Rebirth12 min read
I Died Loving Him, Woke Up to His Regret
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"I opened my eyes to a stranger's ceiling."
I sat up so fast the room spun. Silk that smelled faintly of ink and early tea brushed my wrists. My name rushed at my lips—Ami Buckley—but the mouth that formed it tasted like someone else's name: Isabella Dyer. My chest tightened. Memory after memory hit me like winter.
"I remember him," I said aloud. "Nehemias."
A voice at the door—thin, practical—"Miss Isabella? You awake?"
I swallowed. "Yes. Send my mother."
Minutes later, the woman who called herself my mother stood over me like a lighthouse. She smelled of powder and strong broth. "You're awake. How do you feel?"
"I feel… alive," I lied.
Two lives tangled inside me. Out there I had been Ami Buckley—love-stuck and dying, left in a cold bed to bleed out while the man I loved, Nehemias Browning, mourned in silence. I had counted days by the doctor's warning. I had pressed my palms into cold river water and cursed fate, then closed my eyes for the last time.
Then—someone else's fever dream spat me out. I had become Isabella Dyer, heir of the Dyer ink-house, who had recovered from a long fever three months ago. The town had written her as saved. No one knew that inside her rose Ami's memory like a ghost.
"Tell me everything," I told my reflection.
"You'll tire," my mother said softly, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Eat. Then you can tell me."
At the market later that day I tasted the world again and tested edges. People recognized Isabella and bowed. I bowed back. Haruka Cox, my old friend's likeness, squeezed my hand so hard it hurt.
"You look well, Isa," Haruka said. "You were sick for a month. People thought—"
"I was born again," I said too quickly. Haruka laughed and brushed it off, as friends do when you joke about fate.
But the knot inside me tightened whenever I pictured Nehemias. I had loved him so quietly that I could not even make him look at me. He had said gentle things and kept a safe distance. He had made a marriage of convenience, then apologized with gestures that were too late. He had left me alive and alone for months, and I had died with the taste of his name in my teeth.
I learned quickly what Isabella's life afforded. She had been betrothed to Milo Fleming—tall, sharp, solemn—since childhood. The engagement had been one of two convenient things in Isabella's life: family alliances and duty. Milo was nothing like Nehemias. Milo had fire under his calm. Milo told me once, almost like a secret, "Names change. People don't."
He studied me as if measuring terrain. "You aren't only Isabella, are you?" he asked one afternoon while we practiced calligraphy.
I set down my brush. "I am whoever I must be."
He smiled with something hopeful—no one had ever smiled at me like that in my first life. I matched him with a smile that belonged to both of us.
Days twisted into a shape of plans. Word reached us that Nehemias Browning's health had been failing. He was still the titled Lord of Durnham—My Ami had called him "my Nehemias" in whispers. In my other life I had watched him go thin, drink too much, and wander the house like a ghost. I could not still my curiosity. "Is he… sick?" I asked Haruka one night.
Haruka's fingers trembled around her teacup. "They say he's ill. But it's not the kind of illness a doctor mends. There is talk. Rumor says his mother, Elaine Poulsen, keeps strange remedies and a cold smile."
"Elaine Poulsen," I repeated. The name was a splinter in my mouth.
Milo heard me and his jaw tightened. "You want to help?"
"Yes," I said. "If only because he was part of my last life."
We went to Durnham. The house looked like a painting that had been left in the sun. Nehemias was there in the study, thinner than any memory but still possessing the same tired gentleness.
He looked at me like someone trying to remember a face he'd seen in a dream.
"You look like someone I once loved," he said, and it cut me open.
"Do you?" I whispered.
He walked closer. "I am a fool," he said. "I waited until I had lost the right to beg."
I did not let him beg then. I only left a box of warm bread at his door and walked away.
That night, Milo sat beside me as I thought of the other life. "Tell me why he won't take help," Milo said, his voice low.
"His mother refuses to share the formula," I murmured. "And there is rumor she has been poisoning him."
Milo's eyes snapped. "Prove it, or I will."
We found our first real witness in Curtis Fields—Nehemias's long-serving valet, who had watched a boy be made into an ornament and a scapegoat. Curtis held his chin high, but he shook like a man who had slept on knives.
"He remembers," I told Milo after Curtis leaned in near the hearth and told us, "Yes, Miss Isabella, I saw it. Madam Elaine would stir things into the tray. She'd laugh. She said it was for the boy's endurance. 'Hard men'—she used to call him. She didn't think anyone watched."
"Show me where," Milo said.
Curtis led us to a small storage where the house kept spices, inks, and old ointments. Stacked behind jars were three little vials in a chipped box. The liquid inside had a greenish, oily surface.
"She called it 'strength'," Curtis said. "It tastes bitter. She gave it in his broth. She told me to tell no one."
I felt my throat close. "Curtis, did she ever—"
"She said the boy was spare to her pride. She said she wanted the bloodline unburdened." Curtis's hands went white.
"She said that?" I asked.
Curtis blinked. "She did, Miss Isabella. And she signed a note once. I kept it."
He handed over a folded scrap: Elaine's handwriting, the ink uneven. It said: "Continue as instructed. A stitch here and there keeps him from being a liability."
We had something. But we needed public exposure. Milo's jaw set. "We will bring her to the Hall."
"Publicly?" I asked. My chest beat with a new rhythm. This was the moment that had failed in my last life—the moment that could make a difference.
"Publicly," Milo repeated. "We must make everyone watch."
We planned the stage—the Spring Council Hall, a place where nobles brought taxes, gossip, and weddings. It would also be a place where scandal spread like wildfire.
On the morning of the Hall, the sky was clean. Word traveled: the Lady Elaine Poulsen would be there for a private petition. Nehemias would be brought in, pale but upright; Curtis would testify; Milo would speak for the House of Fleming. Haruka stood at my shoulder like a sentinel.
The hall filled—lords, ladies, scribes, merchants—an audience that loved noise. I wore a plain gown, white at the throat. I placed a small box containing the three vials and Curtis's scrap upon the central table.
"You cannot do this," Elaine said through her smile when she arrived, a queen in widow's black and several perfumes.
"I can," Milo said. His voice carried. "You are accused of poisoning your son."
"Poisoning?" Elaine laughed, then a small, practised sound. "What a monstrous claim."
Curtis stepped forward shaking. "I saw her. I can show the jars. I kept a note she signed."
There was silence, then a murmur. I stepped forward and opened the box. The crowd leaned in. The vials gleamed like trapped storms.
"Explain," Milo ordered.
Elaine's smile faltered. "These are—remedies. Strengtheners. Old recipes."
"Curtis, read the note," Milo said.
Curtis read Elaine's scrawled sentence. The words were simple; the implication was not. The hall's air sharpened.
"You're insane," Elaine said, color leaving her face. She had played this part in drawing rooms for years—this shock, this outraged dignity. But there were witnesses. Scribes scribbled faster. Voices rose.
Milo added, "We have records that show your purchases of the herbs—undisclosed ones—matched spikes in Lord Browning's symptoms. We have witnesses who saw you add powders. Lord Browning's estate physician will confirm the toxicity."
Her composure thinned to a thread. "This is slander," she hissed. "You would have me tried on hearsay?"
"Not hearsay," I said. "We have the jars, the note, the servants, and Nehemias." I looked at him and he flinched like someone stabbed. He stepped forward, weak but steady. "Mother," he said. "Is this true?"
Her face changed in stages—the proud, the sharp, the playful—then the color bled away into something small and animal.
"No," she said at first, a thin bark.
"Elaine," Nehemias said, voice almost a whisper. "Did you poison me?"
Her eyes flicked to him, then to the crowd. "I—did it for our house," she said. "I kept him sharp. I kept him useful. He became soft. He would have failed. I—"
"It was murder," Milo said plainly.
Elaine's hands twitched. "He is my son. I can do what I will." Then panic overtook her. "No—no—" she stepped back as the crowd pressed like a tide.
I drew out Curtis's second paper, a ledger where he had copied the times she added powders. "You wrote the orders in my handwriting," Curtis said, voice small, "but this ledger is mine."
A murmur, then a shrill exclamation. Elaine's stern face cracked.
"Enough," the high steward ordered, but the crowd wanted blood.
"Where's the court?" someone shouted.
"To the square! We will make this public!"
And then the unthinkable happened. In the heat of that moment, a woman from the crowd—once a kitchen maid now married to a merchant who owed money to the Poulsen household—stepped forward with another scrap. "She forced me," the woman cried. "She forced my husband to take the same mixture when he delayed a payment. She keeps bottles in her rooms. We were paid to be silent." Her hands shook. Heads turned. Her story matched Curtis's.
Elaine's face flushed with fury, then drained with fear. Her hands flew to her throat as if to staunch a sudden chill.
"Stop this!" she screamed, but her voice was small now.
The steward called for silence and for guards. "Lady Elaine," he said, eyes flat, "a council will hear this. But in light of these testimonies, we cannot allow you to remain at liberty. You will be bound and removed to the watch until the trial."
Her denial collapsed into a cascade. She began the classic denials—"This is a lie! They conspired!"—then quickly moved through stages. I watched them like a scientist watches a flame.
First: outrage. She met accusation with thunder and fury, hurling the scripts, calling us thieves of reputation.
Second: disbelief. Her breath came short; she touched her chest as if to steady it.
Third: bargaining. "No—take it to the council, but please—my name—my status—"
Fourth: collapse into panic. She started to shake. Her voice rose into a thin wail. "Please—please—no. Not my name. Not my family. I did what I had to do for the house!"
Fifth: denial turned to raw pleading. She fell to her knees in the center of the hall, skirts pooling, hands clasped. "I beg you!" she cried to us all. "I beg your mercy!"
Guards came forward and gently but firmly laid irons upon her wrists. Elaine's knees scraped on the wooden floor. Her hair, once immaculate, hung loose and glossy. She tilted her head up and began to cry insharp, cold sobs. Her proud voice broke into a child's whimper.
Around us, the hall erupted. Some covered their mouths. A few laughed, cruel and sharp like knives. Others muttered about the Poulsen family's downfall. A merchant in the back muttered that he'd long felt free now.
"It can't be true," a noblewoman whispered beside me.
A boy in the corner took out a scrap of paper and drew the scene with shaking hands. "This will be told in ten years as three lessons," he said.
Nehemias sank to his knees beside her and did what I had never seen him do—he reached toward his mother and didn't touch her. "I loved you," he said in a voice that did not ring but broke. "And I thought your hands would save me. You chose otherwise."
She looked at him then—not as her son but as a failed instrument. Her face flooded with something raw and ashamed. "No—no—" she sobbed. "Not you. Not my boy." Then she turned to the crowd and pleaded, "Please, do not let my name be ruined. I—"
The steward raised his hand. "Keep order. She will be brought to the council. The evidence remains on the table."
Curtis, broken and brave, handed over the jars. Milo placed them with a composed hand. I felt the weight of a life shifted. The crowd's whispers tangled into a roar.
That night, the town's square was full of people who had found a new story to repeat. Elaine was removed to a lock cell; her denial had finally withered into a brittle, repeated "I did not mean—" Then, in the hush before the council, I stood at the edge of the square and thought of everything that had been stolen from me in the last life.
Milo found me then and took my hand. "You did this," he said simply.
"We did," I corrected.
He looked at me like a man seeing the world in new light. "You are more dangerous than you know."
The council convened days later. The evidence was laid bare—ledgers, jars, signed orders, servants' testimony. Elaine tried composure, but the magistrate read the list and the charges: attempted murder by poisoning; conspiracy to conceal; breach of trust. The words landed like stones.
They brought forward more witnesses—neighbors who had worked for the Poulsen household, a former apothecary who had been paid and silenced. Each one added a small detail—a purse, a threat, a look—that built a net.
Then Elaine's reaction was the public spectacle that the town would remember. She sat in the defendant's chair while the magistrate read the sentence. She went through the same stages again, but this time the crowd watched her unravel with a new intensity.
"Not guilty!" she shouted when the sentence turned worse than she'd expected—a heavy fine, loss of title privileges, forced labor for the crown's apothecary, and public censure. "You cannot do this!"
The magistrate's face was hard. "We can. The law stands. You weaponized remedies. You targeted your own son."
Then the last scene: Elaine begged for mercy, collapsed, and then—something worse than death for a woman like her—she was publicly shunned. The Lady Elaine was led out, head bowed, while the crowd spat and shouted. Some clapped as if on cue. A few wept for the tragedy of a family ruined. Nehemias did not look.
He did not clap.
He simply stood—a man whose grief had been rearranged into a hollow.
After the hearing we walked out together. Milo's hand found mine and squeezed it. "She cannot hurt him anymore," he said.
"She did hurt him," I said. "She hurt all of us."
I had wanted vengeance once. I had wanted to see everyone know the truth. But sitting with Milo and watching Nehemias, I found something else blooming—a long slow mercy. Nehemias did not collapse under revenge; he collapsed under a different weight: awareness of how late his love had been.
In the weeks that followed, Nehemias changed in small ways. He stopped his late-night drinking. He began to keep a journal. Once, he came to my door with a wrapped cup of tea.
"May I come in?" he asked.
I let him.
"I'm sorry," he said without preamble. "I knew you loved me. I thought—" He stared at his hands. "I thought I could save you by letting you go."
"You thought wrong," I answered, not bitter but factual.
He flinched. "I should have tried. I failed when you needed me."
"It's over now," I said. "But what you do next matters."
He nodded. He began to visit his mother in the lock cell to try to understand her mind. He wrote letters to those he had ignored. He worked slowly to repair the network of hurt.
As for me, something fundamental shifted.
Milo's steady care, his quiet insistence that I eat and sleep and laugh, made a hole for something to grow. He listened in a way no one had. He did not ask me to be someone I wasn't. He asked me once—more like a promise than a question—"Will you marry me? Not as a bargain, but as a choice?"
I had died once loving someone who could not return the favor. I had been given a second life with choices in my hands—dangerous, precious things.
"I will marry you," I said.
He kissed my knuckles and we planned a small wedding in late summer. We invited Haruka, Curtis, Milo's father, and even Nehemias—who sent a note excusing himself, not ready yet to join the celebration.
When the day came, Durnham seemed kinder. Nehemias watched from the edge of the garden. He walked up to me where Milo and I stood under a low arch of ivy.
"I am not what I should have been," he said to Milo.
Milo met his eyes without flinch. "She is my choice," Milo said simply.
Nehemias bowed. "You both have my blessing," he said, and it sounded like a release.
After the vows and simple feasts, I found a quiet bench and looked at the small jade token Milo had given me last night. It had the inscription from Ami's final letter, which he had found in Durnham's old chest: "Stranger as I become, I meant you no ill."
I laughed softly and Haruka slid beside me. "You look like someone who has been to the bottom and back," she said.
"I have been," I answered. "I have tasted the end and found a beginning."
That night, as we walked home along the lantern-lit lane, Nehemias appeared at the gate. He had a small parcel and a letter folded in his hand.
"For you," he said.
I opened it. In the letter, he wrote what he had never said aloud: he had been blind and lazy; he had thought pity and respect would be enough. He had been cowardly. He asked for my forgiveness, not as a demand but as a confession. He said he would spend the rest of his life trying to be better, even if I never loved him again.
I folded the paper and slipped it into my sleeve. "Forgiveness doesn't mean forgetting," I told him later when he asked. "It means I let go so I can move forward."
He nodded as if relieved.
Months passed. Elaine was tried and confined. Her humiliation was complete. The town's stories swallowed her like a wave swallows a shell.
Milo and I built a life quiet and tight. We opened a small library where Isabella's name became known for more than illness. We had a child in time, a quiet boy who loved ink and paper.
One winter morning, an old parcel arrived at our door—a small red box with a faded ribbon. Inside was a pair of tiny cloth shoes and a child's undershirt, stitched by hands that I remembered as both Ami's and Isabella's. There was a note: "For the child you love."
Milo sat across from me as I read the note aloud. "She planned," he said softly. "She planned for what she could not have."
I folded the tiny garments and held them to my chest. "Ami wanted me to let her go," I whispered. "She wanted me to be free."
Outside, snow began to fall like pages drifting from a book.
"Will you be all right when the snow comes?" Milo asked.
"I will," I said. "I am not the same heart as before, but I remember. I remember what hurt and what healed. And I will do better."
We walked into the kitchen and the kettle sang. In the margin of my life, a voice that used to be only regret now turned to laughter. I had been given a second chance and I had used it to save not just a man but a family—and myself.
And sometimes, late at night, when the house was quiet and the moon was a coin against the sky, I thought of Nehemias—how he knelt at the edge of a life and finally rose to be more. I thought of Elaine, dragged through the fire and finally laid bare. I thought of Curtis and Haruka and Milo and the small brave people who had chosen truth.
I had died loving one man.
I woke and married another.
The ending was not a tidy revenge. It was messy and human and, in the end, enough.
The End
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