Page 122 of Before You Fell

The silence stretches between us.

I swallow. “I’m sorry, Graham, for all of it. I’m not saying this to make myself feel better. I know I hurt her.”

He lets out a breath. “I can see you’re aware you weren’t there for her when it mattered. But knowing it doesn’t mean a damn thing if that’s where it stops. You want to be different, Phoenix, then follow through. Not for me. For her.”

I close my eyes again.

“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”

“You better.”

Then the line goes dead.

I lower the phone slowly.

For a long time, I stand on the loading dock with the phone in my hand and the tour thundering behind me. Somewhere down the hall, someone laughs. A door opens. Music spills out. The green room waits with all the same old bullshit I used to call a good night.

For the first time in my life, I don’t want to go back in there. I don’t want to lose myself to some groupie with her hands on my belt and my name on her lips.

Hell, that is what I lived for. But now all I can think about is Willow, sitting somewhere without me, trying to put herself back together, while I stand here with a stadium behind me and nothing in it that is worthy of my attention.

So I shove my phone in my pocket and head to the hotel.

Chapter Twenty-One

Willow

Two weeks in rehab have taught me that getting better is not some graceful little rebirth in which a woman wakes up one morning with sunlight on her face and forgiveness in her bones.

It’s uglier than that.

It is waking up at seven because a schedule says you must, even though your body wants to stay buried under the blanket. It’s sitting across from strangers while everyone holds cups of coffee and pieces of themselves they don’t know what to do with.

The first few days were fucking awful.

I hated being watched and cut off from the outside world like a prisoner. I hated the soft voices and the group sessions because nothing says personal dignity quite like sitting in a circle admitting you were never in control as you worked so hard to appear.

Mostly, I hated the silence.

They call them triggers here. The moments your brain keeps running back to because they taught it that pain should be followed by escape.

Mine always led back to Phoenix.

For the first few nights, I laid awake, thinking about the last thing he said to me outside this place.

Then I’ll fucking learn.

It should have made me roll my eyes. Phoenix has always been better at making promises to himself than at keeping them for anyone else.

But the words stayed with me anyway.

By the end of the first week, I stopped checking the doors every time someone came in. By the beginning of the second week, I stopped expecting the ache to kill me every time I looked at what I had done to myself. It still hurt. Of course it fucking hurt. Recognizing I had let my life deteriorate to a point where the pills seemed like an escape is not exactly a gentle little self-discovery.

It’s progress, apparently.

The days here have a rhythm now. Breakfast at the same tables. Morning check-in. Group. One-on-one sessions. Lunch. Some kind of activity that always sounds harmless until it finds a bruise and presses its thumb into it. Journaling. Walks outside when the weather behaves. Dinner.

People talk. People cry.