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His words did nothing to ease my guilt, even though a part of me knew he was right. It would have taken more than a few rounds of pyschobabble to make Jason stop when he’d set his mind on something. I’d seen him steal from his family, from my family, heard him tell lie after lie just so he could get a fix. Even now, with so much conviction in his voice, there were no guarantees he would never relapse.
“I want my life back, Ellie. I want to get back with the band and-”
“Slow down.” I sat beside him again. “There’s a long way to go yet. A lot of recovery. And...while we’re being honest, Jason, I have to tell Drew the truth. That I knew you had cocaine on you yesterday.”
“Ellie, no. I’m not saying this for me, I’m saying it for you. He won’t understand what you did. You can’t tell him.”
“I have to. How are we supposed to fix everything if there’s a huge lie in the way?”
“What lie?”
Jason’s face paled, his gaze focusing over my shoulder.
This is fine; you were going to tell him anyway, weren’t you?
That didn’t stop my heart from forgetting to beat at the sound of Drew’s voice. I was going to tell him, but away fr
om the hospital to limit the amount of people who’d hear the fallout.
I rose from the bed, already knowing what I’d see. Drew’s jaw clenched, his chest rising and falling faster than normal, and his eyes flicking from me to Jason.
“It’s nothing. Right, Ellie?”
Wrong.
“What do you need to tell me the truth about, Ellie?”
The feeling of weight pressing down on me, stealing my breath bore down on me again, and mixing in with my hammering head, I could easily have sunk to my knees, crying because I didn’t know what to do.
You know what to do.
“There’s something I should have told you yesterday.”
“Ellie,” Jason said. “Don’t. Please.”
We both knew what would happen when the words came out, and again, my chest ached, my insides shrivelling away to nothing. Bits of me seemed to be slowly dying, like petals falling from a wilting flower. There was only one way Drew would see this.
“Yesterday morning, when you left me and Jason to talk, he had cocaine in his pocket.”
For the briefest second, Drew’s jaw relaxed, his eyes softening. It passed in a flash, though. When my words filtered through to his brain, he tilted his head to one side. “What?”
What did he think I was going to say? Jason and I had decided to take a trip back to the days of our beer-goggled kisses, and spent the morning dry humping in my hotel room?
Actually, that was probably it, which would have infuriated me under different circumstances. Pretty hard to be angry with someone when you’ve played right into their insecurities.
“He had cocaine on him, and you knew?”
“It wasn’t her fault,” Jason said, and I turned to him. “I asked her to help me, and she flushed it but I made her promise not to tell you. I didn’t plan to use again, and Ellie-”
“Jason, stop,” I interrupted, turning back to Drew. “That is what happened, but I should have let you know.”
“Why didn’t you?” he asked, his voice frighteningly stoic.
“Because I-” I paused, taking a careful step closer to him. “I believed him when he told me it was a one-off. He hadn’t used any, and I thought once I got rid of what he had, it would be over. I realise it was stupid of me, but yesterday was such a huge mess, and I wanted-”
“To lie to me, and risk Jason getting hooked on that crap again?”
“No! I didn’t want to lie to you, but I didn’t want to make things worse between you two, either. I was scared one more thing would make everything blow up again and I couldn’t stand the thought of you reaching a point where you might not… you might not ever be able to fix your relationship.”
