Page 24 of Contentious

“He’d love that.”

“So would I.”

“I wanted to check in after everything that happened with your parents…”

“It’s nice of you to think of me, but I’m fine. Just doing my thing and trying not to let it bother me.” He was such a fucking liar.

“How’s that going?”

“So far, so good. My dad asked to meet with me and my brothers today, and my mother made the same request of my sisters, but we’re not doing that.”

“How’re you feeling about that?”

“We feel very good about it. My grandfather reminded me this morning that we’re in charge of our own lives, and just because we work for them doesn’t mean we have to participate in their reunion tour or whatever they’re calling it.”

“He’s right. You have to protect yourselves.”

“That’s the plan. Thank you for checking on me. I appreciate it.”

“No problem. I’m here if you need a friend.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Have a great day, Carson.”

“You do the same.”

He ended the call, feeling oddly elated that she’d taken the time to check on him after witnessing the rough night with his family. She certainly had much better things to be doing than wondering how he was doing. Was she thinking about that fucking kiss as much as he was?

In the parking lot at the church where the meeting was held, he checked his messages, gave directions to several employees, declined his father’s Slack invite and powered down the phone on the way inside. While he usually attended meetings closer to home, it didn’t matter where he went. His fellow travelers were always ready to welcome a new friend.

After resisting the help his loved ones had offered and pleaded with him to accept for far too long, Carson had eventually surrendered to the reality that he had a problem with heroin that needed to be addressed. Three trips to rehab later, he’d tamed the dragon into submission and begun living a more productive, drug-free life. Over the last decade, he’d become a leader within NA, often called in to counsel those just beginning their recovery journey.

His clean and sober life was his proudest accomplishment and something he never took for granted. Any time things went sideways, like they had last night, his first stop was a meeting to shore himself up to face whatever came next.

Like he often did whenever he needed reinforcements, Carson listened at the meeting rather than contributing. His problems were first-world compared to what most of the others were going through, fighting to stay clean with a lack of resources and/or family support, neither of which had ever been an issue for him. That made him luckier than most, and he stayed focused on the gratitude for his many blessings. His parents had paid for the best rehab money could buy, which had ultimately saved his life.

He gave back by anonymously paying for rehab for those who couldn’t afford it. So far, he’d paid for twenty-two people and was on call to help with more as needed. Carson felt like it was the one thing he could do for those who hadn’t been born into a family like his that solved problems for a living and had the money to show for it.

As he listened to harrowing stories shared by the other attendees, he experienced another wave of guilt for refusing to engage in his parents’ reconciliation. They’d done a lot for him. He owed them, his siblings and grandfather everything. But he didn’t owe them his emotional energy or the opportunity to take him back to a time when everything felt so out of control that he’d turned to drugs to escape the madness.

Not that he blamed them. His addiction was one hundred percent his doing and his alone. That said, he often wondered what might’ve been different for him—for all of them—without their parents’ contentious divorce running straight through their childhood and into adulthood for several of them.

Would some of them be married with kids by now? Would they have taken more chances on things that might hurt them? Would they have made that solemn vow to remain single and unencumbered? Probably not. So while he owed his parents a lot, he didn’t owe them an audience for their latest drama.

“Carson,” the group leader, Mary, said toward the end of the hour, “welcome to our merry group. If you wish to share, please feel free.”

“Thanks for the warm welcome,” he said. “I appreciated hearing your stories and just want to say I’m proud of us for one more day clean and sober.”

“Cheers to that,” one of the women said.

After the meeting ended, he checked in with a few more of his people working on various surveillances tied to multiple ongoing cases before he returned to the office to write up reports for the attorneys. He went out of his way to run by Ty’s school one more time, relieved to see no sign of Marlon Beckett lurking about.

To be safe, he drove over to Mulholland Drive to go by Cresley’s home, which was also clear. Then he headed down the hill to the office on Wilshire Boulevard, steeling himself to deal with the mess in his own family and countless others.

Drama was the backbone of family law, whether it be a divorcing couple going for the jugular or a custody battle turned violent or wars over property and material possessions. They spent their days building cases for one side or the other and then litigating them at mediation or in court until a settlement was either agreed to or mandated by a judge. Sometimes, like it did for his parents, that took years, leaving an apocalyptic path of destruction in its wake.

Survivors of those wars were never quite the same afterward.