Chapter 1

In my past life, I stormed out after a massive blowout with my wife. That very night, she suffered a fatal heart attack.

I rushed to the hospital, only to be told her body had already been cremated.

When I returned home, broken and grieving, the court was already seizing our house.

It turned out she had secretly racked up millions of dollars in debt before she died.

Driven by guilt, I spent my life working like a dog to pay it off and supported her parents until their final days.

Fifty years later, I finally cleared the debt. My body was failing from decades of overwork, and I collapsed on the side of the road.

As I lay dying, a luxury car pulled up. In the reflection of its window, I saw her―my wife, who was supposed to have been dead for half a century.

She was casually discussing which burial plot to buy for me, laughing as she thanked me for being such a loyal provider all those years.

The sheer rage stopped my heart. I died right there on the pavement.

But then, I opened my eyes again. I was back on the very day I received the notification of her death.

01

The voice of Sasha Sterling, my wife's best friend, echoed in my ear. I caught my reflection in the mirror―young, healthy, and full of life.

I realized with a jolt that I had truly been reborn.

In my previous life, the moment I heard Lylah had a heart attack, I dropped everything and sped toward the hospital.

I kept calling Sasha, begging her to make sure I could see Lylah one last time.

But the universe had other plans. A massive pile-up blocked the only highway to the hospital, turning a ten-minute drive into an hour-long nightmare.

By the time I arrived, her family had already rushed the cremation process.

I screamed in agony, "I told you to wait! I'm her husband! How could you burn her without my signature?"

My mother-in-law, Martha, slapped me hard across the face.

"If you hadn't upset my daughter, she wouldn't have had a heart attack! You killed her! How dare you show your face here!"

Those words hit me like a lightning bolt. I spent the next fifty years believing I was a murderer.

I spent nights kneeling at her grave, whispering her name, and slapping my own face until I bled.

I even carried her memorial plaque home through a storm, sobbing apologies into the wind.

But when I got home, the locks were changed and the house was under foreclosure.

Martha told me Lylah had taken out massive loans to help my business because she saw how stressed I was.

She said the money was lost to a scam, and Lylah died carrying a ten-million-dollar burden.

Even though I knew nothing about it, the guilt made me take it all on.

I worked three jobs, sorted trash, and nearly froze to death in the streets just to pay back every cent.

I treated her parents like my own, thinking I owed them for the life I had stolen from their daughter.

But fifty years later, as I lay dying in a pile of garbage, Lylah stepped out of a limo with her high school sweetheart.

She looked at my filthy body and called me an eyesore, telling her driver to haul me off to the morgue.

I wasn't even dead yet. I was still breathing, but that final betrayal snuffed out my last spark.

Thinking of all of it now, I clenched my fists until my knuckles turned white.

Lylah Vance, you owe me a lifetime. And I'm going to collect it, cent by cent.