Her Second Life Blueprint

Rena

The screech of tires is the last thing I hear. A high, tearing sound that rips the world apart. Then comes the brutal percussion of metal on metal, a sound so final it erases everything else. My head whips to the side, smacking against the glass. A spiderweb of cracks fractures the rainy cityscape. For a split second, there is no pain. Just a strange, quiet thought that feels like an apology. Travis. My parents. I’m so sorry I wasted it.

Then, darkness swallows the thought whole.

I wake with a gasp, a lungful of air that feels stolen. My heart hammers against my ribs like a trapped bird. I’m lying on my side, tangled in a thin, scratchy comforter that smells faintly of stale coffee and cheap fabric softener. My neck aches. My body feels…wrong. Young. The persistent ache in my lower back from twenty years hunched over a drafting table is gone. The dull throb in my right knee from a fall on a job site is absent.

My eyes fly open.

It’s not my sterile, minimalist gray bedroom. It’s a riot of color and clutter. A poster of some indie band I haven’t thought about in a decade is taped to the peeling beige wall. A precarious tower of textbooks on structural engineering is piled on a cheap laminate desk. My desk. My college desk.

This is impossible. A dream. A coma hallucination before the end.

“Finally,” a voice snaps, dripping with impatience. “I thought you were going to sleep through the entire afternoon. Some of us have social lives to maintain, you know.”

I push myself up, my head swimming. The room solidifies around me. There, sitting at the opposite desk, applying a thick coat of mascara with surgical precision, is Alina Croft. Her hair is a sheet of perfect blonde silk. Her lips are pursed in that familiar expression of casual disdain. She looks exactly as I remember her. Young. Annoyed. Nineteen.

My blood runs cold. “Alina?” My voice is a croak, thin and reedy. My nineteen-year-old voice.

“Who else would it be?” She doesn’t look away from her compact mirror. “Are you feeling okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. You were mumbling some weird stuff in your sleep. Something about a tower.”

Dane Tower. Sector 7-B. Catastrophic cantilever failure. The words are seared into my brain, a headline from a future that shouldn’t exist anymore.

“What…what day is it?” I manage, my throat tight.

Alina rolls her eyes, the very picture of teenage drama. “It’s Thursday, obviously. Are you still drunk from last night? Seriously, Rena, you need to learn to handle your tequila.” She gestures with her mascara wand towards the small digital clock on my nightstand.

My eyes find the glowing red numbers. 3:15 PM. September 12th.

September. Twelfth.

My breath catches in my throat. No. It can’t be. I scramble for my phone, my old, clunky smartphone from another era, plugged into the wall. My hands shake as I grab it. The screen lights up with a photo of me and my parents, smiling on a beach vacation. They’re so young. So alive. And the date confirms the clock’s silent testimony.

Three weeks. I have three weeks until they get into their car to drive to the lake house for their anniversary. Three weeks until a drunk driver crosses the center line on Route 9 and obliterates my world for the first time.

“Oh, my God,” I whisper, sinking back onto the lumpy mattress. This isn’t a dream. This isn’t the afterlife. It’s a do-over. It’s a second chance.

“What is your problem today?” Alina finally turns to face me, her perfectly plucked brows furrowed. “Are you coming to the Sigma Chi party tonight or not? I told Chad you’d be there. Don’t make me look like a liar.”

In my first life, I would have mumbled an apology and agreed. I would have spent two hours trying on outfits I hated to impress people I didn’t like, all for Alina’s approval. A bitter taste fills my mouth. How much of my life did I waste trying to please her? How many late-night study sessions did I skip for meaningless parties? How many of my own ideas did I silence because she called them weird?

“No,” I say. The word is quiet, but it lands in the small room with the force of a dropped weight.

Alina blinks. “No? What do you mean, no? We’ve been talking about this all week. It’s the first big party of the semester.”

“I’m not going.” I look at her, really look at her, for the first time with a thirty-eight-year-old’s clarity. I see the deep insecurity hiding under the arrogance. I see the desperate need to be the center of every room. And I feel nothing but a profound, weary pity.

“Don’t be so lame, Rena,” she scoffs, turning back to her mirror. “You’re going to end up a bitter old spinster, buried in blueprints.”

The irony is a physical blow. A bitter old architect, buried in blueprints for soulless corporate headquarters, mourning the life I should have had. That’s exactly what I became.

“I have work to do,” I say, my voice gaining strength.

“Work? Professor Finch’s assignment isn’t due for two weeks.”

“Even so.”

Alina lets out an exasperated sigh. “Fine. Whatever. Be boring. More Chad for me, I guess.” She stands, smoothing down her designer skirt. “Don’t wait up.”

The door slams shut behind her, leaving me in a silence that buzzes with impossible energy. I stand on shaky legs and walk to the window. The dorm room overlooks the main campus green. Students are scattered across the lawn, enjoying the late afternoon sun. My eyes scan the crowd, searching, my heart pounding with a desperate, terrifying hope.

And then I see him.

Travis Dane.

He’s walking near the fountain, a heavy portfolio case in one hand, arguing good-naturedly with a classmate. He runs a hand through his dark, unruly hair, a gesture so familiar it makes my knees weak. He’s wearing a simple gray t-shirt that does nothing to hide the lean, strong lines of his shoulders. His laugh carries on the breeze, a sound I haven’t heard in sixteen years. A sound I thought I’d only ever hear again in my dreams.

He’s alive. He’s real and vibrant and so painfully beautiful it hurts to look at him.

He isn’t a ghost. He isn’t a memory. He isn’t the tragic genius whose career was cut short two years from this exact moment, crushed under the weight of his own masterpiece when a structural support, one he fought the contractors on, finally gave way.

He turns his head slightly, as if he can feel me watching him, and his profile is silhouetted against the sun. Perfect. Classic. The lines a sculptor would kill for. The face I’ve sketched from memory a thousand times in the dead of night.

The sight of him doesn’t just bring relief. It brings fire. It burns away the fog of the last nineteen years of my life, the quiet desperation, the suffocating regret. It incinerates the timid, insecure girl who let Alina walk all over her, who was too afraid to speak up in class, who loved this brilliant, beautiful boy from a distance but was too terrified to ever tell him.

That girl died on a rainy street in a tangle of steel and shattered glass.

I am not her anymore.

I have the memories, the skills, the knowledge of a thirty-eight-year-old master architect. I know which celebrated designs will fail. I know which unknown theories will revolutionize the field. I know about the flaw in the concrete mixture for the foundation of the Dane Tower.

I look at Travis, laughing on the green, completely unaware of the fate awaiting him.

Not this time.

This time, I will save my parents. This time, I will build the career I was supposed to have.

And this time, Travis Dane, I will save you.