Chapter 1: The Preacher's Son

All I ever wanted was to rewrite the ending for the preacher’s son—the boy history forgot, the boy I loved.

Even with the system’s help, five years trailing after Caleb felt like trudging through a Southern summer: mosquitoes buzzing at my ears, sweat trickling down my spine, the air so thick it felt like trying to breathe through syrup. Each day stubborn and slow, every hope wilting beneath the weight of time.

Finally, after a quiet, fateful collision—he broke his vows by accident, and in the hush that followed, he promised to leave the ministry and marry me.

But the night before our wedding, at the governor’s hunting lodge, gunshots shattered the midnight calm. The room was crowded with mounted deer heads glaring from the walls, whiskey glasses half-drunk on a sideboard, and the sharp, acrid smell of gunpowder hanging heavy. Assassins stormed in beneath the glow of hunting lamps.

In that split second, Caleb shoved me aside—rough and desperate—but it was the governor’s favorite companion he shielded, arms thrown wide. I watched his arms wrap around her, my heart stuttering, a sick twist in my gut—he didn’t even look at me.

His hand gripped the blade of a knife, crimson blooming slow and dark across the crisp white shirt he wore only for Sunday sermons or funerals—the kind reserved for moments that changed everything.

He never let the memories he cherished—those rare, pure bits of his heart—get dirtied, not even by his own pain.

I pressed my hand to the wound in my shoulder, the blade having gone straight through, heat and wetness seeping beneath my trembling fingers. The lodge air tasted of pine, blood, and fear.

Finally, it sank in. This love that had carried me over centuries, across lifetimes and midnight prayers, had run its course. It was time to let go.

I called the system like a homesick kid dialing collect from a payphone outside a rundown 7-Eleven, hoping someone would pick up:

“I want to go home.”

“I don’t want to change him anymore, or be entangled with his first love, or face a fate of a thousand heartbreaks and losing my soul.”