Then, I woke up, and there I was again, my sister and I sitting in front of Mrs. Van Derlyn.
Mrs. Van Derlyn smiled warmly, her handsome, quiet son sitting beside her. On the other side, there was a check for five million dollars.
“Hailey, Riley, who wants to choose first?”
My sister immediately raised her hand, pointing straight at the check for five million dollars.
In that moment, I knew she remembered everything too.
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“Hailey, Riley, I’m a straightforward woman, so I won’t beat around the bush.” Mrs. Van Derlyn began, her smile as bright as ever. “This is my
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only son, Xavier. He was hurt as a child, and
has become rather introverted. He doesn’t like
to talk much, and he’s not interested in going into business with me. So, I’d like to pick one of
you to be my daughter–in–law, and eventually
take over the company. As for the other, I can
give you five million dollars upfront. Why don’t
you two discuss how you want to choose?”
As Mrs. Van Derlyn finished her proposal, a flood of bloody memories rushed through my
head.
I knew I had been given a second chance at life!
The last image from my past life was the sterile white walls of the mental hospital. Hailey, her hair a tangled mess, had suddenly pushed me off the seventh–floor balcony.
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As I crashed to the ground, I could almost hear
the blood and brain matter oozing out of my ears, mixed with Hailey’s desperate screams.
“Why? Riley, why do you get to be so
successful and live such a good life? That luck should have been mine. It’s because I made the wrong decision, and you reaped all the benefits!”
Hailey blamed all her misfortunes on me. But in the past life, she had been the one who chose to marry Mrs. Van Derlyn’s son, wanting to be the wife of a wealthy family. She even dumped her long–term boyfriend for it.
Who knew that the seemingly gentle Mr. Van Derlyn was actually a total psycho? On their wedding night, he tied her to the bed and
lectured her on Lagrange’s equations all night
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long.
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Afterward, he gave her problems to solve,
expecting her to apply the equations on the spot. For every mistake, he pulled out one of her fingernails.
The next night, it was Newton–Leibniz formulas.
If she couldn’t learn them, he’d pull out a tooth for every wrong answer.
Of course, Hailey only told me all this when she had completely lost her mind and was
screaming hysterically in the mental hospital.
At first, I felt sorry for her and wanted to help her escape her misery and get justice.
But then, I realized that her biggest source of pain wasn’t being abused by Xavier, but the
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fact that I didn’t suffer the same fate, and
actually had a much better life than her!
Fueled by jealousy and resentment, she ignored
our sisterly bond and pushed me off the building herself.
