Reborn to Save the Billionaire

I lost the dare, so my boyfriend told me to go eat off the poorest boy's tray. In front of everyone.

And to smile while I did it. "What are you waiting for?" Chad gave my shoulder a shove, grinning. "Go on. I've been dying to watch him snap." The whole table was laughing. "Right?

I want to see the untouchable genius squirm." "Genius." Chad snorted. "He's a charity case with a good GPA. That's all he is. Give it ten years.

Out in the real world, boys like that end up filing our paperwork." Ten years. I knew exactly what ten years did.

In ten years that charity case would own more of the tech world than every name at this table put together.

In ten years I'd be the biggest joke in the city, selling roasted sweet potatoes off a cart while people like these ones laughed in my face.

In ten years I'd stand at his hospital bed and watch him die, and I'd blow out the candles on a cake and beg the sky to send me back. And the sky, for once, took the deal.

Because that was the second it hit me: somehow, impossibly, I was eighteen again. A whole decade, undone. Sitting at the exact table where I threw him away the first time.

Not this time. I stood up. I crossed the room to the boy everyone loved to laugh at, took a forkful of the free pickles off his tray, and ate it. He looked up.

His eyes went cold and flat as a shut door. Then, in front of all of them, I started moving food from my tray onto his. The honeygarlic ribs. The braised pork.

Every good thing I had, one piece at a time. "Payback. For the pickle." I smiled at him. "Hope that's okay." I looked at the boy the whole room had already written off.

The one I'd let die once. The one I was going to save this time, whatever it cost me. And I couldn't stop smiling. "Hi.

Eighteenyearold Silas." I held my hand out to him. "I'm Delphine. Eighteen too." That was the year the whole world had him convinced he was nothing.

It was also the year I came back to make sure he became everything. Chapter 1 Let me back up. The first time I lived through this, I was eighteen too.

And I burned it all to the ground. Girls like me didn't pick their friends. Our parents picked for us, and mine had built the fence early: old money, or don't bother.

Chad Whitmore grew up two mansions down from me in Ridgemont Estates, so the people I laughed with were always rich, always a little cruel, and I couldn't stand a single one of them.

I just had nowhere else to sit. The first time around, they dared me to humiliate a boy. And I did it. Back then I did it to wound him.

One bite off his tray to shame him in front of the room, a chocolate set down by his hand afterward because the guilt got to me, and then I walked away and let myself forget he existed.

For ten years, I forgot. Then came the sweetpotato cart.

By then he wasn't the boy who walked with his head down anymore, so low it looked like one more ounce of shame would press him straight through the floor.

He was a name people said carefully now. A tech titan. New money with a whole city folded into his back pocket. And me? My father's empire went up like a struck match.

Chad, the boy I'd grown up beside, the one I would have married, decided a ruined woman wasn't a good look on him.

I became the biggest joke in Braxton. "God, why did we drive all the way out here for one sad little sweet potato?" The woman at my cart couldn't have been more than twentyfive, a brandnew designer bag swinging off her wrist. "Don't call it sad." Her friend smirked. "That's a golden sweet potato.

Roasted by the great Sinclair heiress herself." "Mr. Delacroix, that's really her?" A man squinted at me over his sunglasses. "She looks forty." "In the flesh.

Her father crashed and burned, and then Chad dropped her. Her own husband. That's how a girl ends up here." "God.

Grim." The designerbag woman clicked over to me on her little heels and looked me up and down like produce. "Ten more, vendor. Roast them properly.

I'll hand them out to my housekeeper and my driver." I made my face warm. "Of course. You've got such a good heart, miss." Miss.

She lit right up. "Make it twenty." The man with her caught her elbow. "Twenty? You won't eat a single one." She wrinkled her nose. "That kind of lowerclass food?

I would never put it in my mouth." Lowerclass food. There used to be a version of me who bought street food by the armful, only ever to feed the strays behind our house.

I never once ate a bite of it myself. I was too good for it. And now I was the thing on the paper tray. The thing you buy by the dozen to hand to your driver.

The thing you would never, ever put in your mouth. Chapter 2 "Let me help you." He said it so quietly I almost lost it under the noise of the market.

And when I finally placed the man in the sharp gray suit standing at my cart, when it clicked who he was, my hands went still on the tongs. He took me home. Not to trap me.

Not to touch me. Nothing like the story you're already bracing for.

He gave me a room in a house built for ten times as many people, and found me a job that let me keep my back straight. The way a friend would. Nothing more than that.

I wanted to pay him back. I stayed up nights turning it over, and came up with nothing.

Some nights I'd get up for a glass of water and find him at the tall windows, a cigarette burning down to the filter between two pale fingers. Moonlight lay cold across the floor.

He stood in the middle of all that silence like it was slowly eating him. More than once I wanted to cross the room and put my arms around him from behind. I never did.

I had no right to. Weeks went by, and he really did want nothing from me. He didn't need anything from anyone. Maybe he'd taken me in the way I used to take in strays.

Because I was pitiful, and it cost him nothing to be kind. Then the work caught up with him all at once, and the word the doctors used was cancer. He remembered my birthday.

He insisted on it, propped against the hospital pillows: that I make a wish and blow out a candle. A princess's birthday, he said, needs a little ceremony.

That was what he called me by then. Princess. The sickness had hollowed him out. His eyes had sunk deep into his face.

The hand he lifted to press the candle into the little cake was bloodless, the wrist bone straining against the skin.

He pulled a smile up from somewhere it cost him to reach. "Princess. Happy... birthday." It came out thinner than breath.

I had to bring my ear almost to his lips to catch the words. I looked at him and my eyes spilled over. He just kept smiling at me. "Go on.

Blow them out." He was watching me the way you watch something you're about to lose. Like if he looked hard enough, he could take my face with him wherever he was going. He smiled.

And somewhere inside the smile, his eyes closed. The hand holding mine came loose all at once and slid off the side of the bed. Grief has a smell.

Wet bark and drowned grass, a whole forest left out in the rain for days. It got into my teeth and ached there. My hands shook. I blew out the candle.

I closed my eyes, and I wished for the only thing left to want. Please. I'm twentyeight today. Send me back. Send me back to eighteen. Here's the part I still can't explain.

It worked. When I opened my eyes, a manicured hand was shoving my shoulder. "Miss Sinclair. Hello? Go on already.

I've been dying to see him lose it." They were all grinning toward the corner, hungry for it. And there he was.

Eighteen years old, eating alone at the far end of a table, bad light, that same familiar set to his shoulders. Exactly like the man of twentyeight.

Dead broke or worth a fortune, he sat like an island either way. Him, young. Him, whole. My eyes started to burn.

I picked up my tray and walked straight to Silas Vance, eighteen years old and bent over the cafeteria's free pickles. He watched me come sit beside him.

The bench was already tight. He shifted further down it anyway, making me room. His tray was huge and almost bare. White rice. A scoop of free pickles.

A bowl of thin broth with not a drop of fat on it. The pain went through me like something with a point on it, all the way out to my fingertips.

After the cancer, there had still been a window. One more round of chemo, the doctors said. He could have fought it. He could have made it. Chapter 3 But his body had been too weak.

Years of never quite enough food as a kid had left something broken in him that never healed over. In the end he didn't make it through the second round of chemo.

Now I was looking at that same body, eighteen and already too thin, and my throat closed around the words. "Um. Can you... can you let me—" I couldn't get the sentence out.

I tried to keep myself together and the rest of it just wouldn't come. He had to think I was out of my mind. So I stopped talking.

Under his startled stare, I reached over, lifted one pickled radish off his tray, and put it in my mouth. Salt and vinegar and nothing underneath. Chewing cardboard.

I'm sorry, Silas. I'm late. When I looked up, his face had gone cold again. "The pickles are free.

Get your own over there." Flat. "Don't waste a joke like this on me." Half the cafeteria had stopped eating to watch us. The whispering swelled.

Loudest at the table right in front of ours. "God, Miss Sinclair's got nerve, going after the cold genius." "Only you college kids call him a genius.

Growing up, everyone called him the jinx." "The jinx? Why?" "You don't know? His whole family's dead, and the story is it's on him. His own dad started it.

Blamed the kid for his mother. For his baby si—" Silas's hand closed into a fist. The veins came up hard under that pale skin. The girl never got to finish.

I was already on my feet. "Did nobody ever teach you not to talk about people behind their backs?" It wasn't enough, so I kept going. "You've got two parents at home.

This is the manners they gave you?" She didn't dare come at me straight. She muttered it down into her tray instead. "What'd she take this morning?

Isn't she the one who used to torment him?" That did it. I already had one foot out from under the bench, ready to go have a real conversation with her.

Cold fingers closed around my wrist. Silas. "Sit down and eat." Even. Calm. Whatever had cracked open in his face a second ago was gone, sealed back over. I sat.

And then, with the whole room watching, I moved every good thing on my tray onto his. The honeygarlic ribs. The braised pork. All of it.

I smiled at him, wide and hopeful. "Payback. For the radish. Hope you don't mind." It came out in a rush, too fast to rein in. "Oh.

We've been in the same classes forever and we never actually met. Hi. Eighteenyearold Silas. I'm Delphine. Eighteen too." I held my hand out, beaming at him.

He stared at my mouth opening and closing like I was speaking a language he'd never been taught. "I'm done." Two words. He set them down, stood, and walked out.

I stayed frozen where he'd left me. That, and the chocolate I never got to hand him, going soft in my fist. The first time I lived this, I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway.

Chad told me to, so I reached into the poor kid's tray and cleaned it out. Took a mountain of his food. Then didn't touch a bite, because the thought of it turned my stomach.

Later the guilt caught me, and on my way out the door I left a single chocolate by his hand. That'll be the best thing he ever eats, Chad said, laughing.

Ten years after that, I was clearing out Silas's study when I found the chocolate again. Sitting on his desk.

He'd sealed it inside a small glass dome and pumped the air out so it would never rot.

So a cheap chocolate a ruined girl once tossed him out of guilt would sit there, perfect and untouched, for good.

Chapter 4 That chocolate under glass had let me see something he'd buried a long way down. But the distance between us now was an ocean, and I pushed the thought back under.

It was one chocolate. What was one chocolate supposed to prove? I wasn't an heiress anymore. What gave me the right to stand next to him at all? "Ha.

Delphine, that was cold." Chad dropped into the seat beside me. "Scraping your plate onto the jinx's tray in front of the whole room.

Nobody does humiliation like you rich girls." I stared at him. So that was what they'd all seen. Not a girl feeding a starving boy. A girl grinding his face into her leftovers.

Did that mean Silas had seen it the same way? Idiot. I was such an idiot. All I'd wanted was for him to eat something real for once, and I'd made it land like a slap.

Lachlan took the seat on my other side and drew the words out, slow and easy. "Why'd you bother helping the jinx, though? Those girls weren't wrong.

Parents, baby sister, all of them in the ground, and everyone knows whose fault that is.

Get close to a boy like that and you go down with him." Lachlan Crowe ran the school the way his father ran the campus. The dean's son.

He liked to corner people who couldn't hit back, and he called it a game. After my family went under, Chad had turned on a dime and started steering me toward Lachlan.

Be sweet to him. Get close. There was a contract in it for us. And I'd kept on believing they were my friends. All those years had to count for something.

Then came the weekend both families spent away together. Chad let himself into the room next door. And Lachlan let himself into mine.

That was the night I understood, all the way down, how rotten every one of us was. I looked at Lachlan and let the contempt sit right out on my face. "You're superstitious now?

That's funny. For a guy who does the things you do, I'd keep an eye on the sky.

One of these days the lightning finds you." The color left his face, then came back in blotchy green. "What did you just say to me.

Say it again." Chad shot up to wedge himself between us, all jittery smiles. "Nothing, nothing. Mr. Crowe, she's not herself today.

Don't take it to heart." I knocked his hand off my arm like it was something dead. "You're no better than he is.

You're just quieter about it." The two of them sat there stunned, like I'd started speaking in tongues. They couldn't make it add up.

How the girl they knew had walked in this morning wearing somebody else's spine. I didn't give them time to catch up. I was already headed back to class.

I didn't want to breathe the same air as that circle for one more second. The bell was already going by the time I dropped into my seat. Fine.

I'd find Silas after and explain that I hadn't been trying to shame him with a pile of my own food. It was math. The class I hated most.

There wasn't a scrap of focus left in me, but I forced my eyes to the board anyway. Last time, I let myself be bad at the hard things, and it cost me everything. I skated by.

Married Chad the day the diploma hit my hand. Went straight from my father's money to my husband's and never once stood on my own two feet.

That is how a person rots all the way through. That is why, when the circle finally spat me out, I had no skill, no name, nothing to sell but sweet potatoes roasting on a corner.

Heaven had handed the whole thing back to me. I was not going to waste it. I kept my eyes open and got through half the lesson before I remembered the flaw in the plan.

Friends leave you. Husbands betray you. Chapter 5 Only math will never leave you. Because math has never once lied to me about how much it hates me.

Sitting in that lecture hall, I understood maybe a third of the words on the board and none of the ones that counted. I let out a breath and looked around the room.

My eyes stopped at the front, off to my left. There he was. That stranger I somehow already knew.

Sitting perfectly straight, locked onto the board, working something out on a clean sheet of paper. Lean. Pale.

Not enough blood in his face, a faint bruisecolored shadow under his brows that never quite lifted. Ten years from now, he'd walk into a room and bend the air around him.

Right now he was all sharp edges and rawness and something I didn't have a name for yet. Something a lot like shame. "Delphine. What are you staring at this time? Up. On your feet.

Explain it to the class." I'd been watching him too long, and Professor Grimsby caught me at it.

I stood without a flicker of embarrassment and grinned. "I was looking at Silas." The room lost it. Silas didn't. He kept working his problem, calm as still water.

But the rim of his ear went red, right there where everyone could see. My math was already a disaster, and the answer only wound Grimsby tighter. "Fine.

Tell me exactly what you were looking at.

You're not leaving this room until you do." I smiled at him, sweet as anything. "How goodlooking he is." The whole class went off like a dropped tray. They threw me out, obviously.

But my father's name still meant something, so inside of five minutes another professor had swept me off to a quiet office with the air conditioning on, like I was the one who needed protecting.

The second the next class let out, I went looking for him. I had to fix the food thing. He didn't look up from his problem set. Just answered, flat and low. "It's fine.

I didn't take it that way." My shoulders dropped an inch I hadn't known they were holding. "Good. As long as you didn't read it wrong." He was so much easier than I'd braced for.

Why had I spent a whole lifetime sure he was cold and impossible? He went back to his work.

I didn't want to hover, so I set the chocolate down by his hand and leaned in to smile at him. "My favorite. It's yours." He glanced at it and turned back to the page. "Thanks.

I don't eat those." "It's good. I swear. Just try it." I peeled the foil back and pressed it to his mouth before I could think better of it.

My fingertip caught the edge of his lower lip. He went still. So did I. My finger stayed there a halfsecond too long, the warmth of him against my skin, and neither of us moved.

He didn't even chew. He just looked at me, stunned, like the floor had tilted under his chair. My face went up in flames.

But I was already in it, so I brazened out the rest. "Good, right? Told you I wasn't lying." I stood up too fast. "I'll bring you one every day." And then I ran.

Chad was waiting to cut off my way home. "What," I said. Arms crossed. Not happy. "What is going on with you today? Why are you being this nice to the jinx?" "Because I want to be.

Since when is that yours to manage?" His hand clamped down on my shoulder. "You made an enemy of Lachlan today. For him. You know what that makes Silas now?

His next game." "Is he out of his mind? Tell him to come at me instead." The second Silas was the one in danger, something in me pulled tight. Chad's eyes went flat and dark.

He caught my chin between his fingers and spaced the words out, one by one. "Delphine.

Don't tell me you've actually fallen for that piece of garbage." I twisted my mouth. "Better him than scum like you." "Delphine—" That did it.

He slammed me back against the wall and kissed me, hard. Ten years of memories came up all at once. I gagged on it.

Chapter 6 I shoved him off me and backhanded him across the face. "Chad.

What is wrong with you?" He had the height and the strength and he used both, boxing me in against the wall with an arm braced on either side. "Wrong with me? I already told you.

The girl you saw that day was my sister. This whole act is just you using Silas to get under my skin. Isn't it?" Wow. This piece of work.

I was two seconds from taking him apart when something moved at the edge of my vision. Silas. A trash bin in his hands, headed back toward the classroom.

As he passed, his eyes went to me, to Chad, to the arm caging me in. One second. Then he looked away like it was nothing at all and kept walking.

My chest pulled tight enough to hurt. So that was that. He'd read it the only way it looked from outside.

The rich girl throwing herself at the poor boy to make her boyfriend jealous. I found my opening and drove my knee up into the softest part of Chad.

He folded in half. "Go see a doctor about that." I left him there. I went after Silas. "Silas." It took me forever to catch him. I got a hand on his sleeve. "I don't like Chad.

He's garbage. That back there, just now, he forced it. All of it." He didn't slow down.

His legs were long enough that his walk was my jog. "Miss Sinclair." He didn't look at me. "I'm not interested in whatever's happening between you and your boyfriend.

You don't have to explain it to me." "He's not my boyfriend." Then I remembered we technically hadn't ended it, and tacked the rest on. "We haven't broken up yet.

But we're about to." He stopped. He turned and looked at me, and his voice came out very level. "Delphine. I don't have the interest or the time to be some rich kids' toy.

Do me a favor and don't speak to me again. Thank you." He ground out the last two words like they cost him teeth. Then he walked off and didn't look back.

It went over me like a bucket of cold water, head to heels. I stood there a while. The sunset had gone harsh, almost mean. Why was it always like this with us.

Always a misread, always a halfsecond too late, always just missing each other. It's fine. It's fine. I talked myself back down. I wasn't the sweetpotato girl anymore.

So he turned me down. So what. I went after him again. This time it earned me a roar. "Stop following me. Get lost." Ten years forward and right back here again.

In every hour we'd ever spent near each other, across two whole lifetimes, he had never once been sharp with me like that.

I stood in front of all that fury with no idea what to do with my hands. After a moment I dragged a smile up for him. "Okay. Bye for now. See you tomorrow." I turned around.

The corners of my eyes were wet, and my chest was packed too full to pull a clean breath. For days after, I left a chocolate on his desk. He threw every one of them in the trash.

I stood over the bin and looked at them a long time. It came in like a tide and closed over my head, and I put a hand on the cold rim of the bin to stay on my feet. It's fine.

It's fine. Misunderstandings always come undone eventually. They have to.

Lachlan had put the word out that Silas was the next game, so the whole class turned on the one small thing Silas did, collecting everyone's problem sets.

When he came around for them, people knocked the pages to the floor on purpose and made him bend for each one. So I started gathering them myself.

The next time I set the finished stack on his desk, he finally spoke. "Miss Sinclair. I've stepped down from the problem sets.

Please don't come near me again." Chapter 7 The little flame I'd just managed to relight went out. I sat with it for a few seconds.

Then, because I've never known how to quit, I opened my mouth again. "Why?" He looked up at me.

Those quiet eyes had gone flat and arctic, and the words came off his thin mouth cold enough to leave frost. "Because I hate you." I don't remember how I got back to my seat.

I was a ghost the rest of the day. I couldn't make it make sense. Why, even with ten whole years handed back to me, was this still so hard?

Just tell me what I'm supposed to do next. Please. I'm asking. "Delphine. Come by my office." Ms. Ferris in the doorway was the first good thing all day.

She was young, and my mother kept her generous with a steady stream of designer handbags in return for keeping an eye on me.

She asked, warm as always, whether there was anything I needed help with lately. I teared up and told her all of it. Money in the right place makes things move.

She was quick about it, too.

The bell for the next class hadn't even gone and I was already seated beside Silas, with Chad's assigned spot relocated to roughly the far side of the planet. He was livid.

There was nothing he could do. And Silas, cornered by an advisor he couldn't refuse, had to shelve whatever he felt about me and become my extremely unwilling math tutor.

He taught like he was being billed by the hour. I studied like my life was riding on it. Because it had been, once.

The second time around, I was not going to be another woman whose only skill was getting kept. But God, math. The people who are good at it are genuinely, offensively good.

Silas, full marks, every single time. The people who are bad at it are just as sincerely bad. Me. I once posted a score you could count on one hand.

I was stuck again, on something he called a gimme. "This exact type. Grimsby walked the room through it twice.

I've walked you through it three times." He looked at me like I was a slow child. "If you still can't do it, my honest suggestion is to quit math." Heat went crawling up the back of my neck. "Silas.

I'm angry now. Don't underestimate me.

I am solving this today if it kills me." Half an hour later, he leaned in to check my work. "Pff." His mouth twitched. "You got mad enough to actually land it." His eyes curved.

Light broke across them like sun hitting water. It was the first time I had ever seen him smile. Time quit moving.

My mind went white, and I sat there and stared at him like an idiot. I must have been staring too hard, because he glanced over