Reborn to Dodge the Bad Marriage novel Chapter 1

Chapter 1 Two Sisters Reborn

Nora Sinclair had barely opened her eyes when Mandy Sinclair snatched the battered pocket watch off her neck.
Mandy turned the watch over in her hands and murmured, giddy with it, “This watch belongs to me now. I’m the one who marries Adrian Pierce this time. I’m the one who ends up the wife of the richest man in the country.”
Nora understood then that Mandy had come back too.
In her last life, Nora had saved a stranger out in Deerridge and burned with fever for three straight days, and the moment she woke up, the scene had played out exactly like this.
Mandy had been holding that same watch, and she had sneered down at her, “You sell yourself cheap. You wreck your own health saving some broke nobody, and now he’s crawling back to repay you by marrying you. Go on and follow him to the factory floor.
“Meanwhile I just accepted a proposal from the Westons. I’ll be married into that family within the month, and I’ll be the richest woman alive. Money I can’t spend in ten lifetimes, jewelry I can’t wear in a hundred, mansions I’ll never finish walking through. Everything, and it never runs out!”
In that life, she got exactly what she wanted. She married Julian Weston, heir to the first family of the Big Four, and one month after the wedding Julian dropped dead.
The truth came out afterward. A house like the Westons had only reached down to a small family like the Sinclairs because Julian was dying and the family wanted him married before the end, with an heir out of him if there was any time left. Without that, no Sinclair would ever have gotten through the front gate.
After Julian died, the Westons paid Mandy one million dollars a month on the condition that she never remarry.
Widowhood bored Mandy fast. She kept a pretty young man on the side, got thrown out of the Weston house, and he cleaned out every cent she had before he pushed her into hostess work and paid videos.
Nora, meanwhile, had married into the Pierce family on the strength of a life she saved and a pocket watch that proved it.
When the Westons tore themselves apart and went bankrupt, she was the one who walked Adrian Pierce through swallowing their holdings whole, and he rose overnight into the richest man in the country.
From that day on, his parents doted on her like a daughter of their own blood, and her husband treated her like a queen he had been waiting his whole life to spoil.
Half the internet envied her and the other half hated her for it.
Of everyone, Mandy had envied her the loudest. “Nora, everything just falls into your lap. You go out to the middle of nowhere and come back having saved a billionaire. You don’t lift a finger at home and the designer bags and the diamonds just show up at your door.
“And Adrian worships you. He’d die for you. He doesn’t so much as glance at another woman.
“Look at me. I never even saw Julian Weston’s face.
“If I’d been the one who saved Adrian back then, I’d have that life too. I’d have a better one. I’d give him children, a whole houseful of them, instead of sitting there barren and hogging the title of the richest man’s wife like you do!”
All Mandy ever saw was the shine on the surface. She never knew that the gentle, devoted husband everyone admired took off that mask at home, and underneath it lived a paranoid, possessive man who used his fists.
It started at the wedding, when a boy from her high school got drunk and said he had always liked her, that he would come take her away if she ever stopped being happy. That night, Adrian beat her until she could not stand.
He held her grandmother over her, and the Sinclair family, and every friend she had, and he made it clear there would be no divorce. She never dared expose him. She never dared say a word to anyone.
Now Mandy was racing to claim that suffocating life for herself, and Nora could not have asked for anything better.
Nora played it like she had only just surfaced, and let a little longing bleed into her voice. “Ace gave me that watch. He said he’d come find me.”
Mandy’s fist closed hard around the watch and her glare turned vicious. “That watch was always mine. I’m the one who saved Ace. You think you can fight me for it? Say one more word and I’ll have Dad cut off your grandmother’s treatment.”
Perfect. That was the exact sentence Nora had been waiting to hear.