A Light at Winter’s End by Julia London

Author:Julia London
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2011-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Hannah received her four-week sobriety pen in a group meeting. She accepted it with a smile, thanked her sponsor and the others in her group, and resumed her seat. She kept smiling, but inside she was dying.

Four weeks sober meant nothing to her but that she could call Mason. Four weeks meant four weeks she’d not been his mother, had not smelled his skin, had not seen his smile, had not fed him or bathed him or changed his diaper. Four weeks of not holding him or knowing if he was walking, or talking, or even if he was okay. Was he okay?

Francine Goldberg had the floor. “Hi. My name is Francine, and I’m an addict,” she said into the microphone.

“Hi, Francine!”

Hannah didn’t care if Francine was the president of the United States. Francine, who liked a lot of attention, was one of the inmates here—Hannah couldn’t look at them in any other way, as all of them had come here by court order or family order or the order of God. Francine had something to say at every meeting. “Didn’t you think about your baby?” She’d asked Hannah that question in group one day. This, from a woman who drove a car through the plate-glass window of a neighborhood grocery and seriously injured an elderly man waiting for his blood pressure medicine.

Yes, Hannah had thought of what she was doing to Mason. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She now knew that avoiding withdrawal by feeding her addiction had been more important than her own son.

Hannah had had the opportunity to call him at two weeks, after detox, but she’d been such an emotional wreck, she couldn’t face Holly. She’d felt like she was drifting in and out of sanity as it was. A mother cannot walk away from her baby and expect to stay sane.

Dr. Bonifield, her shrink, had helped Hannah set a new goal for calling Mason: her four-week sobriety checkpoint.

That was today. She was sick with nerves, ashamed of what had happened, lacking confidence to speak to her sister. Sick.

Dick, the group leader, was talking to her, Hannah realized. “Do you have anything you want to say about your journey thus far?” he asked, and nodded toward the new guy. Jeff something. Meth. They were the worst, Hannah thought. The craziest. She looked at Jeff, who stared at her with hollow eyes, daring her to hand him some hackneyed message of hope.

But Hannah stared at him blankly. She felt wrung out. Emotionally and physically spent. She had nothing, nothing to offer this man. “No,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Okay,” Dick said, nodding nervously. He didn’t like it when people didn’t share. “Okay. Rayshon? How about you?”

“Why me?” Rayshon asked. “She’s been here longer than me.”

Rayshon was a drinker, and Hannah had heard detox wasn’t as hard for them as it was for OxyContin or meth or heroin. Detox had been very painful for her, that was certain. Thankfully, she didn’t remember that much about it. She’d

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