“Do you hate me?” I asked.

“No,” she told me. Her lips brushed against my cheek, extinguishing a single tear.

I knew she would be well within her rights to hate me; I’d done it again. I’d given in and let the demons overpower me. And yet, she held me tenderly in the aftermath, hiding the anguish she felt inside. Despair welled within her every time she dutifully wrapped my forearms in clean white gauze, but she never let it show. Seeing the crimson blood and broken flesh pained her; she was ill at the sight of what I had done. But nothing tore her apart more than imagining what depths of agony must have compelled me to do this to myself again.

She could never comprehend the brokenness, the abject madness that churned inside me each time I fell from grace, each time I surrendered to the depraved, twisted beauty of that glistening blade. Nor did she pretend to understand. She just knew I needed someone to break that fall. I needed someone to sit with me while the blood and shame spilled from my veins, staining the cold tile floor. I needed someone who could somehow manage to love me in spite of it all.

She was my single anchor in sanity, the hand that struggled to hold me just a hair’s breadth above the point of no return. By all rights, she ought to have hated me for every twisted coil of darkness she drew out of me and bore as her own.

“I don’t hate you,” she reassured me again in a voice soft as a breath. “I could never, ever hate you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I love you.”