Sweet Romance13 min read
I Died Once; This Time I Became His Keeper
ButterPicks15 views
I died once.
That sentence should have been short, but the memory that came with it stretched into a razor of detail. I was twenty-eight, coming home late from work, my phone buzzing with my mother's usual impatient voice about marriage. I hung up, too tired to answer properly, and in the stairwell a man in a black cap stepped out of the shadow.
My first thought: danger.
"He looked like the kind in the news about the serial murders," I told myself. I ran. I couldn't not run.
He was tall. He caught me with a grip too easy for any normal person. I closed my eyes, the reflex of someone who'd been cornered. Then his breath near my ear, almost gentle, said, "Hello, Tang—"
"Wait—" I opened my eyes and everything went wrong.
I didn't finish the word. I didn't get to. He smiled the way he had smiled in my memory and stabbed me through the back of the neck. I bled into the stairwell, into the dark I'd been so afraid of, and then nothing.
When I opened my eyes again I was five years old and the cartoon on the tiny TV in the living room was playing the same old Crayon Shin-chan episode that had looped in my first childhood. Through the thin apartment wall I could hear a man's voice raised in anger.
My mother moved through the room, scolding, sweeping. She kicked my foot without looking. "Go get the soy sauce," she said. My foot complied like it had a mind of its own. I sat on the couch, small in a yellow chicken jacket, and watched Shin-chan as if the show could stitch time back together.
Outside: the family next door yelled again. They had always yelled. That neighbor house was the center of a small and terrible orbit. That neighbor boy—my old classmate, my elementary school seatmate—had a name I had almost forgotten: Meng—no. I cannot use his real name here. He is Jacob Farley in this life.
I sat very still. The memory of the black-capped man didn't match the boy I saw in the hallway, or so my reborn mind whispered. But the face that had sat beside me in first grade, the lanky child with bruises and a resentment that seethed like rainwater under a stone, felt like a volcano waiting to find a vent.
"Mom," I said, squeezing my mother's hand as she wiped the table. "Let's move."
She looked at me, tired and thick with habit. "Get out," she said. It's funny how grown people extract air from a room; as a child I had no argument that mattered.
So I tried what I could: keep my distance. Last life I had kept my distance and still died. Distance alone wasn't the answer. The only real chance I had left was something stupider than distance and crueler than hiding.
Make him like me.
The logic was either saintly or selfish. Either way, I decided, I would attempt it.
That afternoon I padded to the little corner shop for soy sauce. The neighborhood aunt squished my cheeks and called me a little angel. I bought a cream cake with the change my mother gave me. I took that cake upstairs and there he was on the stairs—Jacob—pale and raw, a bruise blooming purple at his mouth, a smear of blood in one corner.
His eyes went straight to the cake. He smiled in a way I had seen years earlier in the crime footage in a dream. "Give it," he said.
I shook. I wanted to run. The old fear was a loose animal in my ribs. But I also remembered the taste of that cake in my last life—strawberries and sugar—and the foolishness that made me want just one bite more than fear.
I offered him the cake. He ate like a starved animal. Later, when we stood at my door, my mother peeking, she softened. "Come for dinner tonight," she said, like she always did when she saw a hungry child.
I lied and said the cake was for him. Jacob blinked, incredulous. I pinched him just enough to make him yelp. The whole moment felt like a theft of fate.
After dinner, my mother fussed over him and gave him a small set of our pajamas because his own were torn. He was small and thin in my father's old pullover. The sight of him in it made something clench and unknot inside me. I decided, in that second, to be the person who would not let him fall through the cracks again.
"Sit here," I told him when lights were dim. "Are you sleepy?"
"No," he said.
"Good. I will tell you a story."
So I did. I told him the mnemonic I'd been taught for the "twelve sons"—an absurdly patriotic memory game, and he repeated it back like someone had been waiting to hear language do something to his life. He learned fast. He laughed at the impossible parts. When I dozed, he shifted me gently and tucked me as if I was more fragile than I could remember being.
He is seven then. He is bruised and careful. He is not yet the man in the black hat.
Days folded into each other. I taught him multiplication tables, the dignity of taking off your shoes at the door, how to hold a spoon without choking on anger. He taught me how to climb fences and how to wait without giving away your strength.
"Why do you like me?" he asked once, toothpaste on his chin, when I nudged him to study.
I blinked. "Because you are good at the things you do. Because you listen. Because—" I stopped. It was simpler somehow to say: "Because you are my friend."
He squeezed my hand like a promise, and I kept my secret: everything I did was to save my future self.
School life became an odd patchwork. Sawyer Bogdanov—my bald-headed friend since kindergarten—brought green bean cakes. Mark Golubev, the class leader, handed out flyers. Girls whispered. Jacob sat as my desk-mate, stony and high-achieving. He was top of our class. When others mocked him for his home life, I stood up like a foolish, blustering bodyguard.
"Back off," I hissed at a gang of second-year boys who called him names.
"Why?" Jacob asked, oddly small.
"Because," I said, "he's my friend."
It was ridiculous and right.
When Jacob was beaten by his father one night, I, who had been an adult once, dialed the police with hands that did not feel like mine. The next morning the neighbors saw the ambulance, and someone took pictures. Officers questioned us, a thin chorus of adult sternness and neighborhood curiosity.
My father—Nathan Bray—was not a villain like Jacob's father, but he had his faults. He hid money, lied about taxes, and when we found two thousand gone one New Year's Eve, my mother lost her temper. My call to the local line that night was half panic and half calculation: the argument was so fierce that I feared it might end in violence. The police came. I pushed Jacob gently out into the hallway and told them our address.
That night the officers stayed for dinner, awkward in our cramped table, and they left smiling at my mother's hospitality. For a while, I felt some small, greedy satisfaction—the family drama averted, fists stilled. Yet resented by Jacob’s father, no miracle was performed. He landed two years in prison later after a different domestic violence case uncovered a pattern. The neighborhood watched as the man was led away; at the door, he looked back at Jacob with a kind of animal hate.
The community reaction then was complicated. But it was not the public shaming that hurts to remember the most. What stung longest was how small Jacob looked sitting on our couch, wounded but smiling when I made him chicken stew. "You will live here," I told him—and he cried the way people cry when a roof is a present, when a simple sentence becomes a shelter.
Months turned into years. I was a child on the surface and an adult in all the quiet places where intention sits. The more I stayed with Jacob, the more he changed. He grew into his body, into a face sharper than the puffy child’s profile. He learned to play basketball to fit in; he began to laugh with a light I had helped reinstall. He still had nightmares—old scenes of a man with a black cap—but he began to sleep without always trembling.
"Do you remember me?" he asked once late at night, when the moon was a pale coin through the curtains.
"Yes," I said. "I remember."
We grew. I taught him how to stand up for others and to read poems badly in order to learn the cadence. He taught me what it meant to keep a promise.
"Will you be with me forever?" he said one summer, suddenly grown and shockingly intimate in his question.
I wanted to say yes. I wanted to tell the truth that the I who had died had loved nothing else in that last life except the small safe shape of his face when he laughed—ugly, cruel, and tender all at once. I wanted to confess that my survival plan had folded into something more domestic: protection had softened into affection.
"Yes," I said, a lie that felt a little like the truth. "Forever."
High school, then college. We moved through seasons where we were either thin with hunger or stuffed with celebration. There were small rituals I kept: Crayon Shin-chan on my mother's TV, the strawberry on a cake I had saved, the watch—two children's smart watches, one pink, one blue—that my mom gave us that New Year's she thought would keep us apart but instead made us laugh when we used them to call each other during class.
We loved in small, daisy-chain ways. One night he kissed me in the way young men sometimes kiss when everything has finally been known and consent is a simple, bare thing. Another night I kissed him because he had set a bowl of noodles down in front of me and I was hungry for something that was not just food. We argued, we studied, I failed a few exams that would have been easy in another life, and he helped me rise.
There was also cruelty in the world that had nothing to do with fate or reform. A bully in class—Jagger Vazquez—once pushed his weight into Jacob and called him names in front of everyone. I lost my head and beat him until he cried. The kids scattered, and for once the brawler had met someone worse than him: me, an adult in a child's body, all the badness of two lives in my voice.
"Don't," Jacob whispered later, cleaning the blood from my knuckles.
"They needed it," I said.
He took my face in his hands and for a moment I felt like the person in the old nightmares—safe.
There is one night I still replay in my mind that was not mine to rewrite in the first life: the night the black-capped man came back into my life as an adult. This time it was not on a stair; it was in the crowded auditorium where we had gathered for a community talent show. I had just finished telling a ridiculous story about how I once convinced several classmates that I had a secret army of garden gnomes. Laughter. Jacob's arm squeezed mine. The lights were a soft pool that made everything tender.
Then a news alert. A string of murders had a single clue connecting them: a small, neat stitch of thread from a jacket. The footage showed a man in a black cap. I felt the old cold like a fist at my throat. I recognized the walk. My heart stepped aside. The man was not Jacob then—he was older, bigger, but the face, the small habits—the way he cocked his head—left me trembling.
"You saw him," Jacob said later, eyes carefully level.
"No," I lied, because I feared to put Jacob's father in the crosshairs of suspicion. He was a changed man—sterile boasts and late apologies, not enough to erase the past but enough to hold him out of prison.
Sometimes fate is stubborn like a weed. The world wants repetition. The black-capped man prowled outside my life like an itch. I feared and hated him in a way I could not afford to show.
One late summer afternoon, when I was nineteen and Jacob twenty, the neighborhood gathered in front of the community center. People whispered about missing women and the threads of a jacket. Someone produced a thread, the same bright blue on the offender's sleeve in the footage, and an old neighbor identified a pattern of behavior. The police, pressed by public outcry and the investigative itch of a detective named Martin Gonzalez, finally moved in with warrants and cameras.
When the suspect was led out into the sunlight, the street filled with an ugly, simultaneous hunger. Phones rose like flowers to record. Faces came forward in a slow wave: anger, grief, the crush of having been overlooked for so long.
He was not Jacob.
He was Miguel Santiago—someone who had been an acquaintance of Jacob's adult years, a transient man with a history of minor crimes and violent impulses who had worked odd jobs in our district. He had been noticed before by neighbors but had slipped between kindness and suspicion. In the end, it was the pattern of threads that exposed him.
The arrest was public. Detective Martin Gonzales read the charges. I stood near the back and tried not to vomit at the memory of my own death, at the man whose hand had pressed a knife into my neck in a life I had been forced to relive. The witnesses took the microphone like props in a grim play.
"To the families of the victims," Detective Gonzalez began, voice steady, "we will not stop."
"Yes!" someone shouted. A camera light stung my eyes.
Miguel was silent through most of it, at first merely sullen, then shocked, then defensive. "I didn't do it!" he shouted at one point. "You can't—" His voice cracked. People murmured. Some had photographs. Some clapped like judges who had waited too long.
A woman stepped forward with a fistful of photographs and memories. "You killed my sister," she said, and the sound of it tore across the crowd. Miguel's expression altered—first a flush of hatred, then a smaller, spineless denial.
He tried to laugh it off, to tell them they had the wrong man, but the detectives unfurled their evidence like flags. There were fibers, security footage that bolstered witness timelines, and a thread that matched the stitch of a jacket at his place of work. The cheers of the crowd turned to cries. Mothers pulled their children closer. An old man vomited.
For a person like Miguel, the public moment is the worst kind of reckoning. It strips away the private shame he may have used to hide his cruelty. First he was smug, then defiant, then pleading. He accused the witnesses of lying; he accused the police of frame-ups. He cried the way men who had never learned to manage humiliation cry—like someone letting steam out of a broken teapot.
"You're lying!" he said at the microphone, voice ragged and thin.
"Look at him," said a young woman near the front. "Look at him and tell me you don't remember the pattern."
People recorded every expression. There were mothers who spat at him as he walked in cuffs. A dozen phones caught him stumbling, one man slapping the cuffs as if the sound would fix his conscience. Children covered their ears. Someone hurled a bottle; it shattered against the pavement and rained glass glitter across the shoes of volunteers.
What surprised me was not the accusation but the way the accused began to shrink under collective gaze. Miguel's bravado turned brittle. "I have a son," he said suddenly, with a voice small enough to be almost a child's. "Someone will take my son from me."
"No one here cares about your son," a voice screamed back. "You took mothers from their children."
The detectives read off charges—murder, assault, possession of items linked to a dozen cold cases. Miguel's face changed shape several times: denial, rage, the blankness of a soul staring into an abyss. When one of the victims' relatives rose and shoved a photograph at him—an image of a woman with a smile like a broken coin—Miguel stepped back as if struck.
He stumbled and waved his hands, then tried to plead. As the crowd's volume thickened into a single mood—a kind of slow electro-shock of verdict—Miguel's knees buckled. He crouched, then fell to his knees on the cracked pavement, hands flat on stone, and cried like a man stripped of all narrative.
People used words: "monster," "sick," "how could you?" A neighbor recorded him sobbing, and it played on phones that were already live-streaming to feeds. The press wrote the next day's headline in real time. Buttons were pushed, lawyers were contacted, detectives corrected statements. Some people took pictures of Miguel and the detective. Some people took pictures of each other. Two children giggled—shame, the adult thought, is contagious.
Jacob had not been part of the moment. He stood a little apart, silent, watching the man trembling in the sunlight. His jaw was hard as a stone. Later, when the crowd thinned and the cameras left for the station, he took my hand and his fingers were ice.
"I thought it would be him," I whispered.
"Who?" he asked.
"The one who killed me," I said. "The black cap."
"Not all darkness looks the same," he said, and squeezed my fingers like a promise.
We watched Miguel Led Away. The humiliation had been public. The crowd roared. Some people spat at his feet. A teenager from our block climbed up and read off the names of victims until his voice broke. That lawyer on TV said the evidence was solid. People would later go to court and they'd get their verdicts. For that afternoon, the punishment of sight had satisfied a part of the world that had been hoping to see the monster be broken in public.
It was ugly. It was human. It was necessary.
In the weeks after, the neighborhood tried to knit itself back together. Some mothers purchased extra locks. People watched news feeds with a little less sleep. Jacob grew quieter; he refused to let me go to places alone and he did not sleep when I was out. He would wake me by a soft touch, the sensation of someone accounting for me like a prayer.
We grew up in the way all people who have survived together grow up—not cleanly, not simply, but in a way knotted with compromise and small, private rituals. He called me many names in endearment. Once, when I made him a late batch of fried noodles, he said, "You will always be mine, Juliet Stone," and for the first time I let myself believe it.
When the time came to choose colleges, he set aside his first-choice scholarships and chose a school near mine because he would not leave me. I joked that he'd chosen the planet with less gravity. He kissed the top of my head like a benediction.
The day before we formally entered university, a small, absurd ceremony: we sat on the hood of my father's old car and ate a whole cream cake with a single strawberry I had saved like a talisman. We watched the fireworks on television and listened to Crayon Shin-chan reruns in the background. It felt like a life stitched together from goofy stitches.
"Promise you won't ever become him," I said then, the sentence both childish and urgent.
Jacob smiled and touched my cheek. "I will always be me," he said.
That is as close to a vow as I have: to believe that the me I had been could change a man who, in another pattern of time, had been the strangest of dangers. I had died once because I was not careful. I had been reborn and I chose to do the impossible: to save the boy I almost hated and to let him teach me how to be brave in turn.
Years later, when they found other threads and other small evidentiary details that proved Miguel's guilt beyond the outrage of a crowd, the trials were long and ugly. Families sat with paper cups. The judge read sentences with a gravity that tasted like metal. Justice moved like a slow ship.
I do not tell you that the world is clean now. I tell you that I learned to sit inside uncertainty and to make my life a small, stubborn place of care. I grew up under the watch of Crayon Shin-chan and the silly ritual of calling each other on our pink and blue watches, telling silly stories before bed. I learned to cook for Jacob, and he learned—terribly—that I was a better lover than I had expected.
Sometimes, late at night, I still hear the echo of steps in a stairwell and the memory of a blade. I will never entirely unlearn that. But now, when fear pounds at my ribs, Jacob is there to meet it. He has not become a monster. He became, through small patient work and a family's shelter, a man who's better than the violence of his origin. He loves me, stubbornly and plainly.
When we are old enough to look at the whole picture and laugh, I will tell him about the strawberry on the cake, the tiny wristwatch that beeped when I saved him from an old life, and the way one mistake taught me to steal him instead of running. He will laugh, and I will pretend I do not remember being stabbed once in a stairwell. He will hold my hand through it.
And the last thing I will always hear before sleep is the familiar line from the cartoon that kept me small and brave: "Crayon Shin-chan," I will whisper, and he will smile and reply, "Good night, Juliet Stone."
The End
— Thank you for reading —