Chapter 1

~ Danny ~

Present Day

The stark white room drove me fucking crazy. My eyes darted around, desperate to find a hint of color somewhere. The walls were white, the drapes over the bolted window also white—well, more of a musty yellow with age and smoke from cigarettes—and the vinyl floor gleamed white under the bright lights. The fluorescent light fixture on the ceiling buzzed and flickered, the effects of which, combined with everything else, gave me a pounding headache.

“Do you know why you’re here, Danny?” The counselor’s voice pulled me back to my miserable reality.

My eyes flicked around at the others in the room, staring at me, curious about my reasons for being here and desperate for juicy gossip. But each had signed an agreement to keep their damn mouths shut about everything discussed within these walls, and each one of them knew I wouldn’t hesitate to sue their ass if anything leaked I hadn’t disclosed to the media.

There were other programs I might have gone to that were more like a resort than a prison, such as this one, but I didn’t want the fluff. I needed fucking help, not a goddamn pampering vacation. I chose this center back in my hometown because of its notoriety for hard-fought results, which was most important if I had a chance in hell of turning my life around. It made it even harder when everyone only saw me as a celebrity and kissed my ass, rather than a person who needed support and deserved privacy. But if dealing with the unwanted attention led to getting clean, then I’d deal.

I scratched at my hair and met his gaze. “Uh…yeah.”

“What happened?”

I cleared my throat and struggled to take a deep breath, the reality of my situation weighing on me. “I OD’d. Almost died.”

“And now?”

“Well, yeah…I want to be clean.”

“Of course, that’s why we’re all here.” He smiled at me. “But why do you want to be clean?”

He asked me the same question every day since I’d first arrived, and I still wrestled with answering it.

“Because…” I trailed off. Today wasn’t any different.

I stared right into the counselor’s pale gray eyes and almost said what was on the tip of my tongue. But if I voiced it, he would lecture me again about how I couldn’t think that way. I can’t change for someone else; everything needed to be for myself.

I understood that, I did, and I wanted to change for myself, but if I were being one-hundred percent straight, I also wanted to be someone she would be proud of. Not this sorry ass drug addict who’d almost killed himself by taking too many Ativan before chasing with bottles of whiskey. She would hate that person, wouldn’t understand the pull, the need for the drugs to make it through the day—to even face the day—and she would have turned away from it all…away from me.

He understood what was going through my head and nodded. “Take more time, Danny. We’ll try again next time. Samantha? How about you?”

With the attention off me, I rubbed my hand over my now short hair and leaned against the back of the chair. I closed my eyes, not bothering to listen to anyone else’s sad, pathetic story. Mine was fucked up enough; I didn’t need the added misery.

Gabrielle.

Just thinking her name caused my chest to ache and my heart to thud. Six years, and I still wasn’t over her—far from it. I thought about her every day, never missing one since the horrible night at The Sanctuary. Countless times, I’d wanted to cave, determined to find her. But I’d stopped myself, knowing she likely hated me and would refuse to give me the time of day. Even though I didn’t blame her, not one bit, her rejection had the power to slay me. From anyone else, I could deal, but not her. Instead, I’d turned to drugs and alcohol, desperate to dull the constant pain deep in my bones, to chase away the hallowing loneliness inside of me. My life since that night had been nothing but a fucking mess.

To any outsider, looking back with remorse probably seemed fucking ridiculous since the stars had aligned for me as soon as I’d reached L.A. with my boys, Dollar and Big T, and had lucked out with a connection to an agent. After securing a contract, it seemed only months later I was a huge star, almost a household name. But I’d lost all that time to a drug-filled haze.

“Okay, everyone. Thanks for all the sharing. We’re done for today.” The torment was finally over as the counselor ended the session.

I hopped up and booked it out of there before anyone tried to stop me. I kept my gaze low to avoid eye contact, and almost made it back to my room without interference, until I turned a corner and smacked straight into one of the other participants. Gary, or something.

“Hey, DOA! I wanted to ask you—”

“Oh, hey, man.” I cut him off, sidestepping him. “Yeah, no, that’s cool, but maybe later, all right?” I shoved a thumb over my shoulder as I kept walking. “I’ve got…something to do.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. No, that’s cool. I’ll catch you later.”

With my teeth clenched, I let out a breath through my nose and prayed for patience, and when I reached the door to my room, I slammed it behind me. This was the last place I wanted to be, but it was the only place I found peace. To sit in one of the common rooms meant just that; I would have to socialize with others in the program, the absolute last thing I felt like doing. It was always the same, incessant questions about my music, my personal life. Then they’d bring up the stupid fucking rumors—who I was sleeping with, how I’d ended up in rehab—about anything that wasn’t their damn business, and I wasn’t in the mood to ward it off.

So instead, I grabbed my journal with an embossed “D” on the cover from the white Formica desk, and sat on the bed with my back against the wall. I had to work through this fucking block, write ideas for new songs, and somehow get my mind off my problems. But as I sat there struggling to come up with something, even just one motherfucking word, I had nothing. After a half an hour, a blank page blared at me with only doodles in the margin.

“Fuck!”

I tossed the journal onto the floor and it landed with a smack, loose papers spilling out the side, each one of them with nothing but fucking scribbles. Words were out of reach, which worried me more than anything. The inability to produce a mean quip or a clever verse just wasn’t an option. I had to come up with something.

Being famous at almost twenty-five years old was a concept still hard for me to grasp. My songs climbed to the top of every hip-hop chart known to man, a surprise to me each and every time, and they earned me more money than I knew what to do with. Everywhere I went, people recognized me because of the interest my music garnered, both good and bad. I laughed when my songs showed up as examples of what was wrong with the people of my generation by the stupid fucking politicians and public interest groups. But I was humbled whenever they were declared a prime example of pure talent in the hip-hop world.

With the popularity came women, lots of them. I could have a different choice every night, if that’s what I wanted. Sometimes I took up an offer, needing to find release outside of a bottle, but other times, I only wanted to go back to my room—alone—to wallow in my grief.

Every one of my dreams had come true, everything I’d worked so hard to achieve, but I struggled to enjoy any of it because I was fucking miserable. I longed for the one real thing ever to exist in my life, resulting in me walking around with a black hole in my chest for the past six years. My only means to surviving the time without her was to numb the pain wracking my body, and then even my escape of choice turned on me when I’d collapsed. Dollar found me, only hours from death, and called 911, but I almost wished they’d left me to end my misery.

The phone in my room shrilled, threatening to cause a relapse of the headache that had finally relented. I debated not answering, but then whoever it was would keep calling, and if I still didn’t answer, there’d be a knock on my door. A welfare check, as they liked to call it.

“Yeah?”

“You have a visitor, Mr. Anderson.”

“I don’t want to see anyone.”

“Tell him it’s me…Dollar,” I heard on the other end, and I sighed. He’d been trying to visit me, and I’d turned him away each time, not ready to face him and hear his lectures, but I’d put it off too long.

“All right. I’ll be down in a sec.”

Dollar was already there when I arrived, and he jumped up from one of the chairs.

“D, my man.” He pulled me into a one-armed hug.

“Hey, man. Good to see you.” It was, even if I had been avoiding him.

If there was anyone who had complete confidence in me, it was Dollar. Ever since day one, when he first heard me in a freestyle battle at The Sanctuary, a club from our old stomping grounds, he’d become dedicated to doing whatever he could to get me on the path to stardom. He’d hounded me to cut recording after recording, and to rework quips so they were cutting as well as lyrical. Because of him, I’d made it and would never forget all he’d done for me. Not only was he still one of my closest friends, he was my manager as well.

There was only one thing we’d ever disagreed on and that had been Gabrielle; but in the end, it hadn’t mattered because he’d gotten what he wanted.

“How are things going?” he asked.

“All right. Still working through things.” I sat in the chair across from him.

“When are they going to let you split this joint?” He smiled, displaying multiple gold teeth.

“When I’m ready, man.”

“We need you back out there. We need to start some new shit.”

I slouched in my chair and hissed out a breath, not ready for this conversation. “I need fucking time, Dollar. Let me get my shit together. I can’t think straight yet.”

“That’s cool, man. That’s cool. I get it. I’m just curious is all.” He eyed me. “Do you need anything, man?”

My eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

He shoved his hands inside the waistband of his jeans and pulled out a small plastic bag, tossing it into my lap. I picked it up and, recognizing the long, white bars of Xanax, threw it back at him.

“Get this shit out of here, man! What the fuck are you doing? How did you even get that past the search?”

He chuckled. “I have my ways.” He leaned toward me, holding the bag out. “Come on, man, take it. Just in case.”

I stared at him. How could he not understand what in the hell was going on with me? How did he not get that those pills in his hand were the reason I was here?

I jumped up. “What the fuck, Dollar? Why are you shoving that shit on me when that’s what almost killed me? You’re the one who found my ass!”

He stood and held up his hands. “Okay, dawg. I’m sorry! I’m just trying to help. You say you’re struggling, so I wanted to give you something to help, soothe away the stress, whatever concerns you got. That’s all, man.” He shoved the bag back into his pants. “No need to get fucking hyped. You don’t want it, you don’t want it. Simple as that.”

He sat down and waited for me to do the same. When I did, he asked, “What are you stuck on, dawg? What’s stopping you from doing your thing…besides this place?”

My gaze held his, contemplating whether I should tell him the truth or make up some bullshit, but after a minute of saying nothing, disbelief covered his face.

He swiped a hand over his dark shaved head and rubbed his eyes. “Are you fucking kidding me, man?”

My elbows rested on my knees as I leaned forward and stared at the floor. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t fucking need to. You thinking about her, and I know it. It was six years ago, man. Six motherfucking years ago.”

He would never get how she’d been my world; the only thing I wanted more than the game. She was everywhere. She was in my head, in my heart, and even in all my songs. He didn’t get it, and I didn’t have the energy to explain.

I stood and headed toward the door.

“You know, Dollar… I need to go. We’ll talk later, all right? I just need to go.”

“D, come on, now…”

I ignored him and walked out before he could stop me, unable to believe he’d pulled that shit on me. He was desperate for me to get back my mojo—fuck, so was I—but to pull that? It only proved he didn’t understand what I was going through. He didn’t understand that I still wrestled with the decision we’d made six years earlier, and didn’t understand how badly I needed closure.

Back in my room, I sat on the bed, rapping my head against the solid wall, the dull thud echoing. I needed to write something and get past this fucking block.

I closed my eyes and, as always, the first picture to pop into my mind was her. It had taken only one look into her big, green eyes to trap me, despite knowing she was way outside my league. Her vulnerability, her stunning beauty, and her surprising strength had pulled me in, demanding me to reach out to her, to talk to her, to be with her; even when it was the last fucking thing I wanted. But I hadn’t been able to resist, had fallen under her spell, and we’d been happy, had loved each other, and believed we could have forever, until…

An image flashed inside my head of her prone body on the sidewalk, her skin so pale and cold, with her jacket in shreds a short distance away and splatters of blood staining the cement, and my eyes flew open, my stomach souring. I couldn’t go back there and relive that horrible night.

I often wondered if she listened to my music on the radio or downloaded any of my songs, and if so, did she recognize the mentions of her or our relationship. I would never know, but I hoped she did. I hoped she understood it as the olive branch I intended it to be, and that I hadn’t meant what I’d said all those years ago; that there’d been other reasons for what I’d done. Everything had been to save her.

I continued thumping my head until inspiration hit, surprising me, and I jerked upright. Leaning over, I grabbed my journal off the floor, and thumbed the “D” on the front. The night she’d given it to me, I remembered her being so uncertain I would like it and unaware that nothing else could have been more perfect. I’d carried the notebook with me every day since then, had refilled the paper countless times, refusing to use anything else. The scuffed cover was beat up and worn with abuse, the embossment faded, but I didn’t care. I would carry it with me until the day I died.

I turned to an empty page and picked up my pen, hoping my hand could keep up with the verses flying through my mind.

“Even in the beginning, it was because of you,

Every joy, delight, and happiness was due to you,

I’ve lost so much, but in my heart, my head, my soul, I always have you,

I’m alive because of you, I survived because of you,

If only you knew, simply by the mere thought of you…”