Chapter Twenty-Six Cole
It’s been two weeks since I ruined everything good I had going for me. I missed two more IBSG meetings, for a total of four. I didn’t see the point in going anymore.
I lost my job.
I lost my girl.
To be in recovery, don’t you have to have something to recover? I burned everything worth saving to the fucking ground.
A room this large shouldn’t feel so small.
The walls close in on me as I sit in a metal folding chair, staring at my hands while the fluorescent lights buzz overhead with their familiar, oppressive hum.
For the first time, I’m in the community center basement early, twenty minutes before the meeting starts.
Tyler arrived five minutes ago and has been watching me with a mixture of concern and wariness, like he’s not sure if I’m going to bolt or break down completely. Maybe both.
Probably both.
“You still look like shit,” he says finally, pulling his chair closer to mine. “When was the last time you showered?”
He showed up at my door a few hours ago, black coffee in hand and a sympathetic smile on his face. After thirty or so minutes of convincing, I finally agreed to attend tonight’s session. I don’t think it’ll help me get my job back.
It definitely won’t help me get Hailey back.
Rock bottom is a couple levels up from where I am. I feel like I’m drowning over and over again, stuck in a never-ending loop of self-destruction and self-pity.
So I’m here. Because what else do I have to lose?
“I still feel like shit.” My voice comes out rough, like I haven’t used it in days—which isn’t far from the truth. Since leaving Hailey’s apartment, I’ve barely spoken to anyone except Tyler when I called him during a moment of weakness, sobbing like a fucking child.
“Have you slept at all?”
“No.” I lift my head to meet his eyes. “I can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes, I see her face when I told her. She looked at me like I was a stranger.”
“You were acting like one,” Tyler says, but his tone is gentle.
“I just keep playing it back. Everything I’d do differently.”
“That’s the job now. That’s the work. You play it back and you learn and you don’t do it again.”
I want to believe it’s that simple. The problem is, I’m not sure I’m capable of learning. I’m not sure I’m capable of a lot of things I thought I was capable of two weeks ago.
The other members start trickling in. None of them look surprised to see me.
Tracey enters with her clipboard, and her eyes immediately find mine. There’s no surprise in her expression either, just a calmness that makes me feel exposed. Naked.
“Cole,” she says before she takes her seat. “Let’s chat for a minute. Privately.”
Fuck.
“Okay,” I sigh, standing quickly to meet her across the room. Before she can start, I admit, “I can go, if you want. I wasn’t sure I belonged here anymore, but Tyler said—”
“This is exactly where you belong,” Tracey replies firmly.
“You are always welcome here. I just wanted to let you know that even if you no longer have an employer requiring you to attend, there will always be a space for you. This group is an invaluable tool for you to utilize when you’re ready to face your addiction head-on. ”
“Thank you,” is all I can manage. My throat is tight. My eyes burn with tears I don’t want her to see.
“Of course.” She gives me a genuine smile, something I didn’t know she was capable of, then points toward the circle of people waiting for us. None of them look up when we take our seats, but their silence is full of questions.
They know something’s wrong. It’s written all over my face, in my posture, in the way I can’t seem to sit still. They’re wondering where I’ve been for the past month.
“Before we begin our usual check-ins,” Tracey says, breaking the tension, “Cole, would you like to share what’s brought you back to us tonight?”
She’s dangling the invitation, and I know this is my moment. I can deflect, minimize, or give them a watered-down version of what I’ve done and the mess I’ve made. Or I can tell them the truth.
Most of it, anyway.
“I relapsed,” I say. “Completely.”
The room is silent except for the buzzing lights and the distant sounds of another meeting happening upstairs. Grant shifts in his chair while Tyler’s expression is pained but unsurprised. He already knows everything.
“Tell us what happened,” Tracey says gently.
So I do.
I start at the beginning. I tell them about Emma and her ex-boyfriend and how I tracked him with company resources for weeks after he put her in the hospital.
And then how I beat the shit out of him when I found him, and how I subsequently lost my job.
Then how Jack hired me on the condition that I do the group, and how I thought it was all bullshit, and how I convinced myself I was fine when I met Hailey.
Austen is nodding slowly, already seeing where this is going.
I tell them about meeting her and how instantly I was drawn to her. About how she’s a doctor, and about Lars Winters, and how the night he keyed her car I told myself I was just running a plate. Just once. Just to know who I was dealing with.
I tell them what just once turned into.
The license plate. The security footage. The background check. The address. The geofence.
When I get to the geofence, Jessica’s eyebrows go up.
“A geofence,” she says carefully. “On his phone.”
“Yeah.”
“So you were getting alerts when he was in particular places.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s how you knew he was near her the night she caught you.”
“Correct.”
She exhales slowly and sits back, but she doesn’t say anything else. Tyler is watching the floor with his hands folded in his lap.
“How did she react when she figured it out?” Jessica finally asks.
“She told me she needed space.” My voice breaks on “space.” I clear my throat before I continue, “She asked me to give it to her, and I am.”
“That’s good,” Tracey says. “That’s really good, Cole.”
“It doesn’t feel good.”
“It isn’t supposed to.”
The group absorbs each word like I’m their favorite true crime podcast and I just dropped a new episode. I can see recognition in their faces—the understanding that this could be any of them.
“She was right to be angry,” I continue. “I convinced myself I was doing it for her. But I was doing it for me.”
“That’s the thing none of us wants to face,” Austen adds, adjusting his glasses nervously. “The impact of our behavior on the people we’re watching. We focus so much on our own feelings, our own justifications, that we forget we’re making someone else feel hunted or uncomfortable.”
“I hope she doesn’t feel hunted by me.” The words are out before I can stop them, broken by the barely controlled emotion in my voice. “God, I hope she doesn’t.”
Grant looks up from his coffee cup. It’s the first time he’s really looked at me all night. I can’t read his expression.
Tracey doesn’t comment. She just writes something down on her clipboard.
“What about everything else?” she asks eventually. “The tracking. The geofence. The file on Lars Winters. The surveillance on Shitbag Steve…”
“I’ll delete it.”
“All of it?” Tracey raises an eyebrow when she looks up from her clipboard.
“All of it,” I confirm. “Tonight.”
“Okay.” Tracey flips to a fresh page. “Then here’s what happens now if you want to fully commit to recovery.
Daily check-ins with Tyler, not weekly. You will attend every group meeting for the next six months.
No exceptions. You and I will also meet one-on-one weekly, and we’ll work on some coping strategies for your obsessive thoughts.
And I’d like you to begin a comprehensive inventory of all the times you’ve crossed this line in your life. Not just with Hailey. All of them.”
“A comprehensive inventory?”
“Every instance you can remember. Patterns, triggers, justifications. We can’t interrupt the behavior if we haven’t mapped it.”
The thought of writing down every creepy thing I’ve ever done makes me want to crawl out of my skin. But I know she’s right. I’ve been telling myself Hailey was different, that what I felt for her made what I did somehow more acceptable. The truth is this has been building for years.
“Okay.”
“Commit to it, Cole.”
“I commit to it.”
The rest of the meeting moves past me in a blur. Tyler says he’s here for whatever I need. When Tracey asks for my weekly commitment, I repeat it back: daily check-ins, every meeting for six months, individual therapy, the inventory.
…
Tyler walks me to my truck. The parking lot is half empty, and the lamp overhead is flickering like the bulb is silently screaming for mercy.
“That was a lot,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“You said a lot of the right things.”
“Yeah.”
He stops beside my driver’s door and watches me for a long second. I can feel the question coming before he asks it.
“Are you actually going to delete the tracking on Lars tonight?”
I don’t answer. I don’t know what to say because I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Tyler nods slowly, like that’s the answer he expected.
“I’m not going to fight you on it,” he says.
“Not tonight. I’m just telling you—if you’re holding anything back from the group, the group is going to find out.
They always do. And when they find out, they’re going to be a lot less interested in helping you than if you’d just told them from the jump. ”
“The group knows everything. I just said all of it in there.”
“Tracey’s group knows.” He watches my face. “That’s not the same as the group knowing.”
I blink, confused. “What?”
“Nothing. Ignore me. I’m tired.”
“Tyler.”
“Go home, Cole. Get some sleep. Delete what you can actually bring yourself to delete tonight. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
He claps me on the shoulder and walks toward his own car without looking back.