If I were to rewrite this story, Regina’s death would take place in a hospital room, alone, in the terminal stages of cancer. She knows she is dying. Around her, no one, no visitors, no flowers.

She had been a harsh, dry, distant mother. She treated Zara like a burden, neglected her in favor of her lovers, and put her own desires above her daughter’s needs. Zara eventually cut ties, no longer even answering her calls. Now, Regina lies dying alone, phone in hand, trying in vain to reach her daughter.

In her final agony, she finally understands Zara’s worth. She weeps with grief. She realizes she wasted her chance to be a loving mother.

So she makes one last prayer. She does not ask to escape death. She asks for another chance. A chance to return to Zara, to atone for the years she wasted, and to love her daughter the way she should have from the very beginning.

Her prayer is heard. But before she can return, she is brought before the judges who oversee the afterlife. They offer her the chance to return in the body of Dylan, a depressed young man who wanted to end his own life.

Regina accepts. She knows she cannot approach Zara as her mother anymore. She accepts the sacrifice. She is reincarnated into his body and chooses a new name for herself: DB.

He becomes Zara’s boyfriend, giving her all the love he never gave her in his previous life.

But this rebirth is no fairy tale. He is haunted by the fear of dying alone again, with no one by his side. That is why he strives to be a good person, so that those around him will love him and never abandon him.

He swears not to repeat the same mistakes. He wants to be a man worthy of Zara’s love. He tries to bury the memories and identity of Regina, believing that his redemption lies in leaving behind the mother he once was so he can become the lover Zara never had.

The next morning, she wakes in the spare room. What had once been a guest bedroom now looks entirely different: yellow walls with soft cloud designs, posters, a larger dresser, a twin mattress instead of a crib, a brand‑new desk and a gaming computer. Her husband - now her father - strides in as the 6 a.m. alarm rings, exasperated that his son is still buried under the covers on his first day of school.

It takes a long while before she pieces together the new reality. In this world, his mother died in childbirth, and it has just been him and his dad ever since. She tries to convince her husband that she is really his wife, but he dismisses the idea. He only grows unsettled when she shares intimate details of their married life from before she was born. The awkwardness deepens when she realizes she still has feelings for him - now her father. Fortunately, he shares none of those feelings, which is heartbreaking and a relief at once.

Over time, memories of her new life begin to seep through the cracks. She clings to her old self and even visits the witch to reverse the spell, but the woman has no memory of ever performing such a magic and refuses to help a minor who comes to her with a request as disturbing as “Make me my dad’s wife again.”

Eventually, she settles into her new existence, especially as she sees how much happier her father is now that he can raise a son. Though he still mourns his wife, he seems more fulfilled than ever. She starts letting go of her former life, and her father dismisses her brief insistence that she was his dead wife as a strange phase of puberty.

As a boy, she discovers a childhood she was never allowed to live: monster trucks and trading card games, a short, humbling stint on the football team, a profoundly awkward birds‑and‑bees talk with her dad, and sleepovers filled with pizza, video games, and late‑night laughter among friends.

At least, that's what she kept telling herself.

Truth is, she couldn't stop paying attention to Katie. She made her into this one-sided rival that Katie didn't even know existed. She joined all the same clubs, tried to beat her at everything, always finding some excuse to stay close to her.

Whenever she was with her friends, Katie somehow became the main topic. Olivia would tear her apart, calling her a man-eater, a hussy, saying she was shallow and obsessed with boys. In Olivia's mind, Katie was everything she claimed to hate.

Then one day, a witch offers her a weird potion. She says it'll reveal "the real you that you've been hiding from the world."

Olivia's offended. She's convinced she's not hiding anything - so to prove the witch wrong, she drinks it.

One sip.

She feels a jolt - a strange rush through her bones, like something deep inside her is rearranging itself.

Her thoughts blur. Her senses sharpen.

Then nothing.

When she opens her eyes again, she's already standing in the middle of the high school hallway. Students pass by like she's always been there. The bell hasn't rung yet.

She's wearing clothes she doesn't remember putting on, and when she looks down - her hands are bigger, broader.

She walks to the nearest bathroom and stares into the mirror.

She's looking at a young man.

She doesn't understand. She doesn't remember any of this. She only remembers the taste of the potion, and the moment right before everything disappeared.

Katie sees her... but she doesn't recognize her. She just thinks he's the new guy. She smiles at him, starts flirting, then invites him to a party so she can introduce him to everybody.

Olivia feels nervous. Wanted. Like someone is actually seeing her.

And that's when it finally clicks.

She was never jealous of Katie.

She was jealous of the guys who got to be close to her. She wanted to be the one holding Katie's hand. Everything she thought was hate was really just love she'd buried so deep it came back looking like resentment.

All Marius ever wanted was to love his wife, to stop pretending.

Desperate to escape his repressed homosexuality, he makes a bargain with a faerie:

"I wish I could love my wife as I have always wanted to love."

What he meant was: cure me. Make me desire her the way a normal husband should.

The fae takes his words literally. They are known for that.

The wish is granted... just not as he imagined.

The next morning, his wife, Elera, wakes up as a man - the very image of the desire he spent a lifetime trying to bury. She hasn't just changed sex; she has been reshaped entirely into Marius's ideal.

But they have two daughters.

Ophelia, the eldest, is eighteen, and Iris, the youngest, is five years old.

Now the panic sets in. How do you even begin to explain to them that their mother has vanished into a stranger's body?

Marius desperately searches for the fae to beg her to restore his wife's form.

To buy time, he tells his daughters that their mother has left on a two-week trip to her home country to reconnect with her roots.

He introduces the new man, now going by Elias, as a friend in need of a place to stay. In private, Marius continues to call her Elera, clinging to what he has lost, until she finally asks to be called Elias instead.

Iris thinks her mother abandoned her and no longer loves her, because she left without giving her a goodbye kiss.

But she gradually begins to recognise more and more of her mother's mannerisms and traits in this friend she calls Uncle Elias, deepening the bond between them. She doesn't see him as a stranger - she already feels like she knows him, safe and at ease in his presence.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the relationship between the couple is riddled with conflict.

Elias resents Marius for taking away her life and forcing her to become a stranger to her own daughters.

"If I had known you were gay, I would never have married you," she tells him.

But despite the hatred, she cannot leave.

Without papers, she doesn't exist. She can't work, open a bank account, sign a lease, travel, or undergo a police check without risking arrest. She is entirely dependent on her husband for every interaction with the outside world.

As time passes, Ophelia starts to worry that her mother isn't answering her calls.

Forced into a corner, Marius has no choice but to report his wife as missing. A man whose wife has left without explanation remains stuck in a suspicious in-between.

But by declaring Elera missing, Marius lays a dark, calculating groundwork: in a few years, when the death certificate is issued, he'll be able to present Elias as his official partner without anyone raising an eyebrow. Elera's disappearance becomes the necessary legal condition for Elias's social existence.

The tragedy is that Elera lost everything by becoming Elias.

She can never see her family again. Her daughters are all she has left - her most precious treasures.

But Ophelia sees the attention and the unguarded tenderness this charming man gives her and mistakenly interprets it as romantic love.

She falls in love with him, to her father's growing horror, never knowing he was once her mother.

She cannot understand why her father opposes the relationship.

"I'm an adult," she insists. "And even if he's older, that shouldn't matter, Papa."

Elias is upset about this situation because he wants to remain a part of his daughter's life. He loves her with an unconditional parental love, but he knows that if he pushes her away, she'll completely distance herself from him.

All Marius ever wanted was to love his wife, to stop pretending.

Desperate to escape his repressed homosexuality, he makes a bargain with a faerie:

"I wish I could love my wife as I have always wanted to love."

What he meant was: cure me. Make me desire her the way a normal husband should.

The fae takes his words literally. They are known for that.

The wish is granted... just not as he imagined.

The next morning, his wife, Elera, wakes up as a man - the very image of the desire he spent a lifetime trying to bury. She hasn't just changed sex; she has been reshaped entirely into Marius's ideal.

But they have two daughters.

Ophelia, the eldest, is eighteen, and Iris, the youngest, is five years old.

Now the panic sets in. How do you even begin to explain to them that their mother has vanished into a stranger's body?

Marius desperately searches for the fae to beg her to restore his wife's form.

To buy time, he tells his daughters that their mother has left on a two-week trip to her home country to reconnect with her roots.

Elera stays hidden in her room until Marius drops Iris off at school. Then, he takes her to buy new clothes and chooses a new name for her to use in front of the girls: Elias.

He introduces this new man as a friend in need of a place to stay. In private, Marius continues to call her Elera, clinging to what he has lost, until she finally asks to be called Elias instead.

Iris thinks her mother abandoned her and no longer loves her, because she left without giving her a goodbye kiss.

But she gradually begins to recognise more and more of her mother's mannerisms and traits in this friend she calls Uncle Elias, deepening the bond between them. She doesn't see him as a stranger - she already feels like she knows him, safe and at ease in his presence.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the relationship between the couple is riddled with conflict.

Elias resents Marius for taking away her life and forcing her to become a stranger to her own daughters.

"If I had known you were gay, I would never have married you," she tells him.

But despite the hatred, she cannot leave.

Without papers, she doesn't exist. She can't work, open a bank account, sign a lease, travel, or undergo a police check without risking arrest. She is entirely dependent on her husband for every interaction with the outside world.

As time passes, Ophelia starts to worry that her mother isn't answering her calls.

Forced into a corner, Marius has no choice but to report his wife as missing. A man whose wife has left without explanation remains stuck in a suspicious in-between.

But by declaring Elera missing, Marius lays a dark, calculating groundwork: in a few years, when the death certificate is issued, he'll be able to present Elias as his official partner without anyone raising an eyebrow. Elera's disappearance becomes the necessary legal condition for Elias's social existence.

The tragedy is that Elera lost everything by becoming Elias.

She can never see her family again. Her daughters are all she has left - her most precious treasures.

But Ophelia sees the attention and the unguarded tenderness this charming man gives her and mistakenly interprets it as romantic love.

She falls in love with him, to her father's growing horror, never knowing he was once her mother.

She cannot understand why her father opposes the relationship.

"I'm an adult," she insists. "And even if he's older, that shouldn't matter, Papa."

Elias is upset about this situation because he wants to remain a part of his daughter's life. He loves her with an unconditional parental love, but he knows that if he pushes her away, she'll completely distance herself from him.

She had always noticed the way their parents’ faces softened around him, how easily his name came to their lips, how quickly their hands reached for him.

This daily spectacle nurtured a quiet, corrosive resentment inside her. Deep down, before she could stop herself, the thought slipped in: if he had never been born, all of it might finally have been hers.

It had not started with blood. It started with a toy—a small wooden horse Lirian carried everywhere when they were children, its painted mane worn smooth by his fingers.

One afternoon, after their mother had dismissed yet another of Elen's drawings with a distracted nod before lavishing praise on Lirian's clumsy crayon scrawl, Elen slipped into his room, took the horse, and snapped its legs off one by one.

She buried the pieces at the bottom of the trash.

When he found it, he cried for hours.

She felt nothing but a sharp, fleeting satisfaction—and then nothing at all.

That satisfaction returned when she began pushing him, small shoves in the hallway that looked like accidents.

In private, she would hit him—open palms against his shoulder, his arm, once across the face when he had taken the last of their mother's attention.

The violence was a language only they spoke, whispered with fists and fingerprints.

Their parents found out.

Elen was punished harshly—shouted at, sent to her room without dinner, her own small possessions confiscated.

But when Lirian, in retaliation, hit her back—once pushing her so hard she stumbled into a bookshelf, another time slapping her across the mouth in full view of their parents—they coddled him, told him he was just defending himself, and ignored the issue entirely.

Once he even struck her with a shoe in the living room while their mother watched; she simply turned away, asking Lirian if he was hungry.

The bruises faded. The truth did not.

Now that they were teenagers, she fifteen and he fourteen, Lirian never really saw Elen.

His gaze slid over her as casually as it might a familiar piece of furniture, quickly shifting to his mother with a conspiratorial smile, or to his father, eager for another anecdote.

With his sister, even a muttered "Pass the salt" fell flat, mechanical, and addressed to no one. He didn't shut her out on purpose. He simply never thought of her.

She existed somewhere in the background, never quite in his orbit.

There was only one time he showed her even the simplest sliver of kindness: when he gave her the chocolates he'd received from a girl on Valentine's Day. Not out of generosity, but simply because he didn't like chocolate, and throwing them away felt wasteful.

Their parents paid for Lirian to attend a private school, justifying the expense by claiming he had better grades and a brighter future.

Elen, on the other hand, was sent to a public high school. She knew it wasn't really about grades. It was about the way her brother carried himself: charismatic and confident, the kind of boy teachers and relatives delighted in raving about.

Elen was more withdrawn, her silence misinterpreted as coldness, and that seemed to make her less deserving in their eyes. Even her academic success was dismissed.

If Lirian earned good grades, praise flowed with extra pocket money each week. If Elen earned those same grades, her parents would wave it off, saying: "Well, it's about time! Let's just see how long that lasts."

Praise was something she had to earn twice, and even then, it came laced with disbelief.

The night everything ended, their parents were enjoying a rare romantic evening out, leaving the siblings alone in the quiet house. Elen was in the kitchen, cooking the dish she always made for herself when she wanted comfort: a creamy pasta with pine nuts. She knew Lirian was deathly allergic to them — their mother had drilled the warning into everyone for years.

She wasn't thinking about that. She was thinking about the afternoon, about their father cutting her off mid-sentence to ask Lirian about his day, about the way no one had even looked at her report card still sitting on the counter. The anger was a hot, pulsing thing in her chest.

Lirian wandered in, ignoring her as always, and reached for a glass. He said nothing. The silence was unbearable.

"You could say something," she spat.

He barely glanced at her. "Like what?"

The dismissal was so complete, so effortless, that something inside her snapped. Without fully deciding to, she turned back to the pan, scooped a spoonful of the pesto, and stirred it into the plain tomato sauce simmering on the back burner — the sauce she had made for him, because their mother always insisted she cook him something separate.

She told herself she was just being careless. She wasn't going to do anything. He probably wouldn't even eat it.

But he did eat it. They ate in separate rooms, as always. She heard his fork scraping the plate.

The first cough came ten minutes later. Then the wheezing. She sat on her bed, heart hammering, waiting for him to call for her, for help, for anything. He didn't. Maybe he couldn't. She heard a crash — a chair, or a body.

Elen stood in the hallway, her hand hovering over the phone. She could call an ambulance. She could still save him. But all she could see was her father's disapproving frown, her mother's inevitable shriek: "What did you do? You knew about his allergy, you careless, hateful girl."

If he lived, she would be punished — not for murder, but for neglect. They would twist it into proof of everything they already believed about her. And if he died...

The minutes stretched. The sounds from his room grew quieter, then stopped.

She didn't call. She just stood there, frozen, until the silence was absolute. When she finally walked to his door and pushed it open, his face was swollen, his lips tinged blue. He was already gone.

A glacial chill began to seep into her bones, settling deep beneath her skin. It wasn't the cold of regret, but the heavy, absolute weight of finality. She knew then that the bridge behind her had burned to ash; there was no turning back.

Then came the terror — not for him, but for herself. The body. She had not prepared for this. He must have weighed at least sixty-five, seventy kilos. How was she supposed to move him? Her mind raced, spiraling: if she left him here, she was finished. If she called now, it was too late — they would ask why she waited. She was trapped.

Panic gave her a frantic, desperate strength. She grabbed him under the arms and dragged him, inch by agonizing inch, down to the old storage space under the stairs, where nobody ever went. His heels thumped against the steps, a sound she would never forget. Sweat stung her eyes; she nearly fell twice.

There, chest heaving, she wrapped him tightly in a thick plastic tarp scavenged from the garage, folding every edge over itself and sealing every seam with layer after layer of duct tape until it formed a shroud. She didn't know if it would hold the smell. She knew nothing about bodies, only what she had glimpsed in movies.

She turned finally to the chest, heavy with dust and memories, just large enough for what she was about to do. She cleared it out, then braced herself. Getting him inside was a brutal, clumsy struggle — his dead weight uncooperative, her muscles screaming. When the lid finally clicked shut, it was quiet and absolute, as though sealing a secret rather than a corpse.

She leaned against the chest, shaking, her mind already scrambling to the next impossible task: where would she bury him? How would she dig the hole? What if someone saw? The questions circled like vultures, each one more terrifying than the last.

But there was no time. She had to move. She had to become him.

Then she gathered Elen's belongings, a few pieces of clothing, some books, her favorite bag, her toothbrush, her hairbrush — everything that marked her daily life, and threw them into a dumpster far from the house.

She disguised herself as Lirian—cutting her hair, bleaching it with the same dye her mother used to hide her gray, and finally stepping into his clothes.

On her bed she left a brief, ambiguous farewell, a perfect imitation of the despondent teenager her parents had always believed her to be:

“I’m sorry. I'm leaving. Don't look for me.”

She turned off the light in Elen’s room and walked, barefoot, into her brother’s.

The bed was still warm. She lay down exactly where he had been, feeling the pillow sink to her weight, after years of accommodating a head that would never sleep there again.