Simone lifted her gaze to the others sitting around the circle and said, “The other day, I was walking through a gas station parking lot on my way to the bus stop, and this guy standing next to a fancy sedan was staring at me like he knew me. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He was wearing a suit and pumping gas. He kept watching me, and it made me nervous, but after living in fear for so long, I refuse to be scared any longer. I promised myself I would confront my fears, so I walked up to him and asked him why he was staring at me.”

She looked down at her hands, picking at her nails again. “He said he was surprised I didn’t remember.” She lifted her eyes and said, “He was one of the guys my boyfriend had pimped me out to. He said we had sex dozens of times. I knew I had lost memories and time when I was using, but it brought it all to the surface, making me wonder how many other men I’d been with, how many hours, weeks, and months I’d lost track of. I used drugs for five years, almost to the day, believe it or not. That’s about forty-three thousand eight hundred hours, and yes, I calculated it. I can say with great certainty that I can’t recall the majority of those hours.”

There were no flinches, gasps, or comments. There were no judgments. Drug addiction was ruthless, and the people there were all fighting similar battles. Quincy couldn’t help but wonder what Roni’s reaction would be if she was there. He quickly pushed those thoughts out of his head, wanting to keep even thoughts of her away from the ugliness of drugs.

“Those hours are my brass ring,” Simone said. “I want to get to a point where I can say I’ve been clean longer than I was using, and I want to remember every minute of it…”

As Simone went on with her story, Quincy remembered his first few weeks after rehab, which had passed in a blur of NA meetings, self-doubt, and loathing warring with confidence and determination and hundreds of unanswerable questions. But probably the worst parts of those, and many other weeks, were the daily looks in the mirror, the accepting of responsibility for the pain he’d caused, and the deep-seated fear and hope he’d seen in his brother’s and friends’ eyes. He’d seen those same things in his own eyes. Thank God Roni never saw me like that. Quincy was one of the lucky ones. He had, and continued to have, unrelenting support from Truman, the Whiskeys, and the rest of their friends, giving him plenty of reasons to fight for a better life. But he often wondered how people battled the beast without those pillars of support.

“Hour by hour,” Simone said, as if she were answering his question. “That’s what I tell myself. When I think about how many years I wasted, too high to think or feel or speak, it just…” Tears slipped down her cheeks, and she looked at Quincy.