I do. I think about Ollie’s voice, steady and careful as he talked about families being torn apart.
“I wanted to,” I say simply.
Rosa studies me a moment longer, then nods. “Okay.”
She trusts me, and I trust her. Though she doesn’t know the rest. Doesn’t know the name behind the impulse. Doesn’t know that the program is tied to the only person who’s ever made me feel like gravity worked differently.
She thinks it’s just… me being me while also helping out an old college buddy.
I’m not lying. Just not telling the whole truth.
We carry our plates to the living room and settle onto the couch, the TV already queued up. It’s the first League game of the season. I’ve watched the opener every year since I met Ollie.
It started as a joke. Then a habit. Then a tradition I never broke, even after everything else did.
Rosa curls her feet under her, fork poised. “You still do this every year?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
She glances at me sideways. “Because of your friend.”
Ollie. She knows that much. Knows we were close. Knows we stopped talking when I went into rehab.
Rehab. God.
The word still tastes like metal. I’d been spiraling long before anyone admitted it. Tour pressure. Fame. Access to anything that could make the noise in my head go quiet for five minutes.
Then Ollie left and the bottom fell out. I remember the morning it cracked open—the moment I couldn’t pretend anymore.
After he left, I’d stumbled into the bathroom and thrown up until my throat burned, thinking about what he’d told me about the woman’s hands on me while also freaking the fuck out, terrified and humiliated with the possibility that it hadn’t been the first time and I hadn’t known.
I’d stared at my face in the mirror and not recognized the guy looking back. That’s when I knew something had to give.
Rehab was hell.
I’d been stripped down to nothing. There’d been no stage, no persona, and no hiding. Just me and a broken heart and a brain that didn’t know how to exist without chaos.
I hated Ollie for leaving. I still do, some days. But I also know that if he hadn’t, if I hadn’t broken that hard, I might not be here. I might not have stopped in time.
Rosa reaches over and squeezes my knee. “You did the work,” she says, knowing exactly where my mind went.
I nod. It wasn’t pretty. It still isn’t. Some days sobriety feels like walking a tightrope over old habits and old pain.
But I’m here, and I’m alive. And a couple of months back, I gave ten million dollars to a program that might keep some kid from growing up with the kind of fear I learned to swallow.
Maybe that’s something.
The commentators shift gears, voices rising with excitement as the teams take the court.
Rosa glances at me. “You good?”
No.
“Yes,” I say anyway. Because the game is starting and so is the ache.
The arena comes alive in a wash of sound and color. Crowd noise rolls through the speakers, that familiar rising hum that always makes my pulse spike like my body recognizes it before my brain does. Lights sweep across the court. Jerseys flash. The commentators lean into their voices like this moment matters.
It does. It always has.
