Author’s Note

This is a work of fiction drawn from lived emotional experience, not a documentary account. Characters may be composites. Names, locations, professions, chronology, dialogue, and identifying circumstances have been altered or invented to serve the story.

Health, substance use, military service, finances, family conflict, and intimate relationships are portrayed through Maya's limited point of view. Her understanding may be incomplete. Her account of disputed experiences should not be read as a clinical, legal, or factual judgment about any real person.

This is a story about learning to trust what love does, not only what it promises.

For readers who recognize their own uncertainty in Maya's, this story offers company, not diagnosis. Love can be real and still not be safe enough to stay.