Sweet Romance19 min read
I Woke Up Twice — I Cancelled the Engagement and Took Everything Back
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I woke up crying into my mother's arms and then I remembered I had died. Twice.
"Are you awake?" my father whispered.
"I'm awake," I choked, and the room smelled like antiseptic and jasmine and the impossible softness of being alive again. My eyes were ringed in red from the memory; my heart was full of cold fire.
"This is impossible," I said aloud before I could stop myself. "I died. I was—"
"—we thought we had lost you," my mother said. Elise Berger squeezed my hand. "Don't say such things, Gwen."
Gwen Madsen. The name sounded like newsprint and old photos now. I didn't want it to be a ghost. I pushed back against the sheets and felt the weight of my second chance settling around my ribs.
"What's today?" I asked.
"Four years ago," my father answered. Flynn Bates' voice was steady and tired. "The engagement."
Time turned as if it had heard the question and decided I deserved a rewind. My whole life condensed into the one day I had promised everything to Draven White.
"You don't have to hide anything from us," my mother soothed.
I looked at them. Warm faces rimmed in worry. My last memory before the shift was a pool, the slap of water, a crowd, and then—the cold dark and the sound of wolves on the stones. I remembered being betrayed, and I remembered the last hateful words he spat as my lungs failed.
"Don't come near me, Gwennie. You make me sick," he had said. That sentence had been the last I heard, echoing as vultures feasted on flesh, his cowards carrying my body up a mountain to be forgotten.
My fists clenched until my knuckles hurt. I swallowed and let words arrange themselves like knives into something simple.
"I'm not going to marry him," I said.
Flynn Bates' jaw unclenched. Elise's hand trembled at the news and then smoothed as if settling a sail.
"Of course," my mother said. "We will protect you."
"You only say that because you see what he is," my father said. "But what do you want, Gwen?"
"I want him gone," I said. "Not just out of my life. I want the people who used me, who sold my name, who let me die—to suffer in public. And I want to be stronger than I ever was."
"Then we will do what we can." Flynn's voice had the same steel the boardroom demanded. "But tell me the truth—do you still love Draven?"
"I loved him like a child loves a story," I said. "This time, there will be no more stories."
When Draven White knocked on our door later that afternoon and walked in with that syrupy smile, my face remained polite and empty. He expected the old gull I had been. He expected forgiveness and performances. He expected a future where he'd continue to take and never give.
"Gwen," he said smoothly, like a man offering a coin to a beggar. "How are you?"
"I'm fine," I said. "And I'm letting you go."
He blinked as if I'd used a foreign currency.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I'm breaking the engagement," I said.
"You're joking," he answered.
"I'm not."
His smile faltered, then recalculated. "You'll change your mind. This is a mood," he said. "Come on, Gwen. Do we have to do this now?"
"No," I said, and there was no warmth in that word. "We have to do it now."
He left with his practiced huff of wounded honor, and I felt the first honest grin betray me. It was small, vicious, satisfying.
"I expected more theatrics," Draven murmured to his father later when he called. "She won't back down."
"You don't know her," said his father into the receiver. "Stop acting like the victor."
I watched the two of them finish their small conspiracy of calm in the background of the city's chatter. The news began to bloom—an engagement cancelled, rumors of a broken heart. Their side of the story was prepared. My side was not yet written.
"What's your plan?" Elise asked that evening as I sat with a cup of tea the color of old coins.
"First," I said, "I work."
"Work?"
"Yes. I set two fires. One to burn Draven and his dirty little network. The other to build something that never needs them."
Elise nodded like someone balancing ledgers in her head. "Do you have anyone?"
"Not yet." I thought of names I couldn't yet say aloud. I thought of the man who would walk into my life in a way that should have been a dream. For now, my weapon was time and memory.
The city opened up again like a book with the first page scrubbed clean. I went to the only place I knew would unspool opportunities: the small, stubborn game studio on the west side called CloudStart. It had two successful small games, a scrappy team, and a leader who looked tired and bright at the same time.
"Nikolai?" I asked when I found him running his team. Nikolai Albert looked up, surprised at the intruder with the plain clothes and scar of knowing how to read a balance sheet.
"Can I help you?" he asked.
"I want to invest," I said.
He laughed like it was a joke. "You? Gwen Madsen? The one who was engaged to Draven White?"
"A private name matters less than capital," I said. "You have talent, Nikolai. You need three things: funding, a quiet office, and someone who believes your work will make profit."
He stared at me. "You really mean it."
"I do. Fifty percent stake. You keep management. You bring me the project plans. I pay an office and your costs. You'll fancy your freedom and I fancy my investment."
"Why me?"
"You look like someone who hasn't abandoned his team." I handed him my card. "Contact me when you want to move forward."
It was a strange gamble. I had, in another life, watched a similar studio grow until someone bought it out. This time, it would be mine to feed, my little army for the day I needed to smash a house into dust.
"Do you know they'll think it's a whim?" Nikolai asked as the team glanced at me.
"Let them," I said. "They already think I'm a fool."
I signed the papers that evening and watched the bank wires make their small thunder. CloudStart moved into a better office, hired a few key coders, and pretended to be an underdog.
"You're doing this for revenge," my mother said when she found out. "Are you sure?"
"I'm doing it for me," I corrected. "And for the chance to be more than a disgraced daughter who died for them."
From the corners of the city I began to pull threads. I met Kaylin Eklund—my oldest friend—at a bright café as if nothing was different and turned my apologies into meal tickets.
"You owe me ten dinners," Kaylin grinned, eyes bright with that special kind of loyalty. "But I forgive you. Let's get you famous for the right reasons."
"I am not chasing fame," I said. "But I will accept the right press."
Then the world, predictably, did what cruel worlds do. Draven and his sham of a family had channels of funds I hadn't noticed. They were better at theater than I had assumed. A week after I withdrew, their fortunes shifted—suddenly financed shipments arrived, and the Gu family reasserted themselves like something that will not bend.
"I saw the trucks," I told my father. "They got some goods. They didn't need us."
Then Esteban Cherry walked into my life like a winter storm. He had that kind of face you read about in legend—sharp, perfectly composed, with a calm that made the rest of the world feel slapdash.
"Gwen," he said the first time he spoke to me, not asking permission. "I heard you found an internal traitor."
"You're well informed," I said.
"I don't like thieves," he said. "And I don't like people who use women."
I should have been suspicious. Instead I felt the old, irrational heat of gratitude. He arrived at strange moments: the night a local bar recorded me singing like someone had split open and bled art, the morning he gave me a cup of tea and a sanity I hadn't known I lacked. He was the rich, unreadable type who could have been a disaster. He said simple things like, "Let me help," and I, who had sworn to rely on no one, accepted.
"You're not the only one who wants Draven out," Esteban said one night as we walked past a quiet strip of maples.
"I want him to understand losing everything," I said.
"Then we'll help him lose everything," he replied.
It felt easy to believe him.
CloudStart grew. Nikolai and his team turned into a tribe of brilliant hackers and storytellers. Georgina Doyle—my chosen agency head—signed to manage Kaylin and to begin to draft PR like siege tactics. We made plays, product launches timed with precise leaks, and I watched the city take my side.
Then the first real break appeared: a whisper of stolen goods moved through the wrong channels and landed in the hands of a man I knew once in another context—Esteban had friends who would not look kindly on trafficked inventory. The Gu family had always been able to conjure wealth like rivers. This time, someone interfered.
"What do you want me to do?" I asked Esteban one night as he stared at city lights.
"Let me retrieve what's theirs by rights," he said. "I will not take your revenge for you, Gwen. I will do the parts I can."
We started small. A recovered shipment here, a rumor seeded there. The Gu family felt pressures I applied with guile and money combined—I was learning how power spoke.
"You stepped into their world like a woman with a ledger," Esteban observed once, smiling faintly. "You are good at this."
The day it turned from eyes to rope was the boardroom incident.
Draven White was in his father's office, smirking—he couldn't smirk forever, after all. It had been easy to rile him into overconfidence. My father had released a statement that morning: the engagement was officially cancelled and any financial claims tied to it nullified. The press ate it and moved on, but not before a few eyebrows rose.
We had a meeting at a charity gala. The city turned out in black and diamonds. I wore an unremarkable dress on purpose, the kind that made people lean in for curiosity rather than scream statements. Esteban sat at my side, cool and watchful. Draven arrived with Valentina Meyer on his arm—Valentina was the woman who had smiled and plotted in the past, the woman whose smirk cut like knives. She'd been his advantage then, his golden sister in public; now she was his colluder.
I had spoken to Nikolai in advance, and he had turned some of the gala's internal streaming toward a secondary feed. Georgina had handed the event coordinator the best piece of stage time. I had my speech ready, a simple one about trust and contracts and how promises can be as dog-eared as banknotes.
When my time came, I walked out under the lights and looked at the crowd. The cameras found my face and lingered there like an answering echo.
"Ladies and gentlemen," I began, and my voice was steadier than I felt. "We are here tonight to celebrate charity and bettering this city. There is a thing we must look at—truth. Truth does not ask permission. It shows up whether we like it or not."
The murmurs rose like a small storm.
"I was engaged to Draven White. I accepted it because I trusted him and because I believed in stories. He used my name and my family's name. He sold our promises to fill holes in his coffers. He let messengers take what was not his. He pushed me into a pool and made it a moment of theater," I said.
Valentina's smile turned sour; Draven hissed my name like venom.
"But there is more." I had Nikolai's feed play clips: shipping logs, emails, a ledger connecting the Gu family's offshore transfers to purchases that matched the dates of product losses from a company I had quietly protected. The screen showed names. The crowd watched as figures moved from accounts to accounts, then to shell companies, and finally to purchases I recognized as the kinds of cargo that changed hands under night.
"These are not rumors," I said. "These are receipts."
People started to take pictures. The room shifted; whispered speculation turned into hunger. Draven's face stung red and white in turn. Valentina's composure cracked like old plaster.
"Do you deny it?" I asked.
"These are forgeries!" Draven snapped. "This is a set-up!"
"Then step forward and explain it," I said. "Please. Explain to everyone who has seen the evidence."
He saw what was happening—his family's board, the press, the cameras, the stocks in his father's company sliding by a visible notch on a phone alert. He had been king of a house of cards; I had pried out the nail.
Valentina's eyes flashed. "Gwen Madsen—"
"Do you remember where you left me?" I asked. "On a slope where wolves could find me, because you wanted to cover your tracks. Do you remember that your hands were clean because you hired others? Or will you lie here under chandeliers and hope the city will forget?"
"You can't speak like this," Draven stammered. "You are tarnishing reputations."
"You already tarnished me once," I said. "You made me someone they would look at and laugh at. So I will tell the truth. I will tell everything. Not just about money, but about how we were used."
The crowd shifted. Cameras panned in. Georgina's team worked in real time, releasing clips to social feed and to the press outside.
"Release the video we have of the mountain," Valentina hissed, but her voice shook.
"Video?" someone cried.
"Yes," I said. "There was a body. There were notes. The people involved thought they had buried it, but nothing stays buried forever."
The press waited for the black moment and then the small, slinky bomb hit: footage—still images and a voice recording—of a younger man receiving instructions and of Draven's insistence that stories be controlled. The audio showed the call where he told someone to "leave the body and let Nature take care of it." The crowd's intake of air was audible.
Valentina stood, her face ashen.
"Do you know what you will do when the city knows this?" she hissed. "You will regret it."
"No," I said. "You'll know exactly what we will do. We will ask legal questions. We will look up who purchased the trucks. We will follow the money. And we will let every person here look at every paper."
Draven went white and then red. "You're lying," he said.
"You're telling the sort of lie that only people with a bottomless pocket can afford," I replied.
For a moment the gallery fell quiet. Then cameras and phones exploded. The feed streamed across a million tiny screens. Outside, people gathered in doorways and on sidewalks, seeing the culprits on their newsfeeds like a slow-motion fall.
"Draven White," I said, "in public: why did you sell what didn't belong to you? In private: why did you leave my body to the wolves?"
"No," he said, and the attempt at bravado became a small, cracked thing. "You have no proof."
"We have proof," Esteban said from beside me. He had been quiet the entire night; now he stepped into the light.
He had the ledger and the shipping manifests handed to him by friends who knew where to look. His voice was like steel.
"These are public now," he said. "And this is only the beginning."
The room watched as Valentina's practiced mask broke. She began to cry like someone being peeled. "I didn't—" she started.
"No one asked you to be the actor," someone shouted. "Why did you go along?"
The crowd shifted into spectacle. People whispered, cameras rolled, phones captured every betraying flicker. This was not a courtroom. It was a theater of ruin, and Draven and Valentina were the actors turned into defendants.
They tried to bargain. They tried to accuse me of slander. They demanded apologies and retractions.
"Apologize, Gwen," Draven implored at one point, his voice small.
"I saved your life once," I said, and the room held its breath at the memory of moonlight and wet fabric. "You left me in pieces. You walked away while my family searched. I'd rather you be remembered for what you were than forgiven for what you weren't."
When the gala faded and the cameras left with their memory cards humming, the real punishment began. The city's finance reporters, once reluctant, wrote with fresh hunger. A law firm I had quietly engaged filed a complaint; police began to ask pointed questions. The Gu family's stock dipped like a trapped fish.
But public disgrace is not a single act; it's a slow collapse that shows the architecture of crime. I wanted something more: to watch them feel their own world fail. I wanted to watch the men and women around them close their doors.
The first public humiliation was the company's annual shareholders' meeting—an event Draven and his father had always assumed was safe. I had other plans.
A week after the gala, I arranged a shareholder meeting under the guise of a reconciliation speech. The room of finance men and polished women took their seats, the air thick with expensive cologne and equilibrium. Draven came in, smug, certain that the scandal had been a public titbit not worth losing sleep over.
"Before we begin," I told the chairman, who recognized me as the Madsen daughter and looked pleased at the perceived alliance, "there is one announcement I'd like to make."
"Sure," he said. "A word from the family—"
"No," I said. "A word from someone who knows your books."
Nikolai's tech team streamed our findings onto screens around the hall while Georgina's team arranged for a buffer of legal counsel in the room. The screens showed names, transactions, invoices traced back to shell accounts. The audio played the recorded call. The rows of shareholders sat like stunned birds.
"You can't use those records," a man shouted.
"Can," I said, and I had evidence of the goods that had been stolen and the ships they had been loaded on. "Can. And we will report them."
When I called the accountant who had once worked quietly under Draven's radar to the front and handed him the microphone, the betrayal's instrument of shame became human.
"Did you know about the transfers?" I asked.
He stared at me and then at the screens. His hands shook.
"Yes," he said. "I was forced to sign documents I didn't understand. I thought—"
"You thought you'd be fine," I said.
Then Draven's father tried to interrupt and explain, but the shareholders were not placated. They looked at the numbers in black and white on massive screens. Someone in the back whispered something about charges. Phones began to ring and calls were made. Two major partners withdrew offers. The room turned from complacency to chaos.
Valentina walked out, surrounded by whispers. Draven's face had gone the color of cheap alabaster.
"Do you realize what you've done?" he pleaded later in the atrium, his voice cracking.
"I realize what I had to," I said. "Public truth gets truth in return."
It was a small cruelty, but the kind I believed in: legal inquiry, shaking allies, the slow social collapse of reputations. By the end of the week lawyers were involved. Inventory audits were ordered. The Gu family lost contracts. The city that once gave them room to act began to close in.
But I wanted public punishment, not just paperwork. I wanted the moment when a man who thought of himself as untouchable discovered being ordinary.
That day came in the most magnificent of places: the shareholders' public gala turned emergency hearing that I arranged when new evidence emerged. I invited press. I invited the board. I invited the partners, the shipping clerks, the mother of the woman who owned the warehouse where our missing shipment had been last seen. I invited neighbors whose rents the Gu family had raised. I invited the customers who had bought patched goods.
The hearing began like any other, with formalities and the shuffling of papers, until Georgina's team played the last video: footage of a young woman at the mountain, taken by a hunting camera now studied for what it had recorded. It was not a cinematic revel; it was something less comfortable—signs of tampering, evidence of attempts to hide a trail. The audio was a small, cold thing: the same voice taking calls and telling others to "dispose" and to "make sure nothing links back."
Draven's championship of himself withered in daylight. The room's air felt as if it had been pumped with a new truth.
People gasped. Phones were raised. The hearing chair, an old man used to power, grew pale. Shareholders began to talk openly about ethics clauses, about the price of leadership. No one wanted to be tied to a stain.
Valentina and Draven tried again to perform, but now their gestures looked too practiced, too obvious. Board members shook their heads. Several partners stood up in turn and announced they would distance themselves. One of Draven's proudest patrons—an old hospital's board who had donated to charities with his name—walked to the podium and said, "We cannot be associated."
I watched Draven's composure crack like drying paint. Valentina clutched a handkerchief and then flung it away. Draven lunged to defend himself and fell into a tangle of legalese and accusations, his words bouncing off empty chairs.
Outside, supporters of the Gu family tried to rally, but their calls met only the echo of the introduced evidence. Someone in the crowd pulled out a phone, pointed it at Draven, and said, "You're watching a man who's been chiseled out of this city."
That sentence spread like a bruise. People began to confront those who had been used. Staff who once stood quietly at his command now shook their heads toward the cameras. The humiliation of Draven White was not a single event; it was a full public unmaking.
His face changed: from smug to furious to pleading to hollow. He tried to bargain, to sign apologies, to promise restitution. It did not matter. Contracts were being rescinded in real time. Partnerships were being canceled. The firm that had once been a shield slid into a legal sinkhole.
Valentina, who had once smiled as if the whole world owed her favors, stood under the glare and shrank. She tried denial and then tears and finally a public admission that she had "made mistakes" and "trusted poorly." But people were not forgiving. They filmed, they whispered, they photographed, and they did what modern crowds did best: they made the ruins public.
By the time the hearing adjourned, Draven's father had called for a loyalist press note and an internal restructuring. It was too late. A board re-vote forced Draven and Valentina to step down pending investigation. The city watched their fall like a reality show; the boards and courts did the rest.
I stood outside later while they were taken into the lobby and watched them move through the crowd like ghosts. People lined the walkway and pointed. Camera flashes popped like dry summer rain. A woman I didn't know spat at them and called them "thieves." An old neighbor who had lost a vendor's table because of the Gu family shouted "shame."
I typed the words into my own account: "Justice is not revenge. Justice is the city mowing its grass." The post made ripples. People reshared it and added their stories. It was not the moment of a knife. It was the long, hot process of the world finally reading the correct ledger.
Draven's collapse was not instantaneous. Legal battles lasted. But the crucial part—the humiliation—took root in the public mind. He could still fight in court. He could still make claims. But the social capital, once so casually spent, had been severed.
Valentina stood one afternoon in a café, covered by a blanket of shame, when a stranger pointed and spat a phrase that would stick: "You sat on someone's corpse and smiled, and now you ask to be believed."
She tried to fight back with lawyers, with paid op-eds about "misunderstandings." But the world she had inhabited—the one where money smoothed every corner—had cracked.
Draven saw people he had once ordered to fight his battles close their doors. Old friends stopped returning calls. The bank he used to brag about declined to renew his credit line. A creditor who once answered at midnight now did not pick up.
I watched, and when anyone asked if I took pleasure, I said, "A cold sort of pleasure. It isn't delight in their pain; it is relief that the world remembers to look."
The city did not punish them with a riot or a lynching. It punished them with the economy it loved: cold, silent, and precise. That was more permanent than cyclical rage. The shame was public, the fall public. The pity that might have softened their edges was absent because their own choices had taught them no compassion.
"Do you feel satisfied?" Esteban asked me one night when the dust had settled to a quiet.
"Not yet," I said. "This was the first step. They have to pay the price where it hurts."
"And what hurts to you?"
"Everything," I said. "Their lost contract is a wink. Their shame is an echo. They must feel the absence of what their theft took from the people they hurt—not just my dignity, but the livelihoods of the small shops they crippled with their schemes."
Esteban nodded. "I will make sure."
So began the deeper turning of the wheel. We pushed financial channels closed. We withdrew favors slowly like an exacting surgeon. We built businesses that stood like lighthouses and did not forget the old wounds.
CloudStart became a small giant. Our games pushed revenue to the studio, into community projects, into the hands of people who had lost to the Gu family's greed. Georgina and Kaylin rose in the celebrity light with craft and dedication. Nikolai built the company's backbone. I watched my team become my family in ways that did not feel fragile.
"And me?" Esteban asked once, watching me as if I were a map he could read.
"You were a wind that changed the weather," I said. "But I will not sign away my heart twice." I smiled because there was truth in it. Esteban did not insist; he did not demand. He simply kept being what he was: present.
Time did the rest. Cases moved. Lawyers found inconsistencies. Several arrests followed for embezzlement and conspiracy. The Gu family's name crashed in value. They moved houses. They lost patrons. People whispered that their cars were repossessed.
Valentina's video apology remained a hollow thing. Draven sat through depositions. A judge—tired and steady—sentenced several men to fines and terms. It was not always swift. It was not always as spectacular as gossip wanted. But it was public. It was long. It was complete enough.
"I thought you'd want them humiliated in one bright moment," Kaylin admitted one night when we celebrated at CloudStart's smoky party. "But this? This is a better story."
"I thought I wanted fireworks too," I said. "But I wanted something that stuck. Fireworks are pretty but they don't change contracts."
"Do you miss him?" she asked.
"I miss the idea of him for about five seconds," I said. "Then I think of the mountain and the wolves."
The story didn't end with them jailed or dead. It ended with them being ordinary, left to face the paperwork and private scorn they had evaded for so long. That was justice of a sort. And when the city's newspapers wrote about the Gu family's reassignment—board reconfiguration, partner withdrawal—they used words like "found wanting" and "accountability."
My second life had been spent learning a new grammar: how money moved, how reputations bent, how a woman could be both patient and relentless.
There were other things too—complicated, sweet, soft things. The man whose quiet patience became a refuge, Esteban, continued to be there. He did not push or claim. He built beside me because that was how he gave. I taught him to see the beauty in small businesses; he taught me how to be steady under attention.
"Will you marry me?" he asked one rainy afternoon in a place that felt like an old library.
"Not yet," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because there is a ledger I'm still balancing," I said.
He smiled as if that was acceptable. It was.
We kept building: CloudStart's second game launched to global headlines and paid writers lecturing about indie passion colliding with capital. We opened a scholarship funded with the gains from what had once been his family's theft. We trained locals on coding and art. We hired people who had lost to predatory companies, offering them dignity and pay.
Sometimes, late at night, I would lie awake and think of the woman on the mountain and the wolves. I would think of the way Draven sounded when he finally lost his voice in front of the board. I would think of Valentina's tremor and the man who had saved me and left me to find the strength to save myself.
The city changed a little. People who had once flinched at my name began to greet me with nods. Children waved when I walked through the studio. Old neighbors sent sweets. My parents walked more freely. They could finally begin to imagine a future where their daughter was not a cautionary tale.
Revenge had been a plan and a promise and a slow meal. In the end, the thing I had wanted—public exposure and revocation—had become something larger: a reclaiming. I had not only canceled a marriage. I had pulled the thread that let the city remember how to care.
"Do you regret anything?" Esteban asked me once.
"I regret the days I wasted loving the wrong story," I said. "But regret is small. I learned, I paid, I built. That is enough."
He kissed my forehead like a land blessing. "Then let's keep building."
And so we did. The ledger closed on some accounts, opened new ones for those who deserved it, and the city kept doing what cities do: they forget quickly, but they remember in the things that matter—schools, jobs, small businesses that survive.
When the final hearing closed and the judge's gavel fell in a small, practical sound, I thought of the coldness that had once wrapped my chest. I had no revenge fantasies left. I had a stack of receipts and a studio that needed a new lead designer.
I looked at the crowd again in that courtroom and felt something soft and very strong—a kind of affection for the life I had earned, and the knowledge that I had done it on my own terms.
"Thank you for making them see," a woman said to me on the courthouse steps.
"Thank you for making me see," I answered.
The city did not turn gilded that day. But justice is not meant to be a spectacle. It is meant to be a seed: invisible at planting and ferocious when it takes root.
I had been planted twice. I had grown once into an offering and once into a force.
When I closed my eyes that night, I saw the mountain not as a place of death but as the spot where I had finally learned to stand up.
The End
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