Sweet Romance12 min read
I Died, Woke Up in Someone Else, and Married a Billionaire in Three Hours
ButterPicks12 views
I died.
I know how dramatic that sounds, but it's the truth. One moment my heart stopped in a cramped apartment, the next I watched my own body lying under a thin blanket for four days until a landlord opened my door. The smell, the quiet — it all left me strangely calm.
Then a voice like a carnival announcer boomed into a place that was not a place.
"Welcome to the Soul Hub!"
I looked around. Mirrors—endless mirrors—each with a different life playing inside. Different me's. Different endings.
"Those are your splinters," the voice said. "One of your splinters ran. She didn't finish her path. Now you must step in."
"Step in where?" I asked.
"You died in the flesh, but not in the script," the voice answered. "You take her role. Finish. Or you fade."
I slid into a white tunnel and fell like the world had been unstitched.
When my eyes opened, I was in a damp basement, lying on a folded piece of cardboard. A man hovered over me with a small, cruel smile. He held a delicate knife like a child's toy.
"Well, well," he purred. "You're awake. Pretty. Imagine how fun this will be."
I tasted metal and old fear. The memory of my old life surfaced — coffee, late nights, a boyfriend who posted a wedding photo with another woman three days before I dropped dead — and a cold, sharp pinch of rage rose in me.
"Who are you?" I said, but the voice in my mouth was different. It was not the fragile voice I knew. It had an edge.
He answered with a laugh. "I'm what you get when you ignore the warning signs." He moved the knife.
My hand shot out. It grabbed his wrist. I felt a new kind of strength surge through me, shocking for both of us.
He froze. "What—?"
"I don't know," I said. "But I'm not staying dead."
My fingers tightened. I shoved. He stumbled back. A kick, then another. He hit the concrete and coughed a spray of blood. The basement smelled of rust and bad breath. My fists moved in a rhythm I had never known and yet it felt like something I had always been able to do.
"Stop! Stop! You'll kill me!" he gasped.
I didn't. I stood over him, my chest aching, and said, "I saved myself."
When the police came, they lifted him in handcuffs. He tried to call me a monster. I let the lie hang in the air while I stitched my courage into a smile. In the hospital, bruise maps and interviews, I cried on cue and watched him look small and baffled.
They called me "Chen Sirou" in the records. I learned her life in pieces: orphaned, adopted into riches, then taken apart by a boyfriend who enjoyed making others hurt. The man who had been her boyfriend, I learned his name from the case file: Gage Case.
I hated that name half the first day.
"We found the weapon," a detective said to me at one point. "We have enough."
I looked at Gage's limp silhouette in the room beyond glass and felt the kind of cold that makes your hands go numb.
"Good," I said. "Make it stick."
Weeks passed that blurred into ordered forms and quiet looks. I watched the news from a hospital bed and learned another fact: a man named Colin Butler—young, brilliant, heir to the Butler conglomerate—was about to become the CEO his father had promised him he'd be.
"He looks like a movie poster," the nurse said, watching a loop of rolling footage. "The whole internet's melting."
I looked closer at his face on the TV. I knew it. The jaw, the slope of his nose, the way light folded over his cheek. The man who had burst into my hospital room late at night and kissed me without permission. The same man who had, with childish certainty, said, "You're my wife, right?"
"You're sure about that?" the nurse laughed. "That was just his illness, right? They said…"
"They said he can black out," I said, and let the word rest there.
When I first met him properly, his voice was a calm that pulled the world in. He stood like a cliff at a window, watching the city breathe below.
"Who are you?" I asked before I realized I already knew.
He bent and lifted my chin with two fingers, gentle as a weathered page. "I know you," he said, and his words landed wrong and right all at once. "You're my wife, aren't you?"
I stared. "No. I don't know you."
He smiled like someone opening a small, deliberate present. "I dreamed you," he said. "I dreamed you many times."
I had questions stacked like dishes. He answered them with a hand that lifted mine and a look that said: I will hold this.
Later, when he swooned and slumped as though light had been cut, his people hurried and explained, "He's unwell. He sometimes… loses himself."
"He's only twenty-seven," one man in a gray suit said, bowing and shuffling. "He's fragile."
I watched him fall, saw his face slacken and pale. And for a single panicked heartbeat his defense wall dropped. I touched a corner of him then, and an odd, new film of protectiveness smeared across my ribs.
I decided to return a check he'd left me — a thick, crisp bank check written in an unfamiliar hand — but by the time I found him he was in a different suit, a different public face. The same man, a thousand likeable headlines.
"You shouldn't take handouts," I said when I found him at the Butler press conference. The three cameras at the front of the room blinked like beetles.
"Eliza?" he said. He called me Eliza the first time.
That was awkward. My birth name this life wasn't using yet. But a stranger in a black suit said, "Mr. Butler, the woman is causing a scene."
"Let her speak," Colin said softly. The room quieted, like the sea hearing a bell.
I lunged. "You kissed me!" I blurted into a microphone that wasn't mine. "You forced a kiss and then someone said you were sick! Why would you do that?"
He tilted his head. "I don't remember," he said. "But I do remember waking up thinking of you."
A thousand microphones hummed. Reporters scribbled. My words were a drumbeat in my skull. For one delicious second I saw him as something close to human: curious, tentative, and very very present.
We didn't plan a three-hour marriage. We did not even plan to marry at all.
But a strange voice in my head — the same one from the mirror room — said simply, "Finish the threads. A new course is set. In three hours you must find a man under thirty and marry. Or you will drift."
Three hours.
I felt every second like a tiny alarm.
"You heard me?" I snapped to Colin. "I need to get a marriage certificate in three hours. Can you drive? Can you—"
He stared at me for a long beat, the calm in his face shifting like the surface of a lake. Then he said, "Come."
We went. We ran we laughed we argued like two thieves. He did not ask for explanations. He walked me into the registrar office like he had rehearsed this part of his life a thousand times.
"Do you have an ID?" he asked with a soldier's practicality.
My hands shook. "Yes."
"Do you have a household book?" he asked.
I produced papers like a magician pulling ribbons.
We sat down at the scratched wooden desk and filled the forms. He wrote like his handwriting might carve the future — neat, purposeful, a small flourish on the T. I watched him. He glanced up at my stunned face and, in a voice low enough for only me, said, "I wanted to be ready."
"Ready for what?" I asked.
"For when I am not myself," he answered. "When the part that forgets needs a place to anchor."
I blinked. "What does that mean?"
He wrote my name as if etching it into quiet stone and then did the most deliberate thing: he folded his golden cuff back and draped it over my shoulder like a ward against cold.
It should have been absurd. It was not. The cuff was warm from him. The gesture lodged in me like a small, bright pin — a pulse.
Later, the ceremony hall smelled of lacquer and lemon. The official smiled and issued a red booklet that felt like a promise, or a prop, or both.
"Eliza Bridges. Colin Butler." The clerk pronounced us as if naming a new constellation.
When a camera flashed at that instant, I felt something like the world balancing on a hair. The red booklet was heavy in my palm. I had traded four days hovering over my dead body for a new life, and now for a stamp.
"Thank you," I told him, when anyone would have expected fear or giddiness.
He simply said, "We are set."
It was ridiculous. It was strangely perfect. He drove me in a black car that smelled faintly of cedar and rain. He handed me a small champagne-gold box before the car slid away. "For you."
I opened it. Inside was a thin, smooth charm with a tiny carved star. It felt like a small pledge.
"Thank you," I said.
He started the engine and looked at me. "Your name is Eliza, right?"
"Yes," I said.
"Good," he said. "I will call you Eliza."
It was a small moment, but the way he said my name — steady and private — made my heart skip like someone had plucked a string. I had three heart flutters in those first days: his private announcement of my name, his hand tucking his coat around my shoulders against a sudden wind, and the light he let into the tiny way he looked at me during the registrar forms. Those moments were soft and sly and kept me alive like breath.
We moved into my new, absurd life as if two actors stepping into a long, unpracticed play. Colin told his assistant, Erik Thompson, the truth — that this was a marriage for a reason neither of them had fully explained — and Erik scowled and then obeyed. A reporter asked if this would become a PR stunt. Colin said nothing. His silence was louder than any headline.
Then — because life needs a second act — the old monster returned.
Gage Case, who had spent his time spinning lies, got out of custody early on a technicality and appeared where he did not belong: at a charity gala hosted by the Butler Group. He moved with the arrogance of a man who thinks the world is a private club.
I saw him across the glittering room, saw the assumption in his smile. I felt my hands go cold.
He found me near the dessert table — high, expensive desserts like tiny glass planets. He smirked. "You're still breathing," he said, and breathed like that mattered.
I walked up to the stage where the Butler group had a microphone and a thousand guests sat in their glitter like constellations. Cameras. Social media feeds. The city press. This would not be a quiet moment.
"Good evening," I said into the microphone.
The room hushed. I had a plan, and it burned in my veins like a brand.
"Gage Case worked on me," I began. "He broke bones, he trained himself to lie, and he thought the law would never touch him. He used his charm like a mask."
A ripple went through the tables. Someone gasped. Flashbulbs popped like tiny fireworks.
"You told me once," I continued, looking directly at his face, "that you'd planned to watch me die. You said it would be 'fun.'"
"You can't say that," he barked. "That never—"
"Yes, you said it," I interrupted, and I felt the crowd lean in. "You have messages saved. You have witnesses. The knife you used has prints. We have a record of the threats you sent to her, and to other victims. You made a hobby of cruelty and you thought you could hide in plain sight. You thought charm would let you out of every consequence."
He turned as if a match had been struck under him: eyes wide, mouth open. He tried to laugh it off. "You are a liar!" he cried.
A reporter shouted, "Do you have evidence?" Cameras pointed like accusatory fingers.
I had arranged it. I had not only told the truth; I had held proof. I pulled from my clutch a small phone. "This is his confession," I said. "This is a folder." I waved the phone like a banner.
"You're bluffing," he said. His hands shook.
"Check his phone," I said to one of the reporters I'd paid to discreetly help. "Check the bank transfers. Ask the charity security."
People swarmed. His face turned crimson, then grey. He began a string of denials that became more frantic, thinner, less coherent.
"You can't do this," he said at last. "You can't—you're—"
He slumped into a chair as the crowd closed in. Phones filmed; fingers tapped. Someone began to record soundlessly with a device and a dozen feeds went live. His two-faced smile uncoupled into a blank look, then shifted into rage, and finally into a frightened whisper.
"You planted this," he said, looking like a man who had lost the script. "You planted—"
"You did this," I said. "You tortured a woman for sport."
The murmur grew into a roar. Some people hissed. Some clapped. Others snapped photos. Around us, the elegant room became a thicket of witnesses.
He bowed his head, then he looked at me with a kind of pleading I had not expected. "Please," he whispered. "You don't understand…"
"Everyone here understands," I said. "They watched him hurt someone who trusted him."
He tried to stand. Security moved in at once; they spoke softly to him, turned him, and led him away. People in the room followed, some with their phones out, some with real tears. A woman in a sequined dress clapped one moment and then put her hand over her mouth the next, stunned into sympathy. A child in a nearby lap pointed and said, "Why is he crying?"
He was led out to the hotel's glass courtyard, under a sky that reflected the chandeliers. People peered out the windows. A cluster of young journalists waited with microphones.
He begged, first quietly, then loudly. "It wasn't just me," he said, "others helped." He accused imaginary co-conspirators. His face flaked with each new word as the crowd recorded him.
Outside, someone shouted, "Shame on you!" Another called for the police. A hundred messages began to cascade across live feeds and social networks: #HeDidIt, #Justice, #Expose. People took photos and uploaded them before the cold of the night could erase the shock.
He tried to run. I watched him trip on the carpet, arms windmilling, and the video of him tumbling like a fallen actor spread instantly. He crawled, then pushed up and tried to sprint, but security and the hotel staff caught him. He screamed, "You're lying!" and then sobbed like a boy who had been found out stealing.
In the press pack, hands clapped; someone unfurled a banner that read: NO MORE. People waved their phones like torches. The sound was a kind of retribution chorus. Gage's bravado bled out into defeat and fear. He looked at me and his eyes were full of a ragged, pleading regret.
"Please," he whispered again. "Please don't—"
"You have to face what you did," I replied. "And you will."
He was not taken to a court in a closed room. He was taken from a gala with a thousand witnesses. Videos, hundreds of thousands of eyes, watched his face as security guided him into the waiting cruiser. The feeds were merciless. He saw his name fill news tickers. He saw his face on everyone's phones. He begged for mercy in half-sentences while the public cataloged every syllable like evidence.
Later, the prosecutors moved in with the kind of momentum that only mass attention brings. New victims came forward because he had been unmasked in front of peers and cameras. The man who thought cruelty afforded him invisibility found himself catalogued on message boards, cross-examined by trending threads. The supporters who once got in his corner watched their feeds and slowly pretended to have been busy.
At the end of the night, he was arrested a second time, but this time the arrest was different: it was full of spectators and recorded angles, his denials crumbled into nothing, and the world outside the hotel repeated the finality of his undoing.
The aftermath stayed hot. I watched the feeds — the slow collapse of a man who had measured others like toys. I felt nothing like triumph. I felt the soft ache of justice, like a stitch finally closing.
That was my public punishment. The world saw him shrink while I stood steady. The crowd's reactions changed from curiosity to disgust to a cold satisfaction. The man who had once grinned as a collector of pain begged and then broke. Cameras hummed. Fingers typed. The record would not forget him.
After that night, the story shifted. People wrote columns about courage. People wrote thin op-eds about vengeance and mercy. Some thought I had plotted it all. Others called me brave. Colin did not speak much; he stood at my side in the back of the hall, his hand finding mine in the dark, a solid thumb pressing the knuckle of my hand.
"Are you okay?" he asked finally.
"Yes," I told him. "No. I'm tired."
He gave my hand a slow squeeze. "Sleep," he said. "I will be watching."
There was sweetness tucked between the knives and cameras. He, who wore a fortress expression most days, had three ways of making my heart stutter: the small smile he gave me on a day when no one else saw it; the moment he draped his jacket over my trembling shoulders outside in March rain; and the soft, careful way his fingers brushed mine when he helped me fill out forms. Those were stolen, private flares in a life suddenly public.
I still had mission threads to finish. The mirror space had told me to finish a chart of experiences. Every life I lived in those mirrors was a lesson I had not yet learned. This life demanded I survive, forgive, and choose. The rules remained sharp: complete the role and move on.
Then came the contest. Astrid Russo — a small-time director who became a friend by accident — begged me to enter a new reality show, "This Is Love." She promised we'd use it to get her film financed, but we both knew a lie when we saw one. Colin heard me out and surprised me. He didn't forbid me. He surprised me again by saying he would join — not as a competing heart, but as my "husband" on the show. He wanted to anchor himself, he said, for the times his mind might wander.
The show opened like a stage tuned for confession. Cameras circled like birds. The producers fussed. Findlay Coleman, the head director, had taken a deep breath the day the Butler Group signed the checks; money had a way of changing rules.
As we stepped in, lights bathing us, one of the contestants, a young man named Hunter Engel, glanced at me the way a man looks at a view you've only seen on postcards. His eyes admired, but Colin's performed a small, private curl of protectiveness. He did not glare. He only set his jaw a little tighter and, in a single motion, crossed to put his coat across the back of my chair.
"Thank you," I whispered later, when the cameras were off. "For the jacket."
He rustled his coat collar and smiled in that small way, like a secret. "You don't have to thank me," he said. "Not for that."
We rode the currents of the show like novices on a wild river. Some days the cameras were kind; other days cruel. But Colin stayed steady enough to make me steady too. I learned to be honest on camera for the first time. I learned to move as if the red booklet in my bag was both anchor and armor.
Sometimes I missed the quiet of an empty apartment where my only task had been to earn a living. Other times I cherished the small, ridiculous luxury of someone asking me how I liked tea and actually listening when I answered.
In the end, the mirror space is still there, a strange glass room in the back of my head. It reminds me that I am not solely myself, that there are many versions waiting in lines like actors. My life with Colin isn't a fairy tale. It is a complicated line of truth and performance, of public justice and private patches. It's a life that required me to be brave in front of cameras and to fight a terrible man under a basement's dull light.
I keep the red certificate in a drawer and a tiny gold charm in a little box. Sometimes, before sleep, I lift the charm and listen for the echo of the white tunnel. It is quiet, but sometimes I hear a faint whisper like applause.
"Finish," the mirror had told me. I did. I keep finishing. And when I put my hand in Colin's, it feels less like a script and more like a promise written in pencil — erasable, changeable, but stubbornly real.
The End
— Thank you for reading —