The first thing I did after dying was cancel a lesson.
At 16:12, with the rain drumming against the windows of the school library, I opened the calendar on my cracked phone, found the entry "Julian. Foundation interview prep" and wiped it out with a single movement of my thumb. My hand did not shake.
That was when my second life really began. Not in the second I woke in my seventeen-year-old body and heard the fridge humming through the wall, not when I touched my throat and found no tubes, and not when I saw the school uniform hanging on the door, still faintly smelling of washing powder. It began when I looked at the name of the boy I had once loved more than my own future and decided: let him fail on his own.
In my first life Julian Wolf became the youngest Arnsberg scholar in the school's history. The papers called him the untameable talent from the estate behind the freight yard. The teachers called him proof that poverty is not a sentence. The trustees called him an inspiring example. At the ceremony he stood in a borrowed black suit under golden light, smiling that soft, broken smile that made every adult in the hall want to adopt him, and thanked one person alone: the one who "believed in him first".
It was not me. It was Charlotte von Ahlenberg.
Charlotte wore a silk ribbon in her hair, and her father sat on the board of trustees. She had met Julian six weeks before the interview and decided that beside her he looked better than any other boy in the year. Yet she had never once sat up with him past midnight over derivatives, never rewritten his essays until none of the sentences sounded like an apology, and never pushed a sandwich into his rucksack knowing that nerves made him forget to eat.
All of that was me. The thank-you went to her.
And when a journalist asked about me, about the girl who had sat beside him for three years in every reading room in the city, Julian gave an awkward laugh and said, "Klara? She helps out sometimes. She's very devoted."
Devoted. That word stayed in me longer than any confession ever did.
Ten years on he was advising government ministries and looking out from magazine covers. I taught exam preparation in a tutoring centre with no windows, drilling other people's desperate teenagers to write applications as though they had been born confident. I was still using my own inventions: structure ladders, question cards, memory hooks, breathing pauses that turn shame into a plan of action. He had built a career on those inventions. I billed for them by the hour.
On the night I died I was marking other people's essays on a bus, in winter rain. My phone held thirty-one unread messages from my pupils' parents, three from my landlady and one from a newsletter: the wedding of Julian and Charlotte had been moved to the Ahlenberg family estate.
I looked at their engagement photograph while the bus lights flickered on the bends. Julian looked older, surer, smoother, and it had nothing to do with money. Charlotte held his arm like a restored find that had finally been put on show in the right room. The caption under the photograph called her "the one who believed in him first".
I laughed so hard that the old woman opposite asked if I was all right. Then the headlights of an oncoming lorry swam into the windscreen. Metal screamed.
And when I opened my eyes I was seventeen again. I was lying in my childhood bedroom in Heidelberg with my revision notebook for the selection exam open on my chest, and Julian's name stood on every other page.
The kitchen smelled of coffee. My mother was banging a spoon against a saucepan and grumbling that the bus did not wait for princesses.
In my first life my mother died when I was twenty. The cause was cancer, found too late: first there was no time, then it was too expensive, then it was too late. She left so much silence behind in the flat that I moved out within a month.
And now she was alive, clattering dishes on the other side of the wall and cross with me, the living. I lay there listening, silently carrying knowledge that burned inside me: I knew something about her health that she did not know herself. The first cough was three years away. This time I had enough time.
But first, the notebook.
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