The Girl in the Wardrobe

Hayden Shaw came to St. Jude’s Home for Children to choose a sister.
Every other girl scrambled to be seen, praying they’d be the one.
I was the only one hidden away, fast asleep in a wardrobe.

I thought I could escape it this time. Escape the fate of becoming a Shaw, and eventually, becoming Hayden Shaw’s wife. I thought I could finally live a life that was my own, free and happy.

But when I woke up, the first thing I saw was Hayden, standing before the open wardrobe door.
He smiled and asked me, "Cora, how would you like to come home with me?"

1

When Hayden Shaw’s face swam into view, my first thought was that I was still trapped in the nightmare.

It wasn't until the director’s sharp voice cut through the haze that I knew it was real. “Cora, what are you doing sleeping in there?”

The fog in my head cleared. This was happening.

Seeing me frozen, the director, Mrs. Davison, reached in and pulled me out of the wardrobe. The smell of mothballs and old wool clung to me. She straightened my collar, her fingers rough, and then nudged me forward, towards the Shaws. “You were asleep. Mr. Shaw was kind enough to ask us not to wake you.” Her voice was tight with an unspoken reprimand. “We’ve all been waiting for you.”

Hayden stood just in front of his parents, a faint, unreadable smile on his face as he looked at me. He was different from the cold, distant Hayden I remembered. Softer. Younger.

He spoke first. “Hi, Cora.”

For some reason, hearing my name from his lips felt deeply, unnervingly strange. I frowned, my gaze dropping to the floor to avoid his. A question burned in my mind: they could have picked anyone else. Why wait for me?

“Waiting for me? For what?”

Mrs. Davison crouched down, her usual stern expression replaced by a rare, strained smile. “They want to adopt you, Cora. You’re going to have a family. A mother, a father… and a brother.”

I think she was trying to be happy for me. For any child at St. Jude’s, being chosen was like winning the lottery.

But Mrs. Davison didn’t know my secret. I’d lived this life before.

I knew Hayden Shaw was coming today. That’s precisely why I’d hidden in the wardrobe.

“Cora, sweetheart, won’t you come home with us?” Mrs. Shaw took my hand. Her touch was soft, her voice gentle. “Hayden has always wanted a little sister. You could be his sister.”

The scene was a perfect, horrifying replica of the last time. The past flickered through my mind like a broken film projector.

I snatched my hand back. I looked up, not at them, but at the director. “Mrs. Davison, I don’t want to be adopted by them.”

A collective, sharp intake of breath filled the room. Everyone was stunned.

Hayden’s reaction was the strongest. His smile vanished, his brow furrowing. “Why?”

“Because I don’t want to be your sister.”

Despite my rejection, no anger appeared on his face. Instead, his voice became even gentler, laced with an unnerving thread of indulgence. “Then don’t be my sister. Just come home with the Shaws. Live with us. Is that okay?”

Mrs. Davison gave my sleeve a sharp tug, a silent, desperate plea. It didn't stop me from refusing him again.

“No.”

I thought that would be the end of it. But when the director, flustered, asked the Shaws if they’d like to see the other girls, Hayden’s voice rang out, loud and clear. “Mom. I want her.”

He looked straight at me. “Only her. She’s the one who looks the most like my sister.”

2

Last time, that was the reason he’d given, too. I looked like his dead sister.

Back then, when I learned I was chosen, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. I was taken to the Shaw’s sprawling estate, given a new name—Cora Shaw—and my very own room in their enormous house. I didn’t care that the room wasn’t truly mine. I was just grateful to have it.

“Girls from the system can be… unpolished,” Mrs. Shaw had said. “Their manners aren’t fit for our world.”

So, I shed my old self like a snake sheds its skin, molding myself into someone I no longer recognized. Mrs. Shaw was exacting. I was forced to practice the piano for hours upon hours every day. Even when my teacher insisted I had no natural talent, Mrs. Shaw would sit with me, a constant, smiling presence.

But you can’t force a flower to bloom in barren soil.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I still can’t get it right,” I’d apologize, my fingers aching.

And every time, she would look at me with that same indulgent expression and soothe me. “It’s alright, darling. As long as you keep trying, you’ll be wonderful one day.”

It was much later that I learned her deceased daughter had loved the piano. All of Mrs. Shaw's affection was just her projecting a ghost onto me. I was a stand-in.

I didn’t care.

A drowning fish doesn’t question the purity of the water; it only gasps for a breath. Her love was my water. I would take it, clean or not.

I tried harder at the piano, harder at pleasing her. We grew closer, our relationship blurring into something that felt real.

Until Hayden’s engagement party. He was drugged. I was the one who stumbled into his room.

When Mr. Shaw found us, the shock sent him into a fatal collapse.

Mrs. Shaw slapped me across the face, her eyes blazing with a hatred I’d never seen. “I should never have brought you into this house.”

Hayden just watched me, his expression unreadable. But I knew. I knew he was regretting it, too. Regretting the day he chose me to be his sister.

“I don’t know what happened,” I pleaded, my voice raw. “I didn’t drug him. I swear.”

No one believed me.

Later, for years, during every betrayal, every public humiliation in our forced marriage, he would sneer, “You drugged your own brother to marry him. Don’t you dare play the victim now. This is your karma.”

Hayden hated me. He took pleasure in shaming me, in making sure everyone in our circle knew I was beneath him. They all placed bets on how long our marriage would last.

“A year, tops,” they’d whisper. “The second that baby is born, he’ll kick her to the curb.”

They were all wrong. Hayden and I were tangled together for nineteen years. Even after I died, the words carved on my tombstone were: Beloved Wife of Hayden Shaw.

…

“Cora, tell me. Why don’t you want to be adopted by the Shaws?”

After his parents left, Mrs. Davison called me into her office. I was silent for a long time before offering a weak lie. “I don’t want to leave you and everyone here.”

She sighed, a heavy, tired sound, and urged me to reconsider. I knew she meant well. She wanted a better life for me.

But I refused to walk that path again. I would not have anything to do with Hayden Shaw.

That night, a fire broke out, and all my plans went up in smoke.

3

“Did you set the fire?”

I stared at him from my hospital cot, my voice cold and flat.

“No,” Hayden said, his denial swift and earnest. “The fire department investigated. It was old wiring.” He let out a dry, self-deprecating laugh. “Cora, you think I’m a monster.”

In this life, we’d only met a handful of times, yet he spoke to me with a disturbing familiarity.

“I just want to help you,” he said, his voice low. “If you agree to come home with me, I’ll cover all of Mrs. Davison’s medical bills.”

She had been badly burned trying to get us all out.

I let out a cold laugh. “Taking advantage of a tragedy. Does that make you a good person?”

He didn’t try to defend himself. He just said, “Cora, you don’t have to be my sister. You can just be a foster child. Living with us.”

He was persuasive, relentless in his compromise. But it only made me more suspicious. “Why are you so desperate to have me at your house?”

“My mother… she’s been missing my sister a lot lately. And you look so much like her,” Hayden said. “I thought bringing you home might comfort her.”

I was only half-convinced. His behavior was too strange, too intense. I pressed him. “Is that all?”

He hesitated for a fraction of a second before nodding. “That’s all.”

I didn’t want anything to do with him, but Mrs. Davison was lying in a hospital bed, her life hanging in the balance. I had no choice.

On the drive to the Shaw estate, Hayden kept trying to talk to me, but I remained silent, staring out the window. He must have sensed my hostility, because his tone softened, became almost pleading.

“The Shaws can give you a better life. It’s better than the group home, no matter how you look at it,” he said. “Cora, don’t be angry with me. I’m doing this for your own good.”

I’m doing this for your own good…

He’d said that in our last life, too. After hating me for more than a decade, his attitude had softened in my final days. But by then, the cancer was untreatable. My only companion was a small stray cat I’d taken in.

One day, on a whim, Hayden came to visit me at the villa. The first thing he did was have someone throw the cat out.

I’d asked him, my voice weak, “Why?”

He’d looked down at me, his expression cool. “I’m doing this for your own good.”

I knew then what it meant. It was never about my well-being. It was an excuse he used to satisfy his own selfish desires, his need for control. Or maybe it was just another way to torture me. He’d always been like that. Whatever I cherished, he destroyed.

…

As the car pulled up to the house, I saw Mrs. Shaw waiting at the front door. Hayden had called ahead. A room on the second floor had already been prepared.

“Cora, this will be your room,” she said, taking my hand with a cloying familiarity. “Do you like it?”

I looked down at our joined hands for a moment before pulling mine away. I was no longer the desperate, love-starved girl from my past life.

“Mrs. Shaw,” I said, my voice even. “This was your daughter’s room, wasn’t it?” I gestured to the perfectly preserved space. “You’ve kept all her things. You clearly treasure them.” I met her eyes. “If I stayed in here, I might accidentally break something. I wouldn’t want to cause you any pain.”

I finished, “I saw there’s a guest room downstairs. I’ll stay there.”

Mrs. Shaw looked at me, about to argue. “But…”

“Mom,” Hayden cut in. “If Cora wants to stay downstairs, just have the housekeeper prepare it.”

I glanced at him, the one who was supposedly speaking up for me. He had no idea. The real reason I refused to stay on the second floor was because his bedroom was right next door.

In our past life, before the engagement party, we’d had a harmonious relationship, or so I thought. I was a teenager with a crush. I remember Mrs. Shaw asking me, “Cora, what kind of boys do you like?”

I’d looked over at Hayden, flushed and sweaty from his morning run, and smiled. “Someone like my brother.”

That innocent, offhand remark later became evidence in the trial of my character. Proof that I had plotted to drug my own brother. Every time I tried to defend myself—“I didn’t drug you”—Hayden would grab me, his fingers digging into my neck. “You told my mother you liked me when you were sixteen,” he’d hiss. “You were obsessed. You drugged me to force my hand, and now you don’t have the guts to admit it?”

4

Perhaps it was being back in this house, but that night, my dreams were filled with memories of the life before.

In my final days, my oncologist had suggested, “You shouldn’t be alone all the time. Call your family, your friends. Have them visit.”

“I don’t have any family,” I had told her.

As for friends… my best friend used to be Hayden’s fiancée, Scarlett Jensen. She returned to the country five years into my marriage with Hayden. He picked her up from the airport himself and threw a lavish ‘welcome home’ party for her.

Someone deliberately recorded a video at that party and sent it to me. It showed the two of them in a dark corner, locked in a passionate kiss. It was only a few seconds long, but I watched it on a loop all night.

That was the night I made a choice. I gave up on our second child, and I asked Hayden for a divorce.

He asked me, “On what grounds?”

I showed him the video. “Hayden, I know you were forced to marry me. But Scarlett is back now, and it looks like she’s forgiven you. Let’s divorce. We can go our separate ways.”

I had asked for a divorce many times before, and he had always refused. I thought, with Scarlett’s return, he would finally agree.

But Hayden just tore up the papers I’d prepared and deleted the video from my phone.

…

“Cora? Cora?”

I woke with a gasp, my hand lashing out, connecting with a sharp crack against Hayden’s cheek.

He looked at me, a boy’s face, his eyes wide with something that looked like hurt. “I heard you crying from the hall,” he said softly. “I just came in to check on you.”

He turned to leave, then paused at the door. “You should get up. We’re going to be late for school.”

Just like last time, the Shaws had enrolled me in Hayden’s high school.

As I followed him into the classroom, someone called out, “Hey, Hayden, who’s that?”

He introduced me. “This is Cora. She’s staying with my family for now.”

A flicker of memory. In our past life, before everything went wrong, he always introduced me with pride. “This is my sister, Cora Shaw.”

I looked at Hayden, standing just a foot away from me, and a strange realization dawned. He wasn’t the same as the boy I remembered from my first life. But he wasn’t the cruel, vengeful man he became, either. He was… something else.

My heart hammered against my ribs. A terrifying thought began to form.

“Hayden.”

“Hayden.”

Another voice called his name at the exact same moment as mine.

He glanced at me, then looked past me, towards the classroom door. I turned to follow his gaze.

It was Scarlett Jensen.

“Hayden, wait for me after school. I need to talk to you,” she said, her eyes fixed on him. Only then did she seem to notice me standing beside him. Her expression soured instantly.

She sized me up, a quick, dismissive scan from head to toe. “So you’re the girl staying at the Shaws’?”

She was my best friend in my past life. I knew her tells. And right now, the hostility rolling off her was unmistakable. This was completely different. Back then, when Scarlett learned I was Hayden’s sister, she had looped her arm through mine, called me Cora, and welcomed me into her inner circle.

Now, she looked at me the way she did the very last time I saw her. It had been an ugly confrontation. I had asked her, “The security footage shows only you and I went into Hayden’s room that night. I didn’t drug him. So it was you, wasn’t it?” I couldn't understand it. She loved him so much. Why would she ruin their own engagement party?

“Her name is Cora,” Hayden answered for me.

Scarlett forced a tight smile, then said nothing more.

Throughout the morning classes, I could feel her eyes on my back. As much as it unsettled me, I forced myself to ignore her, to focus on the words in the textbook in front of me.

5

In my past life, I was a terrible student. Mrs. Shaw never cared. In fact, the worse my grades were, the happier she seemed. “Cora is becoming more and more like my little girl,” she would say. “She never cared for books either.”

A parent who truly loves their child plans for their future. What mother wishes for her daughter to be nothing more than a beautiful, empty shell? In the end, she never saw me as her daughter. I was just a toy, a comfort object to ease her grief.

This time, I refused to live that way again. I wouldn't spend the first half of my life as a substitute for a dead girl, and the second half as a useless, gilded canary, wasting away in a cage. Education was my only way out.

But it wasn't easy. Frustrated by my inability to understand the material, I pushed my chair back and stood up.

Hayden, who had been talking with some friends, noticed the movement immediately. He turned to me. “Where are you going?”

“The restroom,” I snapped, my patience worn thin.

I remembered the girls' restroom being perpetually crowded during breaks, but today, it was eerily empty. The moment I pushed the door open, I knew something was wrong.

A group of girls inside all turned to look at me in unison. The one closest to me was Scarlett.

She dropped a cigarette butt to the floor, grinding it out with her shoe. She glanced at another girl, crumpled on the wet floor and soaked with grimy water, before turning her attention to me.

“Just messing around,” Scarlett said with a lazy smile. “You’re not going to tell Hayden, are you?”

I looked from the cigarette to the girl on the floor. I realized then that I had never known Scarlett at all. I never knew she smoked, or that she was a bully.

After a moment, I said, “Hayden and I aren’t that close.”

“Really?” she asked, though her expression had already relaxed. “I thought you were living with him.”

I met her gaze directly. “Living in the same house doesn’t mean we’re close.”

Scarlett nodded. “Good.” With that, she and her friends filed out.

Once they were gone, I looked at the girl on the floor. After a moment, I walked past her into a stall. When I came out, she was standing at the utility sink, her back to me. She was only in a thin camisole, washing her school-issued button-down shirt under the faucet.

Hearing the door, she quickly wrung out the shirt and slipped the damp fabric back on. Head down, she made a dash for the exit.

As she passed me, I reached out and grabbed her arm.

The girl looked up at me, her eyes wide with confusion. We stared at each other for a long moment before I remembered her name. Leah.

I took off my own cardigan and pushed it into her hands. “Your shirt is wet. Wear this.”

Leah ducked her head, mumbling, “No, it’s okay.”

“It’s see-through,” I said bluntly. “You can see your camisole right through it.”

Her ears turned a deep shade of red. She clutched her arms across her chest, hesitating for a long moment before finally taking my cardigan.

As Leah went into a stall to change, I let out a quiet breath of relief. I wasn’t the type to get involved. But I remembered her. In my last life, not long after I transferred here, Leah had jumped from the roof of the school. The official explanation was family problems and academic pressure. But seeing this now, I suspected there was more to her story. It was a life… a young life.

“Thank you.” Leah’s voice was soft when she came out, now wearing my sweater.

The words “you’re welcome” were on the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed them. An idea was forming. “You get good grades, right?” I asked her. I remembered that before she died, she had been first in our year.

She looked surprised, then nodded. “They’re okay.”

“Leah,” I said, glancing at the cardigan she was wearing. “I’ll lend you my sweater. In return, you can tutor me.” I didn't give her a chance to refuse. “After the next pop quiz, they’re rearranging the seating chart. We’ll be desk mates. It’ll be easier for you to help me.”

Leah hesitated for a long time before finally agreeing.

After school, Hayden insisted I ride home with him. The moment I got in the car, Scarlett ran up to the window.

“Hayden, can we talk?”

I had no interest in their drama and tried to tune them out. But the parking lot was quiet, and Scarlett’s voice was high and emotional, carrying on the wind.

It drifted right into the car.

“Is it because of her? Is Cora why you’re breaking up with me?” she demanded. “Hayden, we’ve been together for so long. The minute she shows up, you end things. What other reason could there be?”

Hayden’s voice was weary. “It’s not about anyone else, Scarlett. I just… I suddenly realized that what I feel for you isn’t romantic. I’ve always seen you as a sister.”

In that instant, everything clicked into place. I finally understood why Scarlett had been watching me all day, why she saw me as a threat.

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