Unbreakable Obsession

1 Camera flashes blinded me as I lifted the microphone. There he was. The man I had been married to for five years, standing right in front of me, though he only saw another nameless entertainment reporter. I stared at the script glowing on my phone screen and forced myself to ask the cruelest question imaginable. “How are things progressing with your new leading lady, William?” He took his girlfriend’s hand, lifting it high for the sea of flashing lenses to catch the sparkle of their rings. “Everything is perfect. Is that the headline you wanted?” A sick joke. He had to remember the truth. The custom band catching the light wasn’t just set with crushed diamonds. It was set with my ashes. My fingers trembled so violently I nearly dropped the microphone. It had only been ten days since the old “me” died. My body hadn’t even gone completely cold before the ring holding my cremated remains was slipped onto another woman’s finger. Yes, I came back. I woke up in the body of a journalist I had never met in my life. A girl who had drowned, only to breathe again with my soul trapped inside her ribs. We shared nothing in common, except perhaps the shape of our eyes. I looked at my former husband, Hollywood’s current golden boy, William. Then I looked at the flawlessly styled actress glowing beside him, Serena. My stomach pitched into a violent roll. Sickening. It was enough to make me want to vomit right on the red carpet. Serena’s face was the picture of pure, unfiltered bliss. She probably had absolutely no idea she was wearing a dead woman’s remains like a shiny little trophy. I could not even finish the questions on my phone. My vision blurred. The glitz and glamour around me suddenly smelled like rotting flowers. Ignoring the weird looks from the camera crews, I shoved my way through the crowd and sprinted to the restroom. I gripped the edge of the porcelain sink, gasping for air. The cold water splashing against my face was a sharp reminder that I was actually alive. I was no longer the dying woman from my past life. I wasn’t trapped in a sterile clinic halfway across the world, staring blankly at the ceiling with my head shaved, completely numb from the painkillers, waiting to become a lifeless shell. That was when I finally understood. William’s frozen heart would never beat for me again. I was just fixing my makeup when the restroom door swung open. I recognized her instantly. Serena. The exact catalyst that finally pushed me to sign those divorce papers. I still remembered my last birthday. The first notification that popped up on my phone wasn’t a sweet message from my husband. It was a trending gossip alert. William and Serena officially confirm their relationship. That was the exact day I planned to tell him I was leaving the country to get treatment for stomach cancer. He never came home that night. “Are you okay? You looked really pale out there.” Serena tilted her head, her big eyes swimming with fake concern. I wasn’t used to this polite version of her. Then again, I was no longer the annoying wife standing in her way. I wasn’t the woman she once sneered at, telling me the unloved one was the real homewrecker. I shook my head, pretending to casually admire her hand. “That is a gorgeous ring. Custom pieces like that must take forever to make, right?” Of course it was gorgeous. I designed it myself. “Oh, I know! William said it took him ages to get it perfect. He gave it to me the day before yesterday and just held my hand, staring at it for the longest time.” Serena giggled, radiating sugary sweetness. I almost laughed out loud. I shouldn’t have asked. Knowing the truth just made the nausea worse. So William hired a jeweler to forge my ashes into a ring on the exact day of my memorial service, and then gifted it to his mistress the very next morning. I really wanted to crack his skull open and see what kind of twisted garbage was rotting inside his brain. Giving your dead ex-wife’s ashes to your new girlfriend. Talk about out with the old, in with the new. I blew the red carpet assignment. My boss cornered me in the office, threatening to fire me if I messed up the next exclusive. And of course, the folder he tossed on my desk had William’s face on it. It was supposed to be an intimate lifestyle feature, so the interview was scheduled at his private estate. The house that used to be my home. I stood on the porch, feeling completely hollow. It had only been a couple of weeks, yet I was standing at my own front door as an absolute stranger. Before I could even knock, the door swung open. It wasn’t the Hollywood star greeting the press. It was Serena. “Oh, it’s you! The reporter from the premiere. William didn’t even tell me he had a press junket today. I’ll just head out and leave you guys to it.” Her casual ownership of the space snapped me back to reality. I was not the lady of the house anymore. I had absolutely zero connection to this property. William jogged into the foyer holding a whisk. For years I had begged him to learn how to cook with me, and he always refused. Turns out, he just needed a different woman to ask him. I swallowed the bitter taste in my mouth, lowered my head, and followed my camera crew inside. Nothing had changed. The decor was exactly the same. Some of my old trinkets were still sitting on the shelves. I honestly thought he would have burned everything. He burned all the handwritten letters and gifts I left him on the day of my funeral, after all. The interview was a disaster. William kept staring directly at me, but his eyes were completely out of focus. He was looking through me. By the eighth time I had to fake a cough to snap him out of his trance, I lost my patience. “William, if you could just cooperate with the questions, we can wrap this up and get out of your hair.” He blinked hard, like a man waking up from a heavy sleep, and rubbed the back of his neck. He always did that when he felt awkward. “Sorry. It is just… you look a lot like someone I used to know, Miss…” He trailed off. Right. My new name. “Cici,” I supplied smoothly. “My colleagues say I look a bit like Serena from certain angles. You must be missing your girlfriend already. Let’s speed this up so you can get back to her.” The lighting guys chuckled. She had only been gone for an hour. I expected him to laugh it off and play the part of the smitten boyfriend, but he just stared at me again until the silence in the room became painfully loud. Did his brain cells die in the last ten days? Seeing him jump right back to filming movies on day four after my death, and doing couple reality shows by day five, I genuinely thought the man was a sociopath. The final segment was a rapid-fire Q&A. A real struggle for someone who spent her entire past life as a jewelry designer, not a journalist. “Fans notice you keep a lot of vintage decor. Would you say you are someone who holds onto the past?” William shook his head without missing a beat. “No. Dwelling on the past is a waste of time. You get tired of looking at old things eventually. I just haven’t gotten around to throwing them out.” So that was why he burned the memory box I left him. He was making room for his bright new future. After we signed the divorce papers, I immediately booked a one-way ticket to a clinic in Switzerland. Not because they had better doctors, but because I just wanted to run as far away as possible. My private nurse was a sweet older lady who read too many romance novels. She used to hold my hand and tell me that men in books always realized their true feelings once they saw the tragic final letters their wives left behind. I was stupid enough to believe her. I thought I could weaponize my own death, wrapping it in a thick layer of guilt to serve as my ultimate revenge. During my final days, I forced my decaying body to sit up. I wrote exactly one hundred letters. I printed hundreds of photos. I drained my savings to craft a dozen pieces of custom jewelry. I packed it all into a heavy wooden trunk and shipped it back to Los Angeles. I thought he would break down. I thought he would sob over our ruined history. It was the most pathetic thing I ever did. When my soul was untethered from my body, I immediately drifted back to William. I waited for the devastation. Instead, he answered the phone call from the clinic with a chillingly flat, “Got it.” Over a thousand days of marriage. I thought my death would hit him like a hurricane, but his eyes didn’t even ripple. Romance novels are built on lies. Why would a man who spent months sleeping in another woman’s bed feel any guilt at all? I haunted him for seven days. His routine was so mind-numbingly normal it felt like a sick prank. Day one. William received my death certificate in the mail. He skimmed it, shoved it into a drawer, and booked a first-class flight to Switzerland. Day two. He signed the hospital release forms, picked out a generic headstone, and flew back with my urn. Day three. He hosted the funeral. Barely anyone showed up. Day four. He went straight back to the film set. That night, he hit a VIP club, got trashed, and held Serena in his lap, whispering sweet nothings into her ear. Day five. He filmed a cheesy couples’ challenge for a reality show. My urn sat completely ignored behind the locked door of my old bedroom. Day six. The heavy wooden trunk I shipped arrived at his gate. He spent exactly thirty minutes flipping through my life’s final work. He did not shed a single tear. Day seven. He hired a private jeweler to crack open the urn and set my ashes into a pair of rings. And that wooden trunk? He dragged it out to Malibu. He lit a bonfire on the beach and watched my final, desperate fragments of love burn to cinders. I would have preferred him laughing at my pathetic attempt at closure. Anything would have been better than that terrifying, blank apathy. He looked at those letters like they belonged to a stranger he couldn’t wait to forget. Maybe he was just tired. He acted for a living, and he could not even be bothered to fake a sad face for a dead woman. As a weightless spirit, I could not even cry. I just hovered over the flames, watching the agonizing effort of my final dying weeks turn into dirty gray smoke. The crackling fire mocked my ridiculous delusions. I actually thought a man who stopped loving me years ago would suddenly magically care. That was the day Vivian, the celebrated jewelry designer and Hollywood’s best-kept secret wife, truly ceased to exist. And that was the day Cici’s life began. The sun was starting to set when the interview finally wrapped. I stood up and stretched my stiff shoulders. I never realized holding a basic conversation with him was this exhausting. I had a secondary motive for coming here today. I needed to steal back my old design sketches. Back when I thought I was dying, I abandoned all my portfolios in his study. Now that I was alive and broke, I needed my intellectual property back. During the B-roll house tour, I spotted them shoved into a dusty corner of his office, crumpled and neglected like actual trash. Thank god they survived the Malibu bonfire. “I noticed a stack of design sketches in your study,” I casually mentioned as the crew packed up. “I actually have a friend in the industry looking for vintage concepts. Would you be willing to sell them?” Since I was less than nothing to him, the papers had to be worthless. “Those?” William replied, his voice terrifyingly soft. “They are not for sale.” A punch straight to the gut. Why would an A-list actor hoard crumpled jewelry sketches? He had zero use for them. While my brain scrambled for a counteroffer, William stepped closer. “Do you really want them?” I nodded quickly, putting on my most innocent, eager expression. William closed the distance between us. He leaned in, his dark eyes tracing the lines of my face with a disturbing intensity. He looked like a man making a very dangerous gamble. “I will give them to you for free. Under one condition.” He paused, his gaze dropping to my lips. “I want you to stay by my side. As a body double.” A body double? For who? My feet glued themselves to the hardwood floor. My eyes went wide with sheer panic. Before I could even process the absurdity, his hand clamped down on my wrist. He dragged me down the hallway and stopped dead in front of a very familiar door. My old bedroom. The one he had kept locked. William shoved the door open. He pointed a shaking finger at a massive portrait of me hanging over the bed. The next words out of his mouth made me seriously question my own sanity. “Play her. Pretend to be her, and I will give you whatever you want.” He wanted me to play the role of my dead self, just so I could get my own sketches back?

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