Lina loved Aaron the way you love something that can destroy you—with reverence, with hope, with your eyes half closed.
Their love was not loud. It lived in habits: the way he warmed her hands between his when winter crept in, the way she knew his footsteps before he reached the door. She believed that kind of knowing was safety. She believed love, once chosen, stayed chosen.
She was wrong.
The truth arrived without ceremony. A phone left faceup. A name that did not belong to her. A message still warm from being typed, intimate enough to bruise.
*I wish you were here.*
Something inside Lina split, not cleanly, but jagged—like bone through skin.
When she confronted him, Aaron collapsed into apologies. Words spilled out of him, useless and frantic. He said it was meaningless. He said it was over. He said her name as if it could erase the other woman's.
But Lina heard the silence beneath his voice. The space where loyalty should have lived.
"Go," she said. "Before I start hating the part of me that loved you."
Aaron wept. He begged. He stayed at the door longer than necessary, as though time itself might forgive him if he lingered long enough.
She turned her back.
That was the last kindness she ever gave him.
Two days later, the road took him.
Rain slicked the asphalt. Headlights fractured the dark. A drunk man crossed a line he never should have crossed, and Aaron's body paid the price. His car folded in on itself like a confession crushed too late.
At the hospital, Lina was handed facts instead of him. A time of death. A careful voice. A stranger's hand on her shoulder that felt like an insult.
The driver lived.
Aaron did not.
Grief did not care that he had betrayed her. It came anyway—violent and absolute. It wrapped around her lungs and refused to loosen. She cried for the man she loved, for the future she had already buried, for the apology that would now rot unsaid.
At the funeral, she stood close enough to touch the coffin and hated herself for wanting him back. People looked at her with soft eyes and sharper judgments. Some thought she should be relieved. Others thought she was to blame.
Lina thought nothing at all.
After the burial, her life began to disappear.
Not dramatically—no single collapse. Just erosion. Friends stopped calling when she no longer pretended to be okay. Her job let her go gently, like you release something already dead. The apartment emptied. Even the walls seemed to reject her.
She learned that grief is expensive. It costs you everything.
Some nights, she dreamed Aaron was alive and apologizing. Other nights, he was silent, staring at her with the knowledge that she would never get answers. Waking up felt like being punished for surviving.
Years passed in a blur of borrowed spaces and half-lived days. Lina carried her guilt like a second spine—rigid, unyielding. She told herself she deserved the emptiness. That love, once broken, demanded payment.
Eventually, she had nothing left to lose.
Redemption did not come as forgiveness. It came as refusal.
One night, soaked in rain, sitting on a bench with all her belongings pressed against her chest, Lina decided she would not die for someone else's sins.
She left the city. She left the ghosts. She found a place where no one knew her story and took work that required her to exist in the present. She began writing again—not to heal, but to survive.
Her words were sharp. Honest. Unforgiving.
She wrote about love that betrays. About men who choose wrong and women who pay for it anyway. She wrote until the pain loosened its grip—not gone, never gone, but bearable.
Years later, Lina held her own book in her hands. It was heavy with truth. It did not absolve Aaron. It did not absolve her.
But it proved she was still here.
Aaron remained part of her story—not as a savior, not as a villain, but as a lesson carved deep enough to last.
She had lost love.
She had lost home.
She had lost herself.
And then slowly, violently, beautifully
she took herself back.