Reborn: Rejecting My Billionaire Family

Two heartbeats were slowing down inside me. I was lying in my own blood.

My husband's hand closed around my throat. "This is your fault!" His voice tore out of him. "Why did you drive Willa out?

You're going to pay for what you did to her!" In the life before, the girl who took my place killed herself. Every single one of them put her death on me.

Adrian married me for one reason. To lock me inside a marriage with no love in it and hurt me, day and night, until I died giving birth. Then I opened my eyes.

I was six years old, back in the group home. The girl in the next bed was asking me for the silver locket I'd worn since I was a baby.

The one thing that could prove which rich family I came from. I stared at her. Then I smiled. "Sure.

It's yours." Chapter 1 The words were barely out of my mouth, and across from me she went still. Then her whole face lit up. "Really?

Addie, you'd really give it to me?" She looked me up and down. "But… isn't it your treasure?

You said you'd wear it until your family came for you." Everybody in that building knew about the locket. It mattered more to me than I did.

The housemother told me it was tied around my neck the day she found me, still a baby. "Your mom and dad left this for you, Addie." She used to smooth my hair down when she said it. "They'll come looking one day.

You'll see." So I held on to that. The other kids were jealous. Plenty of them tried to take it off my neck. The worst time, a whole group came at me at once.

I got my teeth around it and swallowed it whole before they could pry it off me. It nearly landed me in the ER. After that, they were scared of me. That was then.

Now I reached back, unhooked the chain, and set it in her hand. "Of course I mean it. It's yours." "I couldn't," she said, and her fingers closed tight around it.

She pulled it in against her chest like I might grab for it. I didn't move. In the life before, that locket was how the Ashfords found me. Not this time.

I'd give up every last thing I had before I let myself get tied to those people again. This life, the Ashfords would still get their real daughter back. Just. Not me.

The day they came to the group home, I said my stomach hurt and hid where nobody would look. By the time it was over, word had already gone around.

The Ashfords of New York had finally found the little girl they lost. The girl wearing my locket. Simone Ward. Simone Ashford now, I guess.

That night I went back to the narrow room where we slept. I listened to the other girls breathe. I'd never been so calm in my life.

This time, I thought, I finally don't owe anybody anything. Turns out I'd made it too simple. Two days later the Ashfords came back. They said they had the wrong girl.

That was when it landed on me. The locket had never been the only thing. They must have run a DNA test back then, quietly, before they ever took me home.

Back then I really was their daughter. This time Simone wasn't. The director lined up every girl in the building between six and seven years old.

Harold Ashford and his wife came down the row behind the director, looking at us one by one.

Chapter 2 Out in front of them was a boy in expensive clothes with a bored look on his face. My brother, in the life before. Nolan. I backed into the corner and kept my head down.

I got sick a lot in those days and never had enough to eat. Small, skinny, easy to skip over. They walked right past me. Nolan's eyes went across my face and kept going.

After they left, the housemother gave us the news. Every girl in the building was getting her blood drawn in the morning. Every girl included me. Something cold went down my back.

I was still standing there with no plan when the housemother came in again with another woman. This one came alone. Plain clothes, no fuss.

Nobody was treating her the way they'd treated the Ashfords. There was no lineup for her, either. She looked at us like she wasn't sure she had any right to be there.

But her eyes were kind. I knew that face. She worked for the Ashfords. I'd seen her in that house.

In the life before, after Willa killed herself, they stopped letting me eat dinner. "We hear Willa couldn't even afford food once she got sent away. Living hand to mouth.

Stomach problems before she was twenty.

And here you are, waited on, eating whatever you want." "You can stand to feel a little of what she felt." Nolan looked at me like I made him sick. So dinner ended.

One meal a day after that, and it was always cold by the time it reached me. She was the only one in that house who couldn't stand it.

She'd push food through the gap in my door when nobody was watching. Standing there in the group home, I made up my mind.

When she came close enough, I grabbed her leg with both arms and yelled it. "Mom!" The next morning, while the director marched every girl off to get her blood drawn, I was already gone.

I went home with my new mother, out to the town she came from. The Ashfords housed their staff. By rights I should have moved straight into the staff quarters with her.

I told her I was scared and asked if we could wait a while. I put the rest of it together later. The Ashfords didn't trust anybody.

They'd lost their daughter in the first place because someone with a grudge set it up.

So when the girl at the group home turned out to be wrong, they must have decided they were being played again. They never questioned anybody else in that building.

They just kept working on Simone. And Simone swore up and down she'd been wearing that locket since the day she was born.

In the end they handed her off to cousins on the other side of the family. And lost the last thread they had to their real daughter.

So by the time I walked into that house, two months had gone by. It was over. Everything had settled without me. The day Mom and I moved in.

Willa was curled up against Nolan on the living room couch, crying. "Nolan, Mom and Dad aren't really going to send me away, are they?

I can still stay, right?" His whole face said he hated this, but he kept patting her back. "Where do you even get this stuff?

Even if she comes back, nobody's sending you anywhere." He made a face. "You've been spoiled rotten since you were tiny. How would you last a week out there?

It'd break them." Willa peeked up to check his expression. "What about you?" she said, quiet. "Doesn't it bother you at all?" Nolan blinked. Then he laughed. "Fine, fine.

It bothers me most of all." Very cozy, the three of them. I smiled too. Then I turned around and went into the staff quarters. Nobody in that house questioned me.

Mom told them I was her daughter, that I'd been living with my grandmother back home all these years. Mrs. Ashford looked right at me and didn't know who I was.

Chapter 3 She crouched down to my level. Something moved behind her eyes, and they went red for a second. "…Addie," she said. "There's another girl up at the house.

She's a little older than you, and she's very pretty." "She's been having a hard time lately. Would you keep her company?" Mrs. Ashford wanted a playmate for Willa.

I thought it over and nodded. "Okay." Honestly, Willa was easy enough. Spoiled, but easy. You just had to keep her happy.

Because I was their daughter's playmate, her parents were warm with me. And Mom loved me like I was her own. The one person in that house who stayed away from me was Nolan.

As far as he was concerned, the housekeeper's kid wasn't worth his time. Most days I might as well have been furniture. Except sometimes.

Sometimes I'd catch him watching me with his eyebrows pulled together. I always looked past it.

Then, not long after, Adrian came to the house. "Adrian!" Willa saw him and threw herself at him.

That was how I found out the two families had set the match up before either of them could walk. So they were childhood sweethearts. Grew up side by side. Well.

That explained a few things. Why he hated me the way he did, in the life before, once Willa was dead. Why he married me at all. He spent his whole life getting even for her.

This time she was safe in that house. Still the princess of it. They'd get their happy ending, the two of them. I was still thinking it when Adrian's eyes came my way.

I turned my head toward the window like I hadn't noticed. Missed it on purpose. The years went fast after that. By the time I looked up, Willa and I were seniors.

I was still living in the Ashford house. She'd grown up with that whole family and Adrian watching over every part of her.

Whatever fear she'd carried as a little kid about not really being one of them was long gone. This time around she was pretty, sharp, proud. Everybody at school knew her name.

Me, I kept a careful distance from all of them. Not too close, not too far. Nolan still had no use for me. Now and then he'd say two words to me, and most of them were little digs.

I never did find out why he disliked me that much. I didn't care enough to ask. Adrian was cold to everyone but Willa.

He kept the rest of the world at a distance like it was his job. One thing about him never added up, though. He didn't seem to want her. He treated her like a little sister.

One afternoon he was over at the house, and Willa came running out of his room crying. She saw me and put a hand over the shoulder where her top had slipped.

Her face landed somewhere between furious and humiliated. Then her eyes came to my face, and she stopped short. "…Stop right there." She looked at me for a long moment.

I couldn't tell what she was putting together. "I heard you rolled your ankle at the track meet last week. And Adrian carried you to the nurse's office." It took me a second. Right.

That happened. Somebody knocked me down and my ankle went out from under me. Before I got my bearings, the ground dropped away. Whoever had me gave off no heat at all.

Up close, the line of his jaw. Adrian. I meant to tell him to put me down. His mouth was pressed shut. He carried me all the way to the nurse's office and never said one word.

The truth was, Adrian and I barely spoke, all those years. And somehow I still kept ending up wherever he was.

Chapter 4 I made a small sound. "Mm." Willa's face got worse. "Are you two close? Why would he pick you up? He won't even—" She stopped herself. The air went stiff. Then, finally.

She looked at me with red eyes for a long time. "When are you moving out of my house?" "You're not planning to live off us forever, are you?

You really think you're one of us?" I looked at the floor.

My hands stayed exactly where they were. "Don't worry," I said. "I'll be gone when I graduate." I didn't want to live there either. Mom's husband got cancer when she was young.

She spent every dollar she had trying to save him, then she sold the house. Taking me in had been hard enough on her. I wasn't going to be selfish on top of it.

College would fix all of it. I just had to get in. I didn't look at Willa's face again. I turned and walked out. I never planned on staying in that house.

Second time around, I was going to have a whole new life. A free one