I slammed the journal shut and took it with me.
5
Serenity
It’s been thirty days, and I’ve been clean.
This is the first time in months, maybe years, that I’ve had this much clarity. An entire fog has been lifted off of me since my brothers forced me into rehab. I should be thanking them but I’m not ready to deal with them yet. It’s embarrassing being thrown into a trunk and driven to a facility against your will. Quest didn’t even ask. He just decided. Like he always decided. Like all of my brothers always decided, because Serenity can’t be trusted to run her own life, Serenity doesn’t know what’s good for her, Serenity needs saving.
Maybe I did. But that didn’t make the way they did it hurt any less.
The first week was hell. I don’t think I’ve ever been that sick in my life. My body rejected sobriety the way it had been rejecting everything else for the past year: violently and without warning. I was sweating through the sheets, throwing up bile because there was nothing else in my stomach, shaking so hard the nurse had to hold my arms down during intake. The cravings were physical, this deep gnawing ache behind my sternum that made me want to claw my own chest open just to get to it. Ibegged them to let me leave. Told them I’d sue. Told them my family had money and lawyers and I would make their lives a living hell if they didn’t unlock that door.
They didn’t unlock the door. They gave me Gatorade and a blanket and told me it would pass.
By the second week, the shaking stopped. I could eat without it coming back up. I slept through the night for the first time in I don’t even know how long, and when I woke up, the first thing I thought about wasn’t coke. It was Grandma Rita. I wanted to hear her voice. I wanted to sit in her kitchen and let her fuss over whether I was eating enough and just be her grandbaby for five minutes without performing or pretending or hiding bruises under Hermes scarves.
I called her that morning. She cried. I cried. She told me she’d been praying for me every night and that she knew God was going to bring me back. I told her I loved her and she said, “I know, baby. I always knew. Even when you were lost, I knew you’d find your way home.”
The third week, they put me in group therapy. I sat in a circle with eight other women who had stories that made mine look like a bad weekend. There was a woman who’d lost custody of three kids. A woman who’d been turning tricks for pills since she was sixteen. A woman my age, educated, successful, who’d been snorting Adderall for ten years and nobody in her life had any idea until she collapsed at a board meeting. Addiction didn’t care about your tax bracket. It ate everybody the same way.
I didn’t share much at first. I sat there with my arms crossed and my walls up and listened, because that was safer than opening my mouth and letting strangers see inside. But by the end of the third week, something cracked. I told them about Mega. About the coke he’d put in front of me like it was a gift. About his hand around my throat. About the Cartier bracelet he gave me the morning after he kicked me in the ribs. About howI put it on and kept it on because I didn’t know the difference between love and ownership anymore.
The woman who’d lost her kids looked at me and said, “You’re not stupid, sweetheart. You’re just starving for love. And starving people eat whatever’s in front of them.”
I thought about that every day for the rest of my stay.
Now it was day thirty. My discharge paperwork was signed, my bag was packed, and I was sitting on the edge of my bed in this little room that had become the safest place I’d lived in years. No motorcycles in the driveway. No white powder on the coffee table. No man studying my concealer technique before I left the house. Just four walls, a window, and the sound of birds outside that I’d started to listen to in the mornings like they were a playlist I’d been sleeping on my whole life.
But with this newfound clarity, there was no way in hell I was going back to Mega. I deserved to be with someone who didn’t abuse me. I knew that now. I could feel it in my body, not just my brain. My body had been telling me for months and I’d been too high to listen. Admittedly, I’d been feeling lost the last year or so after my divorce. Hurt and lonely and looking for somebody to make me feel wanted again, and Mega walked in with that jawline and those arms and those trips to Miami and I confused intensity for love because I didn’t know what love was supposed to feel like when it wasn’t hurting you.
Then of course all the shit with my mother. She put such a strain on our family with how she went after Prime and Zainab. I never once blamed him for having her arrested. Though I still tried to be in her corner. I still tried to be there for her emotionally, because truthfully, she’s saved me from a lot. There are things in my past that I wouldn’t have made it through if it weren’t for her. Things my brothers don’t know about. Things that happened at boarding school that Vivica handled quietly and viciously and never told a soul. Say what you want about mymother, and there’s plenty to say, but when her daughter needed protecting, she protected. Even if her methods were criminal.
I looked at my phone. I’d had it back for a week now, the facility let you have it in the final stretch as part of the transition plan. I had forty-seven missed calls from Quest, thirty-one from Justice, nineteen from Prime. A few texts from Grandma Rita that made me cry every time I read them. And six voicemails from Mega that I’d listened to once and then deleted because hearing his voice made my hands shake and I hadn’t come this far to let a voicemail undo thirty days of work.
The counselor had asked me this morning who was picking me up. I told her I’d figure it out. She gave me that look, the one all therapists give you when they know you’re avoiding something, and told me I needed a plan before I walked out those doors because the most dangerous moment in recovery is the first hour of freedom.
She was right. I needed a ride. I needed somewhere to go that wasn’t Mega’s house and wasn’t my brothers’ orbit, because I loved them but they would suffocate me with questions and concern and I wasn’t strong enough yet to hold their worry on top of my own. Quest would want to debrief me like I was an employee returning from leave. Prime would look at me with those sad eyes. Justice would hover. And all of them would be watching me for signs of relapse, counting my blinks, analyzing my tone, treating me like a bomb that might go off if they said the wrong thing.
I couldn’t do that. Not today. Today I needed to breathe without somebody monitoring my breathing.
Especially now. Because there was something else. Something I hadn’t told anyone, not the counselors, not Rita, not a single soul in group therapy. Something I’d been carrying alone for the last two weeks, since the facility nurse ran astandard blood panel during my third week and came back with results that rearranged my entire life in one sentence.
I was pregnant.
Eight weeks. Which meant the math was simple and the answer was ugly. This was Mega’s baby. Conceived with that man who abused me. A baby made in chaos by a man who kicked me in the ribs and tried to buy me off with jewelry.
When the nurse told me, I didn’t cry. I just sat on the exam table with my hands in my lap and stared at the wall and thought about my last pregnancy. The one I lost because of the stress my brothers caused when they cut off Julius’s finger without telling me. The baby that should’ve been mine. And now here I was, pregnant again, and the father was a hundred times worse than the first one, and my body had already proven that it could fail me when the pressure was too much.
I wasn’t losing this baby. I didn’t care what it took or who I had to cut off or where I had to go. This child was not going to pay for the mess I’d made of my life. And that meant Mega could never find out. Because if he knew I was carrying his baby, he would never let me go. He would use this child as a leash, the same way he used the bracelet and the trips and the cocaine. Another way to own me. Another reason I could never leave.
I was leaving. I was already gone.
I scrolled through my contacts. Past Quest. Past Prime. Past Justice. Past Mehar, who I owed an apology to for being such a bitch last time we spoke. Past every name that was connected to the Banks family and everything it carried.
I stopped on a name I hadn’t called in over a year. A name that made my stomach tighten and my chest warm at the same time, which was confusing and probably a red flag but I was sitting in a rehab facility with a packed bag and nowhere to go, so red flags were a luxury I couldn’t afford right now.
My brothers would lose their minds. Quest would probably put me straight back in the trunk to get me away from him. But my brothers had made decisions about my life without asking me for as long as I could remember, and look where it got me. Their protection put me in Mega’s arms. Their control pushed me away from the one person who, despite everything, had never raised a hand to me. He cheated. He lied. He broke my heart in ways I was still paying for. But he never hit me. And after Mega, that distinction felt like it mattered more than it should.
