Chapter 1: The Return

It had been two years since I regressed.

Two quiet years where nothing truly changed, and yet everything felt different.

The day Casey came home, the Caspian residence was filled with celebration. My parents were genuinely happy. Their smiles were wide, their voices warm, and the servants moved with an energy I hadn’t seen in a long time.

Still, beneath it all, there was something awkward in the air.

Casey stood in the center of it, polite and calm, like someone afraid of taking up too much space. He had grown up in a small family. A normal one. And when the truth was discovered, that he was not their biological child, everything changed for him.

They didn’t hesitate.

They contacted the Caspian family and accepted fifty thousand dollars as compensation for raising him. Not a day was wasted. The exchange was clean and efficient, like a transaction instead of a farewell.

I felt no sympathy for them. At least they weren’t my real parents.

My adopted parents once told me that I was born to a single woman. She died during childbirth. They didn’t know who my biological father was.

I never asked about him. I hated him. I hated the man who let my mother give birth alone. The man who wasn’t there when she died on the same day I was born. How irresponsible could someone be, to abandon both life and death so easily?

Casey, on the other hand, was nothing like I had expected.

He wasn’t pretentious. He didn’t act entitled or bitter. He was kind in a quiet way, gentle without trying to be. From the very beginning, he treated me as his real brother.

Legally, I was.

By blood, I wasn’t.

But Casey never made that distinction.

He was brilliant too. Always at the top of his class. So it was only natural that he entered the best university in the country. The same one as me.

Everything seemed normal after that. The household settled down. Casey adapted, my parents still the loving ones. My parents tried their best to bridge the gap between the past and the present.

Only I felt out of place.

I moved through my own life like an audience member watching a familiar play. I already knew the scenes. The conflicts of everything. The ending of the story.

I didn’t know if it was because I remembered the story of this novel, or because I had already lived this life once and failed so completely.

Maybe it was both.

My parents noticed the change in me. They asked if something was wrong. If I was sick. If university was stressing me out.

I told them I was just tired.

That wasn’t a lie. I was really tired of knowing what would happen.

Tired of remembering mistakes I hadn’t made yet. Tired of carrying guilt that no one else could see. Most of all, I was tired of wanting nothing.

I didn’t want love.

I didn’t want ambition.

I didn’t even want redemption anymore.

I just wanted to sit quietly in the background and let the story pass without touching me again.

But stories like this never allow that.

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