Kelly doesn’t answer for a long time, tears streaming freely down her face. She grasps Annika’s hands in hers and squeezes. “I forgive you, Ann. I wasn’t sure I ever could—I was so angry at you for so long. They say those you love the most have the capacity to hurt you the most, right? And you…I would have died for you, Annie. You…you saved my life, Annika—don’t think I don’t know that, don’t think I’ve forgotten. You’ve never said a word about it. Even when you were using, you never tried to play that card. But…when I realized you were lying to me, that you were using…I watched you take the cash out of my purse. I didn’t stop you. I should have, maybe. I don’t know. I just…I felt so betrayed. I thought you’d tellmethe truth, out of anyone. If you’d told me you were an addict and you needed help, I’d have moved heaven and earth for you.” Kelly halts, shuddering. Starts again. “But I know better. My mom was addicted to Oxy. And I watched her. I saw what happened. She couldn’t help herself, and she refused to ask for help. I tried. Dad tried. Gram and Papa tried. Aunt Marnie tried. Mom wouldn’t accept the help. Just kept spiraling. So, I knew if you didn’t ask for help, there was nothing I could do. And honestly, it was hard, watching you, having watched my mom damn near kill herself.”
“Your mom got sober, though, eventually, right?” Annika asks. “I remember you saying she’d been through rehab.”
“She went through a methadone clinic. The treatment was…rough. But she got off the Oxy, at least.” Kelly lets out a ragged sigh. “Of course, she’s an alcoholic, now, so I still don’t see her.”
“Jesus, Kel.” Annika leans into Kelly, rests her head against Kelly’s.
“Some people just…seem to need to be addicted to something. At least with the drinking, she can hold down a job and is something approaching functional. When she was hooked on Oxy, she was…fuck, she was a disaster.”
Annika blows out a breath. “I get that. It was pills that got me into trouble, actually. It hurt so bad, and it never stopped hurting. The pills were the only relief I ever got, but I very quickly realized I was taking more than I should. I knew I was addicted, like, immediately. So I tried to quit.” A shake of her head. “Quitting the pills was pure hell. My knee killed me, literally every moment of every day, so bad I couldn’t sleep. So I started drinking. And then one day, at a party, it hurt so bad I couldn’t see straight and I was going crazy. And the guy I was with offered me a pipe, and he told me it would make the pain go away.” A bitter, harsh, angry laugh. “It did. I feltamazing.For the first time since the accident, I didn’t just not have pain, I feltgood. That was short-lived. It was worse than the pills. Theneed…fuck, you can’t imagine. It’s…it’s kinda like being on fire, and the only way tonotbe on fire is to get a hit.”
I nod. “That’s a good way of putting it, actually,” I chime in. “It’s a hell of a lot like being on fire, just on the inside. And the outside. Your brain, your skin, your fuckingorgans…every last particle of your being just…needsthat hit. It’s all-consuming.”
Kelly’s gaze is sharp as it cuts to me. “You too?”
I look at Annika as I answer Kelly. “Me too. It’s part of what connected Nik and me.”
Kelly looks from Annika to me and back, wiping beneath her eyes with her middle fingers. “And now you’re keeping each other accountable?”
I shake my head. “Nah. Nothing like that. If she don’t wanna be clean, ain’t a damn thing I could do. Same for me. She’s clean because she don’t wanna fuckin’ die. I’m clean for the same reason. We just get each other, because nobody can ever understand an addict like another addict.”
Kelly nods. “So, what’s next in your life, Annie?”
Annika shrugs. “Still working on that.” She looks at me. “Honestly, I don’t know. Chance…he set me free in a very real way, and I’m still processing how that feels.”
Kelly tilts her head to the side. “Set you free in what way?”
Annika is obviously reticent to discuss it. “Um. I owed a lot of money to a very bad dude. Chance…convinced him to, um, relinquish his claim, you might say.”
Kelly arches an eyebrow. “Do I want to know what that means?”
I roll my shoulders, curl my hands into fists. “Look at me. I have a way of making people see things my way.”
“The shotgun in his mouth certainly seemed to help convince him,” Annika adds.
Kelly’s eyes widen. “Oh. Um. I see.”
“He’s alive,” I reassure her. “He ain’t gonna enjoy being’ alive for a good long while, but that’s his problem. He was a filthy piece of useless shit. He got way less than he deserves. Nikki just wanted to be free of him.”
“I don’t claim to know much about this, but I feel like people like him don’t give up all that easily,” Kelly says.
I shake my head. “Not usually. I think in this case I was…very convincing.”
Kelly nods. “I think I’m better off not knowing the details.”
Annika snorts. “I think you are too, Kels.”
Silence, then.
“You’re married to a hot guy, you’ve got a nice house, a nice car…” Annika bumps Kelly with her shoulder. “What else have you been up to?”
Kelly smiles. “I’m a research assistant for a high-profile lawyer in the area, a friend of Luis’s. Mostly, I get to work from home, which I like. I go into the office a couple times a week to report in with my progress on whatever I’m working on. I make my own hours, and it’s always interesting.”
“You always were good at internet stalking,” Annika says, laughing. “Remember when you were dating that guy and you didn’t think he was being honest about stuff, so you hunted him down online and discovered he was lying about literally everything?”
Kelly nods, snorting a laugh. “Yeah, well, now I get paid to do basically that. God, that guy was such aliar. He pretended he was a cadet in the police academy when he was a convicted felon, he pretended he was the heir to all this money when he didn’t have two pennies to rub together, and oh, by the way, he was one hundred percent gay and pretending to be straight. I still can’t figure out why he’d lie about his sexual orientation…hetried to pickmeup. If he was gay, fine, whatever, don’t lead me on.”
“Some people are just pathological liars,” I say.
