“What are you talking about?”
“We wrote it together.”
“No.” I shake my head. Scott and I wrote together; I know how writing as a team works. “I wrote it, and you were in the room. That doesn’t make you my coauthor. It makes you my audience.”
Andrew’s face hardens.
“Andrew,” I try to sound reasonable. My kid says it’s the best way to win an argument. “It’s a personal, feminist song. It doesn’t make sense comingfrom you.” I lift my suitcase onto its side. “But thank you for being there. I’ll mention you in the liner notes.”
I won’t, not anymore, but I need to throw him a bone. I step toward the door. Andrew blocks the way.
I shove the suitcase in front of me, trying to force him to move, but he stands strong.
I throw myself at him, my fists pounding against his rock-hard chest.
I don’t see the syringe, but I feel the needle pierce my skin.
Almost immediately, my body feels like it weighs a million pounds. I slump against Andrew, and he lifts me, carrying me to the bed. He’s not gentle, not kind. He drops me like I’m nothing. It’s hard to remember that just a day ago I held him willingly.
He must’ve dosed me with a sedative, just like Evelyn threatened when I first got here. I try to say something, but my tongue is thick in my mouth. It feels like there’s a bear sitting on my chest, pressing against every breath.
That first day, I was so panicked that they might drug me, that being here would throw my months of sobriety out the window. It nearly happened again when Andrew showed up with Evelyn’s wine, but he didn’t seem to notice when I only pretended to drink it. It was tempting; if I’d had my phone, I would’ve called my sponsor, but I wasn’t about to give Evelyn the satisfaction of asking for it.
I concentrate on my heart. Each beat takes effort, as though my blood has turned from liquid to sludge. I beg my lungs to fill with air.
“Shit!” Andrew says at the sound of my wheezing. “It’s not supposed to—shit!”
I hear him shuffling around the room.
“You have to get here,now,” he says frantically. He must be on the phone.
I don’t know how much time goes by before I hear another set of footsteps, lighter than Andrew’s.
“What did you do?” Evelyn’s voice sounds frantic and out of breath. There’s something else in her voice that takes me a moment to recognize: disappointment.
She must have run from her house. Andrew told me it’s on the edgeof the property, the one structure they didn’t tear down or renovate after Evelyn and her husband bought the land for the recovery center.They wanted a place of their own,Andrew said, then scoffed, adding that Evelyn’s husband only lived there for a few months before Evelyn kicked him out.
I wait for Andrew to explain, to spew a lie about how I attacked him and he had to restrain me, but instead I hear him hiccup and cough. His voice is octaves higher than when he spoke to me, so that he sounds like a little boy.
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
Mama?Again, I try to speak, but my tongue is made of cotton.
Evelyn is Andrew’smother?
Of course. He said it wasa long story, how he got the job here. Turns out, it was a very short story: plain old nepotism.
How could I have missed it? It’s not only that Andrew knew so many details of Evelyn’s personal life—and she’s not the sort who would’ve shared all that with a mere employee—but the disgust when he spoke about her drinking, like it offended him somehow. He was pissed that his mother couldn’t keep her shit together. I’ve seen that same disgust on my kid’s face a thousand times.
“You said you could handle this.” Evelyn’s disappointed-mom voice is undercut by the fact that she’s slurring her words slightly, obviously a few glasses in. “Your father was right, for once. I never should’ve given you this job.”
“This was anaccident!”
I can hear echoes of my own voice, whining every time Naomi scolded me. I’d called a lot of things accidents, trying to get out of trouble, but Naomi always saw through me.
“This isn’t tinkering with your guitar in your room. My job—your job—involves people’slives—”
“It’s not tinkering!” Andrew soundsshrill, I think, though no one ever uses that word to describe a man’s voice. “And music can touch people’s lives just as much as you can.”
