As autumn surrendered to winter, Manhattan received its first snowfall.

Mark Thorne's trial concluded with brutal efficiency. Faced with overwhelming evidence, he received twenty years in federal prison for securities fraud, wire fraud, and embezzlement. The court also imposed crippling financial penalties and a lifetime ban from the financial industry. The verdict merited only a small paragraph in the business section before being swept away by fresher scandals.


Before sentencing, Evelyn made a single visit to the detention center where he awaited his fate.

Across the bulletproof divider, Mark appeared more ravaged than she had been even in her final cancer-ridden days. His hair had gone gray at the temples, his once-confident posture collapsed into itself. His eyes—formerly sharp with ambition—now held the vacant stare of a man already dead inside.

"Why?" he asked, his voice a hollow whisper. "Evelyn, I never truly wronged you. Even with Chloe… I was just bored, that's all. I never wanted you dead…"


Even now, facing decades behind bars, he clung to his self-serving delusions.

Evelyn studied him with detached interest, like an entomologist examining a pinned specimen. "Mark, do you remember what I said as I fell? When you and Chloe pushed me through that shattered terrace door?"


Mark's entire body convulsed, primal terror flooding his eyes.

"I swore that all my suffering—the pain, the despair, the wasting illness—would return to you a thousandfold," she said, her voice gentle yet penetrating. "Your pain and despair have only just begun. As for the rest…"

She left the sentence unfinished, rising to her feet with fluid grace. She gave him one final, pitying glance before turning away. Let him spend the next two decades contemplating those words in his concrete cell.

Fate, it seemed, had become her willing executioner, fulfilling her curse with meticulous precision.

Chloe's existence became a waking nightmare. Crushed under poverty, social ostracism, and legal troubles, her body began to betray her. It started with a persistent cough she couldn't shake, then night sweats, then alarming weight loss despite her meager diet. She began waking in the darkness, gasping for breath that wouldn't come.

She dismissed it as stress and poor living conditions until the morning she doubled over behind the diner where she waited tables, coughing bright arterial blood onto filthy asphalt.

At the county hospital, after a battery of painful tests performed with institutional efficiency, she received her sentence. When she saw the words on her chart—Stage IV Invasive Pulmonary Adenocarcinoma—her remaining world shattered completely.

The exact same cancer that had killed Evelyn in her previous life.

The identical diagnosis, down to the specific subtype.

Clutching the flimsy diagnostic report—which somehow weighed as much as a tombstone—she wandered Brooklyn's grimy streets in a daze. Snowflakes melted against her fever-hot skin as comprehension dawned. She finally understood Evelyn's parting words to Mark.

Pain. Despair. And illness.

Cosmic justice had completed its perfect circuit. Like a thief who unwittingly steals a cursed object along with the treasure, she had claimed not just Evelyn's fiancé and wealth, but her terminal diagnosis as well.

Arthur was the one who brought this news to Evelyn.

They stood together beneath the luxury high-rise where she had plummeted to her death in that other lifetime. Snow dusted her hair like diamond powder, but she felt no chill—Arthur's arms encircled her from behind, his warmth enveloping her completely.

Learning of Chloe's diagnosis, Evelyn remained silent for several minutes. She searched her heart and found no vindictive joy, only a profound sense of completion—as though the universe had finally rebalanced its scales.

"It's finished now," she said quietly.

"Yes," Arthur murmured, his chin resting lightly atop her head. "The circle is complete."

Evelyn turned in his embrace to gaze up at the building that had once been the site of her murder. Warm lights glowed in windows where families lived their ordinary lives, unaware of the tragedy and redemption that had played out there. She felt the last chains of her past finally release their hold.

True victory wasn't witnessing her enemies' destruction—it was standing here alive, whole and free, able to feel snowflakes on her face and warmth in her heart without the shadow of vengeance darkening every moment.

Rising onto her toes, she pressed her lips to Arthur's.

This kiss transcended all that had come before—no hesitation, no holding back, only the pure surrender of two souls who had found each other across death itself. As snow swirled around them like a private universe, they held each other as if nothing else existed or mattered.

Her old life had ended in this very spot. Now, with the gentle percussion of snowfall as witness, her true life was finally beginning.