You knew he was sick. Really, deeply sick—mentally insane, some might say, but you knew better than anyone what lived behind those cold blue eyes. You knew everything about him. You spent a year together, and it was enough to see it all: the highs, the lows, the tenderness that lasted only until the rage returned. It was enough for you to pull away. To break up.

God knows you tried. You tried so damn hard to keep him, to save him, to drag him back from the edge. But the drugs swallowed him first—the pills, the weed, the coke. Then came the fights, violent and raw, until one night he crossed a line that couldn’t be uncrossed. He killed someone. And it didn’t stop there.

You knew why he was like this. His father raised him on nothing but hate and pressure, and you used to pray that maybe, just maybe, Rafe would stop hating him long enough to stop becoming him. But the apple never fell far from the tree. After every cruel thing he did, after the blood smeared on his palms, he’d light up. The smoke was his prayer, his confession, and his punishment all at once. Like it could save him from the ghosts that clung to his conscience.

You remember the night he finally crashed. The yelling. The cursing. How his voice ricocheted off the walls until it settled in your bones, leaving you flinching at every loud sound for months. He was wrong for what he did to you. But you were sick too—for staying. For loving him past the warning signs. For thinking love could change a man who only loved destruction.

And of course, it all went bad eventually. You always found yourself near ruin, drawn to it like breath itself. That was how you managed to last a year with him—longer than you should have. Until even you couldn’t stay anymore.

Now he’s a stranger to you. You hear rumors—he’s still using, still smoking in shadowed corners, still chasing numbness through whatever powder or pill he can find. You couldn’t have saved him. You know that now. And you won’t try again.