Sugar

by Mia Ballard

And so, the plan to kill Dean was born not of vengeance, but of survival. It was the primal scream in the face of an existential crisis, the decision to cut off the tumor that threatened to consume me from the inside out. It was, in its essence, an act of reclaiming my dignity from the ashes of our crumbling relationship, from the lie that had become my life.

The meticulous nature of my planning was not born of malice but of necessity. It was a declaration of independence, a refusal to be the victim in a narrative where I had always seen myself as the heroine. The plan was my salvation, my catharsis, a way to sever the rot before it consumed me whole. Killing Dean, in theory, was not about ending his life; it was about reclaiming mine. It was about staring into the abyss of my own despair and choosing, instead, to rewrite the ending.

The magic we had once believed in was irreparably broken, yet a desperate part of me still longed to recapture it, to feel his love and validation once more.

A woman's life story