At thirty-four, Evan Forrest never in a million years saw this coming.

After all those years, he finally ran into his high school deskmate again—the girl everyone had called the school beauty.

And in the very first second of seeing her, he got sent flying by a freaking truck.

...

It was a night drowned in crazy, nonstop rain.

Then all at once, two huge pale beams tore through the dark, slicing open the curtain of rain as a heavy truck came roaring forward like a beast let off its chain.

Straight ahead, on the sidewalk, a slender woman holding an umbrella was about to be hit head-on.

Evan, standing not far behind her, didn’t even have time to think. His body moved before his brain caught up. He lunged forward, beat the truck by a split second, and shoved the woman away with everything he had.

In that instant, the whole world seemed to go dead quiet.

Time slowed without warning, like someone had hit pause and switched everything to slow motion.

In his sight, the torrential rain seemed to freeze in midair.

Only the woman he had pushed to the roadside turned around in shock, hurried and flustered, her gaze breaking through the rain and crashing straight into his.

And Evan saw her face clearly.

Beneath that smooth, jet-black hair was a face so stunning it almost didn’t feel real—delicate, breathtaking, mature and cool, yet still gorgeous enough to leave people speechless.

The scare made her soft red lips part on instinct. Then, as if she suddenly realized what was happening, her expression changed hard—shock, panic, disbelief all hitting at once—and she opened her mouth like she was about to shout something.

And at that exact same moment,

Evan recognized who she was.

Clara Whitfield.

The undisputed school beauty of Yunan High back then.

And now, the icy business goddess of South Province, worth billions and famous enough that basically everyone knew her name.

And also…

His old deskmate from high school.

"Fate really works in weird ways."

That was the very last thought that flashed through Evan Forrest’s mind.

Then came the brutal scream of brakes, rushing closer and closer, mixed with the harsh scrape of tires clawing at the road—and a woman’s panicked cry, strange yet somehow painfully familiar:

"No!!!!!—"

Pain hit him like a tidal wave, crashing over him in an instant. Then his whole world went black.

His consciousness seemed to drift loose from his body, floating in that endless darkness, dazed and weightless, for who knew how long.

Until, somewhere in that blur, he vaguely saw a figure charging toward him with everything she had, desperately reaching out, trying so hard to grab him.

Almost on instinct, he reached out too.

And the moment their hands met, the darkness shattered with a bang.

Evan jolted awake.

He opened his eyes and looked around.

Only then did he realize he was sitting in a bright, spotless classroom.

It was summer. Outside the window, cicadas droned nonstop while birds flickered past in the light.

Above his head, the ceiling fan creaked and rattled as it spun, pushing out waves of warm air. On the platform, the homeroom teacher droned on in a flat, lifeless voice, the kind of lecture so sleep-inducing it was honestly kind of lethal. Put together, it was enough to make anyone’s eyelids start fighting to close.

Everything felt ridiculously familiar.

So real that it almost didn’t feel real at all.

…

Then memories came flooding back, slamming into him like a burst dam. And only then did Evan finally understand what kind of unbelievable miracle time itself had worked on him.

It was early summer, 2007.

He was a senior at Yunan High School.

Time had slammed into reverse, rolling back a full sixteen years.

He had been reborn.

If he had to guess, it was probably karma cashing in on that one heroic moment of his. Maybe even heaven had been moved.

Evan Forrest felt all kinds of things at once. A little dazed, a little emotional, but way more fired up and stunned in the best possible way.

A second shot at life.

That meant he could patch up a whole pile of regrets from before, and maybe finally live the kind of life he actually wanted.

Come to think of it, he probably ought to thank that former school-belle deskmate of his too—the one he hadn’t seen in years, who had popped back into his life and basically gotten him killed the instant they reunited—

Wait.

Deskmate.

Only then did Evan snap back to himself and turn to look beside him.

He was sitting by the window in the last row of the fourth group in the classroom.