Rebirth16 min read
I Woke Up Wet, Beautiful, and in Someone Else's Life
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I sneezed and woke up cold.
I blinked and realized two things at once: the silk against my skin was wrong, and my hair was dripping. I sat up and water ran down my neck and into my lap.
"Ah—" I started, then touched my cheek. Someone hit me.
A woman in green sat in a high chair and looked at me with a slow, measuring stare. She wore enough jade and pearls to make my modern, red-carpet wardrobe jealous. Her smile had no warmth.
"Who is this insolent girl?" she said. "Autumn, teach her a lesson."
Autumn—an old servant with hands like leather—spat into her palm, and the spit landed on my hair like an insult.
"Stop!" I croaked. "What is wrong with you? I'm—"
"Silence." The woman flicked her eyes at me and at the servant who coasted toward me like a vulture.
The first spit stung. The second strike made me spin, the third shot pain across my temple.
"Please!" I begged. "We can talk. I'm not—"
Autumn did not care for my pleading. Her palm cracked on my face again and again.
I was not an easy mark. I caught her nervous hand, twisted, and kicked her shin. I shoved, I bucked like a wild cat, and she fell in a stir of skirts and shocked gasps.
"Help! Madam!" she screamed, clawing for sympathy.
A tall man in an official's robe came running. He stopped, took in the scene, and his face was thunder.
"What is this?" he demanded.
"Father," I said before my brain stopped me. The line felt like a script, and acting saved me more than once. I let a small, trembling sob loose and dabbed at my face with a linen cloth stuffed in my sleeve.
The man's expression changed—softened, then sharpened. "My daughter," he said. "Who struck her?"
The woman in green, the mistress, put on a mask. "She was unruly. She spoke nonsense and refused teaching. I only had her disciplined."
"Enough." The man—my father—reached for me and the room spun like it had been written by a director trying out a scene.
I watched his concern like a live camera. It slid into the frame. I used it.
"I am cold," I whispered. "My head hurts. Mother made the maid teach me decorum by... by hitting me."
His face crumpled. He called for mercy, rules, and a doctor. He punished Autumn with fines and ordered me closed to my room for five days.
I was Daniela Thomas and I had been the most famous actress in my world. I had walked red carpets and accepted awards and had a public who adored me. Fifteen years old in this body's present life, I had no idea how long my awards would stay relevant in any world. I was damp, smelled like river muck, and my mind pinged between panic and an actor's instinct: act, observe, then plot.
"Which year is it?" I asked, low voice. I had learned to probe like an interviewer.
"My child, it is the twelfth year of Emperor Xuan of the Ning dynasty," my father said.
Ning dynasty. That meant nothing I knew. It felt like a fake costume from one of my film sets—only there were no cameras. The world did not feel like a set, it felt dangerous.
Over the next week people told me what I was: the elder daughter of Levi Copeland, a high official in charge of household and finance. My mother had died giving birth to me. My father still loved the dead woman. The new mistress of the house, Katherine Payne, was the man’s legal wife. Her daughter, Karlee Boyer, was the proper, polished elder citizen-approved child—always carved in calm compliance.
"And you?" I asked the little maid who scrubbed my feet. "Who are you?"
"Tilda Neves, milady," she said, bowing like a prologue. "I am your maid."
She had a soft twitch at her mouth when she said it. She was loyal in the way only those who lived on scraps of kindness could be loyal.
"You're my maid now," I said and meant it. "Promise me you'll tell me everything."
She nodded until her chin trembled.
"Good. We keep each other alive." I kissed her knuckles like a queen handing out a mission.
Days passed. I learned to knit words cleverly. If I could act, then I could pretend to be who this poor, bullied girl had always been. If I could use my modern mind, I could change the script of this life.
"Do not let them push you around," I told Tilda. "Remember: clues. Watch, listen. Everything is a line."
She blinked. "Yes, milady."
Then I met him properly.
"You have a lot of nerve," a voice said from the fake mountain behind the garden stall. "And a very loud mouth."
I stared at the speaker. A young man in icy blue robes and a white cloak stood with his hand on a jade-hilted sword. He seemed to have been scripted for charm—too handsome for the roles he played in my mind—but his smile had a lilt that promised trouble.
"Who are you?" I asked.
He delighted at attention. "Jackson Bauer. I am the fifth prince."
Of course he was a prince. Everything here was royalty and traps. He kept leaning in until his breath smelled faintly of cassia.
"You fell in the fountain last year," he said as if he were revealing a blockbuster spoiler. "I almost thought you were washed from the water on purpose."
"You—" I gasped. It was true. In the city's temple the previous year someone had shoved me into a pool during a charity prayer; I had been the gossip horse for months afterward. I hadn't thought of it as important, but apparently people did.
Jackson laughed. He took one of my wrists and pinched like a juvenile god. "You have bright eyes," he said. "And you are infuriating. I like that."
"I do not," I snapped. "You were spying. You pretended to be a voyeur to prank me. Not cool."
He tilted his head as if I had said something witty. "I was checking how long you would notice your own tragedy," he said. "You took your time."
"You are an arrogant child," I said, and the world shrank to the two of us.
"You look nice." He shrugged. "You are more interesting than most of the polished ladies in town. Come, let me buy you a skewer with candied fruit."
Somewhere between being grabbed by the wrist and eaten by the crowd of festival-goers, I recognized something like a heartbeat that could be called curiosity.
The next night I had a dream. I was somewhere that wasn't a town, a river, or a stage: a place between things. A girl about my age stood under a pale candle. She looked like a defective mirror of me—softer, older in some sorrowful way, with a single tear-marked mole at the left corner of her eye.
"You are me," she said. Her voice felt like wind across a stage.
"I am not you," I said.
"You are my next walk," she said. "I died on my twenty-fifth birthday. I had a life full of small cruelties. My name was the same as yours. Now you are here. I stayed to claim one thing: revenge."
"Revenge?" The word tasted sour and metallic.
"Live my life right," she said. "Learn the lines I never got to speak. Find the ones who hurt me. Make them suffer in public. Only then will I let you leave."
I woke up with the cheeks of the other girl's ghost still warm on my skin. I decided the ghost might be messy, but she was useful.
I began to act, really act: not fake tears, but precise calculation. I learned the staff names. I learned when the kitchens sent food. I learned my father’s mood cycles. I learned the exact string of syllables my stepmother used to say before she pinned me as the entertainment of the household.
The first victory was small. I had to get out.
"Miss," Tilda whispered. "Tonight the servants get half a day to go to the lantern festival."
"Good," I said. "We go. But you have to be careful."
We walked into the crowd. I bought cheap paperbacks by the armful just like a tourist—my heart was a little modern store inside the old city. Then someone stole my purse.
"Thief!" the stall owner screamed. My cheeks went hot with embarrassment. I had no money.
I turned to leave with my head lowered and bumped into a man with a smile like a liar's last flourish: Jackson Bauer.
He laughed as he picked the thief up by the collar.
"Did you think you could vanish with her purse?" he asked the thief.
"Please," the thief whimpered. "I had to feed my children."
"Not here," Jackson said. "Not like this." He took the wallet back to me. When I paid the stall owner, I felt like tipping an actor who knew how to do a good scene.
"Thanks," I said.
"You were brave," he teased. "And reckless. Both are charming."
He escorted me to a modest tavern and insisted on treating me to stewed duck and candied hawthorn. He called me "little tiger" and offered me a ridiculous slogan: "If the festival's lights are one thing, my grin is a hundred."
"I am not your slogan," I told him, half laughing. The warmth of being seen was not so bad.
"You're stubborn," Jackson said, closer than necessary. "I will take that as a compliment."
That night a skyful of fireworks burst and lit Jackson's profile like a movie poster.
"One day I'll set off fireworks for you alone," he said with the naive arrogance princes are taught by tutors. "I'll make the sky look small next to you."
I smiled despite myself. I kept my distance like the actress I had been. I took the line, folded it, put it in my pocket.
Back home the household's drama bubbled louder. The mistress, Katherine Payne, and her daughter Karlee Boyer kept plotting. Karlee had an idea to discredit me at the horse races, where I would be shoved into danger.
"She will fall," Karlee said to Katherine when she thought no one was within earshot. "She'll be humbled. Send word to friends at the riding grounds. Let the horse bolt. Let her be broken."
I remembered the night: the horse, the sudden panic, the jolt that sent me flying. I could have died that day.
I also remembered feeling the short, sharp sting of betrayal when Karlee and Katherine pretended to worry for me as I was carried back into the courtyard like a broken prop.
"Forgive me," I whispered to Tilda when I woke up. "I will not be a victim like her."
I had a plan. I wanted to do more than survive. I wanted a public unmasking.
A week later, the riding tournament arrived. My father insisted that I attend to learn decorum. Katherine smiled a thin smile and dressed Karlee in dazzling pinks. I wore the white riding gear that looked like it belonged on a lesser stage.
"Don't forget to breathe," Tilda said. "And pretend you know what you're doing."
I did not ride often. My range of horse skills came from filming—fake mounts and padded saddles. I would be a liability, and Karlee's plan would look polished.
I remembered the hidden pin. Karlee's vanity pieces were prized, and once she loosened her favorite hairpin and set it near the horse's flank.
At the moment when my horse bolted, I pulled a trick. I had planted Karlee’s pin—an identical one I had borrowed and replaced—in the horse's coat earlier. I let a little clatter make the animal restless. Then I rode in a show of bravery. The horse reared. I fell.
It looked dangerous.
A man lunged forward as if thrown into the scene by fate: Axel Baumann—my brother returned from the provinces—grabbed me midair. He saved me, reckless and raw.
I limped back to the courtyard clutching my sprained pride. Karlee screamed betrayal.
"You took my pin!" she screamed in front of the velvet seats and the crowd. "You stole it, and you ruined the match!"
I held up the pin with the dried blood on it. "This is your pin," I said. "Your handwriting? Your crest? Someone put it in my saddle to make me fall."
The prince, Jackson, and his sister, Princess Monica Morel, were present. Jackson rose like a small thunder, his eyes accusing air.
"Who would do this?" my father demanded, red and raw.
"It was Karlee," I said. I pushed and did not stop pushing. "She and her mother plotted to send me to my death in the name of honor."
The court hushed.
Princess Monica stepped forward with a clear voice. "I saw them near the stables, Karlee," she said. "I wondered then why you lingered when you should have been watching the match."
"Katherine, did you not instruct someone to make her fall?" Jackson demanded.
Katherine hissed like a cornered animal. "How dare you—this is my home. My daughter is—"
"Enough." The prince's tone slammed down like a gavel. "You will prove it."
Katherine's face paled when I produced the second pin, the matching one I had kept secret. "You traded pins?" she shrieked. "You tell lies!"
"Stop!" my father shouted. "You will not turn my house into a stage for your games."
Then Jackson did something I had not expected. He called for the palace's white-robed ladies and commanded: "Let all who witnessed come forward."
Witnesses swore the exchange of plans, murmurs became a chorus, and Katherine’s smile cracked.
"Did you not ask the stable-boy to loosen the girth?" someone cried.
"Yes," Autumn confessed, trembling. "My lady told me to 'teach her a fright' because she scares away the household's peace."
Katherine's eyes went wild.
"You asked him to hurt me," I said.
"She wanted you humiliated," Karlee wailed. "Not dead!"
"But you arranged it," I said. "You prepared the pin. You hid the false token. You lied in front of Father."
"Enough." Father stood and pointed. "By household law, anyone who conspires against the family shall be punished."
Katherine stepped forward. Her voice had become a pleading rasp. "Levi—please. My father is a member of the Treasury—if I fall, his reputation will be ruined. He will fall with me."
"You should have thought of that before," I said softly.
The punishments began as family law allowed. But I wanted more than private shame. The ghost in my dream had demanded a public reckoning. I wanted every servant, every neighbor, every merchant at the market to see their cruelty unravel.
I asked Jackson and Princess Monica for one thing: don't let them hide this behind household curtains. Bring it to the public hall after the meal.
They agreed.
The next day we moved the tribunal from the private parlor to the main courtyard. The household servants, neighbors, the market women, merchants with plates of porridge, even those who sold paper lanterns came because the courtyard had a way of drawing people like moths. The prince and the princess arrived as witnesses; they took seats like judges from another world.
I stood in the center on purpose.
"You have made a career out of controlling what 'should' be," I began. "You convinced my father to overlook things for the sake of peace, and you used that peace to tighten your grip. Peace under your rule was tyranny for me."
Katherine's face hardened. "This is slander," she snapped.
"Autumn," I said. "Tell the truth."
Autumn looked like someone who had swallowed needles. She told it all: the whispering at the ledgers, the payment to the stable-hand, the instructions to discredit me at the law of horses. She told how Katherine had instructed her to step in earlier, how she had wanted me to be 'taught a lesson.'
Katherine's mask slipped.
"Enough!" she cried. "You filth! After everything I've done—"
"Have done?" I echoed softly. "You called me names. You burned my clothes. You made servants pull my hair. You planned to sell Tilda to gold houses where she would never be a maid again but a commodity."
"Maid?" Autumn sobbed. "She—"
I raised my hand because I wanted the courtyard to quiet enough for every ear to hear the sound of the trap snapping.
"You plotted to send my loyal Tilda to a place called the Phoenix House," I said. "You called it the gold-brothel as if that made it acceptable. You told Autumn that if I resisted, she would be taken out of my sight and sold. Did you not do this? Say it!"
Katherine's face was a ruin. "It—"
"Yes," Autumn hissed finally, "she said, 'Sell them, tie their mouths, and we will be free of their insolence.'"
The courtyard shuddered like a body under a storm.
Katherine's father, faint and pale, had been spared from court appearances for years. News spread: the Treasury's assistant had family impropriety. He started to look gray.
"Public confession," Princess Monica said, her voice singing like steel. "And restitution."
The prince added, "And social consequence. Let the market know. Let your name be a caution."
So the punishment unfolded.
First, Karlee was brought before all. She had thought her father's influence and her mother’s power would save her. They would not.
"Karlee Boyer," I said, and the word was a bell. "You planned to make me fall."
She wept, real now, because her wounds had become knives that she had not counted.
"You will be publicly shamed," the prince declared. "You will stand at the market with a sign naming your crime. You will be forbidden from wearing your jewelry for six months. You will apologize to all you have wronged—on your knees in the marketplace at noon for three days."
"Three days!" Karlee wailed.
"Public," Princess Monica repeated.
And the market saw her. On the first day she took her place and looked small and ridiculous. The women who had once envied her riches pointed and whispered. Children ran up to imitate the shaking she made when she was struck with regret. Her face, once carved and pretty, trembled.
"Shame!" the stall women called. "Shame on you!"
She tried to defend herself but found there were no defenders anymore. Katherine had been very careful to ensure those who might protect Karlee were embroiled in favors she had given. Now she had nothing.
I watched the crowd. They were not kinder for my sake. They were just watching life take a shape they liked: a bully being unmasked. The sight of a rich girl forced to apologize restored for them the balance they believed in.
Katherine's punishment was more complicated. She was not Karlee. She had ambition, wealth, and family ties.
"You will lose your seat at the head of household," my father declared publicly, though his face was raw. "You will be placed on temporary house exile where you may not interfere in my daughter's affairs. You will pay the prices of restitution of any goods you have stolen—five times the value—and you will return Tilda to the household without penalty."
Katherine's father called his staff. Pressure came from the Treasury; patrons of the court did not want a scandal attached to their names. He started to tremble.
The humiliation was formal, legal, and painfully social. We took away the right to sit in judgment at family gatherings. We required Katherine to publicly take a low stool and recite—aloud—every injustice she had done. She had to name each wrong; her voice, once honeyed with command, broke on the truth.
"The first time you spat in my daughter's hair," I said, and the audience flinched at each articulated wound. "You will speak it."
She did. Her words were small, like coins tossed in a well. "I was jealous."
"Jealous of a dead woman?" I asked. "Of your husband's grief made into my name? Say it."
She said it.
At Jackson's urging, we spread a rumor through the market: "The mistress who plotted against her husband's favored daughter has been stripped of house peril and trust." People came and spoke; Catherine's once-supplicating friends no longer sat with her. Servants boycotted her table; the kitchen refused to present her favorite dumplings.
Most stinging of all, the woman who had used gossip and borrowed authority lost her social sanctity. Gentlewomen would not take tea with her. Merchants would not seek her patronage. The Treasury men kept their distance.
For Karlee the blow was immediate and physical—the lash of public humiliation. For Katherine the blow was structural and enduring. She found herself deprived of the very currency that had fed her cruelty: attention.
At the market, Karlee's apology on the stool lasted three days, and each day the sellers and customers added small cruelties. A potter refused to offer a cup. An old seamstress turned her back. A boy spat and called her "the one who pushed the girl." The crowd took delight in the spectacle. The chant was not free of cruelty, and I wished not for them to enjoy it too much, but I had asked for exposure, not mercy on my enemies.
When I had my moment, I spoke directly to Karlee. "You wanted me broken." My voice did not tremble. "You wanted me forgotten. I am not."
Her eyes went wild at me. She said, "Please. Mother—please—"
"Have you learned anything?" I asked.
She could not meet my eyes. The shame hardened like an old wound.
Katherine's fall did not stop with social exile. The Treasury reassigned her father's office’s favors away from him. He was made a listless figure, watching what his daughter had done scatter his colleagues' trust. The price of ambition had been paid not only by his daughter but by the father who had relaxed his duties at home for the sake of career.
I sat on my little stool after it was done, and the courtyard felt like a theater where the actors had become unmasked.
"Why did you do this?" Tilda asked me later when all had settled except for the smolder. She clutched a warm cup and looked as small as ever.
"Because the ghost wanted it," I said. "And because it needed to be seen."
She looked at me with an old servant's pity. "And are you satisfied?"
I blinked. My chest had been hollow and had been filled with action—acting, planning, unmasking. It was good. It tasted like victory.
But the revenge had its cost. Watching a mother beg for mercy that she had never given was bitter. The country felt smaller when I saw Katherine retreat to a small room at the edge of our compound—no jewels, only knitting—and a man named Levi Copeland, my father, looking at her with the same complex ache I had.
"I won't let them do worse than the law," I told Tilda. "The rest is their conscience."
The princes stayed nearby for a while. Jackson was mischievous again, but the glint in his eye had become a held thing. When he leaned near and said, "You did well today," I felt my chest contract.
"Are you proud of me?" I asked, and it came out as a genuine plea.
"I am," he said. "Not because they fell—because you stood."
We shared a small warmth; his hand brushed mine. "I don't do this for you," I teased.
"Good," he said. "I prefer it that way."
But things did not finish with one public spectacle. Katherine plotted small rebellions from exile. Karlee repented publicly but still glared privately. The family fractured and remade itself around the truth. I used that opening to reestablish my life.
I went to the temple. I spoke to the old woman sitting outside who sold prayer beads. I spoke in plain words: "I will live my life for both of us—the one who burned, and the one who could not leave."
"Live with honor," she said. "But do not forget to be kind where you can."
So I learned something else—a new line for my character. Revenge satisfies but does not free the heart like kindness does. I kept my eyes open.
Love, though? Love took its own time. Jackson did not make proclamations like heroes in my movies. He appeared, then disappeared. He supported me at trial. He saved me from a falling horse. He joked and frightened. He had three moments—short and small—that made my heart scramble.
"Once," he said, eyes half-closed, "you laughed while the court was scolding you."
"That was your fault," I said.
"You were brave," he insisted. "You never fled a stage and you never ran from a camera. You stood."
He reached for my hand then. His fingers were warm and true. He took my knuckled hand and held it like a promise that didn't have to say the word.
"You look good with sparkles in your hair," he murmured one night when we watched fireworks from the palace edge. The light turned his face into a map I wanted to memorize.
"You're annoying," I said.
He smiled. "And you would be lonely without me."
Jackson made me feel small and brave at the same time. He gave me a coat one rainy dawn, wrapped it around my shoulders, and walked me back to the house without a comment. That quiet made me want to return care.
A reality remained: I was not a simple heroine from a romance. The ghost reminded me daily that I had a job: to right wrongs not only for myself but for those who had no stage. I learned to take advantage of modern ideas—book-learning, a public persona, the notion of social pressure—and mix them into local customs like a director staging a new play.
Days rolled into months. Father improved; he softened his treatment of household staff. Tilda stayed by my side. Karlee moved from public humiliation to a smaller, hushed life of sewing and apologies. Katherine's reach did not end—no one's reach did—but her fingers were no longer in the parts of my life she had once clawed at.
"Do you still want to go back?" Jackson asked once, leaning against the arch where the garden met the sky. It was a simple question.
"Sometimes," I said. "Then I remember awards and interviews and the lights. Then I remember a girl's ghost and the price of silence."
He nodded. "Stay here a while."
I smiled. "I think I will."
At night, when I look at the moon and remember the bright stage lights from the life I left, I realize that being an actress had not prepared me for everything. But it had given me the tools: discipline, observation, and the courage to speak when others wanted me silent.
So I speak. I stand. I act.
And when I needed a final scene—a closing that was unmistakably mine—I walked into the garden where fireworks had lit Jackson's smile.
"You promised me one day of fireworks," I said.
He grinned. "I never promised a date. But I'm good for surprises."
He took my hand, and the sky burst, and the sparks echoed the slow, steady beat that had grown inside me: not the chest-thudding panic of a star chased by cameras, but the quiet pulse of someone who had carved a place in a middle-aged house, in a public courtyard, and in a prince’s half-smile. It was small, real, and mine.
The End
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