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‘You seriously brought me here to lecture me about my love life? I’m not going there with you.’
‘You don’t have to. Every time you decide you’ve had enough it’s all over the net again. When it comes to your love life, it’s out there, Tate. After going public with Chloe, she’s out there now too. Just remember that.’
Tate doesn’t respond. Not a great start that she assumes he’s going to throw Chloe aside when he gets bored. Just because he’s done that with every single relationship he’s been in before. He looks out to the sea and grimaces. She might have a point.
‘I need to ask you something.’
He knew it. There was no way she could move on without knowing why he did it. ‘You want to know what drove me to drugs?’
‘Yeah. I need to understand. I need to know why the person I’ve known my whole life became an addict in the space of a few weeks. We saw each other at Christmas. You were fine. The tour was going really well and you’d gotten number one for the second year in a row. Everything was great. What the fuck happened?’
‘Don’t curse.’
‘Stop treating me like I’m a kid. I’ll curse if I fucking want to. If I added to a swear jar every time you cursed, I’d be worth more than you are at this stage.’
‘Seriously? You’re having a go at me about cursing now?’
‘No, I’m having a go at you because you won’t talk to me. You can’t expect me to be okay with you if you’re being dishonest with me.’
‘Hey, don’t go there. What the fu—’ he pauses and swallows the curse. ‘What have I been dishonest about?’
‘There’s no way you fell into taking something like heroin out of nowhere. Do you think I’m stupid?’ She sniffs and wipes her face on her arm.
Tate looks over at his sister. She’s crying. He did that.
‘Do you have any idea what it was like to get that call from Mum? Tate’s in hospital. He’s unconscious. It looks like a drug overdose.’ She looks at him and wipes more tears away. ‘How would you feel if you got that call, huh? You’d want answers, wouldn’t you? You’d be desperate to know why it happened so you could do everything in your power to make sure the person you love would never get into that situation again.
‘You’d second guess every single thing they said and did in the weeks leading up to it. You’d wonder if it had been going on for longer and you just didn’t notice. Or if something terrible happened to them and they couldn’t deal with it. All these thoughts would be racing around your head, over and over again. Then when they eventually wake up after six terrifying days unconscious, they won’t tell you a thing. No reason. No explanation. Nothing to help you to help them.’
‘Bria—’
‘You were my damn hero, Tate. You protected me from the monsters under the bed, from the goblins I swore were hiding in my wardrobe. You remember how the left-hand door would never close properly? I swore there were things hiding in here, looking out the open door. You propped a chair against it to keep it closed.’
‘Yeah. Didn’t help though. You thought I was doing it to keep the goblins inside and if you moved the chair they’d fall out and come after you. You didn’t go near the thing for going on a year.’
She laughs and wipes her face again. ‘I hated that wardrobe.’ She falls into silence and looks at the waves crashing further down the beach. He feels like she’s just reached into his chest and beaten the shit out of his heart.
He gets it. It shouldn’t have taken her saying all that for the truth to sink in, but he absolutely understands why she wanted nothing to do with him when he woke up. He never thought about her getting that phone call. He had focused on the fact his parents found him, but never thought about her hearing what he did.
‘I’ve been using for years, Bria.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing as serious as heroin, but using full stop was fucking stupid. Doesn’t matter what it was.’
‘Do Mum and Dad know? Do the guys know?’
‘I don’t think Mum knows, but Dad does. I didn’t use alone. Dillon and Luke did too. Gregg a little, but he was the one who eventually kicked us all into shape. We took a step back, but never fully stopped.’
‘Right. You managed to keep that well hidden.’
‘It wasn’t all the time. Anyway things escalated after Christmas. I started remembering stuff about my past... from before I was adopted.’
Bria looks over at him but doesn’t say anything.
‘My father, at least I think he’s my father, hit me. I think I blocked it all out and forgot about it until Christmas. I got really intense nightmares. Every single night. Then the memories would hit when I was awake. I couldn’t escape them. I couldn’t sleep. I was knackered from the tour anyway and this just made it worse. I tried blocking it out with drink, but it didn’t work so I stepped it up.’
He shrugs and picks at some seaweed beside him. ‘I didn’t think about what I was doing. It didn’t register that I was taking heroin. I just kept focusing on the fact that when I took it, I didn’t care about the dreams and my memories. They went away.’
