19. Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Nineteen
Willow
Rehab.
The doctor says it in a quiet voice, standing beside the hospital bed with his hands folded in front of him, as if a softer tone could sand down the edges. It doesn’t. The word still lands in my lap with all the grace of a body hitting tile.
Rehab. Treatment center. Structured support. All these clean little names for the same brutal truth, that I didn’t have this under control, and everyone in this room knows it now.
I sit against the pillows, my knees tucked beneath the blanket, my hair is dirty against my neck and my mouth still dry no matter how much water Mom keeps making me sip. Dad stands by the window, arms crossed, looking out at the parking lot as though he might find someone out there to blame.
And all through it, outside the glass, Phoenix is still there.
He has been there every time I have woken.
At two in the morning, when the hallway lights were dim, he sat in the same seat with his head tipped back against the wall.
At four, when a nurse came in to check on me, he was bent forward, elbows on his knees, hands locked behind his neck.
At six, when the hospital started waking around us, he was in the same ugly chair, eyes closed, his face relaxed, looking too fucking beautiful for a man who has made such a mess of my heart.
I turn my head and see him staring through the glass.
For one awful second, I wonder how much of this he knows. How much he heard when Dad’s voice rose. How much of my shame has already seeped through the walls and landed at his feet.
God, I hope not. I’m embarrassed enough, lying here in a hospital bed with everyone staring at the mess I made of myself.
“We are not expecting you to do this on your own,” the doctor says, pulling my attention back.
“That is why we are talking about rehab. Support. A safe place. Time away from the pressures around you. People who can help you work through what has been happening before you go home and try to manage it alone.”
Manage it alone.
That almost makes me laugh, which is inconvenient, considering my body feels one bad breath away from filing a formal complaint.
I have been managing it alone for two months and my apartment probably looks less like a home and more like the crime scene of every bad decision I swore I had under control.
“How long would I need to stay in there?” I ask.
“At least a month,” the doctor says.
Mom’s fingers close around my arm.
Dad turns back to the window.
A month.
Thirty days in a place where everyone knows why I am there. Group rooms, check-ins, rules, strangers with calm voices, and me trying not to crawl out of my skin every time someone sees the mess I have made of myself.
I glance at Mom’s hand on my arm, then at Dad’s back as he stands by the window.
I never want to put them in this situation again.
Where I dragged them into a hospital room and made them observe their daughter lying in a bed with machines around her.
Never again will I wake up to see my mother trying not to fall apart and my father staring out a window because looking at me hurts too much.
“Okay,” I say even though my throat fights me on it.
The doctor gives me a brief nod. He tells me someone will come through to give me the details once the booking is made, and then leaves us with the word rehab suspended in the air.
Dad turns from the window. “I’ll drive you.”
“No.”
His jaw ticks. “Willow.”
“Dad, I want Phoenix to drive me.”
The room goes quiet.
Dad stares at me as if I had just asked him to drop me into traffic and wave goodbye.
“No,” he finally manages to say.
“It wasn’t a question.”
His face hardens. “Absolutely not.”
I glance through the glass. Phoenix has heard the raised voices and his eyes are fixed on my dad.
Dad steps closer to the bed. “After everything, you want him driving you there?”
“Dad.” My voice softens, even though the next few words are going to hurt to say. “This is on me. I was the one who took the pills. This is not on Phoenix. You can’t keep blaming him for all of it. I did this shit to myself.”
“No,” he says. “He was with you every day, Willow. Every damn day. He saw you. He should have seen you were spiraling.”
“I’m not a child anymore.”
Dad goes still.
I know he loves me. That he wants to protect his little girl from the world, from Phoenix, from me, and from every ugly thing that put me in this bed. But he cannot stand guard over every broken part of me forever.
Dad shakes his head. “You are not thinking clearly.”
Something hot flares in my chest, sharp enough to cut through the exhaustion. “Don’t do that.”
His eyes narrow. “Do what?”
“Make every choice I make now sound like proof I can’t be trusted with myself.”
His anger falters and fear shows through. He looks older than he did yesterday.
“I am trying to protect you,” he says.
“I know.” My voice shakes, but I keep it steady.
“And I love you for it. But you can’t protect me by taking every decision out of my hands because you’re scared.
I’m embarrassed enough, sitting here with everyone knowing I fucked up so badly that I need a month away from my own life.
” My throat aches around the words. “Please don’t make me feel like I can’t make one choice. ”
Dad looks toward the glass, where Phoenix now stands.
Dad’s mouth tightens. “I don’t understand why you still want him anywhere near you after what he became.”
The words strike a chord in me because I see his exact viewpoint. Cocky rockstar. Arrogance. The entitled asshole. A man who chased strangers screaming his name and somehow stopped seeing the girl who had been standing by his side all along.
However, Dad is not privy to the entire situation. He doesn’t know how much it hurt not having Phoenix in my life, even though I tried so hard to convince myself I could survive without him.
He is ignorant of the fact that Phoenix’s absence did not feel like being set free. It felt like cutting out the part of me that still knew how to breathe.
I stare down at my hands. “No matter what he does, he will always be part of my life, Dad.”
Dad lets out a sigh. He remembers the two of us joined at the hip. Schoolbags dumped by the door. Notebooks spread across the kitchen table. Phoenix stealing food off my plate while I pretended to hate it.
He just doesn’t understand how that boy became this man. And, honestly, neither do I.
Dad looks back through the glass, his face hard as his eyes stay fixed on Phoenix. “I don’t like it. If he turns this into another Phoenix Stone performance, he is done.”
Dad drives mum and I to my apartment. Phoenix already left to pick up a rental car and I hate that some stupid part of me notices how relieved he looked when he realized I’m allowing him to drive me to rehab.
One hour. That is all I have given him. One hour in a car with me before I hand myself over to strangers with calm voices and polite accusations.
My apartment is the first humiliation.
The second Dad opens the door, I see exactly what I left behind.
Dirty dishes stacked by the sink. Clothes thrown over the back of the couch.
A pair of heels lying on their sides near the hallway, abandoned.
Empty glasses on the coffee table. Notebooks on the floor, some open, but mostly blank.
A pen with its cap off bleeding ink onto a page that has nothing written on it.
Nothing says I’m fine like an apartment that looks as if I got drunk and redecorated it.
Mom moves first, crossing the room too quickly, already reaching for the mess.
“Mom,” I say. “Leave it.”
She stops with a glass in her hand and I can’t look at her face.
Dad’s either.
There is no way I can stand here while they see every ugly little piece of evidence that I was falling apart long before the bathroom floor made it official.
I move toward my bedroom before I start crying in the doorway.
In my room, I open my suitcase and lay it on the bed. I pack quickly, desperate to get out before they can examine the mess I made of my life. Clothes. Underwear. Toiletries. A jumper. My hairbrush. Phone charger. Notebook.
I zip the suitcase and rest my hands on top of it because they are shaking.
By the time I move back into the living room, Mom and Dad both turn their gazes to me. The wheels of my suitcase roll too loudly over the wooden floorboards, as if even my luggage wants to announce that I have fucked up badly enough to need a month away.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
A knock at the door has Dad moving.
Phoenix stands in the hallway, his hair still a mess. I can tell he has not showered or changed. His eyes find me immediately before flicking to my suitcase.
“Well,” I say. “I guess it’s time.”
Phoenix takes my suitcase. “Car’s parked out front when you’re ready, Wills.”
He turns and leaves, giving me time to say goodbye to Mom and Dad.
“I love you,” Mom says, pulling me into a hug. She sniffles against my shoulder and I grasp this is killing her.
“I love you too, Mom.”
Dad’s hug is stiff at first, before his arms close around me, and the side of his face briefly presses against my hair. “I’m proud of you.”
He has always told me that. Even when I came in last at a school science fair because my volcano refused to erupt until three minutes after judging ended and then spat baking-soda lava all over Mrs. Henderson’s shoes.
Mom kisses my cheek one more time before I walk out, leaving them behind in my apartment.
I get into the rental and we pull away from the curb.
Phoenix drives with both hands on the wheel.
I glance out the window because looking at him is a terrible idea when I have things to say.
For a while, neither of us speaks. The silence sits between us, filling every inch of the car.
“I’m sorry,” he manages to say.
I keep my gaze out of the window, watching the street. “Sorry is too small for what you did, Phoenix.”
“I know.” His hands flex on the wheel. “I know.”
“You fucked me and then treated me as if I were disposable.”
“You weren’t disposable.”
“Don’t tell me what I was not,” I say. “I’m telling you how you made me feel.”
He nods. “Okay.”
The car stops at a red light. He looks straight ahead for a second before turning his head toward me as we wait for the light to change.
“I was a selfish prick,” he says.
I don’t answer.
“I could say I was scared and that would be true, but it would also be bullshit dressed up as an excuse.” His jaw clenches. “But I was scared and so I made it your problem.”
“Scared of what, Phoenix?”
“You.”
His fingers curl tighter around the wheel. “I fucking wanted you and I hated that wanting you felt bigger than anything I knew how to control. Then I acted like a cocky asshole with a God complex and the emotional range of a broken amp.”
My chest aches.
He glances back at the road as the light changes and moves the car forward.
“I fucked it up before it could fuck me up first,” he says, glancing my way.
“I thought you were going to fucking die, Willow.” He swallows and I watch his Adam’s apple bob.
“I sat beside that hospital bed and kept watching your chest because I needed to see it move. That was my whole fucking world. Your chest moving. Your hand in mine. The next beep. The next breath. And for once in my life, I had no joke or filthy little comment to get me out of it.”
My throat burns.
“I kept thinking that if you didn’t wake up, I was done.
” His voice cracks on the last word and he looks furious that it slipped out.
“I would still have been breathing, yeah, but that’s not the same as living, is it?
Not when nothing in my whole fucked-up life would have mattered if you weren’t in it. ”
I stare at him because this is the most honest he has ever been in his entire fucking life and he looks as if every word costs him something.
“It took almost losing you for good to see how I fucking treated you,” he says. “And I hate it. I hate that I was so far up my own ass that it took you lying in a hospital bed for me to understand what I should have known while you were standing right in front of me.”
His hands shift again on the wheel. “I’m so fucking sorry, Wills. I know I was wrong and I realize that saying that now doesn’t fix what I did.”
He stares at the road with wet eyes and a jaw so tight it must ache.
The treatment center sign comes into view and Phoenix turns on the indicator before turning in.
The nerves in my stomach hit hard.
We follow the curve of the driveway and a large building sits behind a low brick wall and a line of trees, making it appear gentler than the word rehab has any right to. Pale stone and glass. A path leading toward double doors. Garden beds pretending this is all normal.
A woman and a man stand near the entrance. The woman holds a clipboard under her arm, waiting.
Phoenix pulls up near the entrance and kills the engine.
For a moment, neither of us moves.
“You don’t have to get out,” I say.
He gets out anyway and walks around to the backseat, pulling my bag free. I step out of the car and the woman near the entrance smiles gently. Phoenix hands my bag to the man who comes down the steps to take it.
For a moment, we stand looking at each other.
His hands hang at his sides. In all the years I have known Phoenix, I have never seen him like this, as if one wrong move might cost him the only thing he has left worth losing.
He glances at me, then at the waiting woman, then back at me.
“Can I hug you?” He asks, which is so unlike him. Phoenix has never asked permission to take up space in my life.
I nod and he steps closer.
The hug is tentative at first, which seems wrong because nothing about us has ever been careful. Then his arms close around me and my face presses against his chest.
The familiar smell of him almost makes my knees falter. The same stupid, dangerous combination that has been eroding my common sense since I was old enough to know better and dumb enough not to care.
I close my eyes.
His chin dips near my hair and his voice comes out low. “I wish I had done it differently, Wills.”
My fingers curl lightly into his shirt.
“I don’t want to lose you from my life,” he says.
The words go straight through me.
Phoenix’s hands fall away slowly and I raise my eyes towards him.
There are a hundred things I could say. A hundred sharper ones. A hundred softer ones. I could tell him I love him. I could tell him I hate him but that would be too easy and not even true enough to be useful.
So I give him the thing that scares me most.
“You don’t know how to stay, Phoenix,” I say. “You know how to want something until it gets too real and then run before anyone can ask you to be better.”
His face changes as the words hit him square in the chest.
“Then I’ll fucking learn,” he says.
I turn and walk toward the doors and the woman and her clipboard.
“Hi, Willow. My name is Suzanna,” she says as we climb the steps.
The glass doors open and cool air brushes my face.
I step over the threshold and, for one second, everything in me wants to turn around and run straight back to Phoenix.
But instead, I follow Suzanna inside.