Page 168 of Relapse

“Or your mother comes home to find out her precious son has brought drugs back in the house. That he’s stolen from her purse. That he’s right back to his old habits, after she had such hope for his future.”

My panic began to rise. “I don’t have any drugs.”

He pulled back just enough to meet my eyes. “But I do. I’ll tell her I found you with another needle. Like the one you had at the hospital. I’ll tell her I tried to stop you, but you got violent. Unrecognizable.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. David gave me that heroin at the hospital. I hadn’t told a soul about that. And now, he was threatening to use it against me, after I basically did exactly what he wanted.

He told me I was a waste of space, and I believed him.

I believed that the world would be better off without me. I allowed him to think I was doing Delane a favor by taking myself out of her life permanently.

He handed me drugs that were meant to kill me, and I used them.

And yet, here he was, still trying to use me and degrade me.

I couldn’t fucking win.

“She won’t believe you.” I seethed.

“Won’t she?” He smiled, and it was the smile of someone who had been gaslighting a woman for twenty years.

“Your mother believes whatever I tell her to believe. She has to. It’s how she survives. And if I tell her that her son—the one she cries over, prays over—if I tell her that son attacked her husband when he tried to help him stay clean?” He shook his head sadly. “It will break her. Truly break her. Not just her heart. What’s left in her mind will be gone too.”

“Don’t talk about her like that,” I growled.

His nostrils flared. “Or maybe I’ll just actually break her. One bone at a time. And you won’t know it until it’s too late. You’ll come home one day—maybe three months later when you get your next fancy chip—and I’ll have her body waiting for you in your room.”

I must not have heard him right.

“What did you just say?” My question floated from my lips. I needed confirmation from him. My brain couldn’t fully register that he had just threatened to kill my mom.

The anger in his features relaxed and he smiled. “Eventually, if you don’t do what I want, I’m going to kill her. But before I do—” he stopped, rolling up his sleeves. “I’ll do what I want to do to you—to her. And I’ll make it so much worse for her too.” He laughed. “I’ll make her cry her fucking eyes out.”

And I knew he would. He would destroy her. Destroy her soul like he destroyed mine. To just imagine what David was suggesting, filled my eyes to the brim with tears.

Never.

That could never happen.

“Or,” David continued, his hand sliding down to my throat, not squeezing, just holding, just reminding me of how easily it could be crushed if he put enough pressure, “you can be good. You can do this one thing, and I will tell her how proud I am of you. How well you’re doing. How the new Noah is such a miracle. And she’ll believe that too. She’ll go to sleep tonight in her perfect, crazy little world believing her family is finally healing.”

His other hand moved to his belt.

My lip quivered. “Please don’t…”

“One action,” he said. “That’s all. And your mother keeps her sanity. You keep your place in this family. We all go on pretending. Kumbaya.”

Tears were streaming down my face now, hot and humiliating. They were the tears of a child who never learned how to be protected. The child who wanted to save the world even when the world didn’t give a shit about him. The one who still didn’t understand why the people closest to him were hurting him.

“You’re the Devil,” I choked out. I was struggling to breathe now. The hyperventilating was starting even though I hadn’t exerted myself.

“Maybe,” he agreed, almost kindly. “But I know you would sell your soul to protect the ones you love.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and pushed me down, not with force, but with the weight of everything he had corrupted inside me. Years worth of shame, silence, and fear anchored me to the floor. I was consumed with the desperate need to believe that if I just took it, if all of the pain and abuse came to me, then someone else would be spared.

“Think of her,” he whispered as I knelt, broken, on the kitchen tile.

And I did. I thought of her. I thought of her fragile hope, her oblivious cloud of a mind, her love that had never been enough to save me. I thought of her finding me dead of an overdose, or in jail, or simply gone—and I chose, as I had always chosen, to swallow the poison so she wouldn’t have to.