Chapter 5
By college, we were orbiting each other so closely that everyone else had already decided what we were.
Only we had not said it.
He was thriving. So was I.
And for the first time in either life, that felt like enough.
Until the fire.
It happened during a class camping trip in sophomore year.
There were cabins tucked into the woods, star-view tents, cheap snacks, loud music, couples pairing off like they always do when young people are dropped somewhere scenic and unsupervised.
Ethan carried my bag. Chose my cabin. Stayed close without hovering.
Lucas was there too, as a friend’s guest. I saw him, felt the old tension twist once inside my chest, and let it pass. He was background now.
At the supply station, I thought I glimpsed Olivia.
Just for a second.
By the time I turned, she was gone.
That night, alone in my cabin, I smelled something strange right before the world tilted sideways.
When I woke, smoke was everywhere.
Heat slammed into me. Orange light licked the walls. My head swam so badly I could not stand.
And then memory hit.
Not memory like a gentle return. Memory like a blade.
I had been here before.
In my first life, there had been a fire at a college camping trip too. I had forgotten it afterward—forgotten because trauma had swallowed the details whole, because everyone around me had decided forgetting was kinder, because Lucas had carried me out at the end and everyone had crowned him my savior.
But he had not been the one who came in first.
Ethan had.
Ethan had gone into the flames for me.
Ethan had died in that fire.
That was why he was gone from my first life. That was why the bank card had come later. Why his death had been reduced to rumor and silence and no one had bothered to say what had really happened.
The roof groaned overhead.
I was crying before I even realized it.
“Ethan,” I choked out.
And then the locked door burst open.
He came through the smoke like something carved out of sheer will, eyes wild, coughing hard, shouting my name.
I do not remember reaching for him. I only remember his arms around me, lifting me, the crash of part of the ceiling coming down behind us, and the sickening sound he made when a burning beam struck his leg on the way out.
“Ethan!”
“I’ve got you,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
Outside, chaos was everywhere. People screaming. Calling 911. Someone yelling for water.
And through all of it, Lucas was running toward the fire, his face white as ash.
He was shouting my name.
Then he saw me in Ethan’s arms.
He stopped as though he had been shot.
For a second, the whole world seemed to narrow to that single moment—me clinging to the man who had saved me in both lives, Lucas staring at us with the full horror of understanding crashing over him.
Too late.
Everything was too late.
This time, Ethan lived.
His leg was broken. He spent weeks healing. Dad personally handled the hospital, the specialists, every bill, every detail. And when I told him about Olivia possibly being at the camp, about the smell in my cabin, about everything that felt wrong, he launched an investigation that moved with the force of a storm.
They found evidence of arson.
The target had been me.
In my first life, the truth had been buried under shock and gratitude and convenient silence. This time there was no room for that. Olivia had motive, access, and a long trail of desperation behind her.
Before the case fully closed around her, Lucas turned himself in.
He asked to see me before sentencing.
I went because I needed to hear him say it with his own mouth.
“It wasn’t me,” he said the moment I sat down. He looked hollowed out, older than his years. “I didn’t set the fire.”
“I know.”
He laughed once, exhausted. “Of course you do.”
We sat there in the sterile room with a lifetime between us.
Then he said the thing I think he had been carrying from the moment he remembered.
“You came back too, didn’t you?”
I gave him nothing.
His eyes turned red anyway. “It doesn’t matter. Even if you didn’t, I know. I know what I did. I know what I became.”
He looked down at his cuffed hands.
“In the first life, I told myself I wanted dignity. I told myself I hated being seen as the poor boy your father elevated. I wanted money that was mine, power that was mine, a life no one could say I only had because of you. But somewhere along the way, I confused pride with cruelty. I thought if I took enough from you, I’d finally feel like a man.”
His voice broke.
“And all I really did was destroy the only person who ever loved me without conditions.”
I sat very still.
“I loved you,” he whispered. “That’s the sickest part. I did love you. I just loved my pride more.”
There it was.
The answer I had once begged the universe to give me. The truth I would have died for before.
And now?
Now it felt like ash.