Sweet Romance18 min read
"I Woke Up in a Murderer's Face — My Deadliest Mistake"
ButterPicks13 views
“I don’t want to see you,” I said, and the elevator dinged like a small, guilty bell.
“You could have said that three years ago,” Dominick Baxter said. His coat was too expensive, his sigh was too calm, and his eyes still cut me open the way they did in college.
“I could have,” I said, pretending my hands weren’t shaking.
He leaned on the chrome wall, like he owned the light. “You look different.”
“You too,” I said. “You look like a museum exhibit.”
He smiled without warmth. “Still the same tongue.”
The elevator stopped. The doors glided open, and a woman pushed in like a storm. She wore a black coat and a hard look, and she looked at me the way you look at a person who owes you blood.
She said my name.
“Clementine?” she asked. Her voice was low and flat.
“You’re not…?” I started.
She pulled a knife. The world went thin.
I remember three things after that: the knife, the fall, and Dominick’s hand — not to save me, but to steady himself as he watched the elevator shudder.
I woke in a room that smelled like damp cardboard and old smoke. My hand flew to my face and I slapped myself hard.
The face that stared back in the warped mirror was not mine.
A stranger’s face. A face on a wanted poster. “WANTED: Ximena Baldwin,” my eyes read back at me, and then the room slid out from under me like a stage prop.
I hit the mirror with my palm. “This is a prank,” I whispered. “This is some kind of joke.”
Someone knocked. “Rent!” a voice shouted. I took a breath. My mouth made a sound that wasn’t mine.
I am Clementine Mendes. I am thirty, an auditor. I buy my groceries from the same shop. I have one house key, one bank card, and a ring that sits like a coin of peace on my finger. I know the names of every partner in my firm. I know how to run numbers so that fools think we cannot be wrong.
Now those facts meant nothing. I was wearing Ximena Baldwin’s body.
I opened the door to the landlord, handed her the four hundred dollars she demanded, and tried to think like a woman who had been living with fear like a second coat. Four hundred dollars? I had three hundred and sixty-eight in my real wallet. I lied.
“You pay next month,” the landlord said. “You better not drag this out.”
She slammed the door.
I sank onto the nearest box and opened the phone I had found in the jacket pocket. It belonged to Ximena. Her wallpaper was a grainy photo of a city at night. Her phone had more unread messages than mine had ever had. The top message read: “Reward 200,000 — Wanted for murder.”
My head did something awful. I ran my fingers over the face in the mirror. Ximena’s eyes looked back like a smear.
I had to go home.
My own key slid into the door with fingers that did not feel like mine. My mother opened it and hit the ceiling with a scream the moment she saw me.
“You!” she shouted. “What are you doing in my house?”
“Mom,” I said. “It’s me.”
She grabbed the nearest broom. “Get out!”
“Mom—”
The woman with Ximena’s face clutched the broom like a weapon and stepped between me and my parents. “Call the police,” she screamed. “This is the woman who attacked me in the elevator.”
My father called the police without saying my name. My brother stared at me like I had switched languages. My fiancé, Eleazar Brown, walked in mid-scene and stood like a statue as the room spun.
“Who is she?” he asked.
“She is the attacker,” the woman lied. She cried at the edges of her voice like someone practicing victimhood.
“She’s my fiancée,” I said. My voice flicked with panic. “She is not— she’s not who you think.”
He pushed me away with the smallest movement. “Get out,” he said to the woman with the wrong face, then looked at me and said the thing I knew would kill me slower than bullets. “You need help.”
I ran.
I ran the way only someone with nothing left to lose runs. I ran past the market stalls, past the supermarket, under a sky that did not care. I ran until my lungs burned and my head hit a parked car. I closed my eyes and waited for the world to stop.
Instead, a man leaned into me from the driver’s seat of a sedan and said, “Are you okay?”
It was Dominick.
“You should not be out alone,” he said.
“You should not be in my life at all,” I said.
He did not argue. He put me in his car like a beat-up thing you patch and keep. He did not take me to the police. He drove to a hospital, then somewhere quieter, and he let me sleep on a couch with a blanket that smelled faintly like cedar.
When I woke, Dominick was watching me with an expression he had always worn when he thinks he’s right. “You need a story,” he said.
“I need my face,” I answered.
He laughed once — not warm, not cruel. “You want your face back more than you want to go to jail.”
“I want both,” I said.
He looked at me as if seeing me changed everything. “Tell me everything that happened in the elevator,” he said.
I told him. I left nothing out because at that point, nothing I said sounded crazier than what had happened.
He listened, then he said two things that were both a question and an offer: “You and Ximena switched. I can help. But you will owe me a favor.”
“I’d owe you my life,” I said too quickly.
“No,” he said. “You’ll owe me information. There’s a project — a stadium audit at Linton Real Estate. I need to know what you know. Help me, and I’ll help you.”
I had been an auditor at Linton. I had been assigned to a tricky file. I also hated Dominick for reasons layered in small slights. “You want me to betray my professional code,” I said.
He shrugged. “You’re not yourself.”
He said the words like a verdict. He offered me safe shelter and a demand. I took it.
“We start tonight,” he said.
“I don’t know how to begin,” I muttered.
“Begin with the truth,” he said.
“You mean from before the knife?”
He nodded. “Everything.”
I told him about the audit file: money that moved between shell companies, a project manager called Walter Stone whose fingerprints were on the worst spreadsheets, and a string of late-night emails that smelled like panic.
“Stone,” Dominick said. “He’s dead.”
“Yes.” I looked up. “He is.”
“The woman who attacked you is accused of his murder,” he said. “Ximena Baldwin.”
We both sat with that. I felt the air change.
“You’re saying she had motive,” he said, quietly. “But motive doesn’t make murder.”
“Something is wrong,” I said. “She singled me out in the elevator. She remembered my name. That wasn’t random.”
He watched me like he was rearranging pieces on a board. “You and Stone overlapped on files. You were the only other person in Linton who had worked that folder.”
“I barely touched it,” I said. “The file was messy. Walter left huge errors.”
“You told him,” he said.
“I told him to fix them. He didn’t. I flagged him.”
“So he had motive to hurt you too.”
“I didn’t expect knives,” I snapped.
Dominick stood, then walked to the window. “You’re telling me she attacked you because of the audit?”
“I don’t know. I only know she wanted me dead.”
He turned back to me. “If she is innocent, she is probably silenced. If she is guilty, she’s dangerous. Either way, you are in Ximena’s body and she’s in your bed at the hospital.”
I remembered the crash of ambulance lights at the building that night. I remembered seeing my own face lying on a hospital gurney and being held by a man who once called my name like a joke.
“You will help me fix the Linton books,” Dominick said. “You will help me find who killed Walter. In return, I will get you proof that you are you.”
I agreed because the alternatives were worse: staying in a body that people wanted hanged, or walking straight into Dorchester Prison.
We worked like conspirators. I taught him spreadsheets. He taught me how to move in a high-rise apartment without being noticed. He opened a drawer and took out a slim envelope. “This is a photo of Ximena’s phone,” he said. “I hacked it because I have resources. Don’t ask.”
“I hacked for you once,” he said, voice soft. “I will not ask either.”
Dominick’s methods were not legal. Neither were mine. We were both walking a line.
The first break came when I needed to understand Ximena’s life. Dominick agreed to drive me to Linton’s offices under the pretense I was there for a day job. I slid into a manager-level cubicle like a ghost.
“You sure about this?” he whispered as we sat in his car for two minutes outside.
“No,” I said. “But I have no other way.”
Inside, the files smelled like paper and recycled air. I found the audit folder. There, tucked between two old invoices, was an expense for a “consultant payment” that pointed to an offshore company.
“You see this?” I said into the phone. “This isn’t Ximena’s work. This is orchestrated.”
“Who benefits?” Dominick asked.
“I don’t know yet. But certain names keep repeating. Stone invoiced the consultant the quarter before he died.”
We kept digging.
Meanwhile, Ximena — in my body and in my life — lived like oil in water. She went to my workplace and sat in my office like a lioness bagging territory. She told my boss she had brain fog from the fall and he nodded like he owned a heart. She smiled like a woman who had stolen from the world and planned to keep it.
She called my mother “Mom” and then changed the subject to what colors went well with a crocodile-skin bag. My fiancé treated her like a trophy. Every time my phone buzzed with someone asking about me, my throat closed a little harder.
I felt rage boil in me that had nothing to do with Ximena’s crimes. She had my face; she had my life. She had chosen cruelty. I was small, unarmed, but furious.
We found a trail of messages pointing to a contractor, a shell company, and a man named Gregory Holt. Gregory was a businessman with a public name and a private appetite for risk. He had been seen at Linton, buying silence like a luxury.
“He had dinner with Walter three nights before the murder,” Dominick said, flicking through a printout he’d made. “Why would a contractor meet a project manager at a bar three nights before his death?”
“To bribe him,” I said.
“Or to threaten him,” Dominick said. “Or to be threatened.”
The next week, Ximena — in my body — slipped in front of my family at dinner, sobbed for cameras, and then served my mother a plate of praise. “She looks an awful lot like you,” my mother told her, and my mother was happy to be fooled.
I could not let my life be a lie. I could not let someone else live my home, my wedding, my tidy accounts. I needed to pull at the thread that bound these two lives together.
“So we pull Gregory,” I said. “We make him sweat.”
Dominick’s lips tightened. “If he’s connected to Stone, he will have friends who will want to stop us.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “I want my face. I want my life. I want him to stop hiding behind invoices.”
We started with the easiest thing: we called Gregory’s bank for a record. A legal subpoena would take weeks. Dominick had a way that took longer: pressure.
“You know how to pressure men like Gregory?” I asked.
He smiled. “I know men who get what they want.”
Several weeks of small fights and close calls later, we got the break we needed. A junior accountant at Linton — Anna Reyes — handed us a file she had hidden. She had been scared for weeks. “I keep the sheets,” she told me. “I know the numbers. I don’t want bodies.”
“Why are you telling us?” Dominick asked.
“Because I think Walter was blackmailing someone big,” she said. “I can’t say more. But Stone was into his file. He told me he was worried.”
We had the paper that connected the dots: Gregory’s shell company, payments, and a series of withdrawals that went to a private account owned by someone anonymous — until we dug into it.
The account belonged to a company registered in Walter Stone’s name, but only on paper. The hand that signed off the final payment had a different signature — one that matched an email from Linton’s head procurement officer: Henry Carver.
Henry Carver was a man with clean hands in his photo and blood on his ledgers.
“He signed it,” I said. “He authorized the payment that crippled Stone.”
“Maybe he wanted Stone quiet,” Dominick said. “Maybe he owed Gregory or someone else.”
We needed a confession. We needed a scene that would force Henry’s hand.
“Public exposure,” I said. “We stage a meeting. We force him to explain the payments. If he lies, we criminally subpoena him. If he confesses, maybe Ximena’s story crumbles.”
“Why would he confess?” Dominick asked.
“Pressure,” I said. “We make his colleagues see him with the evidence. Men like him hate public ruin more than prison.”
We set the trap. We leaked a rumor of a compliance audit to the board. Henry panicked. He called a meeting with all departmental heads. I walked into Linton in Ximena’s body (because I had no choice) and Dominick sat in the back like a judge.
“You’re brave,” he murmured.
“I’m reckless,” I answered.
Henry gave a performance: thin smiles, slide decks, confident talk. I distributed a packet of documents: bank wires, photos, copies of emails.
His mouth tightened. “Where did you get this?” he asked.
“From your company’s server,” I said. “From an internal whistleblower.”
“You can’t accuse me without proof,” he said.
“I can,” I said. “And I will.” My voice sounded strange in Ximena’s face, but it carried.
The room fluttered. Board members leaned forward. Henry’s assistant went pale.
“You can call the police,” he said finally. “Call the police and show them.”
I did.
The board asked the questions that make men sweat: why these wire transfers, who signed them, who benefitted. Henry dried his face with a napkin that did not hide his shaking.
“You authorized the payment to Gregory Holt,” I said. “You signed for Stone’s consulting fee.”
He tried to stall, then break. He did not immediately confess, but his phone calls betrayed him. He called the procurement lawyer and begged for a scapegoat.
“What do you want?” he hissed into the receiver.
“Silence,” the voice said back. “You will be handled. You will take the fall.”
He was cornered. The room smelled like ink and cheap perfume. The board called an external counsel on the spot.
We were not done. That night, I walked out of Linton in my stolen face and felt hands following me.
I was not safe.
The next incident changed everything.
I was leaving the subway when three men blocked me on the stairs. Their breath smelled of rot and alcohol. “Hey, pretty thing,” one purred. “Where you going with that face?”
One shoved me. Another groped.
I fought. I had no training. I had a brick of rage and a panicked move. I kicked, shoved, and managed to break free. They pulled knives. I hit first.
It was messy. I bled. I screamed. I thought I would die.
Someone ran down the stairs and threw them off. “You get your hands off her!” Dominick’s voice — I had not seen him, but there he was.
He was not alone. A dozen people in suits, neighbors, security guards had arrived. He had somehow gathered a small army.
“What did I tell you?” he said to me later as we sat in his car, both of us breathing like boxers. “You don’t run.”
“Do you always save me?” I asked.
“You make it very simple to care,” he said.
He did not kiss me. He did not hold me like a lover. He cleaned my wound with a practiced hand and handed me a napkin. In the mirror, Ximena’s face looked like a cry in a painting.
I kept working the audit while Dominick worked his contacts. The board froze Henry and opened an external investigation. Gregory Holt was questioned. A pattern emerged that linked Henry’s scheme to a money spike that Walter Stone had threatened to reveal.
But we were still missing one thing: motive. Why Ximena?
I pushed deeper into Ximena’s background. I learned she’d been terrified of being exposed as a low-level fixer — someone small caught in a big net. She had been bullied, suffocated by debts, and cornered by men who thought they could buy her silence.
Then I found a voicemail on Ximena’s old phone I had access to: “She knows too much,” a man said. “If she talks, everyone goes down.”
The men who said that? They were connected to Holt’s network. They had names on the same invoices as the payments.
We had a conspiracy. We had a nervous, guilty procurement officer. We had a contractor who paid men to keep people quiet. And we had Ximena — a woman who might have acted in desperation.
I needed to see Ximena herself.
I found her where small crimes rest like furniture: in an abandoned block not far from the tracks. She lived in a single bed with a heap of plastic bags and receipts. When I opened the door, she looked at me like a person who had been betrayed by a mirror.
“You’re me,” she said, and it sounded like a question, not a statement.
“No,” I said. “I am me.”
She laughed. “You think they’ll believe your story?”
“They will when I show them the ledger,” I said. “When Henry confesses under pressure.”
She watched me like a cat.
“You want your life back,” she said. “You want the man you love.”
I spat the words out like a confession. “Yes.”
She closed her eyes. “Then give it back.”
“How?”
She opened her eyes. They had a hardness I recognized from my own anger. “I will give it back when you give me something that the world cannot take: my voice.”
She meant exposure. She meant truth. She meant a reckoning.
“You killed a man,” I said.
“I killed him because he took everything,” she said. “You think I wanted to? He hurt my sister. He blackmailed me. I went to him and I wanted money and to talk. He pushed me. He pulled a knife. He was big. I took the knife. I did what I had to.”
“You told the police he was dead because of me,” I said. “You even told my name.”
She looked guilty. “I stabbed. But I did not name you.”
“You did on CCTV. You screamed my name.”
She slid down the wall and put her face in her hands. “I was not myself. I was out of my head. I panicked. I saw you and then I wanted… control.”
“Control?” I said. “You wanted my life.”
She nodded.
I felt a new hunger — not for violence, but for justice. “Then we will swap the truth,” I said. “You tell them what you did. I will show what Henry did. We will split the guilt and the cost.”
She looked up slowly. “And you think they will believe you?”
“We will make them believe,” I said.
We arranged for Ximena to come forward, but not to the police alone. We staged a setting where public shame would hurt Henry more than anything else: the Linton shareholder meeting.
The plan was fragile.
On the day, I stood in the crowd, Dominick to my right, small and steady. Ximena went in with a pale face and a trembling hand. My mother sat at home turning a radio dial. My fiancé sat under the fluorescent lights and watched like a man watching his country fall apart.
Ximena walked to the lectern and put her hands on the wood. “My name is Ximena Baldwin,” she said. Her voice broke at first, then gathered a terrible steadiness. “I killed Walter Stone.”
Gasps ran through the room like a cold current. Henry looked like someone watching a stage collapse. He stood.
“It was me,” Ximena continued. “He was blackmailing us. He would take our jobs, our homes. I went to him. I fought to get my life back. I pulled the knife. I did not intend to kill him, but I did.”
A dozen phones rose up like birds. At the back of the room, people whispered.
Henry’s face turned grey. He tried to say something but the counsel had already started to speak. The law moved in wheels.
The police closed the room. Henry was led out in handcuffs like a man in a bad dream. The board murmured. The media ate it with hunger.
My family watched on TV as their daughter — the woman with my face — confessed to murder and took ownership. My phone buzzed with messages from colleagues who had seen me on the screen.
“You did it,” Dominick said later, when the smoke cleared. “You turned it.”
“No,” I said. “She did it.”
We had both set the trap, but nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.
The exchange flickered like a switch.
I woke in a hospital bed.
“My God,” my mother said, and she was crying for real. “You’re alive.”
The monitors whined. A woman in a white coat smiled like someone who’d found a miracle. I sat up and looked in the mirror and saw my own face.
“Did it—did it change back?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” the doctor said. “You passed out during the meeting. You had a seizure. But you’re here.”
I ran to the window like someone checking the weather. I wanted proof. Dominick handed me my phone. There were messages from Anna Reyes, from the board, from people who had promised to help.
The police had taken Henry in. Gregory Holt had been arrested weeks earlier after his men were linked to the shell companies. The trail had ended where it began: with greed.
Ximena was in custody. She had confessed — partially true, partially more complex. The police investigation would find what it found.
But the public reaction was not a tidy thing. My face had been in the center of both confession and accusation. People demanded justice and wanted two things: to see me punished or saved. My fiancé went to the news feed and watched my face on two different screens and decided his answer.
Eleazar called and said, “I can’t trust you.”
My mother hung up the phone and said, “You look like you’ve been through hell. I’m sorry.”
My brother hugged me and swore he had always known.
The hardest blow came from the small crowd at the courthouse when Henry’s confession rolled into evidence. Eleazar stood at the back and watched. I watched him watch.
After the police statements and Henry’s transfer, the public turned.
“Dominick,” I said one night when we sat on his narrow balcony, “why did you help me?”
He looked at me like he had the entire night in his hands. “Because you were myself in a different life,” he said. “Because you were the one who once cut the line on my basketball shorts and I have been holding that grudge forever.”
“You still hold grudges,” I smiled.
“I also wanted to see the one who ruined me get revealed,” he said. “And maybe I wanted to see you be honest to yourself.”
“Honest how?” I asked.
“You asked about Walter Stone. You looked. You did not stop.”
He was right. The days inside Ximena’s life had sharpened me. They forced me to be brave enough to stand where I had hidden.
The legal process took months.
“Will they free her?” I asked when we sat across from the prosecutor.
“If evidence shows she acted in self-defense or under coercion, penalties may be lighter,” the prosecutor said. “But the law is slow.”
Ximena’s trial began. She testified about poverty and blackmail and the fear that had become a constant drumbeat in her life. We had given the board documents and testimony. Henry’s guilt was a bright, cold fact.
At her sentencing, the courtroom was packed. My face walked in and sat. Ximena sat separately, hands trembling, and when she saw me she bowed her head. For a long time she refused to speak with me. The trial did not grant immediate peace.
I kept my job, my house, and most of my dignity. My fiancé left a letter that read like a small accusation. “I can’t look at you and not think of what I saw on the screen,” he wrote. “I can’t trust a life that has been swapped and confessed. I can’t be the one who holds the bride when their face is a country’s headline.”
My mother cried and then she mended the broken places of my home like she always had. My brother found a job and tried to act brave.
The public turned their eyes like a tide. Some people called me a liar. Others called me a victim. I learned to move through both with uneven grace.
Then a kink of fate happened at a hearing where the city council discussed the Linton stadium project. The press was there. The board attended. Henry gave a speech about regret. Gregory Holt’s men disappeared in police custody.
I walked in with Dominick by my side. He had not asked for a reward. He asked for nothing and yet he had taken everything he could: knowledge, satisfaction, an upright pain.
“You didn’t owe me anything,” I told him later when we sat across from the river and watched the city lights.
“You told me you wanted help,” he said. “You told me a man was dying behind wires. I wanted to help the truth win.”
“You were very patient,” I said.
He laughed, the first real laugh I had heard from him in years. “I am not patient. I am exact.”
We were quiet for a while. The river moved like a secret.
Then, abruptly: “Will you let me make it up to you?” he asked.
“Make up for what?” I asked.
“For all the times I chose the easy cruelty. For all the ways I thought I could fix people with irony. For all the times we were students and I was proud. Make it up by letting me be present.”
It sounded like an ask wrapped in a dare.
“I am not sure I want that,” I said. “I have been hurt. I have been accused by my own body.”
He smiled, small, fierce. “Then let me humiliate the world for you if it needs humiliating. Let me stand beside you while you pick up the pieces. If you want, I can be a shock absorber.”
People say romance turns like a tide. This was less melodious. It was two people who had been opponents and who now decided to be each other’s allies.
“I will accept help,” I said.
“And I will accept the work you said you owe me,” he said with one eyebrow raised.
“Deal,” I said.
We laughed then, a little too loud. The world had bent, and we had doubled.
The final chapter came fast.
During Ximena’s trial, the defense and prosecution agreed on a truth: the murder had been a violent act under pressure, but there were other crimes underway. Henry lied. Gregory paid for silence. Men had hidden behind papers and numbers and people had died because of it.
“Clementine Mendes,” the judge said in the courtroom, looking at me for reasons I could not name. “You provided crucial evidence. Do you have a statement?”
I stood. The gallery leaned forward.
“You will read me as many things,” I said. “You will decide what I am. But I want one thing to be clear: I am not the face that my life held for a few weeks. I am me. I did not plan a crime. I am an auditor. I made mistakes. I wish I had done more before the knife came.”
The judge nodded and thanked me.
Outside, cameras were eager. Eleazar stood with a neat jaw and a heavy silence. He walked past me without looking back.
“Will he regret?” someone asked me later.
“He might,” I said. “Regret is a private business. People decide when they feel it.”
Months later, at a small hearing, the prosecutor read the charges: Henry Carver was charged with fraud and obstruction. Gregory Holt with bribery and conspiracy. Ximena Baldwin was convicted of manslaughter but received leniency after giving testimony and because she acted under duress. She was sentenced to community service and a long rehabilitation program, which many protested but which I supported in spite of everything.
“You helped rescue her,” my mother said, though her eyes asked me how I could bear to after everything.
“I didn’t rescue her,” I corrected. “We made the truth do what truth does: it frees and it wounds.”
Dominick kept his promise. He handed over the recorded file that the board had used to prosecute Henry. “You asked for proof,” he said.
I took it because I wanted to close the loop. I wanted my accounts to clear and my name to be less of a question mark.
After the trial, the city council restarted the stadium project with new vendors, and Linton shuffled leadership. People wrote columns. Some called for tougher sentences. Others wanted mercy. The city argued with itself.
Finally, one night, I went to the small café where Dominick liked to sit. He was there, waiting like a man who had time.
“You returned my life to me,” I said. “You didn’t have to. People would have thought you were cruel.”
He put his hand over mine. “You returned something to me,” he said. “You gave me a chance to be the man who helped instead of the man who mocked.”
We were not lovers yet. We were something simpler: allies with a future.
“You owe me the audit,” I said.
“And you owe me a confession at least once a month,” he said.
“Fine,” I said. “I will confess.”
We kissed then, small and surprising, like both of us were learning to accept heat. The world did not explode.
Months later, when Ximena visited me from time to time as part of her community program, she handed me a small envelope. “For your trouble,” she said.
Inside was a photograph of two women laughing in a small apartment years ago — poor, fierce, alive. A moment that was not stolen but shared. I looked up at her and saw a woman who had been forced into a corner and then made, painfully, to choose.
“You could have killed me,” I said.
“You would have killed me,” she said. “You were me then.”
We laughed, a little ragged.
The court of public opinion had slapped and praised. The people who had mocked me at first had to eat their words. My parents went on, imperfectly proud. Eleazar moved on. The audit saved no one’s soul but the stadium project was cleaned. Henry Carver left his cornerstone office, and Gregory Holt’s name vanished into pages of court transcripts.
I had my body back. I had my life back. But I had also learned that identity is a fragile agreement between yourself and everyone else.
One morning, walking along the river, Dominick stopped and looked at me. “What are you now?” he asked.
I looked at my reflection in the water and at him. “I am me,” I said. “A woman who survived being someone else. A woman who will never trust a mirror completely. A woman who still counts ledgers.”
He smiled. “Then help me make a new ledger.”
I linked my fingers with his. We walked forward.
The End
— Thank you for reading —