Eva's POV
I'm going. Again.
My body is being ripped apart from the inside. I'm yelling, but the sound doesn't feel like it's coming from me. Bright lights blind me. People in masks shout words I can't understand through the pain.
"She's hemorrhaging!"
"Blood pressure dropping!"
"We're losing her!"
Then—a baby cries.
The pain stops like someone flipped a switch. My chest heaves as I gasp for air. A nurse leans over me, her face swimming in my blurry vision.
"Mrs. Thornfield," she says, smiling. "You have a beautiful daughter."
She puts something warm and squirming in my arms. A baby. A tiny, red-faced, screaming baby wrapped in a pink blanket.
I stare down at the baby, my brain stuttering. This doesn't make sense. I was in a car crash in Barcelona. Metal and glass and blood. I was dying on a rain-soaked street, thinking about my mom, about Dominic, about all the mistakes I'd made.
I wasn't pregnant. I've never been pregnant.
So whose baby is this?
"Congratulations," another nurse says, smiling. "She's perfect. Eight pounds, two ounces."
My hands—except they're not my hands—shake as I hold the baby. These fingers are too thin, too pale. The nails are painted a soft pink I'd never choose. And on the left hand, there's a diamond ring so massive it could pay off school loans.
I force myself to look down at my body under the hospital blanket. It's not mine. The arms are thinner. The skin is lighter. Everything feels wrong, like I'm wearing someone else's skin.
"How are you feeling, Mrs. Thornfield?" A doctor emerges beside the bed, checking something on a monitor. "You gave us quite a scare. Your heart stopped for forty-three seconds." Mrs. Thornfield?
My throat is dry. "Where—" My voice comes out raspy. "Where am I?"
The doctor frowns. "You're at Manhattan Presbyterian Hospital, in the private maternity wing. You just delivered your daughter." He leans closer, shining a light in my eyes. "Are you feeling confusion? Sometimes blood loss can cause temporary confusion."
Manhattan. I'm in New York? But I was in Barcelona. I was driving to the airport. There was a truck, and—
The baby in my arms starts crying harder, and something inside me shifts. Some urge I didn't know I had makes me pull her closer, rock her gently. She quiets a little, her tiny hand wrapping around my finger.
"She knows her mama," the nurse says warmly.
But I'm not her mama. I don't even know who I am anymore.
The next few hours blur together. Nurses come and go. They help me feed the baby—though I have no idea what I'm doing. They check my vitals, give me medications, tell me I need to rest after such a difficult birth.
I go through the steps like a robot, my mind spinning.
When everyone finally goes and I'm alone with the sleeping baby in the bassinet next to my bed, I force myself out of bed. My legs shake. Everything hurts in ways that confirm I just gave birth, even though I know—I know—I didn't.
The private bathroom is huge, all marble and gold equipment. Nothing like the tiny flat bathroom I had in Barcelona. I flip on the light and stumble to the mirror.
A stranger stares back at me.
She's beautiful—the kind of beautiful that goes on magazine covers. Honey-blonde hair, even messy from labor. Perfect bone form. Pale blue eyes that look cold even when wide with shock. This woman probably never had a pimple in her life.
But it's not me. It's not Eva Hart with her messy brown hair and warm brown eyes and the tiny scar above her eyebrow from falling off a bike when she was seven.
I touch the mirror, and the stranger touches it too. I open my mouth, and so does she.
"What's happening to me?" I whisper.
The stranger's lips move with mine, making words in my voice coming from her throat.
I'm shaking now, gripping the sink to stay standing. This is impossible. This doesn't happen in real life. People don't just wake up in different bodies like some weird movie story.
But I can feel it. This body is real. The soreness, the fatigue, the way my heartbeat thuds against ribs that aren't mine—it's all real.
I died in that car crash. I know I did. I felt it. The collision, the pain, the darkness closing in.
So what is this? Heaven? Hell? Some kind of justice for running away from everyone I loved?
Back in the hospital room, I look for anything that might explain what's happening. There's a brand purse on the chair—expensive leather with gold hardware. Inside, I find a phone with a broken screen and a wallet stuffed with credit cards.
All the cards have the same name: Celeste Thornfield.
My hands go numb.
I pull out the driver's license with shaking fingers. The stranger from the mirror stares back at me from the picture, along with a name, an address, a birthdate that makes her twenty-seven years old.
Celeste Thornfield. That's who I am now. That's whose body I'm wearing like a borrowed coat.
The baby—Lily, according to the hospital tag on her tiny wrist—makes a small sound in her sleep. I walk over to the bassinet on habit, looking down at her scrunched-up little face.
If I'm Celeste, then this is my kid. Except she's not. She can't be.
Unless—
The phone in my hand buzzes. A text message lights up the cracked screen.
I almost drop it when I see the name at the top of the message.
Dominic.
My Dominic. The man I left three years ago. The man I loved and wronged and thought I'd never see again.
But that's impossible. Why would Dominic be texting Celeste Thornfield's phone?
My heart pounds as I read the message: "The nurse says you and the child lived. I'll be there tomorrow to take you both home. Don't expect me to pretend this changes anything between us."
The words are cold. Clinical. Nothing like the warm, passionate man I knew.
But it's his number. I know it by heart—I've looked at it a thousand times in the last three years, my thumb hovering over the call button, never brave enough to press it.
With shaking hands, I google "Celeste Thornfield."
The search results load, and my entire world tilts sideways.
The first picture is a wedding photo. Celeste—this body I'm wearing—stands in a flowing white gown next to a guy in a black tuxedo.
Dominic. My Dominic.
The title reads: "Tech Billionaire Dominic Thornfield Marries Socialite Celeste Ashford in Private Ceremony."
The date is from eighteen months ago. One year after I left him. One year after I broke his heart and ran away to Spain.
I'm not just in a stranger's body.
I'm in the body of Dominic's wife.
The phone slips from my hand and clatters to the floor. I can't breathe. Can't think. Can't understand what this means.
I died and came back as my ex-boyfriend's wife. The man I loved and abandoned is married to the woman whose body I now inhabit. And we have a baby together.
Lily starts crying again, her wails filling the quiet room. I pick her up naturally, holding her close as my mind races.
Tomorrow, Dominic is coming here. He's going to look at me with Celeste's face and expect his cold, withdrawn wife. He has no idea that inside this body is the woman who destroyed him three years ago.
"What do I do?" I whisper to Lily, who just cries harder. "What am I supposed to do?"
The door to the hospital room opens. A nurse pokes her head in, smiling. "Everything okay in here, Mrs. Thornfield?"
I want to scream that nothing is okay. That I'm not Mrs. Thornfield. That I'm Eva Hart, and I don't know how I got here or why this is happening or how to fix it.
But I can't say any of that. Because nobody would believe me.
So I force a smile onto Celeste's face and nod. "We're fine. Just getting to know each other."
The nurse leaves. I'm alone again with a baby who isn't mine and a life I never selected.
And tomorrow, I have to face the only man I've ever loved—knowing he'll see a stranger when he looks at me.
I walk to the window, bouncing Lily gently. New York City glitters below, all lights and life and potential. Somewhere out there, Dominic is probably working late in his office, building his empire, thinking his wife just gave birth to his daughter.
He has no idea his world is about to get a lot more difficult.
Neither do I.
Because as I stare at my reflection in the dark window—Celeste's face with Eva's soul trapped inside—one terrifying thought comes to me: If I'm here, in Celeste's body, then where is Celeste?
And more importantly—why?