She stood on the back of time

"I'll take responsibility for this. I'll file the marriage application tomorrow."

Joshua’s voice was cold, final. He buttoned his white shirt—still damp, clinging to his frame, outlining the defined muscles of his abdomen.

He was the best-looking man on this remote fishing island, and the only college graduate among them.

Just ten minutes earlier, he’d pulled Ellie from the river in a panic. Soaked and shivering, they had clung to each other, walking past the villagers’ stares without a shred of shame.

Ellie still wore his white shirt over her own clothes.

In 1980, if Joshua didn’t marry her, Ellie was ruined. In their tight-knit island community, a scandal like this meant she’d be branded a loose woman—shunned by everyone, with no prospects for marriage or respectability. In her past life, she’d accepted with joy, only to be broken, piece by piece, until she took her own life.

But fate had granted her mercy. She’d been reborn, returned to her eighteen-year-old self, to the very day before she’d agreed to marry Joshua.

Joshua was her brother-in-law—or would have been, if her sister hadn’t died on their wedding day. To keep a promise to Savannah, he’d given up a brilliant future and returned to this backwater to care for the sister she’d left behind: an orphan their parents had thrown away, passed from household to household for her meals.

The first time they met, Ellie had been fighting a neighbor’s dog over a bone. Joshua had appeared in her life like a miracle, handing her a roll, offering her a home.

From that moment, he’d taken root in her heart.

Now, in a daze, Ellie stared at this younger Joshua, his hair still thick and black, so different from the man she’d known. The words slipped out before she could stop them.

"What about Diane?"

Diane was Joshua’s sweetheart. His ideal, his perfect first love.

Joshua paused at the door, hand on the knob. After a moment’s silence, he turned back. "I’ll end things with her. I’ll be a proper husband to you."

The door clicked shut. Ellie collapsed onto the bed, weeping with violent, body-wracking sobs.

In her past life, Diane had overheard those very words when she came to plead with Joshua to return to the city. A furious argument, a stormy departure—Diane had gone back and married someone else just to prove a point.

And Ellie had gotten her wish. She’d married her brother-in-law, Joshua.

For a time, she was happy. Joshua indulged her in everything, cared for her with meticulous attention, until Ellie almost let herself believe he’d fallen in love with her.

Then, the following year, Diane returned to the island by boat. She was pregnant with her second child, come to persuade Joshua one last time. The island was hit by a devastating tsunami. Diane was lost at sea.

When the news reached Joshua, his hair turned white overnight.

Ellie, blissfully unaware in her own first pregnancy, missed the change in him entirely. She was too wrapped up in the joy of their coming child.

The baby was born. She nursed him, watched him take his first steps. Then Joshua, against her desperate pleas, took the boy out on the boat.

Their first child died in a storm surge.

The second got tangled in a net and was dragged under.

The third was swimming when a storm rolled in, struck by lightning.

The fourth…

The fifth…

…

Until the tenth was fished from the sea, a small, cold form. By then, after twenty years of burying her children, Ellie had gone completely mad.

She sat on the ground, cradling her youngest son’s lifeless body, a wordless, broken hum escaping her lips. Just yesterday, he’d been so full of life, calling for his mama, begging for candy. Now he lay still and cold in her arms.

Her eyes were vacant, her song a broken whisper. When Joshua came to take the child’s body, she launched herself at him, a wild thing all claws and screams.

"Why?" she wept, tearing at his clothes. "Why do this to me? To our children? Why couldn’t you keep them safe?"

Exhausted, Joshua pried the small body from her arms. He walked to the door, step by step, then turned back—exactly as he had years before when he promised to end things with Diane.

His voice was flat and final. "We owed Diane a life. Our children have settled that debt."

He took the boy away. He never told her where he was buried. From that day, Ellie’s mind shattered completely.

She’d see a child and scream at them to stay away from Joshua, or he’d take them to the sea to drown.

Joshua never cast out his mad wife. He cared for her for the rest of her life. Every time she lost herself to the madness, he’d slice into his arm, not stopping until he saw white bone gleaming through the blood.

When Joshua was forty, a young woman who bore a striking resemblance to Diane came to visit. She fell for him instantly, confessed her feelings. As a token, she gave him a set of sheer lace lingerie.

Joshua flew into a rage, shouting the girl out of the house.

Ellie just giggled nearby, rocking a pillow in her arms as if it were a baby, humming that same broken lullaby.

It was in the dead of night that Ellie woke. She shuffled past the study, her nightgown damp with urine.

There, she saw him. Her husband, the upright man she’d known for a lifetime. He held the girl’s underwear, his body moving in a rhythm of desperate, shameful need.

A groan escaped his lips, fervent and longing. "Diane… your daughter… she’s so beautiful, just like you. I miss you."

Those words were a curse, breaking a thirty-year fog.

Everything rushed back. He’d married her, and Diane had died. So he hated her. To make her suffer, he had killed their ten children.

That very night, Ellie dressed herself in the clothes of her girlhood, before any marriage, and walked into the hungry sea.

She hadn’t expected a second chance. But fate had granted it. This time, she would not marry Joshua.

Ellie wiped her tears away, one by one. She dressed properly, then pushed open the door to the room next door.

"Don’t pretend with me. I know how you feel. Get me away from here. Get me off this damned island. I won’t marry Joshua. I’ll die before I marry him!"