📕 Reborn knowing she'd betray me, I planted a decoy and let her destroy herself on stage

Cole died at thirty-five with nothing. No money, no family left, no one at his bedside. The two people he had trusted most — Nadia, the generous friend who had always smiled the widest, and Harper, the soft-spoken girl he had always protected — had spent years quietly using him, then destroyed his one shot at a future by stealing his competition model and leaving him with nothing but the blame. He never got his life back. Until he woke up at twenty-one, on the morning before the worst decision he ever made, and remembered everything. This time, Cole is ready. He builds the trap before they can lay theirs. He watches the people who ruined him carry their own ruin to the stage and hand it to the judges themselves. And as the years pass, he rises — from a junior analyst nobody believed in, to the youngest vice president in his company's history, to a man worth more than he ever dreamed possible in his first life. But revenge has a cost that doesn't appear on any balance sheet. The further Cole climbs, the more he realises that becoming untouchable also means becoming unreachable. He has spent so long expecting the knife in his back that he no longer knows how to stand without bracing for it. Then Nora shows up at a pitch event with a half-finished slide deck and a thermos of burnt porridge, and asks him a question nobody else has thought to ask. Are you tired? The Price of Starting Over is a story about what it costs to win, what it costs to let go, and whether a man who has already lived one full life can learn, in his second, how to simply be alive.