Chapter 1

The factory beauty stole a watch and paraded it around town, and the owner caught her red-handed.

Just as the security office was about to haul her away, her fiancé rushed forward to take the fall.

"I stole the watch and gave it to Josephine. She didn't know. She's innocent."

I was furious that he'd pick this moment to play the hero.

But I didn't want to watch him throw away a hard-won college acceptance letter to become a criminal either.

So I still spoke up and swore that on the day the watch went missing, he and I had been in town buying study guides.

With my testimony, the factory beauty was branded a thief.

To escape paying restitution and taking responsibility, she fled in the middle of the night, lost her footing off a cliff, and died...

My fiancé kept his face calm.

But on the day we set off for college together, he deliberately shoved me toward an oncoming train.

"If you hadn't stuck your nose in and stopped me from saving her, Josephine wouldn't have died!"

"I worked to test into college for her. You got her killed, so you deserve to die too."

There was nothing I could do.

I could only struggle to drag him down with me, watching the train bear closer and closer...

This time around,

I didn't stick my nose in and stop him from playing the hero.

He just didn't know.

Stealing a watch was theft for the factory beauty. For him, it was a capital crime that would cost him his head.

—

"Fine, I admit stealing the watch was wrong. But if you didn't flaunt that cheap watch of yours every single day, why would I ever have stolen it?"

"Don't you know you're not supposed to show off what you've got?"

"I was doing you a favor, giving you a heads-up. That way you won't strut around like this in the future, and next time what gets stolen won't be a watch, it'll be your head."

My fiancé, Harry Matthews, flung my hand away. Right there at the factory gate, in front of all the workers coming and going, he made no attempt to hide anything as he pulled Josephine Lambert into his arms and jabbed a finger at the owner, Louisa Donaldson, cursing her out.

Anyone who understood would say Harry was confessing to the theft. Anyone who didn't would think he was the one who'd been robbed.

I was shaking with rage.

The crowd around me looked at me with pity, feeling sorry for me because I'd caught my childhood-sweetheart fiancé fawning over another woman and had been driven half out of my mind with anger.

I hadn't been.

I was this worked up because I'd realized I'd been reborn.

In my last life it went exactly like this.

Josephine got caught stealing and showing it off, and she was so humiliated and enraged that she cried until she couldn't catch her breath.

And when Harry saw the woman he cherished being called a shameless thief to her face, he decided on the spot that here was his chance to make Josephine think more highly of him. So he rushed forward to take the blame for her.

And even though I was angry, I still cleared him of the thief's name.

But he wasn't grateful. He only thought I was jealous and couldn't stand to see Josephine do well, so he handed over every bit of his savings to her, telling her to pay the owner back.

Josephine took the money and vanished without a trace. Half a month later, word came that she was dead.

Harry was heartbroken. He apologized to me again and again, and for the sake of all our years together, I forgave him. Like a fool, I paid for his train ticket to college. I never imagined that the train ticket I paid for would keep me on those tracks forever...