Part 3Reborn to Refuse the Billionaire's Ring

After cutting ties with the Hastings family, I blocked every single one of their numbers and leased a sunlit loft in the city center.

In my past life, in order to become the polished, unobtrusive Mrs. Zachary Whitmore, I had abandoned my oil paints the day after graduation, spending my youth arranging seasonal centerpieces and waiting for a husband who hated coming home. I hadn't lived a single day for myself.

Now, living off the freelance illustration fees I’d quietly saved and a modest inheritance my grandmother had left me in trust, I rented a corner booth at a local cooperative gallery. Every day, I mixed pigments and lost myself in the rhythm of the brush.

No cold shoulders. No biting remarks over breakfast. No headlights sweeping across the bedroom ceiling at 2:00 a.m. to signal an arrival I dreaded.

Freedom felt so light it was almost terrifying.

One late July afternoon, sunlight poured through the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling windows, casting long, geometric shadows across the hardwood floor. I was standing before an unfinished canvas—a sprawling night sky, testing shades of Prussian blue and indigo, trying to capture a depth that felt vast rather than suffocating.

The chime above the front door jingled.

Without turning, I gave my standard greeting. "Afternoon. Feel free to look around. Anything with a red dot is already spoken for."

No answer came. Only the dull, heavy thud of footsteps across the floorboards, coming to a halt about six feet behind me.

"Paige."

The moment the voice hit the air, my brush slipped, leaving an ugly streak of black across the canvas.

I closed my eyes, took a long, measured breath, dropped the brush into a jar of mineral spirits, and turned around.

Zachary stood in the pool of afternoon light.

He had lost an alarming amount of weight. The boyish, athletic contours of his jaw had caved in, hollow and sharp, and bruised purple hollows hung beneath his eyes. He wasn't wearing his usual bespoke suits or designer labels; he was swallowed up in a faded black hoodie, the drawstrings pulled tight.

He looked less like an heir to an empire and more like a ghost that had forgotten how to haunt properly.

"Can I help you?" I asked.

He stepped closer, his gaze desperate, raw, and terrifyingly fragile. "Paige... for the past two weeks, I’ve been digging into something."

"Digging into what?"

"Into whose number I actually saved that night."

His voice was hoarse, his knuckles white as his fists trembled in his pockets. "I spent three straight nights reading every single text from that year. From the first 'hello' to the last. The girl on the other end understood track days. She knew suspension tuning. She knew why I obsessed over telemetry data. She replied to me at three in the morning, and she never missed a single one of my races."

He lifted his bloodshot eyes to meet mine.

"Brooke doesn't know a thing about cars. She couldn't tell the brake from the accelerator if her life depended on it. She never stays up past ten, and she throws a fit if someone texts her after midnight. Paige... it was you. The whole time, it was you."

His voice began to fracture, trembling like thin glass.

"I saved the wrong number. I fell in love with a ghost, projected her onto the wrong sister, and then spent two years torturing you for not being her." He choked back a ragged breath. "Paige... that wasn't just a nightmare, was it? Tell me it wasn't a dream. Because the way you look at me right now... you don't look at me like a stranger. You look at me like you hate my guts."

Looking at his shattered, miserable expression, I didn't feel a drop of triumph. I only felt an overwhelming wave of exhaustion.

"Zachary, if you’re suffering from psychotic breaks, schedule an appointment with a psychiatrist," I said, tossing a rag into the wastebasket. "I have no idea what you’re talking about. And as for hating you? You flatter yourself. I don't waste emotional bandwidth on people who mean nothing to me."

"You're lying!"

He snapped, lunging forward, his hands reaching blindly for my shoulders. "If you didn't remember, why did you reject me at the table? In that life, you blushed and said yes! You loved me! I read your journals, Paige! After you died, when I was packing up your things... I read every single word you wrote about me!"