“The pills? Oh, I don’t know, Otter. Maybe it was the time you guys forced me into therapy. You remember that? I told you I was fine, that I didn’t need anyone after Eddie, and especially not here, but you guys made me go, and then you jumped wholeheartedly on the drug train at her first suggestion. Remember? Yeah, I’m pretty sure you do. She said pills, and the both of you just sat there with these relieved little expressions on your faces. Oh look, here’s a solution, here’s a fix so we don’t have to deal with Tyson and all his problems. They’ll be muted and soft and just glazed over, right? Isn’t that how it went? Yeah. So, Otter, it started when you guys agreed to medicate me.”

“And yet, you didn’t say no,” Otter pointed out, refusing to take the bait. “In fact, you didn’t argue at all. You agreed.”

He rolled his eyes. “What would have been the point?”

“We would have listened to you,” I snapped at him. “If you hadn’t wanted it, we would have listened. We told you that. If you didn’t want it, you wouldn’t have had to have it. Full stop. That was the deal. We could have found some other way around it.”

“How, Bear?” the Kid asked. “By… what. Talking about it? About our feelings? I do that enough in therapy as it is. I don’t want to have to come home—if this is even still my home—and spend more time talking things over.”

“Yes,” I said. “If that’s what it took. After Dominic—”

His eyes flashed dangerously. “Leave him out of this.”

“No. I won’t. After Dominic, after I found you in the goddamn bathtub again, if you had said no, Bear, I don’t want the Xanax or I don’t want the Klonopin, I would have listened to you. Because every single choice we made, I thought we made together. So no, you don’t get to throw that back in our faces. That’s not gonna fly.”

“Is that when this started?” Otter asked. “With… Dom?”

The Kid made a choking sound, and he shook his head furiously. “I’m not—I don’t—he’s not….”

“It was easier,” Otter said. “Wasn’t it? Feeling numb.”

The Kid said nothing, though his shoulders were trembling. It took everything I could to not go to him, to pull him close, to whisper in his ear that everything was going to be okay.

“You wanted to feel numb, and it got harder and harder. So you escalated. Took more. And then we switched you to Klonopin. I remember that too. I thought there was going to be an argument, but… you didn’t say much at all.”

He didn’t look at us.

“And… what. You worried about how much you were taking, because you thought you were going to get caught. So you started buying it off of someone or someones, and they said we’ve got other stuff here, why don’t you try that? And you just said sure. Okay. Why not.”