The scent of gardenias pulled her awake.
Lina gasped, bolting upright, chest heaving as though she'd been dragged from deep water. Phantom rain still echoed in her ears. But the room, this room was wrong.
It was beautiful. Impossibly, achingly familiar.
The master bedroom of the Cole estate. Champagne-and-gold damask curtains. Silk sheets that cost more than most people earned in a month. Morning light falling in soft bars across the floor. The faint, sweet rot of gardenia blossoms in the vase on the dresser; the flowers Lucien had always kept there, though she never once thought to ask why.
Her hands flew to her face. It was smooth and unlined. She pressed her palms against her cheeks in disbelief, then looked at them; there were no raised veins, no papery skin, no evidence of the decades she had lived through.
She swung her legs off the bed. Bare feet sank into plush carpet. The mirror across the room showed her a woman she hadn't recognised in years.
Twenty-three. Spring, 2016.
Everything crashed back at once.
Lucien was in Singapore. He wouldn't return until Sunday.
Elena was already pregnant, and she was six months along with the boy Lina would spend three decades raising as though love could be manufactured through sheer, desperate effort.
And Ivy, her sweet Ivy was not yet born.
Lina's hand moved without thinking to her lower abdomen. She pressed there, lightly, and felt her breath catch.
She was six weeks pregnant. She had found out four days ago. She hadn't told Lucien yet.
In her first life, she had told him at a candlelit dinner she'd spent two days planning. He had nodded, said "that's good news," and returned to his phone. She had spent the rest of the evening smiling so hard her face ached, pretending she hadn't noticed. She had spent the next twenty years making excuses for moments like that one.
Not this time.
She straightened slowly, crossed to the window, and looked out at the rain-wet gardens below. The roses were just beginning to bloom. In a few months, Ivy would exist with a heartbeat, a flutter, a whole person forming in the quiet dark of her body. A person who deserved a mother who stood upright. A person who would never have to grow up watching her mother fold herself in half for a man who couldn't be bothered to look at her.
"Not again," Lina whispered. Her voice sounded younger than she felt. Steadier than she had any right to be. "Never again."
A soft knock at the door broke the silence.
"Madam?" Maggie stepped in with a breakfast tray, worry already etched across her face. "You slept nearly twelve hours. Are you feeling unwell? Mr Cole called last night, the Singapore deal wrapped earlier than expected. He'll be home by Friday instead of Sunday."
In her first life, those words would have sent Lina into a quiet frenzy planning dinner reservations, flowers, the right dress, the right smile. Hours of preparation for the slim chance he might look at her warmly across the table.
Instead, something settled in her chest. Cool and still, like water finding its level.
"Thank you, Maggie." She turned from the window. "Set the tray down. And tell the kitchen I'll handle the dinner arrangements myself. Cancel the usual florist, I'd like white lilies this time."
Maggie blinked. "Lilies, madam? Not gardenias?"
"Lilies," Lina said firmly. "My favourites."
Maggie nodded, confused but obedient, and withdrew.
Alone, Lina sat at the vanity. She looked at her own face for a long time, she really looked, the way she had stopped doing somewhere in her thirties when looking had only made her feel like she was disappearing.
She had two lifetimes of knowledge locked inside this twenty-three-year-old body. She knew which photographers would matter in three years. She knew which small brands were on the verge of exploding. She knew exactly which steps, taken in which order, would turn a face into a career and a career into independence.
She knew, too, that she was carrying a daughter who would one day stand in a marble-floored room and tell her she had volunteered herself.
Lina touched her abdomen again, just for a moment.
"I know," she said softly. To the room, to the memory of Ivy's dry eyes, to the child not yet formed enough to hear her. "I know what I did wrong. And I am not going to do it again."
She picked up her fork and ate breakfast.
For the first time in decades, she tasted it and actually relished in the act of eating.