Part 1This Time, I Won’t Save Her

My hopelessly lovesick best friend married my womanizing stepbrother.

While she was pregnant, she found out he was cheating.

In my last life, I urged her to end the pregnancy and get a divorce. I helped her leave him with nothing, then made her a partner in my firm without asking her to invest a cent.

But after she became financially independent, she secretly got back together with that scumbag!

Worse, she stole confidential files from my firm and destroyed everything I had built. I wasted away and died.

As it turned out, she hated me.

“Emily Hayes, you killed my baby with Ryan! You deserve to die with my child!”

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day she discovered his affair.

The crash of breaking dishes came from outside my bedroom.

“Ryan Carter, how could you do this to me?

“You kept saying she was just someone you went to middle school with. But you’ve been sleeping with her this whole time!”

Chloe Bennett’s heartbroken voice rang through the living room.

I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling. It took a long time to accept that I had come back to life.

On this same day in my last life, my best friend—who was also my sister-in-law—had received a text from an unknown number.

The message was simple: a photo of Ryan sleeping shirtless.

Pink lipstick marks covered his face and neck.

There was no mistaking what he had done.

Chloe had pounded on my bedroom door, sobbing.

Once I understood what had happened, I couldn’t stand my stepbrother’s shameless attitude or the calculations written all over my stepmother’s face. I took Chloe back to my rented apartment.

The next day, I went with her to a prenatal appointment. The doctor discovered a congenital defect and recommended terminating the pregnancy.

So I firmly urged her to end it and divorce Ryan, making sure he walked away empty-handed.

For a long time afterward, I protected her and did everything I could to keep that cheating bastard away.

After all, I believed a man either never cheated or never stopped.

After the divorce, I helped her secure full ownership of their marital home, even though Ryan’s name had been on the deed. Then I brought her into my newly established firm and paid her a generous salary without asking much of her.

I took her to see spring blossoms in the South, snowy landscapes in the North, and moonlit skies overseas.

I knew she lost all reason when it came to love. Still, I believed that once she no longer had to worry about making ends meet, once she saw more of the world, she would move beyond her failed marriage and find happiness again.

But I never imagined that the girl who had held my hand through our teenage years—the girl who had crossed half the country in the middle of the night to be with me when my mother was critically ill—would stab me in the back at the height of my career!

After she got back together with Ryan, she stole my firm’s confidential files. To protect me, my fiancé took the blame and went to prison!

As I lay dying in a hospital bed, I asked her through my tears, “Why?”

Her childhood kindness had been swallowed by bone-deep hatred. She ground out the words through clenched teeth.

“Emily Hayes, you killed my baby with Ryan! The doctor said I can never get pregnant again! Do you have any idea how much it hurts to know you’ll never be a mother? You deserve to die with my child!”

She blamed every misfortune in her life on me.

I got up and opened my bedroom door.