Rebirth13 min read
Second Chances and Chocolate Cake
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I remember the press room lights like a white glare that never cooled. I remember the host's grin, the camera lenses, the pressure. I remember my hand—wrapped in bandage—on my phone, and the game we had just lost. I remember a taped-on task: call the first contact in my phone and say "I miss you."
"Elise, are you ready?" the host whispered into my ear.
I swallowed. "Ready."
The phone rang. It walked through the long hollow seconds like an echo. When a man answered, his voice was colder than the fluorescent air: "Hello?"
For a second I was lazy with hope. "I—"
"Who is this?" he asked.
The world narrowed to the voice on my phone and the bright smirk of the host.
"I—" I forced it out. "I miss you."
Silence spread like frost. Then, quietly, he said, "We're divorced. Stop this."
The line clicked dead.
"Wait—" I wanted to say. But the host pulled the mic away and the lights kept blinking like accusatory fingers. The live comments exploded. Someone in the back muttered, "That voice—doesn't that sound like Dalton Delgado?" Another fan wrote, "Hidden marriage? Hidden divorce? THXPA's PR is trash." Sponsors pinged. Reporters leaned forward.
I left the stage with my hands trembling. Later, in the team van, I sat at the very back and watched the world blur past tree branches and reflected lights. My teammates tried to joke and failed. Fielding leaned over.
"That sounded like Dalton?" he asked softly.
"It wasn't him," I said. My throat felt raw. "It can't be."
He looked at me like I had already broken somewhere inside. "Elise—"
"Don't." I folded in on myself.
At the dorm, my phone lit up with messages. One name blinked—Dalton Delgado. I stared until my eyes blurred. I should have done what I promised myself: change the contact, scrub the past. But nostalgia is its own kind of cowardice. I didn’t.
At midnight my inbox still hummed. I typed my last broadcast tweet like it weighed heavy with surrender: "Three years, one path. Elise Bloom retires from THXPA." I tapped send with hands that felt like someone else’s, and stared at the spinning circle on my screen. I powered the phone off.
The phone rang. I let it ring twice before answering.
"Two days to move out of the dorm," Dalton said. "Since you're retired."
"Okay," I answered. My voice was a whisper that could not carry the salt of the thought: you're glad I'm gone.
I packed in silence. When I touched the divorce certificate—Dalton's signature crisp in ink dated three years ago—I felt the fine paper tear something inside. There had been no wedding, no public day, no announcement. There had been a quiet exchange of promises and a signed paper that said something else.
Two nights later the pain in my wrist became a living creature. I couldn't sleep. I went to the hospital.
"Ms. Bloom," the doctor said, looking at a gray scan like a traitor. "This is bone cancer. Stage three."
He talked in clinical tones about survival rates that sounded like numbers culled from an impossible ledger. "Three to six months, with aggressive treatment. I'm sorry."
I laughed then, a small, ugly noise that felt like a foreigner in my own mouth. Three months. Six months. A life with Dalton spent in gossamer moments, then silence. I held the paper like a prophecy.
The last night I was awake before the hospital's fluorescent calm, I typed into a search box, "If I die, what will my epitaph say?" My fingers hovered, then I wrote the one ridiculous thing that had kept me sane.
"I want to be known as Dalton's wife."
My finger trembled over the delete key. I removed it. I did not want the whole absurdity of it all to show. I went to sleep thinking of chocolate cake and movie theaters and the way Dalton once smiled at me like a dangerous thing.
I didn't expect to die. I didn't expect the cancer to swallow me like a rumor. But I did.
And then—like a cruel gift—I opened my eyes in the dark of a cinema, a date stamped in my heart: February fourteenth. The film's light washed the aisle. Dalton Delgado sat beside me.
"You're awake," he said.
I stared at him. "What—where—"
"Don't make it weird," he murmured. "You fell asleep."
It should have been simple. It wasn't. I had been given a second ribbon of time, thin and terrifying. The things I knew were no longer future; they were leases I could break.
"You remember everything?" Dalton asked.
"I remember enough," I said. I did. Every empty anniversary, every cold refusal, the divorce papers. The diagnosis. The black notebook I had found later—his private journal—saying, "When I opened my eyes, she was beside me: Elise." I had read that entry in the future, and had bled for it. Now I held it like a map. I would not bury again.
"Then—" Dalton pretended to be annoyed. "Don't die on me, Elise."
I laughed—a brittle, trembling thing swallowed by the theater.
"I won't," I promised. "I will change things this time."
He turned to the screen. The movie's lines stitched into the dark. I rehearsed plans in my head like prayers.
*
This second chance was a bargain: knowledge for effort. I began with small surgeries of the past. I did not wait for Dalton to notice me. I erased the 'Dalton' tag from my phone and replaced it with something secret. I started going to the team kitchen and made simple breakfasts, not to win him back but to carve space in the days.
"You're being strategic," Fielding observed one night, watching me figure the team rotation.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I'm just tired of waiting."
"Good." He smiled. "Play like you have nothing to lose."
I did.
I trained harder. I didn't hide the pain. I told the team I'd been having wrist pain for months and insisted on proper tests now. When I learned the early signs on the second loop, I stopped them. I took turns at the keyboard, iced my wrist, and when it flared I came clean.
Dalton looked at me the day I told him I had made an appointment. He was quiet.
"You need to stop being stubborn," he said.
"I need to live," I said. "And I need to play."
He surprised me. "Settle for both," he told me.
I laughed. "How magnanimous of you."
It was enough to make my heart beat loud in my ribs.
We kept each other close that season in small, private ways. Sometimes he would come up behind me in the training room and wrap his coat over my shoulders when I was cold. "You're going to stay," he'd say. I would feel the world tilt and not know whether I deserved his warmth.
There were three moments that always landed like small miracles.
The first was the night he smiled at me in the recording room when I'd corrected a strategy on the fly. He didn't smile at teammates like that. He never had. His grin was private, the kind that ordered silence. Fielding saw it and winked; the others pretended not to notice. I kept the memory in a shallow box.
The second was when he took off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders at a sponsor event—an impulsive, rough gesture that had nothing to do with PR. "You catch a cold, you stop being useful," he muttered. It was clumsy and earnest.
The third was his late night text: "If anyone asks, I'm in the kitchen making chocolate cake. For a friend." The way he called me friend—then turned up with a cake—made my chest ache.
Those small intimacies were not grand; they were the thread that mended me.
But the world still had those knives: Jennifer Mercier. The PR manager had brushed into the dorm the month after my first death-in-the-old-timeline. She wore her ambition like perfume. Jennifer had smiled with a professional predatory ease. When she came back into our orbit in this second pass, I watched very closely. I found her handwriting in emails that had gone missing. I saw the drafts she kept.
"Elise, you should be careful," Fielding warned.
"Of Jennifer?" I asked.
"Of everyone who wants a headline."
I decided to act early. I approached Jennifer at a public PR meeting.
"Jennifer," I said, "I want to talk about the team's public messaging."
She didn't smile then. "We both want what's best for THXPA."
"Do we?" I asked.
She told me, with all the nice polish of a woman who knew exactly how to make a scandal and call it positioning, "Controversy drives metrics."
"Does it drive human beings too?" I asked, and she blinked like a person unaccustomed to being seen.
She thought I would be simple. She'd made her move previously—leaked divorce hints, doctored messages, and circulated a narrative that made me the mistake in Dalton's life. She thought it would stick. She counted on me being alone.
She didn't count on me being armed with memory.
I began to collect evidence. I found saved drafts in her cloud. I subpoenaed—quietly—the email headers and texts. I had Fielding and other teammates give testimony about PR decisions. I had Aurora—my friend who had come to me in the hospital, who nursed me when I couldn't nurse myself—search through old digital records. We taped things together like a detective's board: timestamps, edits, doctored images. Jennifer's beautiful face looked ridiculous in the files.
"You're being thorough," Dalton said once when he saw my notes.
"I'm being honest," I said.
He leaned in, eyes soft. "Don't let them burn you twice."
I went public at the right moment. Not on a stage with only headlines; not in a court. I chose a charity gala where the team had to speak. The hall would be full—fans, press, sponsors. The perfect place to upend someone who loved a crowd.
Jennifer stood at the dais, balanced glass of white wine in hand, smiling into cameras. I walked to the microphone and kept my face neutral.
"Hello," I said. The note in my voice trembled like a wire. "I want to say something about honesty."
Her smile did not flicker. She expected a PR-friendly line. She had arranged the cameras to catch every spectator's expression. Had she imagined that I would use the same setup against her? She should have known I could.
"You're interrupting PR time," she said in public, loud enough for a camera to map her vocal success.
"This isn't about PR," I said. "This is about truth."
I clicked the remote. A slideshow rolled on the big screen behind her. Timestamps. Draft emails titled "Leverage: Hidden Marriage." Screenshots of messages edited to read "We are divorced" that did not bear Dalton's signature. Logs that showed Jennifer's account accessing Dalton's phone backups. The hall tilted somewhere: gasps, the clink of silverware.
"Explain this, Jennifer," I said.
She froze the way predators do when they realize the trap is set for them. She stepped down from the dais to block the view of the screen, but the images were already in the broadcaster's queue. Someone in the front row clicked record and within seconds the footage was in dozens of hands.
"You can't talk like that about someone's private life," she said, breath sharp. She tried to make her tone managerial.
"That's not what this is," Dalton said, and he had appeared at the side of the stage. "This is fabricated. She manipulated facts and inserted false narratives into public discussion to benefit her campaign."
The room filled with voices like a storm. Reporters shouted questions. Sponsors whispered to each other. Fans lifted their phones like a field of small lights.
Jennifer's cheeks had paled. She was good at spin. The spin didn't hold when confronted by emails, files, and the truth of witnesses. We played the final card: a recording of Jennifer on a phone call telling a media agent to "create engagement" by leaking a staged scene of a 'divorce argument' and re-label it as Dalton's voice when it had never been him.
Her mouth went dry. There it was: the change of expression—pride sliding toward panic.
"You're a liar," a woman in the front cried.
Jennifer's face twitched. "That's not—"
"Save it," I said. I arrested the room with calm. "You will see this evidence. We will publish everything. These are not rumors anymore."
She staggered as if struck. I watched the arc of her change—control to denial to brittle outrage to collapse. She tried to press buttons: counter-interviews, private messages, lawyer threats. But the seeds had been planted. The crowd watched her unravel.
"How could you?" a sponsor asked, standing. "We asked for transparency."
"I did what was best for the team," Jennifer said, voice shaking like an exposed wire. "I—"
"You made up my life," I said.
Her eyes were wet stalked glass. She had misjudged me twice: assumed weakness and assumed complicity. Now she faced the public crush.
She faltered, then broke.
"I—" Her voice shredded. "I thought—this would help. It was a mistake."
"Then admit it," I said. "Here, now."
She fell into the sick ritual of a career built on plausible deniability. She tried to claim good intentions. The crowd's reaction was not gentle.
They began to record. Phones blossomed. Someone shouted, "She planted evidence!" Another shouted, "You ruined someone's life!"
Jennifer's lips trembled. "Please—this is my career! I need—"
"A job built on deception," Dalton said, his voice cold as the optics of the hall. "We will let the sponsors decide."
The sponsors—mainly men who had hired Jennifer's talent—stood and walked away.
Jennifer tried to hold on to her veneer of dignity, but the floor had tilted. The PR teams around her began to distance themselves. A camera in the corner held her face like evidence. People leaned in. Someone recorded her break, the whole world listening.
She lost her tone. Her voice small now; the empire cracked.
"Please," she begged in a voice that had been oiled with charm a hundred times. "I—I'll apologize."
"Apologies are cheap," someone in the crowd said. "You took money from people for lies."
She dropped to her knees. The cameras kept rolling. They showed her on every platform within minutes. The live feeds birthed articles within the hour. The sponsor who had threatened withdrew support. Her phone calls went unanswered. Her colleagues looked on with stunned pity; I could see some had long known.
"Forgive me," she said, hands fisted in the hem of her dress. "I made an error. Please."
There was a soft, bright sound in the hall—someone clapped, then another, and then laughter, scornful and loud. People who had been wronged did not feel like comfortable witnesses. They wanted accountability. We gave it to them.
When it was over, the worst part for Jennifer wasn't public shaming. It was the slow collapse of trust. People who had once chatted with her over coffee now avoided her. Her LinkedIn filled with sparing, cold messages. The PR agency that had employed her sequestered her for an internal review. I watched through tears that weren't quite mine and felt a small thing: justice had teeth tonight.
It was more than humiliation. Her fall was a lesson the public would replay: there are real people behind manufactured headlines. There is cost.
When she left the hall that night, the press hounded her—to the car, through the doors, across the blacktop. She shouted, cried, pleaded. Her face moved through stages—anger, shame, denial—until finally there was only the brittle acceptance of someone who had been exposed. By dawn there were articles headlined: "PR Manager's Fabricated Narrative Exposed." Sponsors canceled contracts. Jennifer's career limped toward an ugly, quiet end.
I did not exult at her ruin. The public shaming hurt me too; we had turned a theater into a courtroom. But I had given voice back to my own life.
The punishment lasted in hours and days and then became a scar. People shook their heads. Jennifer tried to call Dalton and me; we did not pick up. When she finally showed up in person at the team base to apologize, the doors were shut.
She knelt in the rain outside the dorm entrance as players left for training. The soaked fabric clung to her like truth. Passersby filmed. Her once-commanding voice reduced to pleading.
"Please," she said again and again, to us, to the world, to anyone who would listen. "I was wrong. I will be fired. I'm sorry."
No one clapped this time. A few people stopped, some shook their heads. Fielding spat without thinking. Dalton turned away, jaw tight. She begged for work, and was refused. Her public ruin unfolded on every feed and in every office. She sat on the curb while the fans, the press, and the sponsors debated what this meant for professional ethics in the industry.
That was the punishment. It was public. It was long. It was real.
I watched her change from impregnable to small, and even as pity pricked me, I was glad I had acted.
*
The rest of the season moved fast. The team tightened like a fist around the goal. We reached the finals. I kept my promise: I would live, and I would play.
Dalton and I grew closer by accident—small collisions of warmth. In locker rooms, he passed me protein shakes and a stray towel. In quiet hotel corridors, he pressed my gloveless hand in his and said, "Good call." We did not have a single, huge confession. Instead, we accumulated little moments until the sum of them swelled into something.
One night, after a grueling practice, he walked me to my door and paused.
"I'm not getting sentimental," he said. "But I can't stop this."
"What can't you stop?" I asked.
"Keeping watch over things that matter," he said. "You matter."
I laughed and then cried. The motion surprised me, soft as a paper curtain.
We won the final. The crowd went crazy. The stadium vibrated. I sat at the side of the stage with my hands numb from adrenaline and a bandage gone into solid strength. The team lifted the trophy and the lights scythed. The audience chanted names.
Between the interviews and the sponsor handshakes, Dalton pulled me aside.
"You stuck it out," he said.
"I had help," I said.
He smiled something like forgiveness and something like offer. "I know. Will you—" he faltered, then steadied— "stay with me. Not in a contract, not in a headline. Just—stay."
I looked at him like someone looking at a sunrise after a winter of storms.
"I already did," I said.
*
We built a fragile life. The world still bruised us now and then—media, gossip, the slow culling of sponsors who preferred sanitized stories—but we learned to keep each other honest. Dalton was not perfect. He had been cold in the first loop. He had signed papers he didn't need to sign. But he also stayed when I needed him. He carried the black notebook with him—a journal he had never expected me to open. Once I had, I kept it safe.
At the end of the season we walked into a small restaurant. He pushed a plate with chocolate cake across.
"Old-fashioned," he said.
"I remember now," I said. "You promised once to get me cake."
He grinned. "I always keep promises."
We laughed like two people who had learned their lessons the hard way.
When the PR dust settled, Jennifer had lost her job. She attempted to rebuild, but the industry is a small world, and reputations have long shadows. The memory of her stunt would remain as a case study for new managers.
I still had scans to do, but the second chance had given me time to manage the disease early. The doctors were guarded and honest. "We caught it earlier," they said. "We can treat it."
"Then we will treat it," I said.
There were no grand, cinematic lines in the end. No sweeping "always" or theatrical vows. We had instead a string of daily, ordinary choices: to train, to play, to lie down with a hot cup of tea, to talk in the dark about the stupid, small things. Dalton learned to be present. I learned to ask for help.
At night, when the city lights opened like tiny unread messages, I read Dalton's black notebook in the hush. His handwriting had one sentence repeated across a page. I traced the letters.
"When I opened my eyes, she was there. Elise."
I tucked the notebook inside my jacket and went to sleep smiling.
The final moment I remember is small and unmistakable. We sat in a cheap theater watching a slightly ridiculous romantic comedy, a world away from championship lights.
"The last time I was here…" Dalton said, mouth half-full of buttered popcorn.
"I remember." I leaned my shoulder against his.
"Too bad we don't have a souvenir program," he said.
I frowned, then reached into my bag and found a napkin. On it I scrawled: "Elise Bloom — Dalton Delgado's Wife (known and chosen)."
He looked at it, then at me. "You keep that," he said.
"And you keep the black notebook."
"Deal."
We laughed quietly.
"Promise?" he asked.
"No promises," I said. "Just this: I will not go quiet anymore."
He took my hand. "Not quiet."
The theater lights dimmed again. The movie's laugh track rose and fell. Outside, the world spun on, full of the risk of small things—the chance to be honest, the chance to be brave. I had been given a second life that was not a do-over but an opportunity: to be kinder to myself, to fight when needed, to call out lies, and to accept the messy, human warmth of someone willing to stay.
I kept my wrist steady. I kept my voice. I kept my games. I kept Dalton's silly black notebook, and he kept baking me chocolate cake on bad days.
At the end, I wrote one last line in my journal before closing the book.
"Today the theater was full. I kept my eyes open."
The End
— Thank you for reading —