The way she smiled at me when she realized who I was…it was the same way she’d smiled at me when she looked up and saw me walking into the computer lab that day a million years ago.

Like the sight of me made her so happy.

It kicked me in the fucking gut, that smile. Just like it had then.

I still couldn’t breathe right.

And all that shit she was talking about those lunch hours in the art room.

She’d thought about it. She’d made herself come thinking about it.

I mean…what was I supposed to do with that knowledge? How was I supposed to sit up here and drive and not lose my shit?

And how could she think for one minute that I didn’t like her touch on my skin. That I had been in any way repulsed by her?

She’d been beauty personified.

Her hand under my shirt when we were in the art room… If I concentrated, I could pull it up so clearly. Like it was real. Like it was happening now. I’d liked it so much I’d almost come in my pants. I’d been so hard, it had taken every bit of my strength not to lean up against her. Not to grind into her.

God. The things I’d thought… the things I’d wanted.

Still wanted.

Fuck.

It took everything I had not to pull the car over onto the side of the road and just…stare at her. Just take her in. Catalog the changes.

She was beautiful. She was more beautiful than I could have ever imagined. All that beauty combined with something so wild. So artistic and unique.

Beth had turned into something I lacked the imagination to even describe. That inky hair with all its colors and her eyes so bright and cutting. And she was a woman now, with a woman’s body. All that promise realized.

She was tourmaline and I was fucking concrete. But she always had been. And I’d always known it.

My shoulder still burned where she’d bitten me. I reached back to touch it, in the guise of rubbing a sore muscle. But I could still feel the imprint of her teeth. The small divots. My shirt was damp from her mouth.

Part of me, exhausted and perverse, wished she’d made me bleed.

Blood pounded in my dick and I hated it. Hated myself.

My shoulder would burn for days. Just as my body had burned for years after St. Joke’s. The dreams I’d had about her were matches under a fire that never went out.

The clock said 7:50 and I pushed the gas pedal to the floor, sweat crawling down my spine. I had the heat blasting into the backseat, trying to warm up the woman shivering there. I’d never felt so keenly my lack of a jacket. I had nothing to put over her except Pest, and she’d soundly rejected that body heat.

The high-performance engine responded in a nanosecond, and we hurtled around a semi and a slow-moving pickup truck.

Beth—no, Jada—was going into withdrawal. How bad the withdrawal was going to depend on what she’d been taking and for how long.

I pushed the gas to the floor.

Because I needed her out of this car. And out of my life.

Because she was bringing back all the memories. The fucking feelings.

Of us. All of us. Carissa and Rosa and Simon. Memories of me. The kid I’d been. Starving and so fucking sure I could take care of everyone.

The fucking wishes I’d wished for us. All of them dust now. Mud and shit and nothing.

“Jeez, Tommy, is this some kind of kidnapping race?”

I understood what she was doing. Being a smart-ass because I was scaring her, because she was freaking out.

We all needed armor in this world, and I was glad to see she had hers.

Jada was excellent armor.

It’s none of your business, I told myself. Who she is or what she’s become. It has nothing to do with you. You’re going to drop her and walk away.

And not look back.

That was fucking key. I wasn’t going to spend the next seven years building a life for her in my imagination. I wasn’t going to make small talk and get to know her. I wasn’t going to exchange numbers with her and text her in a few days. I wasn’t going to imagine her underneath those clothes. The changes the years had made.

I would drop her off, and I would forget her.

I would.

Promise me you won’t let anyone hurt me. Promise me like you’re still the boy who gave me those graham crackers. Promise me like that.

I had no reason to believe whoever was on the other end of this drop-off would be there to hurt her.

But there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t, either.

There were ten minutes left on the clock, and according to my phone we were still twenty-five miles away.

I took the exit off the highway and followed smaller roads up into the foothills of the San Francisco Peaks.

“I think I’m dying,” she said. The first words she’d spoken in a while.

“It’s the drugs.”

“I know it’s the drugs,” she snapped. “I just feel like they’re making me die.”

“Do you know what you were taking?” I asked her.

“Downers after shows so I could sleep. Uppers so I could wake up and perform. There were other prescription things too. The injection was a serious sleeping…thing.”

“Sleeping?” I said before I could stop myself. Concern flaring up before I could stop it. She’d always had so much trouble sleeping.

“Yeah, it’s still a problem.”

I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to give a shit.

The things she’d been taking were a cocktail designed for addiction. She was going to have a rough day or two ahead of her for sure. And more in the future. I still had bad days, moments when I’d give anything for some sweet oblivion. And I’d been clean for five years.

“It wasn’t…I haven’t been doing these drugs all along. It was only…the last part of the tour. Everything was just so intense.”

I made a low rumbling noise of understanding.

“I thought I could control it.”

I understood that feeling, too but there was nothing to say, so I kept my mouth shut.

My phone squawked a few more directions at me, and soon I was driving down a long asphalt road, with mesquite growing high and thick on either side. The driveway opened up into a circle in front of an old beautiful adobe mansion with black metal balconies and white curtains fluttering through open windows. The property was groomed with trails and other outbuildings. Flowers bloomed everywhere.

There was even a fountain in front, water spitting from a fish’s mouth.

Everything about it said class.

And safe.

I exhaled a breath I’d been holding for what felt like forever and pulled to a stop in front of a discrete sign that read:

Willow Addiction Rehabilitation Facility.

Oh God. Oh thank God.

Giddy with relief, I put my forehead down on my steering wheel.

Rehab. I was driving her to rehab.

The relief was fucking thrilling. All the tension in my body just drained away. For a second I couldn’t feel my face.

I put the car in park and turned, not sure how this particular conversation was going to go.

“We here?” she asked. Her eyes were closed and she was shaking, holding on to her thin body with both hands like she might rattle away if she didn’t.

“Yeah,” I said.

“How bad is it?”

“Open your eyes. It’s not bad at all.”

“Is it a spa?”

“Not quite.” Her eyes blinked open. So brown, her eyes. I’d forgotten how they changed, light and dark depending on the light around her. I saw them now, bloodshot and swimming in tears, and I saw them seven years ago as she sang in that church beside me. I would see them forever, I supposed.

“Rehab?” she said when she saw the sign, and laughed. “This guy you owed a favor to thinks I need rehab?”

“I guess so,” I said lamely, because I’d been up for a solid twenty-four hours at this point and the world was getting fuzzy. And nothing Bates has ever done has made sense.

“I don’t need fucking rehab,” she said. “It was just a rough month.”

I said nothing. I didn’t have to.

“Don’t do that,” she sneered. “Don’t judge me.”

“I’m not.”

I wasn’t. I’d been where she was right now, too many times. The judgment she felt was her own.

“You don’t want to check yourself in, fine,” I said. “Go in and call your people. Call the cops. Go back to your life. I’m just…” So many fucking things. Too many to name. “Supposed to drop you here.”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do. Call my people. All of them.”

But what she needed was this place. And I was pretty sure she knew it.

“Can you walk?” I asked.

“You’re a jerk.”

“Can you dial a phone?”

“An asshole.”

“Can you remember the name of one person who could help you?”

“You could help me and drive me away from here,” she said.

I shook my head.

I’d fulfilled my promise, and I had the rest of my life to live, without the shadow of Bates and Beth and St. Joke’s over my head. I was going to drop her off, drive to Los Angeles and drown every memory of her in a bottle of whiskey. That’s what I was going to do.

I was going to exorcize the ghost of Beth once and for all, or I’d fucking die trying.

And then I was going to get on with my life.

Whatever that meant.

“Maybe,” she whispered, wiping her face with a shaking hand. “Maybe I’ll stay here a few days, just to get this shit out of my system.”

That was good. Excellent. Exactly the right call.

“You want my phone?” I asked. “So you can call the cops?”

It was only fair, after all. I did kidnap her.

She shook her head. “No cops.”

I couldn’t lie; that was a relief, too.

“Let’s get you inside,” I said. “We can—”

Beside me Pest barked at something out the windshield, and I turned to see a woman with her pale blonde hair pulled back into an intricate bun had come to stand on the small landing of the main building. She wore a deep purple business suit, and an expression I could only call smug. And I knew smug. Simon was smug as fuck. And this woman… God, it was kind of gross her standing there in front of rehab looking like she’d been right about every person who walked in those doors.

“Oh my God,” Beth whispered, her voice laced with panic and disbelief. Her face when I looked back at her was—if it was possible—even more pale.

And the terror in her eyes…I’d seen that before. And it broke me, that fear. Broke me right in half. Every muscle went on high alert again.

She lurched forward, grabbing the edge of my seat and my hand on the console. Her eyes were sharp and clear and stabbed right through me.

“You can’t leave me here,” she said.

“Jada—”

“No. Listen to me. I’ll go to fucking rehab. Just not this rehab.”

“Why?” I asked. She glanced over my shoulder, her lip quivering and her eyes filling with tears. And twenty years from this moment I would still claim despite everything that happened next, that she wasn’t playing me.

She wasn’t playing me. Her fear was real.

“I can’t go in there with her,” she whispered, her voice thick with tears.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“My mother.”