Chapter 1

The last thing I remembered from my first life was the sterile smell of the hospital room and the incessant, soulless beeping of the heart monitor. I was dying. Cancer had eaten away at my body, a body already broken by years of stress and heartache. My successful career, the one I had built from nothing, had crumbled. My fortune, the one I had amassed to give my family a perfect life, was gone.

And there, standing by my bedside, were the two people responsible for it all.

My wife, Sarah, still looked impeccable. Even in the dim hospital light, her makeup was perfect, her designer clothes crisp. She held the hand of our son, Billy, a sullen teenager who couldn't be bothered to look at me.

"Just sign the papers, Mark," Sarah said, her voice devoid of any warmth. She was talking about the last of my company shares. "David needs the capital for his new venture. It' s for Billy' s future."

David. The man she had been sleeping with for years. The man who was, as I would learn in my final moments, Billy' s biological father. A lifetime of devotion, of pampering her, of making her the envy of every woman in our social circle, and this was my reward. I had been a fool, a blind, willing fool.

I remembered the arguments, the late nights I spent at the office while she was out at "charity events." I remembered how she' d convinced me to sell the family home, my childhood home, claiming it was for a better investment. That money went straight to David' s gambling debts. I remembered the "accident" that took my mother. A faulty brake line on her car, a car Sarah had just "helped" her take to a new mechanic. In my final, gasping breaths, Sarah had laughed about it, a cruel, final confession meant to break me completely before I died.

"She never liked me anyway," she had whispered, her face close to mine. "And Billy... look at him. Does he look anything like you? You pathetic idiot."

The monitor flatlined. The last image burned into my mind was of Billy turning away in disgust, and Sarah smiling, victorious. My life had been a lie. A complete and utter sham. The pain, the betrayal, it was a weight so heavy it crushed my very soul.

And then... I gasped.

The air was clean, not sterile. I wasn't in a hospital bed. I was standing on the plush, cream-colored carpet of my own living room. Sunlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, glinting off the expensive art on the walls. My body felt strong, healthy. I looked at my hands. They were the hands of a man in his prime, not the withered claws of a terminal patient.

Across from me stood Sarah. She looked exactly as she did on this day ten years ago, youthful, beautiful, and filled with a cold resolve. It was the day my perfect life began to unravel for the first time.

"Mark," she said, her voice sharp and final. "I want a divorce."

The words were the same. The scene was the same. I had been reborn. I was back at the starting point of my nightmare. But this time, I wasn't the loving, naive husband. I was a man who had already lived through hell and remembered every single detail of the fire.