This Time, I Let My Sister Die

Nora once lost a full fifteen years of her life because of the death of her sister Delilah.

In the previous life, at 11:47 p.m., she received a call and learned that her sister had died from methanol poisoning after drinking the "19-Year-Old Reserve" from the winery. To save her sister, she rushed to the hospital and, relying on her expertise as a winemaker, told the doctors how to rescue her. Her sister eventually died. But what awaited Nora was not gratitude.

Her husband Adrian accused her of killing her sister and the unborn child in her womb out of jealousy; her foster father Graham produced an empty wine bottle from her office; her blood tested positive for alcohol; the family collectively proved that she had been a chronic alcoholic. All the evidence pointed to her.

Nora was therefore convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. During her imprisonment, she even lost her most important sense of smell as a winemaker due to being poisoned by someone. But fifteen years later, when she finally gained her freedom, she saw Delilah alive on the streets of Sonoma.

Not only was she alive, but she was standing with Adrian. There was even a boy of about fourteen or fifteen years old beside them, called Delilah "Mom". At that moment, Nora finally understood: the "sister's death" in the previous life was actually a carefully designed deception, and she was the one who was truly sacrificed in this deception. The fifteen years she lost, the winery, her reputation, her sense of smell, even her life, had all been exchanged by them for a complete family.

And when time returned to that night that determined her fate - 11:47 p.m., the phone rang again. Delilah was on the verge of death. Everyone was waiting for Nora to rush to the hospital like in the previous life, using her winemaking records to save her, and then step by step into the trap they had prepared in advance.

But this time, Nora didn't go. She only told the emergency room the correct way to handle methanol poisoning over the phone, pressed the recording button, and left every word with a timestamp. Then, she returned to the winery office, opened the surveillance, and pulled out the drawer she had been falsely accused of in the previous life. It was still empty now. Nora knew - the wine bottles had not been put in. So she sat down and waited for the first person to enter her office. Eleven minutes later, Adrian appeared. He tried to force Nora to go to the hospital, but inadvertently said out the "19-Year-Old Reserve" that only someone who knew the inside story could know. Nora responded in kind. Adrian showed the first sign of weakness. Then, Marjorie and Graham appeared one after another, accusing Nora of alcoholism, murder, and colluding and framing her according to the script from the previous life.

But this time, Nora didn't defend herself. She began to look for the loopholes they had left behind. Only nineteen minutes after Delilah's death, Graham already had a death certificate with the cause of death, the delay in treatment, and his signature. And this certificate came from a clinic that couldn't possibly have known the cause of death in advance. The "script" they had prepared for her showed the first inexplicable time gap. Then, the police found two empty wine bottles in Nora's office drawer. In the previous life, these two bottles became the key evidence for convicting Nora.

In this life, Nora directly called the police and accused Adrian and Graham of planting the evidence, conspiring, and framing her for murder. She began to dismantle the evidence chain they had prepared for her one by one. As the investigation deepened, the truth hidden for nineteen years gradually emerged.

Nora discovered that the Vance couple, who had loved her, adopted her, and regarded her as their daughter, actually had deeper secrets hidden. Delilah was not their biological daughter. And Adrian was their true biological son. The DNA report showed that there was a high probability of a parent-child relationship between Adrian and Graham, Marjorie, and there was a chance of it too. He was sent to a children's home after birth and was secretly found by them twenty years later. A few months later, he appeared at Nora's winery.

This finally allowed Nora to understand the inexplicable details from the previous life. Why did Graham never allow anyone to investigate Adrian's background? Why did Marjorie become so close to Adrian when she first met him? Why did they cry even harder at Nora's wedding than Nora herself did? And - why did when Delilah "died", what they truly cared about was not Delilah, but Adrian's future?

But this is not the biggest secret. After Nora continued her investigation, she discovered that the Vance Winery itself did not truly belong to them. The original land deed from 1974 showed that this land originally belonged to Aurelio Reyes. The 62-acre vineyard was built by him himself, while Graham was just the cellar manager at that time. When Aurelio was preparing to hand over the property to his descendants, a fatal car accident occurred. A maintenance record from twenty years ago, as well as the witness testimony from that time, made Nora start to suspect that the deaths of her parents, the change of ownership of the winery, and Graham's later obtaining of guardianship were not coincidences. She had thought that she was just a victim of a false accusation in the previous life. Later, she discovered that she had been involved in a family conspiracy that had lasted for decades since her birth.

In this life, she is no longer the Nora who rushed into the hospital and tried to save everyone. What she has to do is to make every person who participated in this scam leave irrevocable evidence. She no longer follows the script they wrote. Instead, she lets them walk into the script themselves.