Track marks up both arms like railroad tracks leading nowhere.
I was the one to find her.
An adult, sure, but walking into that trap house looking for the rent money she'd promised me, and instead finding the woman who gave me life lying cold and dead on a stranger's floor.
I remember the smell.
The terrible smell of death and drugs and decay.
I remember the way her hand felt when I touched it—cold and stiff, nothing like the hand that used to braid my hair when I was little, before the pills took her away from me one piece at a time.
I remember standing there, frozen, unable to scream or cry or move.
Just standing there while the world collapsed around me.
I've been chasing that oblivion ever since, trying to outrun the ghost of her, trying to forget the way her dead eyes seemed to look right through me.
You'll end up just like me.
Her voice echoes in my head, a prophecy I've been fulfilling for years.
Every hit, every overdose, every hospital visit brings me closer to her fate.
One day, someone will find me just like I found her.
Cold. Blue. Gone.
And Garrett will be the one standing there, frozen, trying to make sense of a world that has taken another woman he loves.
Is that what I want?
To make him suffer the way I've suffered?
To leave him with the same haunting memories that drove me to the needle in the first place?
For the first time in longer than I can remember, the answer is no.
I don't want to die.
The realization hits me like a slap to the face, stealing the breath from my lungs.
All these years, I've been slowly killing myself, and part of me has been okay with that.
Part of me has welcomed the possibility of an ending, of finally being free from the exhausting work of existing.
But lying here, looking at Garrett's face, at the hope and fear and love written in every line of his expression, I realize something has shifted.
I don't want to die.
I want to live.
I want to see what life could look like without the constant hunger for the next fix.
I want to wake up without my first thought being about how I'm going to get high that day.
I want to be the woman in that memory—the one with the golden hair and the bright eyes and the laughter that came so easily.
I want to be Garrett's wife again.
