“But that problem is not the problem that I have,” Teagan slowly explained to her. He rarely drank. He didn’t do drugs—save and except for whatever he’d been prescribed during the past week. “I don’t need to go to rehab, and I can’t take a vacation.”
Sloane snatched the admissions packets away from him.
“You’re not listening to me,” she complained. “They have yoga and mindfulness training, and all the food is organic and anti-inflammatory. Don’t you think that would help you?”
“It probably won’t hurt me, but I think twenty milligrams of daily Lexapro have it covered already.”
Sloane grimaced. “We could spend some time together,” she said, trying a different tactic. “I barely see you anymore.”
“Of course we can spend some time together,” Teagan said. “Anywhere. Regardless. School doesn’t start back up for another month or two, does it? I can stay at the house in Irvington with you until you go back to Claremont.”
“You’ll just spend every day at the office if we do that. We could go hiking here. Don’t you like hiking?” Sloane suggested instead, sensing that he was wavering.
Teagan squinted at her, more thoughts penetrating the gray fog shrouding his mind. Sloane didn’t like the outdoors. Their mother had tried to ship an eight-year-old Sloane off to Teagan’s childhood sleepaway camp in Vermont in the first year that he didn’t come home from college for the summer. Sloane had bribed a staff member for use of her cell phone, called Teagan to inform him that it washot, there werebugs, and she wanted to gohome, then waited at the camp entrance with her suitcases until Teagan drove up in the middle of the night from Boston to collect her.
“Sloane, are we here becauseyouneed to go to rehab?” he asked, slowly working through it.
She licked her lips, considering.
“Sloane.”
“I mean, everyone in our family had issues,” she said. “We probably needed more therapy. All the therapy, for all of us. Remember when you got so mad that mom left me home alone while she went to Art Basel that you called CPS on her? Like, you should have probably talked to someone about that too.”
“You were ten! And that still doesn’t explain why you want to go to rehab.” Teagan paused, stomach dropping as he began to imagine everything she could have gotten into out of sight in California. “What have you been taking, exactly?”
Sloane scrunched up her foxlike features. “Just pills. A little coke. But you know, given everything with our family, I thought maybe we could both stay at a place like this and work on ourselves...” Her voice delicately trailed off as she looked up at him in open appeal.
Teagan rubbed a week’s worth of stubble on his cheeks, then ground his palms into his eyes. He should have paid more attention to how Sloane was handling their mother’s death. He’d been too absorbed by all the estate work, by the foundation. None of it was more important than his sister. Jesus. He should have been on top of this too.
“Okay. Okay. How much does this place cost?” he asked. He hadn’t worried about that so much until now, but he hadn’t planned for a month of luxury accommodations for two people.
“What do you mean, how much does it cost?” Sloane asked, alarm visible in her eyes.
“Imean, how much does it cost? Or does this place take insurance?” Teagan was abruptly glad that he’d resisted his directors’ suggestion that he cut employee health benefits.
“Why does that matter?”
“It matters because I need to figure out if I can afford it,” he said.
“You have a literal trust fund. This is literally the reason why people put together trust funds for their kids—so they can go to rehab after all the shitty parenting.”
“I don’t have one anymore, actually. I poured it into the foundation when mom died.”
“Jesus Christ. Why would you do that?” Sloane asked, appalled.
“I thought it would make me feel better,” he said, turning and heading for the main building. He couldn’t justify inheriting money from his mother when the foundation had been two months from missing payroll under her mismanagement. It had been a moment of triumphant moral clarity—but moral clarity was not a good and consistent source of serotonin, as it turned out.
“Doesn’t look like it worked,” Sloane called as she followed him. “And now you have to worry about paying for stuff.”
Teagan put what he hoped was a soothing expression on his face and paused. It must have been hard for Sloane to articulate that she needed help. He turned to put his hands on her narrow shoulders. She’d always been small for her age, and it was still hard for him to consider her full grown now that she was taller than most women. “Don’t worry about it. Dad left me some money too. I’ll take care of this.” His dizzy attempt to project reassurance must have worked, because she finally nodded.
He let them into the camp’s main building. Everything was decorated in shades of white and cream, in travertine stone and pale wood, like a spa. He supposed it was a spa.“If this place is too expensive, I’ll find a place we can afford. Rehab’s important.”
“But I wanted to go tothis one,” Sloane said. “They customize your diet to your personal immune profile.” She waved the nutrition brochure, which depicted a soft-focus bowl of raspberries, pistachios, and what appeared to be... butter? Had to be margarine—the place was vegan. Teagan kept his skepticism of the therapeutic benefits of raspberries and vegan butter to himself. The best rehab program was one that Sloane would actually stay at; their mother had dabbled in sobriety, but never for long, or long enough. Better to get this right the first time.
Teagan halted on the plush sisal rug covering the pine-board floor of the reception area. Rachel, the program director who’d greeted them upon their arrival, was typing on a computer in a glass-sided office, but she stood up to intercept them as they approached the main desk. She was in her fifties, with one of those immobile, ageless faces achieved via high-quality medical intervention.
Rachel brought over two little copper cups of ice water as she greeted them. There were bits of unidentifiable red leaf floating in each cup. Possibly some kind of cabbage. Sloane smiled, the expression honest and delighted for the first time since she’d signed him out of the hospital. Some small knot in Teagan’s chest loosened; he didn’t feel like he’d delivered for anyone recently, and if Sloane’s sobriety demanded leaf water and hot yoga, he’d liquidate investments to get them for her.
