Lay Low

She’s done surviving for everyone else. Now she’ll live for herself—even if it kills her. Kylee has always kept her head down. At school, she’s invisible. At home, she’s broken—caught between a stepfather’s rage and a mother who refuses to see the damage. The only way to cope is silence. Numbness. Disappearing. But then Price moves in next door. He’s all wrong for her: too charming, too curious, too determined to see what she’s worked so hard to bury. Still, Kylee can’t help but let him in. And with Price comes something else—something she can’t explain. Scratches on her skin she didn’t make. Whispers in the night she swears aren’t hers. Visions of a girl who looks just like her, begging to be remembered. As her grip on reality frays, Kylee must choose: stay hidden in the shadows of her pain, or face a truth darker than she ever imagined. Because someone is watching her. Someone who wants her to forget. But this time, Kylee won’t be anyone’s ghost. A haunting, emotional slow-burn romance with a twist of the paranormal. Because sometimes the bravest thing a girl can do is write her own heartbeat—and choose to live it out loud.

Dari has hard always been the careful type, coming from a big home, her three elder sisters where already too much to handle, she had made up her mind as a young girl from a poor family, that she will never have a child until she is hundred percent sure that she can give her child the best, Financially, mentally and emotionally, while growing up she had witness her mother insulted several times while seeking help from relatives. her had struggled to survive and go to college all be herself, she was still struggling to pay for her student loan, and meet up with her bills. This was the only reason she was still putting up with her terrible boss. so it was only natural that she was scared and confused when she found herself pregnant from a drunk one night stand with a stranger, who she can't even remember his name.

My twin sister, Ruby Stone, and I split up after our parents' divorce. She stays with Mom, while I went with Dad. Since the divorce, he's sunk into a deep depression, gambling away every penny we have. We move into a dark, damp apartment, and life becomes an endless struggle. Every day, I go to school and quietly work a part-time job to keep us afloat. Then, out of nowhere, Ruby—whom I haven't heard from in forever—sends me a link to a live stream. "Check this out, Aria. There's a surprise waiting for you." I click it, and my jaw drops. I'm the one topping the trending live streams. The screen splits in two. On one side, I sit in my dingy apartment, hunched over homework under the dim light. On the other side, Mom and Dad cuddle with Ruby on the fancy couch of their sprawling villa. The comments came pouring in. "Let's see what happens when twins are raised on opposite sides of fortune all the way to 18." "Aria still doesn't know, right? Her parents never divorced. They're loaded and perfectly happy. Ruby's life has been like a dream too." "Poor Aria. She's always starving and never has anything decent to wear. Isn't that basically abuse?" "She's the more sensible one, so her parents decided to raise her poorly."

After the breakup, my ex mocked me and called me a coward scavenging for scraps, then lured me to her new lover's winery just to humiliate me in front of everyone. Later, she accidentally shattered a bottle of priceless red wine and tried to pin the blame on me. What she didn't know was… the winery belonged to my family.

The new intern in the unit had to be chronically incompetent. He handled my mother's post-surgery medication and somehow mixed up the drug. He gave her a potent blood thinner. That night, she died from a hemorrhage after her operation. Before I could even accuse him, the intern had his puppy-dog eyes ready. "I'm sorry, Dr. Benford, but I thought that was the drug you wanted me to mix. Who was I to question my superior's order?" Then the hospital director, who was also my wife, chimed in, "Your mom is the idiot for taking her meds without checking. She brought this on herself." I was so enraged that I had a heart attack, which meant I had to undergo surgery in the same hospital. The intern insisted on redeeming himself and assisted Victoria during the operation. He could not even thread a needle because his hands kept trembling. In the middle of the procedure, this medical fraud removed his mask and wet the end of the surgical thread to force it through. I died in the ICU the next day. The cause was a bacterial infection. As I neared death, I heard the intern whine through tears, "How could I be so careless? If I weren't so clumsy, Dr. Benford would have lived." Victoria gently ruffled his hair. "Don't take it to heart, pumpkin. Everyone knows how risky medical procedures can be. You're just starting out, so don't be so hard on yourself." Because of my wife's efforts, both my mother and I were cremated without any investigation or disciplinary action. You would think that was the end. It wasn't. The next time I opened my eyes, I was back on the day Hugo Spencer first joined our hospital as an intern.

I rented a house with a bloody history because it was cheap. On the first night after moving in, the faucet turned on by itself. I yelled into thin air, “Are you paying the water bill?!” The water instantly stopped flowing. I thought that was just the beginning of the ghost not bothering me. Unexpectedly, the next day, I saw a main course with two side dishes prepared on the dining table.