Rebirth15 min read
The Day Before the Wedding I Could Hear His Thoughts
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I signed the contract because my father’s company was dying.
"My name is Katelynn Lange," I told Reed Thomas across the desk, the marriage agreement between us like a cold slab of glass between my fingers and the world. "I will perform the role of your wife."
Reed’s face was a rectangle of calm. He didn’t look up. He signed like a man trained to make decisions without display.
"Good," he said, and then, softer, not for anyone but himself, I heard the first thought float into my head like a wayward bird.
[Yes! I finally get my wife!]
I blinked and almost laughed out loud.
"Reed?" I asked, voice level. "Do you—"
"I don't know what you mean, Katelynn." He kept his face blank and walked out.
[He heard me.] The thought came, bright and guilty. [My wife signed. My wife signed my name so pretty.]
I stood with the contract in my hands and the sound of thoughts — his thoughts — hovering like a private radio in my skull. The noise wasn’t loud; it was precise, as if someone had switched on a lamp in a dark room. I tried to call it a hallucination. I tried to call it stress. My father, Mason Schmidt, had begged. My mother, Wilma Dalton, had cried until she looked like a person who had run out of tears.
"Sign," Mason had said softly, and looked at me like a man tying the last knot on a very small sailboat.
And so I signed.
It began in small, ridiculous ways. Reed would say, "Stay away from me," and in his head a parade of smaller, urgent words would shout, [Don't go, please don't go.] He would say, "I dislike you," and I heard the opposite: [Love, love, love.] It was like knowing the weather underneath the sky.
"Are you well?" my mother asked when I explained breathlessly.
"How would that be normal?" Wilma said. She sat in a kitchen that suddenly seemed too small. "He’s a cold man. Don’t let him take advantage of you."
"Why would he—" I tried to explain. "He wants my father's company stabilized. He needs a marriage."
She squeezed my hand. "Then act. You are an actress. Be the wife he expects."
I laughed. "I always did better acting for the camera than the home," I said. "But okay. I can do this."
On the day of the private wedding, I sat in the bridal suite as stylists fussed, and I heard Reed’s thoughts from the moment he pushed the door open.
[She looks so unhappy. God, how I want to hold her. Why am I so terrible at this?]
He stood framed in light, wearing a white suit instead of black like in the contract photo. The room smelled of perfume and hairspray and a thousand little ordinary human terrors.
"You're late," I told him with an edge. He looked at me exactly as a man might look at a dog that has learned a new trick — pleased and ashamed in equal measure.
"Tomorrow," he said very plainly. "Tomorrow."
[Oh my god, tomorrow we get married. She smiled slightly. I like that. Keep her. Keep her. Keep her.]
Everyone clapped; the world sang in practiced phrases. Our union saved my father’s business. The stock steadied. We posed, we smiled, we pretended. Reed stood with a mask; behind the mask, the radio in my head pinged with tiny, affectionate sounds.
At night, alone in a vast, chilly room, Reed stood, his face lit by the window. He said, "Sleep early." I reached for him.
"Reed—" I tried to be teasing.
He pulled away like a creature startled. "Katelynn, do not make the mistake of misreading this."
[Oh my God, I said the wrong thing. Did I scare her? Did I? Kill me.]
He left. I sat very still. The thoughts became louder, centered, human. The pieces in his head did not match his mouth very well, and I felt ungenerous sympathy for a man who lived two lives at once.
Soon I realized the cost of the contract: I had signed away nothing illegal, but everything symbolic. I would pose as his company wife, play the role of an elegant partner, and in return the Thomas Group would prop up the Schmidt family. A transaction disguised as vows.
I made a small, private maneuver: if I could hear his thoughts, I could choose to influence his actions. It felt like finding a control panel in a stranger's car and pushing buttons labeled "soft", "please", "stay". For a woman in an arrangement, that felt dangerous — and liberating.
"Next week," I told Reed one quiet morning, "I start a new shoot. It will be three months."
[Three months? No. That is too long to not see my wife. I will die. I will wither. I will—]
He barked, then forced himself calmer. "No. You will not. I will arrange it so you are free."
This was Reed: a man who obeyed "plot" and habit, but whose inner narrative loved me in bursts of noise. He was a stitched thing of two fabrics — the original character and the man from another line of life.
Because one night I forced him, sitting on his lap, tears ready in the ridiculous theater of my marriage, he said something that collapsed a few bricks of the wall between us.
"I like you," he said, but between his teeth I heard another voice — not his face.
[Say it louder, please.]
He swallowed. "I am tired of being told what to do." Then, in the same breath, for me alone: "I love you."
Those syllables were small and enormous. I did the thing I told myself I'd never do — I kissed him. It was awkward, then true, human. After that, the world felt a hair looser at its seams.
But the world had other voices: the industry that refused to forget who had once been better marketing than me. The day I returned to set, I got a call saltier than seawater.
"Katelynn, did you see the notices?" Cosmo Wheeler, my agent, sounded like he swallowed a battlefield. "Someone from the board said to hold your shots. The company's decided to promote another actress — Ximena Lombardi is returning. They want a fresh face. For now, they're shelving you."
I heard Reed before Cosmo finished his words.
[No. No. Do not. She is mine. I refuse that story. I will not let the page turn like that.]
"Who?" I asked, voice cool.
"Sebastien Bowers. He sits on the board of the entertainment firm. He's been in a meeting with—well, influence runs deep."
Sebastien Bowers was a man who smiled like a contract. He would order people to be invisible with a pen stroke. He loved the power of narrative inertia. He was not a man to be made small. But I had learned a thing — Reed's interiority could be loud like a band. It might be enough.
I did the only thing I knew that would feel like rebellion: I refused to be buried.
"Cancel the shelf," I told Cosmo. "Publicly. Make noise. Make them pay attention."
"I can try," Cosmo said. "But Sebastien has the networks. He can lock down screens."
The shelves came down anyway: my name stopped trending. Roles were held. Promotional images of Ximena bloomed across every entertainment feed. I watched the world compress. It felt like being pushed into a well and being told to hold my breath.
I could have folded. I could have gone home and let the plot swallow me. But I had learned something about stories: they could be bent.
I slept at Emil Bell’s — he was the film’s handsome lead, talented, and a man with a pocket-sized honesty. He had been kind to me during the long shoots. He offered a spare apartment because we both knew what it meant to need a place with no expectations. We were friends who could be blunt when life got absurd.
One night someone knocked on Emil’s door and the apartment’s light was a harsh white. Reed stood there like a specter carrying upheaval.
"You're here," I said. "How did Reed find me?"
He looked at me as if each piece of the answer was a separate arrow. "I followed," he said. "I checked. I came looking. I had to."
[She is safe. She is at Emil's. She is cold. I will protect her.]
That was the moment the plot tried to push its pawns. The original book — the "world" Reed had come from — wanted me to be swept aside for the returning Ximena, who in the old draft became the rightful center of Reed's attention. The author had written a course. Readers had demanded different endings.
"You're from a story, aren't you?" I asked him once, the night laid between us like loose coins.
Reed's laugh was a sound like a hinge opening. "It sounds crazy. But yes. I was not always Reed Thomas. I woke up in this life with a whispered sentence in my head: if you deviate from the plot, the world may... fragment. But then I heard you. And I chose to put you first when I did not have to."
"If you knew the plot, why put me first?" I asked.
[Because before I was Reed, in some other version of my life, I loved you. The book told me to let you go, to follow the script. But when I was given the choice because I crossed worlds, I kept thinking: not this time. Not without trying.]
That day I learned Reed's duty: he had been handed the route of the story and expected to obey. But he carried his own heart.
We tried small rebellions together. I stormed Cosmo's office with demands. I stood in front of cameras and gave interviews that showed my face alive and present. I wrote op-eds. I held an impromptu small "class" for those around us on a whiteboard in a borrowed study — a ridiculous, rebellious lesson where I put two words on the board: "Identity" and "Choice." I taught people to ask why they did things the way the story told them to.
"Why are you coming after me?" Ximena demanded once, all smile and rehearsed softness when I cornered her in a glass hallway.
"Because I think you're following a script," I said. "And because you should get to be who you want, not who the plot needs you to be."
She blinked. "Do you think you are the author now?"
"No." I tapped the whiteboard. "But I think the people in this world can decide."
Ximena pressed a hand to her mouth, like a girl discovering an unexpected truth. "I have been feeling... odd. Like I'm being told lines."
"Listen to your own voice then," I said. "Say one thing that came from you without thinking of how the plot uses it."
She opened her mouth, then closed it. For the first time I watched someone in our little world have a tiny fracture of consciousness. For the first time I felt hope.
But there were people who would not yield with reason. Sebastien Bowers arranged a press conference one morning with the sort of polished cruelty built for cameras. Cosmo called me from his car with his voice like a recorded tremor.
"Katelynn," he said, "they're going to hold a gala to celebrate Ximena's return. Sebastien will be there. If you say anything about the shelving, you'll be painted as bitter and small. He'll cut budget if he feels it saves face. He plays for keeps."
"Then we make him play for keeps too," I said.
And so, when the gala came — the bright hall full of flashbulbs and champagne, Aviana Donaldson, Reed's mother, in the crowd like a queen watching court — I had prepared a different play.
"Welcome," Sebastien said into the microphone, smooth as oil. "We celebrate a return to art."
[Your face looks like a crow's feather—always neat and tidy. Keep it. Keep it. You look splendid.] Reed's thought was a small cheer. He clenched my hand under the table.
When Sebastien ended, Ximena took the stage and smiled with a practiced warmth that cut glass. Reporters angled their cameras. I stepped forward with a smile like a blade.
"Excuse me," I said, and the mic was handed to me. Everyone turned. "I'd like to speak."
Conversations are made of timing. My speech did not begin as an indictment. It was a statement of simple things.
"My name is Katelynn Lange. I am an actress, a daughter, and until last week, someone the industry believed enough in to put a camera on her."
A murmur ran through the hall.
"You know," I continued, "stories live when people are honest. Scripts that erase those who dare to speak are weak. When a company decides who can work, it is not acting for art — it's acting for control."
Sebastien's smile did not fall. "Ms. Lange—"
"—Sebastien," I said. "When you signed agreements to 'shelve' me, you made a choice. You chose a narrative that makes you comfortable. You chose Ximena's return to be the headline. But the truth is this: the final editor of any life is the person who lives it."
Ximena fidgeted. Reed’s thoughts were a storm now, quick and small.
[Say it, say it louder. Show them. Show them she is mine.]
And I did.
"I was shelved," I said plainly. "Contracts were moved. Roles were offered elsewhere. 'Shelved' is a gentle word for what was done—erased."
A reporter leaned forward. "Do you have proof, Ms. Lange?"
Cosmo had already fed my team documents. I let them speak. I handed a file to the bureau chief and then to the cameras. Inside were emails, scheduling drafts, and a single note that read with clinical bluntness: "Prioritize X. Freeze K."
The room smelled of stunned silence. Wine glasses stopped their tink.
Sebastien’s lips tightened.
"You broadcast these?" he asked.
"I broadcast the truth," I said.
[No. This cannot be public. Damage control now—now—] The thought was not mine. I felt his cold calculation. It wanted to slice, to hush, to spin. Reed's inner voice became a drumbeat: [Protect her. Protect her. Protect her.]
The pushback was immediate. Sebastien tried to reclaim the narrative. "This is—this is business. Everyone can understand business decisions—"
"Business that ruins people is not art," I answered. "If people can be erased for a better headline, then what are we but characters in a cheap tale?"
A fine thread of whispering began, then a louder chorus. The cameras fed live — and somewhere, tens of thousands of people watched the small room become an arena. Journalists typed. Influencers tweeted. The story spread faster than anyone could have convinced it not to.
Sebastien’s face changed through five stages like a badly edited reel. First: amusement. Second: irritation. Third: denial. Fourth: panic. Fifth: collapse.
"No," he said into the microphone in a voice that tried to recover its ease. "Ms. Lange has misinterpreted—"
"Stand down, Sebastien," Aviana Donaldson said. Reed’s mother had stood. Her voice was velvet in a glove; it could be warm or crush like a fist. "I appreciate your work, but we will not allow false accusations in this house."
He flinched.
"And I," Aviana continued, eyes fixed on him like an anchor, "do not want our theater to be a place where people are quietly put away for profit."
People in the hall began to murmur. A television anchor, microphone stealing the lingering silence, asked the stern question: "Is the company now publicly apologizing and reversing this decision?"
Sebastien opened his mouth like a fish; nothing came. His PR people looked like backdropped dancers with no choreography. Board members shifted and pulled at ties. One by one, they removed themselves from the man who had labeled an actress expendable.
An apology was demanded. A retraction. A press release written by others who had always been ready to supplant him.
Cosmo leaned over to me and whispered: "You did it. You made it public."
Reed’s thought was a desperate cheer. [Yes. Good. She is mine. Good job.] His hand squeezed mine until the skin went white.
Later, the press conference turned into a smaller hearing where board members asked Sebastien for explanations. He had to answer in a way that the cameras would accept as honorable. He tried to deflect. He tried charm. Then, a new piece of evidence surfaced — a leaked note that connected him to a third party with a bad history of manipulating artists' careers. The gesture was small: a name.
"Enough," Aviana said, and the room seemed to agree. "Either this company behaves like an institution of art and fairness, or I will take Reed's investment elsewhere."
The board moved faster than I expected. Sebastien was moved out of the spotlight; an internal investigation was announced; he was escorted from the building with his face a shade too pale. Reporters followed. Social media chewed. Contracts that had been frozen were unfrozen within days. Offers were rearranged into places that let me work again.
That day Sebastien's public fall was not a courtroom sentence; it was worse because he had no script left to read. He tried denial and flounced to anger and finally ended in the flattened, sullen look of a man who knew that his reputation was a tide that had gone out to reveal all the rocks beneath.
It was vindication, yes, but I had expected something different from the tide's outcome. The story wanted spectacle; I wanted fairness. I had both.
But punishments were not only for businessmen. There were people like Ximena — women who had been placed into roles by an author and a market, who then wore them because the plot told them to. She came to the wedding we later held again — the open wedding this time — smiling, lips tight. Aviana had made it public because the board, embarrassed, wanted to throw a grand gesture to show they supported the couple who now owned the narrative.
"Let's talk," I said in front of cameras and friends and guests and a thousand gossiping phones.
"About what?" Ximena asked, voice sugar.
"About whether you were ever asked to act a certain way," I said. "About whether someone told you to be the other woman when it suited them."
She squirmed. "I love Reed," she said. The cameras captured it. Reed's face at that moment was a portrait of private wreckage.
"No," I said. I held out the copies of the same drafts that detailed her schedule, the notes that read like directions. "You were asked to come back to a particular place in the plot. There is one question I want everyone to ask you now, and I want you to answer in front of our guests."
Her laugh was brittle. "What question?"
"Did anyone ask you to return to break another woman's life?"
Her hands trembled. "No. I—"
The trick was to force a public reaction. This was not about humiliation for the sake of cruelty; it was about showing that manipulation had been used and that the manipulated had a right to choose their response publicly.
"Do you love Reed because of you, or because the story told you you should?" I asked.
She tried to smile; the smile unglued. "I—" She looked at Reed. "I thought I loved him."
[Stop it.] Reed's thought stabbed: [Stop lying. You were placed. You were chosen. But do you want to be you?]
Ximena’s face crumpled, the practiced mask sliding away like wet makeup. There was an interval — a public hush — where the cameras filled with the interiority peel. She had been playing a role; she then had to admit she had been playing it. She tried to deny. Friends watched. Journalists typed. Guests shifted like a bed being made.
Then something strange happened. She did not double down. She did not wield the cliché of entitled lovers. She started to cry.
"Why did you return?" I asked quietly.
She hiccupped. "Because I was told I was the answer."
"Who told you?" I pushed gently.
"People," she said, and she named a few names on live feed, connections that reached into publicists and editors. "They said I could be more if I stepped in."
Aviana, who watched like someone weighing coins, stepped forward. "Then decide now," she said. "Decide whether you are going to be the actor in someone else's script or the author of your own life."
Ximena’s reaction changed in the span of that microphone. She went from confident to shaky to small to oddly liberated. The cameras did not stop.
"Give me time," she said finally, a small, human request. "I don't want to hurt anyone."
"Then do not," I said. "Do not be used."
Her humiliation was public. People whispered it as scandal, but in truth it felt like exorcism — one by one, the men and women who had trafficked in narratives were exposed. Ximena's face, once a weapon wrapped in polished charm, was now a human face admitting confusion. The crowd shifted, not with cruelty but with the tiny satisfaction that truth had exposed a lie. She would, in time, be judged. People would gossip and take sides. But in that room she was given a choice and she knelt before it.
Her public fall was not a collapse into ruin; it was a terrible, visible admission that she had been used, and an invitation for her to own her stomachache and rise again. That scene lasted a long time. Cameras hummed. Phones flashed. People leaned in.
She left that evening under a rain of social media commentary, some cruel, some compassionate. The important thing was that it was not a quiet disappearance. The market and the machines that made markets saw her, saw what had been done, and adjusted.
After all of this—after the board reversed the shelving, after Sebastien retreated, after Ximena's public breakdown and the industry's chatter—I found myself at a crossroads.
Reed and I had split quietly once. We had married as a transaction and then made it into a choice. We divorced in a publicity-quiet way, according to the original book's rules, then came back together in a ceremony that was open and real. Aviana stood at my side and told reporters she had always known her son loved me. The cameras found some finality in that line; people liked the arc of a mother who learned better.
"Why did you stay?" a journalist asked me a week after the open wedding.
"Because," I said, "I could hear him. And I realized the world that was meant for us was not fixed. It was a place with thin walls. If the walls could be pushed, then it's our right to push them."
Reed kissed me in front of everyone that day and his mouth found mine like the end of a sentence finally delivered. He whispered later, when the crowds thinned and the TV vans pulled away, "I am glad you didn't follow the script, Katelynn."
I closed my eyes to the soft smell of him and said, "Neither am I."
We kept pushing. We taught people to ask if their choices were their own. We sat in small rooms and called out the little instructions that had been handed like second-hand clothes. We were sometimes rude, sometimes kind, always human. Emil Bell went on to write more and to step away from acting. Cosmo wheeled through crises like a secret weapon. Mason recovered: his company rebounded, not just because of an arrangement, but because the people inside it stopped living in fear of being silenced.
And the book-world? It did not crumble. Reed and I stepped off the designated lines and lived in the space that existed between them. We made new sentences. We broke a few rules. Sometimes things wobbled — a day where an entire production stalled because an editor refused to accept a change — but the earth stayed in its place.
"Do you ever worry the world will break because we didn't follow the script?" I asked Reed once, fingers linked with his in a parked car watching a rain that washed the city clean.
"Sometimes," he said. "But the world was breaking quietly when people were forced to be small. Now it's messy but alive. I'll take messy."
[Good. Good. She smiles. She is mine. She is mine and not only because of the plot.]
He leaned over and touched his forehead to mine like a man making peace. I said, "Then let's keep writing."
At the end of the story — the one we lived, not the one some author printed and others edited — we stood in a small room and I took a whiteboard. I wrote on it, with a marker that squeaked just once: CHOICE.
"Do not let anyone write you without your ink," I said, and the room laughed and clapped and the cameras blinked with a lighter appetite. It was a strange ending: not a perfect one, but ours.
When the last guest left and the noise settled, Reed put his hand on the small of my back and whispered aloud, for once not just to himself, "I love you."
I smiled. "I hear you," I said, the cadence of it like a bell.
He grinned, a real, clumsy grin reserved for private crimes. "Say it back."
"I love you," I said.
And because endings are not universal, I folded the remaining page of our arranged contract in half and put it into a drawer, then hammered a tiny tack into the wall above my desk and propped my whiteboard there for days. The marker's line was already dry in places like a memory.
If someone out there is reading the draft that thinks their life is a script, don't wait for an author. Take the pen. Ask the people around you: were you given a choice? If not, make one. Life is not a line to be followed — it's a place to be inhabited.
The End
— Thank you for reading —