Rebirth16 min read
Carnations and Second Chances
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I remember the lake like a mouth that swallowed me whole.
"I told you to lock the gate," someone hissed as boots hit the rusted metal and pushed a door open.
I was asleep in a narrow, cold room - or maybe I was already gone. I remember hands dragging me, ropes burning my wrists, and the sky tearing open with a single footstep. "Where is she?" a voice snapped.
"I don't know! Boss said—" a man stammered and a slap silenced him.
"You liar!" another voice growled. "Tell me now!"
They threw me into a dark pool where the cold was a blade. I thought of one sentence I had been saving in a drawer for years: forgive me. I thought of a jade bracelet, a silly little thing that had meant the world in a life I had not yet finished living.
"He's lying," a voice said, breathless and certain.
"Don't look at me," the other answered. "We did what we were told."
I couldn't breathe. The cold beat against me like a second death. I watched the surface ripple and then still. I thought, for a single, ridiculous heartbeat, that someone would dive in. I thought of him.
"You used her as bait," someone screamed—angry, animal, small man yelling into a sky that gave nothing back. "You told them she would lead them out where we could get them."
"Shut up," the reply hissed. "Get out."
I was being pushed down. I tasted metal and salt and the last bright thing was a child's laugh that didn't belong to me. Then the water closed like a lid.
When I opened my eyes again, it was sunlight and the smell of small cookies and a dented blue bicycle in the courtyard. I learned later that those two things belonged to a life that had already ended once.
"Isla, pick up your bag," my friend said. She was impatient and perfect in the way my one past life never was. "You'll be late for trial lessons."
"I will be late for everything," I said. "Everything that matters can wait."
She laughed. "You say that now. You'll forget."
I didn't forget. Somewhere between the lake and a courtyard, the world folded, and a second thread of my life started.
Three years had passed before I found out how empty regret could be.
"I can't believe you used her," Coen Mendes had said when the men came with the news.
"You set your bait and left her," Abel Burns answered, voice like stone. "What was your plan?"
"We did what we were told," one admitted. "They—"
"Save your breath," Abel snapped, and then he slammed his palm against a table as if it would hold the world together. "Where's the body?"
"In the lake," the man whispered.
Abel's jaw moved. "She didn't deserve that."
He drove until the highway blurred into a single strip of metal. Later, the papers would say he had spent every day in a garden of carnations, that he had carried a picture in his wallet and slept with it against his ribs. I knew those things because, even then, a part of me heard his grief echo across years.
"He loved her," Coen had murmured one night, and the room with the censer behind him felt colder. "He used her. Then he loves her. The world is ridiculous."
"I used her," Abel said simply. "And I will not be excused by my own excuses."
When Abel knelt in front of a picture of me, his face shredded into something raw and honest that had nothing to do with money or teeth or empire. He cried in a language with no words.
"I failed you," he told a photograph as if the photograph could do anything but listen. "If I could go back—"
"I hope you can fix it," Coen said, but the hope sounded like a wish thrown into a well.
Abel did what the living can do: he built gardens and marked graves and taught himself the geometry of apology. He flew across oceans. He never stopped setting one hand over his heart as if he could hold someone there forever.
When the heart finally failed him, they found him with a yellowed picture in his fist. There was a note on the back in a careful, trembling hand. "If all lands were joined, I would walk them to meet you," it read. He had meant it.
I had been dead, and still, my absence carved people into new shapes.
Years slipped through me like weather. The city got new lights, and rumors made mascots of grief. Coen left the city, and Isabella Beck, who had once tied a green jade bracelet around my wrist when I had a fever, found a quiet death in a different place—saving a child from a river. Her death was a sharp and beautiful thing: she placed a small body on shore and kept breathing until she could no longer.
"Stay," she had said softly, and the boy sputtered and coughed and then lived. She did not.
People mourned in different languages. Abel covered his regret in gardens. Coen counted every silence. I woke up again with memory like a seam rip.
This time, I learned the taste of a single hour. I was fifteen and light was a substance I could swallow. I kept the jade bracelet; it fit like a key around my wrist and belonged to a life I had once had but never fully lived.
"You should try the city high school," my friend—Isabella Beck—said, squeezing my hand as if she could make decisions for both of us. "You have a sharp brain, Isla. Don't hide it."
"Maybe I want to hide," I said, and watched the playground spin. "Maybe hiding is all the life I can afford."
"You think the world will not notice you?" she asked, fierce. "It will, in the end. It always notices."
We lived in a small building with roses out front, and I remembered being small enough to fit in a cupboard when thunder came. My past life fit under my skin like a secret bandage.
A man in a dark coat stopped me one afternoon outside the school. He looked at me not like a stranger but like someone who had been given truth.
"Come with me," he said.
"Who's asking?" I had been told to mistrust men in suits. I had seen too many of them on the wrong side of a lake.
"The person who worries you," he answered. "Abel wants to meet."
"Abel who?" I asked, because in a city like ours, there were Abels and Brunos and everyone tried to mean two things at once.
He smiled with a restraint I could see the edges of. "Abel Burns," he said. "He's built a garden of carnations for someone's memory. He asks, politely."
I went because some doors open only when someone else decides to lift the latch.
"You're smaller than I expected," Abel said when I was brought into a room of glass and white.
"You're taller," I answered. "You have very good taste in chairs."
"Do you want something to drink?" he asked, moving like a man who had practiced moving as if the world could be controlled by motion.
"No, thanks." I shook my head. My lungs still sometimes told me the lake's story in the dead of night.
He gave me a cup anyway and watched the tea fog like a small mystery.
"Do you know why I kept your picture?" he asked suddenly. "Do you know what it is to be the man who did not stop?"
"No," I said. "Tell me."
He was quiet for a long time. "Regret weighs lighter when you do something for the person you failed," he said. "But sometimes, regret is a map. It can point you to the same place that killed you."
I should have walked away then. Instead I sat because curiosity can be its own kind of brave.
"Why are you here?" I asked.
"Because I promised we'd take care," Abel said, and his voice went small. "Because I thought I could fix what I broke."
I thought about asking for specifics: who, why, who had been behind that night at the factory. I thought about the men and their names and the sound of boots. I thought about the crimson bloom on water. I did not ask.
"You should come to the garden," Abel said at last. "It's full of carnations. They cover everything."
I did go. It was a place where the air was soft and red-blushed. It looked like an apology made into a room.
"Sit," Abel said. "Tell me where it still hurts."
"It hurts everywhere," I answered, and for the first time in a long time, I let a word of my past slip out. "I was thrown into a lake."
"Who?" he demanded, and his fingers closed until a tendril of white knuckle there was pain.
"It doesn't matter," I said. "They are dead to me."
Abel burned the words like a sheet of winter wood. He did not ask for names. He kept asking how he could fix it, as if building a new castle would undo a single nail.
"Stay with me," he asked. "Not as a prisoner. Not as a favor. Stay because I will make a life that keeps you safe."
"Do you know how to keep a person safe?" I laughed, a brittle, half-humored sound. "You failed once already."
He bowed his head. "I know the cost," he said. "I will pay for it."
I told myself I would go home. I told myself Abel's gardens were only more furniture for a house already full of regret. Then he made me a bowl of porridge that tasted like warm sunlight. He named a tea he said I should only drink at dawn. He put a sweater on the back of a chair like an offering.
"Do you trust me?" he asked.
"Not yet," I answered, and that was the truth. Trust is not a thing you hand across a dining table. It is something alive, and it must be fed.
"Then stay in the house," he said softly. "Only until you find your own legs."
"How long?"
"Until you say otherwise," he answered. "Until you tell me to go."
So I stayed. He kept his word in small ways: room keys that opened doors, nights where no one knocked, a garden of carnations I could walk in until my feet learned to feel the earth again. He never asked for more than I gave, and for that alone I began to meet him with less suspicion and more faint curiosity.
"Do you know what you look like when you sleep?" he asked once.
"No. Describe it," I said.
"Like a person who remembers laughter," he said. "Soft."
"You have very bad taste in metaphors," I told him.
He smiled then, and I could see years of regret in the curve of his mouth. "My metaphors are for you," he said, ridiculous and sincere as a child.
He had a man who followed him, a second who never once seemed to surprise me. "Kenji," Abel told me one afternoon, introducing a tall, silent man with eyes like small rocks. "This is Kenji. He is not authorized to leave my sight when it comes to you."
"I can look after myself," I said.
"You can," Kenji answered quietly. He had eyes that measured distances. "But I would prefer you not be alone on the road."
"Kenji," I said one night as we walked along a terrace while Abel argued with someone on the phone. "Were you ever young?"
"Once," he said, "and it was terrible." He did not elaborate, but the night had room enough for confessions and silence mixed.
I learned the rhythm of the house. I learned that Abel could open any locked thing he wanted and taste the tea only if he wished. I learned that Coen Mendes would visit occasionally with a stack of papers that smelled like the cold sun.
"You can't keep her forever," Coen said once, to Abel, when he thought my back was turned.
"Who told you she would be kept?" Abel's laugh was harsh. "I promised only to give her shelter."
"Promises count," Coen said. "Even loose ones."
"We all have something we clasp and won't let go," Abel answered. "Her life is not mine to own."
But there were shadows. A girl named Leila Cooke from my school had been malicious, and rumor had teeth. She had been the one who first gave me the wrong kind of friend, someone who handed me powders and pits of sleep. Leila's father had friends, and her friends knew ways into hospitals and halls.
One night, a man I would later name Calvin Vieira came to the house with a smile like a razor. Calvin was a man who had made a fortune turning people's worst needs into other people's coin. He had been one of the quiet hands that moved me like a piece on a board years ago. He did not know me then because I was between names; he knew me now because Abel had named that I existed.
"She is young," Calvin said, when he was introduced with the wrong sort of politeness. "She has charm."
"She has nothing of yours to take," Abel answered.
Calvin's lips twitched. "Is that a threat, Mr. Burns?"
"No," Abel said evenly. "It is an order."
"Orders are interesting," Calvin murmured. "Things break in heavy hands."
He left with a laugh that tasted of oil. I did not like him. I told Abel I did not like him, and he made me tea and did not send him away. Sometimes men are their own ruin.
"You will not hurt anyone here," Abel vowed the night Calvin left. "Not on my watch."
Days went into seasons. I learned to unlace the old memories and string them into new ones. Abel taught me to taste a pear properly, to put my hand through warm pastry dough, to hold a pen without fear. He would watch me write with a tender that felt dangerous.
"Who taught you how to be gentle?" I asked him once as we stood in a kitchen he had made soft for me.
"No one," he said. "I invented it after I failed."
"I like your invention," I said.
He had made the house into a place that did more than hold people: it taught them to arrive again.
But the past, like a limpet, will cling.
One morning I was on my way to the market when a voice called from a car. "Isla!"
A familiar, sharp laugh. I turned and saw Leila, flanked by people with faces like money. Her smile was a wound. "Fancy seeing you here," she called as if fate had conspired for her benefit.
"Leila," I said. "What do you want?"
"To say congratulations," she said. "You picked a rich friend."
"Thank you," I said, and turned away. I could feel the stares like needles.
Later that day the truth came out like a reed shoved through water: tapes, messages, a secret someone had kept in their sleeve.
"She lied," Leila told a crowd that had grown like mildew. "She isn't who she says."
"She used me," a man shouted. "She ruined things!"
Abel watched the first of the videos the way a man in a trench coat might watch rain. He had learned not to startle at anything. "Ignore them," he told me. "They will try to embroider the past with new lies."
"Why would they do this?" I asked. "To what end?"
"For money and sport," he said. "The world is cruel in small ways."
But the world is also cruel in grand ways. One evening, at a public charity gala where Abel's name was expected to polish old wounds into new gold, the past we had all tried to lay to rest moved its hand.
"Tonight," I said, because Abel had whispered he would go and I had begged that I could at least be somewhere safe, "I will stand with you. But I'm not a puppet."
"Stand as you wish," he said. "But leave if you want."
We went. I wore the silver dress he'd given me—he said I suited cold metal—and a mask so that when people took pictures, they would be confused as to which ghost I was. The room smelled like sugar and power. People raised their glasses as if the clink would make them holy.
"You're beautiful," Abel said under his breath. "Like the moon made of glass."
"You've said that before," I whispered back.
"Because it's true," he said. "And because you need to know I mean it even when I am wrong."
Then the cameras found us. Smiles came like teeth. A microphone was shoved forward, and a man with a voice like a saw asked questions a man should never ask in public.
"Mr. Burns," the host said, "what is your connection to Miss Isla Herrera?"
"My connection," Abel said smoothly, "is that she is free. Everything else is gossip."
"But the tapes—" the man started.
"Those tapes are crimes," I said. My voice found itself at the microphone like a steady boat. "They are evidence of a sin. I would like them examined." I said their names then, the names that belonged to the small band who had dinner that night and thought themselves safe: Leila Cooke, Calvin Vieira, and the others who had sold moments for a bribe.
The room quieted, and there was a smell like paper burning—people realized this might be more than gossip.
"She is accusing me," Leila sneered. "You heard her. She is making stories."
"You're an accessory," Abel said. The room shifted closer, drawn as if by a magnet.
Calvin smiled at first, small and confident. "This is a private matter," he said. "Why make it public?"
"Because the truth should have a stage," I replied.
Calvin's smirk faltered. Someone in the crowd recorded the exchange, and the record went like lightning across faces.
"You think you can accuse me and walk?" Calvin said, as if his words were weapons. "We are not the same class of people."
"For a moment you forget I live in the world too," I shot back. "And it has ways to unmask men even as it feeds them."
The air had turned viscous. Cameras clicked; phones lifted like small, obedient birds. People surrounded Calvin like fish at an aquarium, novelty staring at a thing that belonged to them.
"She is lying." Calvin's face, once polished, began to crack. "She has a grudge. She wants money. She wants attention."
"Is that how you explain tapes?" Abel asked.
"I will not be blackmailed," Calvin said loudly. "I am a man with reputation."
"Then don't have one to fear," I said. "Or have someone else hold your reputation like a child holds a coin."
He laughed at first—then he swayed. He reached into his pocket and tried to pull up a restraining paper, an advertisement, a sliver of something to deflect. People took out phones, and a dozen different tongues held the same story born in their hands.
"You're accusing a philanthropist," a woman said, as if logic were a shield.
"A philanthropist who paid men to throw a girl into a lake," I answered. "Is that not a crime?"
The hubbub grew.
Calvin tried to smile. "Do you have evidence?"
"I have witnesses, and I have recordings," I said. "You let videotapes be made. You let men talk loud in the wrong rooms. I have what you have left careless."
He went white. "This is slander," he said, and the word was a prayer.
"Then defend yourself with proofs," I said. "I will wait."
He opened his mouth and closed it. The cameras were merciless. The phones had already sent the first frame to a hundred different places.
"You can't do this in public," Calvin said finally, voice cracking into something smaller than a man. "You can't humiliate me."
"Why not?" I asked. "Is public humiliation only for the poor?"
People began to murmur—first curiosity, then pity. They had never seen this man stripped of the glossy veneer. The first spark of something like triumph warmed Abel's shoulders.
Calvin swallowed. "I didn't throw anyone into a lake," he shouted. "I didn't—"
A video started to play on someone's phone and then on the big screen—somebody had uploaded a clip. It was grainy, taken from an alley angle years ago. A figure in shadow forced someone over a railing. A laugh that sounded like Calvin's was caught on the audio.
The room did not wait; cameras blossomed, and hands began to film the filming. People started to call the police. A woman whispered, "Look at him now," as if the man on the screen was a creature in its cage.
Calvin's face went through the stages recorded in every book about men brought low:
At first he was still proud. "This is staged!" he declared, his voice high and thready with terror.
Then denial. "I didn't—" His eyes were large. "They set me up."
Then shock as another clip surfaced—an old receipt of a wire transfer, signatures. He laughed nervously. "That's fraudulent."
"Isn't it interesting," I said, "that fraud usually follows bad choices?"
The crowd had gathered, phones recording. Someone shouted, "Call the police." Another, sharper voice asked for arrest. It was a chorus now: going from cold indifference to active witness. People who had danced under the chandelier a half hour ago were now crowded against glass, watching a man tremble.
Calvin tried to step back toward a getaway door, but a little knot of well-meaning men in suits blocked him, companions who had once thought themselves untouchable. People were moving; security had closed the exits. Abel reached out and did nothing; his eyes were hard, but his hand did not need to touch to roughen the air.
"Please!" Calvin begged suddenly, and the voice was small and animal. "This is—please—"
No one moved. Phones clicked. Someone applauded, a thin, cold clap that started as shock and became approval.
"You did this," Abel said, voice flat like a blade. "You will answer for it."
Calvin's face twisted. He dropped to his knees as the crowd closed in, the glamour of the evening turned into a stage for accusation. "Please! Please!" he cried. "I didn't—I'm sorry. I'm sorry—"
Cameras focused on the plea. People recorded the kneeling like a pet demonstration. A pocketful of strangers recorded like jurors of a new moral code. Men who had once shrugged at suffering watched mouths open.
"It isn't pacifying," a woman said from the back. "This is justice."
Calvin's lawyers tried to pick him up, then stopped as the weight of the moment sat on them. He writhed and said the things men say when their control is gone: lies, attempts at bargaining, pleading for leniency. At first he was arrogant, then shocked, then insistently denying, and at last collapsing into a weeping pile of supplication that made everyone inside hold their breath.
Someone took a video of his knees, and the world chewed on it. People photographed the trembling lip of a man who had once smiled in power. Some in the crowd began to chant, "Justice! Justice!" like a litanic recitation.
"Don't let him up," a bystander said. "Let him feel it."
It was barbaric and necessary all at once. Calvin's allies tried to hold firm faces; they failed. Women took pictures and posted them. Men who purchased silence for a living suddenly looked very small. Abel looked at me once, and I knew he had not wanted this theater. He had wanted an answer. He had wanted to protect me.
"This isn't vengeance," I said into the buzzing sea of light. "This is daylight."
Calvin shrieked a last time—begging, whispering, bargaining. "Please, I have children. Please, I—"
The crowd's reaction had been recorded in a hundred new ways: murmurs of pity and disgust, some clapping, some filming, some stepping forward to talk to the police officers who had finally arrived. Abuses were listed, accusations read into the record, witnesses brought forward. Calvin's face was the map of all the unjust things men do when the ledger is held up.
Afterward, when the lights were meaner than before and the garden of carnations smelled like something softer than blood, Abel and I sat in the car and did not speak for a long time.
"You didn't have to do that," he said finally.
"Someone had to," I said.
"You made him—"
"Go down," I ordered simply. "Let the law do what we cannot."
He obeyed. He had learned to let the world move, to let evidence be the final ledger.
Abel left with his hands on the wheel and the night like a cloak over the world. He did not know how to make white mornings. He could only try.
After the party, the story traveled fast. The man got fined and sued and chased down by more than hungry microphones. He lost his glitter and had to answer questions in courtrooms and on the steps of buildings where reporters circled like birds. He begged. He walked through humiliation. He was annoyed, furious, then small—then human at last in his fear.
I thought the worst part was the watching. There were people who came to the courthouse to see his collapse. They took selfies. They applauded. He fell to his knees in the sun and begged for forgiveness. It was terrible. It was also irrevocable. That day, the force of witnesses did what a single life could not.
Abel and I made our vows in small ways after that. He respected my boundaries and promised to let me choose small things. He let me go home when I wanted, and he taught me to trust that the world could sometimes be good.
"Don't do anything stupid," he would say as I left his garden to go to school. "Call me if a man stares at you wrong. Call me if you find a new favorite tea."
"Call me if you miss a bus," I would tell him, because two people can hold a long list together. It is how you build a day.
Time braided itself into a calmer rope. Coen Mendes came back once and gave me a book of poems he thought I should read. Isabella Beck still visited hospitals, softer than before, and once she told me a story about saving someone and then returned to the mountain as if it was the only right place to be.
"Will you leave?" I asked her once.
"For awhile," she said. "There is a village with children who need someone to tie their shoes. I can do that."
"Promise me you'll be careful," I said.
She promised and went with mud on her boots and a smile like a baby moon.
Years passed with small mercies. Abel taught me to plant morning glories and to speak like a person who had something to say. I learned how to speak and how to listen. I learned to look at photographs without a hand on my chest.
In the end, if anyone asked whether a second life could be better than the first, I would say yes. Not because the universe had become softer, not because blood did not still darken a winter, but because people who contain regret can still choose to make something new.
"You saved me twice," I told Abel once, while he held my cold hand in a hospital room that smelled like disinfectant and lilies.
"No," he said. "You saved yourself. I only opened a door and stood with you."
He died like the rest of us die—slowly, eventually, wrapped in the truth that he had not been a villain alone but also a man who had bent everything to love. When his breath left him, he smiled as if he had met someone at the end of a very long road and could say, without regret now, that he had loved well.
And in the quiet after, I walked to the garden of carnations. Their petals were soft and a color like apology.
"If all lands met," I whispered to the air like a promise, "I'd walk for you."
The flowers answered with silence and the low, sweet hum of bees.
The End
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