The Girl Who Died and Came Back for Her Final Exam

§PROLOGUE

The end came on a Tuesday, under the indifferent grey sky of Oakhaven, Pennsylvania.

Ten years.

Ten years I had given them, and in return, they gave me the curb.

The contents of my life—a few worn-out clothes, a handful of books—lay scattered in a pathetic pile on the wet pavement, tossed from the front door of the house my parents had left me.

My uncle, Keith Ingram, stood on the porch, his face a mask of false sorrow.

“It’s what your grandmother wanted, Fallon. Her will was very clear.”

His will, not hers.

His wife, my Aunt Brenda, stood beside him, a venomous smirk playing on her lips.

“Don’t look so surprised, you little leech. Did you really think you’d get a penny?”

And then there was my cousin, Marissa, stepping out of a sleek, new car—a car bought with money that should have been mine.

She glided towards me, wrapped in a cashmere coat, smelling of expensive perfume and victory.

She laughed, a sound as sharp and cruel as breaking glass.

“You’re an idiot, Fallon. You gave up a scholarship, a future, everything… to be a nursemaid to an old woman who never loved you. And for what?”

She gestured to my pathetic pile of belongings.

“For this.”

The words didn't just sting; they hollowed me out, leaving nothing but a cold, echoing void.

I wandered the streets in a daze, the icy winter wind cutting through my thin sweater.

Ten years of emptying bedpans, of cooking and cleaning, of enduring insults and casual cruelties.

Ten years of being their unpaid servant, all for the promise of an inheritance that was a lie from the very beginning.

I was twenty-eight, but I looked forty.

My hands were rough, my back ached, and my spirit was a shattered thing.

A truck’s horn blared, a sudden, violent sound that ripped through my stupor.

I looked up.

Two blindingly bright headlights rushed towards me, swallowing the grey world in a blaze of white.

My last thought was not of fear, or of regret.

It was of a burning, all-consuming rage.

If only I had another chance.

§01

Gasping—

I shot upright, the stale, recycled air of the Oakhaven Community Center filling my lungs in a painful rush.

My heart hammered against my ribs, a wild drumbeat of confusion and terror.

The world swam back into focus.

The sticky vinyl chair beneath me.

The low murmur of anxious teenagers around me.

A large banner hanging crookedly on the wall: WELCOME, NORTHGATE ENDOWMENT EXAM CANDIDATES. GOOD LUCK!

The Northgate Exam.

My hand flew to my face. The skin was smooth, unlined.

I looked down at my hands. They were not the calloused, work-worn hands of a twenty-eight-year-old caretaker. They were the hands of a teenager.

My hands at eighteen.

The world tilted on its axis.

This wasn't a memory. This wasn't a dream.

It was real.

I was back.

Back on the single most important day of my life.

The day my life had veered off a cliff into a decade of darkness.

A faint vibration came from the pocket of my jeans.

Slowly, as if in a trance, I pulled out the old, cheap smartphone.

The screen lit up.

INCOMING CALL: GRANDMA.

The name stared at me, a harbinger of doom.

Last time, I had answered it.

Her voice, laced with fake panic and pain, had poured through the speaker.

*“Fallon, help me! I’ve fallen in the bathroom… I can’t get up… the pain, oh, the pain!”*

I had abandoned the exam. The single greatest opportunity of my life—a full scholarship to any university, a ticket out of Oakhaven, a future.

I had thrown it all away to run to her side.

For a lie.

A lie that had cost me everything.

The phone continued to buzz, a relentless, venomous insect in my palm.

This time, I knew. I knew it was a setup. A cruel, calculated trap designed by my uncle to keep me chained to their family, to keep me from the inheritance they had already stolen.

My thumb hovered over the green answer button.

Every instinct, every scarred memory, screamed at me.

*Don’t.*

With a deliberate, steady movement, I pressed the side button.

The screen went dark. The buzzing stopped.

Silence.

I slipped the phone into my backpack, zipped it shut, and placed it in the temporary storage locker.

The final call for the exam’s afternoon session echoed through the hall.

I stood up, my legs trembling slightly, not from fear, but from a new, electrifying power.

I was not the naive, kind-hearted girl who had walked into this building this morning.

I was a ghost with a decade of scores to settle.

And my revenge began now.

I walked into the exam hall.

§02

One hundred and fifty minutes.

Two and a half hours that I had relived in my mind a thousand times over the last ten years.

In my previous life, on nights when the hopelessness was a physical weight on my chest, I would download the exam paper from that year.

Download the Novellia app, Search 【 363037 】reads the whole book.

MotoNovel

App Store

Google Play

Novellia

App Store

Google Play