I Was You

Hana Sato is sixteen, suffocating under high school anxieties, and trapped in the crossfire of her parents' crumbling marriage. Thirty-two-year-old Hana is a ruthless, career-driven corporate executive—dubbed the "Ice Queen"—who has traded human connection for professional success, leaving her profoundly isolated. Though they live years apart, they are the exact same person from different timelines, separated only by a lifetime of regrets, choices, and hardened walls.

Everything changes when an antique pocket mirror bought at a thrift store shatters the boundaries of time, forcing these two versions of the same soul into an impossible body swap.

With the teenage Hana thrust sixteen years into her own future, she must navigate a high-stakes corporate world she doesn't understand. By bringing her raw vulnerability, empathy, and unfiltered teenage perspective into a cold workplace, she begins to dismantle the ruthless persona her future self worked so hard to build. Meanwhile, the adult Hana gets a miraculous, painful second chance at her own youth. Navigating her past high school life with a mature perspective, she sets out to mend her parents' broken relationship, face her old anxieties, and find unexpected solace in a slow-burn, emotional bond with Ren, a quiet classmate.

Bound together across time, both versions of Hana must confront the choices that define them. I Was You is a deeply emotional, contemporary speculative novel about healing family trauma, finding human connection in a corporate world, and discovering that the most profound changes in life don't leave craters—they leave cracks where the light gets in.