The tremor of a sobbing voice pierced through the midnight air, cutting through the sandalwood scent drifting from the automated fragrance system.
"Mr. Hayes... please, slow down—"
"Mr. Hayes, I really can't... please..."
"Mr. Hayes..."
Inside the penthouse suite of Crestwood Manor, a woman in a scarlet bodycon dress was having a very private conversation with Ethan Hayes — the kind that involved heavy breathing and tangled sheets.
He'd drunk a little too much tonight. His female assistant, Claire Ashford, had insisted on seeing him home. She'd practically threaded his hand inside her blouse the entire elevator ride up. What her intentions were, Ethan couldn't have been more certain if she'd handed him a written proposal.
He was drunk, yes. But not that drunk. His mind remained a blade — sharp, analytical, cutting through the fog of alcohol with the same precision he applied to hostile acquisitions and boardroom warfare. Claire's performance was transparent. Clumsy, even. A B-minus at best.
But she was wearing black stockings beneath that scarlet dress, the fabric hugging every curve of her figure like a sculptor had measured her personally. Her waist dipped and swelled in a silhouette that belonged on a Renaissance painting, and her every step carried the unhurried confidence of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing.
Ethan Hayes — thirty-two years old, CEO of Apex Meridian Capital, feared across Wall Street — had been single for seven years.
Seven. Years.
Since graduating from Wharton, when he and Savannah Cole had called it quits, he'd poured every ounce of himself into building his empire. And Savannah? She'd married someone else in year three. Pregnant by spring, photographed at a vineyard wedding by summer. He'd seen it on LinkedIn of all places.
For years he'd convinced himself it was devotion. That he was holding onto something real, something worth protecting. But standing here now — sharp-eyed even in his intoxication — he could see it clearly for what it had always been.
A joke.
He'd let a ghost haunt him for seven years. Let it starve a perfectly good man of warmth, of laughter, of the simple weight of another person sleeping beside him. If that man could speak right now, he'd probably say: "Dude. She moved on in eighteen months. Wake up."
So Ethan woke up.
He stopped resisting. He stepped into the warmth Claire was offering, and for twenty minutes, he was simply a man — not a CEO, not a symbol, not a machine in a tailored suit.
The world dissolved into breath and motion, like tide after tide drawing its fingers across the shore, each wave retreating only to return again. He caught a glimpse of moonlight shimmering in her eyes —
Then the cold sweat hit his forehead.
His heartbeat spiked — not from exertion, but from something else entirely. His chest constricted. His vision tilted sideways. The room began folding in on itself like a collapsing origami crane.
He heard Claire's voice go sharp and panicked: "Ethan— Ethan, can you hear me—"
Then: nothing.
The ceiling was wrong.
It was too low. Too familiar. A faded glow-in-the-dark solar system sticker was peeling near the light fixture, and a LeBron James 2012 Finals poster was tacked slightly crooked above the desk.
Ethan sat upright.
His hands were smaller.
He turned them over slowly, studying them the way a jeweler examines a suspicious stone. The calluses from years of golf and squash were gone. The faint scar on his right knuckle from a boating incident in the Hamptons — gone. These were soft hands. Young hands.
His hands. But from a long time ago.
The room assembled itself around him in pieces: the twin bed with the navy comforter, the cluttered desk with a graphing calculator and a dog-eared AP Chemistry textbook, the half-eaten bag of Doritos on the windowsill, a soccer ball wedge against the closet door.
He recognized everything. And it terrified him.
"...This is my old bedroom," he said aloud, his voice coming out higher than expected — the voice of a seventeen-year-old, raw at the edges. "This is my high school bedroom."
He sat there for a moment, absolutely still. The way he went still in boardrooms when someone dropped a number that didn't add up.
Then the two sets of memories hit him simultaneously — a full collision, like two freight trains on the same track. His brain felt like it was trying to run two operating systems at once, each fighting for the desktop. He pressed the heels of his palms against his temples and squeezed.
2014. Late May. Senior year.
The College Board calendar on the desk confirmed it. Someone — past-him, apparently — had drawn a countdown in red marker in the corner.
27 days until finals.
And below that, in messier handwriting, a different countdown:
34 days until the World Cup. 🔥
The priorities of a seventeen-year-old were something else.
Ethan Hayes — who had just, in another life, closed a $2.3 billion deal to absorb a floundering tech firm in Seattle and then promptly died mid-celebration in a luxury penthouse — stared at the ceiling of his childhood bedroom in suburban Columbus, Ohio.
The house was quiet. His parents were at the shop. His dad ran a dry-cleaning business on Morse Road; his mom kept the books. They wouldn't be home until six.
Which was a relief, because what came out of his mouth next would have gotten him a forehead thermometer and a worried phone call to their family doctor.
"Are you serious right now," he said to no one. Then louder: "I'm reborn?"
The soccer poster didn't respond.
He flopped back against his pillow and stared up at the faded solar system, letting the reality of it settle over him like a weighted blanket.
All that money. Never even got to spend most of it. All those years grinding, networking, sacrificing — survived the 2018 market dip, the 2020 collapse, three hostile takeover attempts, a lawsuit from a man named Gerald who really should have read his contract more carefully, and roughly eleven thousand sleepless nights.
He pressed a hand over his face and laughed — quiet, exhausted, a little unhinged.
He was seventeen again.
Twenty-seven days before his college entrance.
The 2014 World Cup was about to start.
And somewhere out there, in a timeline he now remembered with perfect clarity, Savannah Cole was finishing her junior year and had absolutely no idea that the boy in AP Economics who sat two seats behind her was going to waste seven years mourning a relationship that she'd already emotionally packed up and donated to Goodwill.
Ethan sat up again, slower this time. His mind was already moving.
He had everything now. The knowledge. The patterns. The mistakes, catalogued in perfect detail. He knew which start-ups would explode and which would crater. He knew which markets would shift and when. He knew what to say, what to sign, and more importantly — what never to sign.
He looked at the graphing calculator on his desk.
He looked at the AP Chemistry textbook.
He looked at the Doritos.
"Alright," Ethan Hayes said quietly, cracking his knuckles the way he did before every major deal. "Let's do this differently."