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I am healthier now.

I am also a jealous ex-girlfriend who remains offensively possessive of you.

If we ever find our way back to one another, I will want your attention most. I will never politely allow another woman to interfere with us, and if she touches you after knowing you are mine, I will pull her tongue through her asshole.

Therapy has given me healthier communication skills. It hasn’t made me a saint.

Briggs starts laughing when I read that part aloud.

“You’re fucked,” he says.

“She threatened hypothetical women inside a letter explaining her emotional growth.”

“That’s growth for Charm.”

“Apparently.”

“I like her.”

“You liked her before.”

“I like her more now.”

“That wasn’t the purpose of the letter.”

“Maybe she wrote it for both of us.”

“She doesn’t know you’re here.”

His humor fades without vanishing. “Neither did you.”

I look at him sitting on my bedroom floor while the remnants of Lyric’s damage remain beneath his eyes.

“No,” I say. “I didn’t.”

I return to Charm.

Jealousy is not the only part of me that love will not cure.

I have body dysmorphia and anorexia. Recovery doesn’t mean they disappear. My doctors explain it like addiction because treatment can teach me how to live without obeying the illness, but it cannot promise I will never hear it again.

The fight should become easier. I will become stronger and recognize the voice faster, but some days and life events will always affect me differently.

If we ever marry, I cannot give you a wedding like Cade and Bliss had.

I dreamed about a wedding that large for most of my life. I imagined the dress, photographs, flowers, and hundreds of people looking at me. Now I understand that one day beneath that much attention could become weeks or months of fighting the damage afterward.

I won’t risk my health to perform a dream I inherited before I understood its price.

I would take the marriage, though.

I would marry you surrounded by the people we love and call it more than enough. I would choose the life after the wedding instead of gambling that life for one perfect day.

I also refuse to surrender pizza.

I spent too many years pretending pepperoni, mushroom, and olive wasn’t the greatest combination ever created. I am currently living my best life with an alarming number of pies, and any future involving me will contain a significant pizza budget.

Life with me could be complicated, Ryan, but it would be complicated with pizza.