Prologue

The trailer was cold, but not a single speck of dust remained. I had spent three weeks scrubbing, rearranging, and throwing away the remnants of a life I no longer wanted to remember. Every corner, every surface, every shadow had been meticulously cleansed, stripped bare of the grime and sorrow that had accumulated over years. The air, though no longer thick with the scent of stale beer and desperation, still held a faint, lingering chill, a persistent reminder of the emptiness that had once permeated these four walls. I had believed that with enough bleach and enough effort, I could erase the past, sanitize the memories, and finally, truly, move on.

The cracked floor still bore the ghosts of my past, the place where I had once broken. It was the exact spot where fists had rained down on me, a relentless assault that had left me bruised and battered, not just physically, but deep within my soul. The splintered wood, even after countless hours of scrubbing, seemed to whisper tales of anguish, of a spirit pushed to its very limits. I could almost feel the phantom ache in my ribs, the burning sting on my cheek, the cold, hard reality of hitting the unforgiving floor. Those weren't just cracks in the linoleum; they were fissures in my own being, mended haphazardly but never fully healed. The weight of those memories still lingered, a heavy shroud that no amount of cleaning could dissipate. Yet, I had cleaned it. I had reclaimed it. Or so I told myself.

I stood in the center of the room, listening to the silence. It was not a peaceful silence, not the comforting of a home at rest. Instead, it was a vast, echoing emptiness, a void that seemed to swallow all sound, amplifying the frantic beat of my own heart. This was the sound of a clean slate, a deceptive quietude that promised a fresh start, a future I was desperately trying to build. But even in the stillness, I could still hear the echoes of that night. They were faint at first, like distant whispers carried on a phantom breeze, then growing sharper, more insistent, cutting through the manufactured calm of the trailer.

The past wasn't just in the walls of this trailer. It was in my blood. It coursed through my veins, a dark, indelible stain that no amount of scrubbing could remove. It was in the way my hands still trembled when the wind howled too loudly outside, mimicking the desperate cries of that forgotten night. The innocent creak of the old wood, the sigh of the wind through the eaves, each mundane sound had the power to transport me back, to unravel the fragile composure I worked so hard to maintain. My fingers would clench, my knuckles turning white, as if trying to grasp onto something solid, something real, in a world that often felt like it was slipping through my grasp.

It was in the way my heart still ached for a love I had chosen to leave behind. That love, once a beacon of warmth and unwavering support, was now a source of exquisite, enduring pain. He had been my anchor, my strength, the one person who saw through the chaos and found the real me. Choosing to walk away from him had been the hardest decision of my life, a sacrifice I made convinced it was the only way to protect him, to save him from myself. The thought of him, of his kind eyes and gentle touch, brought a familiar, piercing ache to my chest, a constant reminder of what I had given up.

I had made my choice, walked away from him to save him from myself.

It was a part of me, a part of my story, and no matter how far I ran, no matter how hard I tried to forget, it would always be there, waiting, ready to resurface and claim its due. And I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that one day, it would.