He Faked His Death With My Best Friend,So I Took Everything Back

The day my daughter went in for her liver transplant, a video surfaced on my feed: my husband marrying my best friend.

Hudson Delgado stood there in a sharp, tailored suit, lifting his glass in a toast, and beside him Leah Henson's bridal gown burned itself into my eyes until they ached.

I tore into that reception like a woman gone mad, demanding answers.

Hudson didn't say a word. He grabbed Leah's hand and turned to leave,

and the second they stepped outside, a speeding truck slammed into them and threw them dozens of feet down the road.

Hudson and Leah died on the spot.

Overnight I became the woman who'd killed two people, the 'murderer,'

and the guilt that gnawed at me kept me waiting hand and foot on Hudson's parents and Leah's parents, never once complaining.

A vicious online smear campaign.

A daughter too sick to recover.

A mountain of housework.

In the end it all crushed me,

and I died of illness three years after Hudson's death.

But at my own funeral, I saw Hudson and Leah standing there.

It turned out they had never died at all.

Hudson's parents had known the whole time.

After I was gone, Hudson stepped neatly into my company and seized my fortune,

threw my parents out of the house, abandoned our gravely ill daughter at the hospital, and never asked after her again.

Three days later, my daughter died alone in that hospital.

The grief and rage burned through my parents, and within days they too were gone.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the very day of my daughter's liver transplant,

staring at Hudson and Leah, so tender and in love right in front of me.

I dug my nails quietly into my palm.

This time, the ending would be completely different…

——

'Now that's our Hudson! Keeping the home fires burning while the side flags fly free, ha, you've really mastered that old saying!'

The raucous laughter jolted me back to myself.

I glanced at the date on my watch, then at the bustling wedding reception in front of me,

and realized I truly had been reborn.

And reborn on the exact day of my daughter's liver transplant.

In my last life, I'd waited outside the operating room, frantic for any word about her, calling Hudson again and again.

Before all this, he had promised our daughter,

no matter how busy he was, he would come and be there for her surgery,

he swore that the moment she came out of that operating room, the first face she saw would be her daddy's.

But the night before the surgery, Hudson dropped off the grid.

By the 108th call,

his voice came through, thick with irritation.

'Are you done yet?! Are you useless?! You can't just sit there and watch her yourself, you have to keep dragging me into it?!'

Before I could get a word in, the line went dead,

and in my panic my finger slipped, opening a social media page, and what filled my eyes left my whole body numb.

The man who'd shared my bed for ten years, who had once sworn it would be the two of us and no one else for the rest of our lives,

was at that very moment holding a wedding with my best friend.

Hudson in a crisp, tailored suit,

Leah hanging shyly off his arm,

the two of them cooing over each other as they toasted the room,

Hudson's friends, his parents, all of them there.

I rushed over like I'd lost my mind, screaming at Hudson and Leah, demanding to know why they would do this to me.

Leah only cried.

Hudson said nothing, just grabbed her hand and ran for the door,

but the instant they cleared the hotel entrance,

a truck came barreling head-on and hurled them dozens of feet,

crimson blood spreading across the whole street,

Hudson and Leah dead where they landed.

The wailing of both sets of parents swept past me,

and as I stood there frozen,

Mrs. Delgado lunged forward and slapped me across the face, glaring at me with bloodshot eyes as she screamed,

'Murderer!'

'If you hadn't come storming in to confront them, how would my Hudson and my Leah be dead?!'