Reborn to Save My Doomed Family by Evelyn Marlowe is a second-chance family saga.
The last thing I remembered was the smell of smoke. Not campfire smoke, or the good, clean smoke of the hearth in the east parlor where my mother used to read to us on winter evenings. This was the other kind. Chemical and hungry, the kind that crawls under a door and finds you no matter how tightly you've sealed yourself in. I remembered the heat against my cheek. I remembered the glass cracking in the window frame like ice in spring. I remembered thinking, with the strange clarity of the dying, that
I had been wrong about so many things, and that it was far too late to be right about any of them. Then nothing. Then this. I opened my eyes to a ceiling I had not seen in ten years. Two water stains above the window, shaped like a lopsided heart. A hairline crack running from the light fixture toward the corner. My mother had complained about that crack for three years before my father finally had the whole ceiling redone, and by then the house was already gone. I lay very still.
The sheets were the pale-green ones from the guest wing, because I had spilled ink on my own set the week before and hadn't gotten around to replacing them. The window was open a finger's width, and through it came the sound of gulls and the low, mournful bell of a buoy out on the water. Brackenport. Home. My heart began to beat so hard I could feel it in my throat. "No," I whispered. My voice came out young. That was the first thing that undid me. It had the smooth, unrusted quality of a voice that had never spent a decade learning to say we've lost everything without crying. I sat up. My hands were the wrong hands. No wedding band, no thin white scar across the knuckle where Julian's car door had caught me. Smooth knuckles, unpainted nails, the faint callus on my middle finger from the fountain pen I'd carried all through my twenties. I turned them over twice, as if I could find some trick in the light. On the nightstand: a chipped coffee mug. A paperback with a cracked spine.
