not let me disappear, Nicolas the doctor, my manager and friend Meredith, and the man who had once died holding me so I could live.
At the album launch months later I walked onto the small stage and saw faces both new and familiar. Cameras flashed, and I thought of the courtroom of the world we live in now: the public eye that can save or crush.
"All this is yours," Leonardo had said at my side earlier. "But sing it for you."
"I will," I replied.
I placed my palm on the small charm I had started to carry after I learned I would be a mother—a tiny, brass music note that Leonardo had once read aloud to me from a photograph. It warmed under my skin like an ember.
"Sing," he whispered.
I did. I sang for the life I had been given one last time and for the one I would now keep.
The End
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