There are emotions that scream. And then there are emotions that go silent. Lately, mine have gone quiet. Ryan and I have been through hell and back over the past two and a half years — the kind of hell you don’t come back from unchanged. The kind that strips you down to survival mode and leaves you standing there wondering when you stopped feeling so much… and why that now feels like relief. He relapsed. And while the world loves a clean, simple explanation for relapse, the truth is messier. His reasons are tangled in trauma, in a past that never loosened its grip, in wounds that existed long before I ever entered his life. Addiction didn’t start with me, and it didn’t end because of love — no matter how much we wish it worked that way. As for me? I learned about a world I only thought existed on television. Drugs. Addiction. Street life. Prison culture. Relapse cycles. Withdrawal. Chaos disguised as normal. Survival disguised as strength. I didn’t grow up in this world. I did...