Chapter 26 Not the Same Life
Months passed. In my past life, I remembered how small those milestones had felt, how overshadowed I’d been, how everything revolved around Apple’s achievements.
But in this life I’d already pushed myself onto a new trajectory. One that didn’t orbit anyone but me.
I made my college choice.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT.
In my previous life I had chosen Utah Valley University so I could follow Payton.
Well, so I could really follow Nick.
He was already there, a year ahead, and I’d convinced myself proximity was destiny. With Payton we’d shared the same childhood dream, rehearsed the plan since we were nine: same school, same dorm, late-night study sessions.
This time, I broke the script.
I didn’t tell Payton I was applying to MIT until my decision was locked and irreversible.
She cried.
Confused tears, hurt tears.
She didn’t understand what had changed, because in this life she hadn’t done anything wrong. She was still the girl who braided my hair at sleepovers and believed our friendship was permanent.
I had apologized.
Lied.
Told her I needed a challenge, something different.
She accepted it with a forced smile, but hurt lingered in her eyes for days.
Rebirth came with its own cracks. I couldn’t step back into that closeness, into blind trust. Loving people too deeply had cost me everything once.
Distance was safer and the more distance I put between us, the faster other girls stepped into the spaces I abandoned. Payton wasn’t alone for long, she never struggled to find people to orbit around her warm, bright center.
I watched it happen with a strange detachment, like observing a life I once lived but no longer belonged to.
We were still friends… just not the kind who shared souls anymore.
Nick.
In this life, I’d tried to keep my distance. I ignored his texts for weeks at a time at first. Like distancing myself now would save us both from the disaster we became in my past life.
But Nick had always been… relentless. Patient. The quiet kind of persistent that wore down walls.
Eventually, his determination wore me down, or maybe it reached a part of me I hadn’t fully managed to bury. I gave in and texted back. Just small things at first. Stupid little jokes we would’ve shared anyway.
How’s school?
Why MIT? Why so far?
Not gonna lie, I’m low-key offended you’re abandoning Utah /cry.
I’d rolled my eyes at the emoji, but my stomach had tightened all the same. I told him MIT was a last-minute choice.
He sent dramatic emojis. Threatened to “boycott the universe” for stealing his friend. Then joked about visiting me and eating awful cafeteria food together.
We fell into a rhythm, light, easy conversations. Memes at midnight. The occasional rant about school.
Nothing deep. Nothing dangerous.
But every time my phone lit up with his name, I felt the same traitorous softening in my chest. No matter how hard I tried, the old feelings were still there, humming quietly under my ribs like a bruise that never healed.
I pretended they meant nothing, that I wasn’t affected, that I wasn’t remembering another lifetime where he had loved me and I had loved him.
MIT made sense for who I was becoming. For what I needed to do. Amy was going too, already certain she wanted Computer Science & Engineering. It suited her, hacking wasn’t just a hobby for her, it was instinct.
I didn’t know my exact major yet, but I knew what my long-term plans required and MIT was a step in the correct direction.
Apple, meanwhile, was exactly where fate had placed her before. She was accepted into Juilliard for violin.
The prodigy.
The miracle child.
Marissa cried when the acceptance letter came, clutching Apple to her chest like she’d won a war.
She was already planning a massive graduation party.
A celebration of “both my girls,” she said, but money was tight, which meant my eighteenth birthday a few weeks before would be a small home gathering with relatives and friends.
But I knew the truth. I’d lived the truth before.
The party had never been for both of us. It was always a celebration disguised as a shared event but constructed entirely around Apple’s Juilliard repertoire.
Her stage, her spotlight, her worshippers.
Guests fawned and applauded, showering her with praise she accepted with practiced modesty.
And me?
I’d been sidelined, overshadowed, and humiliated.
Not in this life.
A few weeks after submitting the request, I finally received a copy of my mother’s death certificate. My real mother.
I already knew the cause of death, homicide, but seeing it printed in black ink beside her name still punched the air out of me.
The document gave me her birthdate and the small French town where she’d been born. But not her parents’ names.
A dead end.
And the marriage license I managed to obtain wasn’t much better. Nothing useful. Nothing that told me who she had been before she became a tragedy.
I sat there staring at the papers, feeling the familiar frustration coil tight in my chest, when my mind drifted back to the moment everything had shifted.
A few months ago, Amy had handed me a phone.
“Look,” she’d said.
I had asked her to hack into Apple’s phone, yes. But I’d expected something small. A backup. A few files. Maybe access to her messages if we were lucky.
I hadn’t expected this.
I wasn’t prepared for what I saw on the screen.
Every photo.
Every message.
Every call recording.
Apple’s entire life.
Right there. In my hands.
I stared at the device.
“Where did you get this? Is this—Apple’s phone?”
“It’s a copy,” Amy said. “A clone.”
I stared at her. “How is that even possible?”
She explained it calmly, like she was discussing homework.
“iPhones back up everything to iCloud when they’re charging on Wi-Fi. When your sister’s phone connects, it exchanges a secure session token with Apple’s servers. I cloned that token and fed it into this phone. So the servers think this—” she tapped the device in my hand “—is her phone.”
I stared at the screen, trying to comprehend the scale of what she’d done.
“Wouldn’t she get a ‘new login’ alert? Or something?”
Amy gave me a look that said please don’t insult me.
“Of course not. The server thinks it’s the same device syncing. No alerts. No warnings. As far as they know, your sister just… syncs a little more often.”
“Don’t those keys expire?” I asked.
“Not if the system thinks the device is still alive,” she said. “So the key never dies. It just quietly renews itself as long as she doesn’t change her password.”
“And if something does break? If she changes her password or..”
“I can get back in,” she said simply. “Her security is a joke. Half her passwords are ‘apple123’ or ‘1234Apple.’ She hasn’t changed them in years.”
I thanked her for the clone, then told her I wanted to hire her. That I’d have access to significant money soon and I needed more than just this. Deeper work. Broader work.
She agreed without hesitation.
Over the months, we drifted into something like friendship. I learned she had an older brother, eight years her senior, a cop in our own town. She spoke of him with an odd mix of exasperation and warmth.
When the basketball team scandal exploded, he brought it up at a family dinner. The moment Amy pulled him aside and told him the truth, that she had been drugged, barely conscious, and that I had been the one to get her out, he nearly lost it.
He’d gone silent at first.
Then furious.
Then devastated.
He told her she should have called him immediately. That if she’d gone to the hospital for blood work, they could have nailed those boys to the wall. Built a case with teeth.
In the end, though, he respected her decision not to come forward.
He didn’t agree with it, but he respected it.
He also told her he wanted to thank me in person for saving his baby sister.