“Just hang on for a little while longer. Can you do that?”

Cody moved closer to her. Stared at her for a moment before he said, “I’ll always have your back.”

Ellie nestled herself in the crook of his arm. She rubbed his chest and stomach, hooked her leg over his waist.

“Why is this so important to you?” he asked. “Can you at least tell me that?”

She thought about telling him about her brother and then decided against it—and not because she didn’t trust him, because she did. She didn’t want to share it with him or anyone else and run the risk of being talked out of her desire, maybe even obsession, to find her brother. She didn’t want to give that power over to someone else. She wanted to keep it close, tucked inside her, where it could grow, be protected.

“It just is,” she said.

“Does it have something to do with—?”

“No more questions, okay? Please? I just want to lie here and enjoy you. Us.”

Then, when he didn’t answer: “Okay?”

“Sure.”

Ellie turned and kissed his chest, wanting to lose herself in his flesh again but unable to stop thinking about the crack in their relationship—and it was there, no question. She could feel it splintering, and if she wasn’t careful, it would grow into a crevasse that would swallow them both.

CHAPTER 25

WHEN SEBASTIAN GOT sober, what surprised him the most was how his body betrayed him. Instead of being grateful that it no longer had to metabolize excessively large amounts of Scotch, it got good and pissed off. Those first awful months, he would hit the pillow every night, mentally and physically exhausted from dragging himself through yet another day of fighting off his insane craving for booze, and when he shut his eyes, the doctor-prescribed Ambien already floating through his bloodstream, his body stubbornly refused to shut down and rest.

People who weren’t alcoholics—“earthlings,” in AA speak—couldn’t understand that addiction was a living, breathing entity. It was like you were possessed. It lived inside a damaged part of your brain and it talked to you constantly and it could, and did, use your body against you, without your permission. Those early days when he hit the pillow, his addiction, which he came to view as a spiritual entity, like a demon, constantly whispered in his ear: Sorry, my man, no sleep for you. Not unless you give us what we need.

What the demon wanted—demanded—was a glass of Scotch. And not the cheap shit, either; only the top-shelf stuff would do. Sebastian refused. His addiction laughed. You can take as many sleeping pills as you want, amigo, but it’s not going to make a lick of difference. I control things around here, not you, and I’m going to prove it. And prove it his addiction did. His body had been hijacked, and it, along with the demon living inside his skull, introduced him to a new level of hell called insomnia.