Sweet Romance11 min read
I woke up in someone else's life — and kept my mouth open
ButterPicks15 views
I woke up.
I felt the soft give of a huge bed and stared at an ornate ceiling for a long, slow hour.
I know the drill. Classic time-travel cliché: "Water... water..." I mouthed, half to test fate.
No one came.
I kept lying there, like a corpse on display. No one came.
Fine. I got up.
The water jug on the vanity was beautiful. I twisted off the lid and drank until my throat stopped asking questions.
"This feels amazing," I said to no one.
Then I looked around. The room was full of wealth—heavy wooden doors, a carved bed the size of a small island, a painting that swallowed light. A child peeked from the doorway.
I laughed. Then my chest tightened.
I talked to the kid. He said his name in a tiny voice: "Boston."
The voice was familiar and not. "Boston Winkler," he finished.
When I asked who I was, Boston blinked and answered, "You are... my mommy."
He said my name like a secret: "Daisy Belov."
I sat down hard and cried properly, for the first time since I woke up. The tears were stupidly pretty on my face and clung to the silk robe. Then the truth hit: I was inside the body of a woman in a book I used to read on nights when the city smelled like oil and cheap noodles.
Daisy Belov used to be the standard-issue tragic supporting wife in the novel "Absolute Love: The CEO and His Childhood Bride."
Daisy's life, boiled down, was a list of betrayals.
She married Jalen Bond—because the old man of the Bond family saw something in her and pushed the match. She had a son, Boston, who was bright and silent. Jalen's true heart belonged to another woman, Eloise Colombo. Eloise would leave with Jalen to F country for four years and leave Daisy and Boston behind. Daisy’s life crumbled. She drank, she lost her mind, she hit Boston. In the end she burned everything down and disappeared in flames.
I felt faint.
Then I dried my face. If I was going to live in Daisy's life, I might as well do it properly. I found the closet, tried on a dress, and marched out.
At a mid-range mall, a thin white-dressed girl spotted me and smiled like a blade.
"Eloise?" I mouthed before I could stop myself.
Her friend—small, green-eyed—barked, "Daisy Belov, what a surprise."
I tried to run but I was out of practice. Eloise looked fragile and perfect in every way, like a porcelain doll someone had left in the sun.
"Give me seven million and a divorce," I blurted the first line I thought of.
Eloise blinked. Her voice was soft: "Sister, what are you talking about?"
"Okay, eight at a discount," I said. The girl with green eyes looked ready to pounce.
A tall man in a black suit drifted into my peripheral vision. He had gold-rimmed glasses and a face the tabloids would spend weeks trying to make human. He didn't look angry. He looked interested.
"Hello," he said. "We haven't seen you in six years."
It was Jalen Bond. I audibly wanted to run. But I couldn't because something else happened. The green-eyed girl spat at me with a practiced cruelty.
"You put Eloise in the water once," she said loudly. "Everyone in A City knows your name."
I did something stupid: I took her hand and whispered, "qnmlgb, nmsl."
Silence folded the mall like a quick curtain.
Eloise and the green girl froze. Jalen’s face did not change, but his eyes—his eyes did something like choose.
The green girl burst into tears, ran under Jalen's wing, and I realized Jalen was the kind of man who could hush a room with a single finger over his lips.
The fear inside me was new and mean. Since I had woken up, this man was always a shadow in the corners of everything Daisy had ever done wrong. I decided to run the other way.
I returned home with a stack of shopping bags and the knowledge that Boston Winkler—my son—counted our savings down to the last cent.
"I think we have three thousand two hundred fifty dollars," Boston told me in a voice that should have belonged to an accountant and not a five-year-old.
He didn't smile. He never smiled unless he was sleeping.
"That can't be right," I said.
"It is," he answered calmly.
That night I called Eloise.
"Come to XX Cafe," she said.
I showed up five minutes late and very hungry.
Before she could offer sugar or a smile, I cut to the chase. "Seven million. Divorce."
Eloise looked like she swallowed a lemon, then politely held out a scarlet invitation. "This is Mr. Bond's father's birthday. We would like you there."
I blinked. "I am going to that list of free food like a conquering queen." I pocketed the invitation. Money or funeral—Daisy's life needed both sometimes.
At the entrance to the manor, hands hovered like vultures. I was led to a table and introduced by practiced smiles to a woman with a haughty brow.
The woman—Daniela Kovalev—stared me down and sniffed. "You brought a child," she said.
I said the first thing that came to my mind. "Is your face dead? Did it suffer some kind of stroke before you were born?"
Tension sharpened like a blade. The room's noise shrank. Daniela's hand trembled. Eloise's smile froze.
"She is the one who threw you in the water," Daniela hissed.
"Maybe I didn't," I said. "Maybe you two practice falling into puddles for your hobby."
The aura of the hall turned sour. Someone stepped forward. It was Jalen, carrying a wineglass, watching like a man who has seen too many wars and is tired.
Then I did the unthinkable: I said out loud—loud for all eight hundred napkins and chandeliers to hear—"Is your husband dead? 'Cause you seem to be living like you married his corpse."
A gasp like an animal echoed. The room closed around me with a thousand eyes.
Daniela's face pinned pale. She sputtered. Eloise went white.
"You," Daniela started. "How dare you—"
"How dare you?" I interrupted. "You, the woman who wears other people's pity like perfume—how dare you touch Boston's life?"
I turned to the crowd and pulled Boston in front of me.
"Everyone," I said. "Look. This boy sleeps through the night because he counts pennies. He hates school because teachers humiliate him. And you all stood back and watched."
"Is it not true?" I asked. "Is it not true that the woman right there—" I pointed a finger so that my nail brushed Daniela's cheek—"stood by when a child was hurt?"
The manor fell into a hush that tasted like metal. Forks paused. A woman in pearls stopped shoving caviar.
Daniela's mouth opened and slammed shut. Her voice slid into a whimper. "You insolent—"
"Did you think we'd never remember?" I asked. "Did you think cruelty had a short memory?"
A man at the head table finally found his voice. "Enough," he said flatly. "Daisy—"
"Mom's dead?" I asked without breaking eye contact with Daniela. It hit like a child dropping a stone into a well. She went rigid.
"No," she managed. "I—"
At that word "No" something popped in the room. My words were a spark in a gas-laden kitchen.
"Is that the truth," I said slowly, "or did you just not want to admit you treated a young woman like trash?"
I stepped forward and slapped Daniela twice. The sound alone was enough to stop time for thirty people.
Daniela staggered back, hand to her cheek, mascara bleeding like damaged ink. The crowd leaned forward like it was theatre.
Imogen Ewing—Eloise's little dog-leg—tried to speak, to throw salt on the wound, but people had already pulled out their phones.
"She hit me!" Imogen shrieked to the cameras.
A cluster of guests murmured, "Get the clip."
"It was self-defense," I said, my voice steady. "Your daughter shoved my child. You laughed."
More people reached for their phones. A dozen phone cameras trained on Daniela's splotched face, on Imogen's wide eyes, on Eloise's brittle composure.
"I demand an apology," Daniela managed weakly, but the cameras had teeth. A woman beside me whispered, "Do you want me to post this? I've got two hundred thousand followers." She raised her phone like a priest holding a relic.
Daniela's smile melted into something ferocious and small. The room shifted: people leaned away from her tone, leaned toward my belligerence. For once I wasn't the only spectacle.
Eloise had tears in her eyes, but they were not guilt. They were calculation. She waved a hand and said softly, "Daisy, this is not the place—"
"Isn't it?" I said. "You and your little court have been arranging this place to humiliate us. Now the court has a different jury." I opened my palm and told the room, "If anyone here thinks distasteful gossip is better than courage, keep your phones down."
The room hummed. Someone began to clap. Then another voice: "She speaks the truth." The applause spread like a rumor.
Daniela started to cry, a kind of wounded animal loudness. "You lie!" she cried. "You are destroying my reputation!"
"Reputation?" A woman near the door, who had once been pushed aside by Daniela at a charity event, stepped forward. "You broke my daughter's scholarship," she spat. "You called the police on her when she was late—because she was poor."
The group circling Daniela thinned. Reporters who'd come to photograph Jalen Bond's father's birthday had found a better story: the woman who had always been untouchable, touched.
Imogen tried to hide her face. A teen snapped a live video. Comments flooded: "Who is the violent aunt? Why is Daisy forgiven?" "Boston is adorable." "Eloise crying—did she think no one would remember?"
Daniela's color drained. Her eyes searched the room for a savior and found only thin men with polite smiles. They didn't step in.
She collapsed into a chair and sobbed. The sight was somehow theatrical and catastrophic. Her power slipped away with the applause.
The guests' reactions were a map of changing tides: disgust, then curiosity, then a slow, terrible justice. People who had once laughed at Daisy's misfortunes now tilted their heads and listened when she spoke.
Jalen Bond did not applaud. He watched with a look that could have split a mountain. When the room's noise became a whirring drone, he stood. He stepped forward and said, simply: "This house does not tolerate bullying."
His voice was a gavel. Everyone hushed. Cameras still filmed, but now they filmed him. He turned to Daniela. "Resign from the charity board," he said coolly. "And deliver a public apology to everyone you've bullied."
Her mouth opened, closed. The crowd buzzed. Daniela's face held the expression of someone who had been told the rules of a game played by other people.
Her pride fell in real time. She clutched her pearls like a life raft as her social circle shrank into nothing. The photographers took their shots. People whispered, "Finally."
They trailed off into gossip and judgment. Some guests pulled out cigarettes with little dramatic flourishes. Some sent texts that were fast and cold. My chest loosened.
Eloise stood a little aside. Her fragile image had been used as a shield, and now that shield had a hole in it.
"Thank you," I said to the room, because sometimes you can win by making people remember how the person you love—the child who counts pennies—deserves better than whispers.
The punishment was public and messy and perfect. Daniela's world of borrowed power cracked into tiny pieces, captured by cameras and shared within an hour. She would be cursed at for weeks on social feeds. Sponsors would lean away. Her invitations would dwindle. She had been the kind of person who measured revenge in installments—now the interest was due, and it was paid publicly.
Daniela lost more than face that night. She lost a court that would defend her whispers. She lost allies who loved the power of being cruel. I watched her flounder and felt something like calm.
After we left the table to eat, Jalen followed and stood beside me like a silent armor.
"Daisy," he said. "You have a way of making the world honest."
I looked up at him. "Don't be fooled," I said. "I'm terrified."
He reached for my hand, a motion at once small and huge. "Stay," he said. "Don't run."
Days with Jalen were like quicksilver. He was cold and careful and then, in private, he was small and differently fierce.
"Don't open my drawers," he warned once, but he didn't say it like a man being possessive. He said it like a man asking a favour. I laughed and promised.
I called the police once after I slapped a teacher who had been cruel to Boston. "You hit my son," I said, and it turned into a school scuffle with Julianne Diaz, the teacher. Alvaro Dennis was the cop on duty. He was kind-eyed and strict.
"You can't beat a teacher," he said, reading me like a book.
"I was defending my son," I said. "She stood in the rain and ate her pride."
Alvaro sighed, and then, because the Bond name had weight, because Boston—his eyes a little like Jalen's—had run to his father and begged, things settled. Crew Stevens called, and Jalen lent his cool hand to fix the mess. I sat in a room with paper thin walls and thought: I can survive this life if I speak loud enough.
The more days passed, the more I realized something I hadn't expected: I liked him.
I liked the way he took my hand and washed it with a towel because my palms were covered in ash from the garden fire we started burning sweet potatoes and bad ideas.
"You're ridiculous," he said once, with a softness that stole the air out of my chest.
"I know," I answered. "And you're cruel."
"I'm careful," he corrected.
"Same difference."
He put a ring on my finger one day in the study, like a quiet declaration that cut through a thousand dailies. "We will hold a wedding," he said, "public and clean."
I thought of running again. I thought of all the nights I had spent in cheap apartments eating noodles at midnight. I thought of Boston counting pennies. I slid the ring on and felt ridiculous and oddly rooted.
There were low days. News ran stories about Jalen's family alliances. Some pictures looked scandalous and were heavily edited. I panicked and packed us into a pink suitcase and fled like a thief.
We hid in a small town and I taught Boston how to peel an orange. He learned quickly. We watched late-night soap operas I pretended to scorn, and I cried when they killed the wrong character. Somewhere between laughing at trivial things and burning the last of my pride, I found a quieter life.
Then the cars came to our door and my heart thundered. I thought we'd be found and taken back to a life of strings.
I crawled under a bed and held Boston tight. He peered out of a closet and whispered, "Mommy, don't make a scene."
The door opened and there he was—Jalen, changed in ways that the dust on him could not hide. His eyes were tired but fixed only on me.
"Daisy," he said softly. "Come home."
He did not raise his voice. He did not shout. He did not demand. He only carried me like a guilty thing back to the world that had been waiting for me to either burn or blossom.
Back in the house, the reckoning came slowly. We had a hundred small battles—over money, over Boston's education, over my appetite for garlic fried chicken at three a.m.—and a hundred small truces. He knew I was not the original Daisy Belov. He knew I was someone who had read a book and then decided to live inside it. His answers were always simple, honest.
One night he said, "If you left, whom would I marry?"
I laughed. "Nonsense. You would marry Eloise."
He made a face and then kissed me. "You are my Daisy," he said. "The one who will not leave."
I tried to be brave. I tried to be kind. I tried to be honest. Boston stopped hiding when he was bullied. He learned to say, "My mother is fierce," and meant it like a cautionary tale.
Eloise faded from center stage in the way that a trained actress does when the camera turns. She tried small resistances—hospital visits, sweet voice—but when the crowd witnessed the truth about the woman who had used other people's pity as currency, Eloise's shape shifted. She became smaller, a shadow cut out of public praise.
The punishments—the ones that mattered—happened where people watched. Daniela's fall from false dignity was recorded, commented on, and remembered. Julianne Diaz, who had a penchant for humiliating Boston, found herself publicly revealed when parents whose children had been ruined by her tactless cruelty marched to the school office and demanded action. Imogen Ewing, who had once delighted in small cruelties, found herself the butt of a thousand online jokes after she cried into a camera and was captured looking insincere.
They sought to make me the villain; the room had refused.
One evening I sat on the terrace with Jalen and Boston, the city a quilt of lights beneath us.
"Will they try again?" I asked.
He wrapped his arm around us both. "People will always try. But you are not alone now."
I rested my head against his shoulder and let the small, steady heartbeat of a family—strange and haphazard— lull me.
"Promise me something," Boston whispered.
I looked at him, but I did not answer the way the book promised I would. I said instead, "I can't promise forever."
He pouted, then grinned.
Jalen touched my hair and said, quietly, "Stay."
I stayed.
The End
— Thank you for reading —