Reborn to Love Mr. Right – Episode 15
Derek’s warning struck Arianna with the force of another collision. The ballroom, the guests, and the glowing screens receded behind the memory of brakes failing on a dark curve. No one in this timeline should have known what that road meant to her. Yet Derek had chosen words too precise to dismiss.
Security pulled him toward the exit while he laughed at her stunned expression. Donald assumed the threat referred to reckless driving and ordered his guards to document it. Hayden saw something deeper in Arianna’s fear. He stepped closer without touching her and asked what Derek knew.
“I don’t know,” she answered. It was the first lie she had told Hayden since returning. Explaining the crash would mean explaining her death, his confession, and the impossible second life connecting them. She could not force that burden onto him in the middle of a public scandal.
Arianna completed the presentation despite her unease. She announced the scholarship recipients, including an athletic grant that gave Emmy another path toward college. The applause belonged to students rather than Derek, restoring the event to its intended purpose. Watching Emmy’s stunned happiness reminded Arianna that changing the past could create more than revenge; it could return opportunities her blindness had once taken from others.
When the guests began leaving, reporters surrounded Donald for statements. Ivy departed through a side hall wearing a hotel robe while staff packaged the unpaid gown. Jeff followed the attorneys to discuss the charges against him, abandoning Derek to wait outside alone.
Hayden remained beside Arianna until the ballroom emptied. He did not repeat his question or demand the truth as payment for his help. That patience made concealment harder. “Derek has threatened you before,” he said. “Whatever happened, you do not have to face the next threat alone.”
Arianna looked at the man who had once arrived too late to save her. “Promise me you won’t drive yourself tonight,” she said. Hayden’s surprise confirmed that he did not understand, but he agreed. His security team would take them both home in separate vehicles.
Donald joined them and thanked Hayden for recovering the presentation. He also apologized for Arianna’s earlier accusation about Scott Global. Hayden accepted without turning the moment into a negotiation. The quiet integrity of his response deepened Donald’s approval.
Outside the hotel, rain shone on the pavement beneath rows of white lights. Derek was gone, but a dark sedan idled across the street with its headlights off. Arianna noticed it because the shape resembled the car she had seen in her mirror moments before the crash in her first life.
She gripped Hayden’s sleeve. The sedan pulled into traffic as soon as his security chief looked toward it. Its license plate had been obscured by mud, and the tinted windows revealed nothing. Hayden ordered one vehicle to follow while keeping Arianna inside the hotel entrance.
“This is what you were afraid of,” he said. Arianna could no longer pretend Derek’s warning had been empty. Someone had been waiting outside an event Derek expected to control. Whether the driver intended surveillance or violence remained unknown.
The pursuing guard called moments later. The sedan had run a red light and disappeared onto the highway. Its route led toward the same northern roads where Arianna’s fatal crash would occur years later. Her second life was changing events, but danger appeared to be moving faster in response.
Donald insisted they return to the mansion under escort. On the ride home, Arianna reviewed every memory of her accident. Derek had suggested the route, Ivy had been near the garage, and Jeff had arranged the vehicle maintenance. Any one of them could have hired another driver.
Hayden sat opposite her in the armored SUV. He asked why a dark road frightened her before anything had happened. Arianna answered that she had been having vivid nightmares since the day of the volleyball game. It was not the full truth, but it gave him enough to understand her urgency.
“Then we treat the nightmare like intelligence,” Hayden said. He requested records for every vehicle linked to Derek, Ivy, and Jeff. Rather than dismissing Arianna’s fear as irrational, he turned it into a plan.
At the mansion, Donald doubled security and ordered a mechanical inspection of every Taylor vehicle. The family office began tracing payments from Derek’s frozen accounts. One recurring transfer led to a repair shop near the northern highway.
Arianna recognized the shop’s name. It had appeared on the service sticker inside the car whose brakes failed in her previous life. The discovery proved that Derek’s future crime had roots reaching back to high school.
Donald called the shop owner, but the number had been disconnected within the last hour. Hayden’s team found that the business registration belonged to a shell company created by an unknown director. Someone had erased the easiest trail immediately after the gala.
A housekeeper entered the study carrying an envelope found beneath the front gate. It bore no stamp, address, or fingerprints visible to the naked eye. Arianna opened it while Donald and Hayden watched.
Inside was a photograph of Arianna in her wheelchair on the night she died—an image that could not exist yet. The ballroom floor, her bloodstained gown, and Hayden’s ruined suit were captured with impossible clarity. Across the bottom, someone had written a single sentence in red ink: “You were not the only one who came back.” Hayden looked from the photograph to Arianna, and she knew the secret of her second life could no longer remain hers alone.
