“A binge?” Noah shouted. “You were almost in a coma!”

“Shit, lower your voice.” It was a groan.

“What the hell are you doing, Abe?” Fox asked through what sounded like clenched teeth. “You stopped snorting coke, so you’ll kill yourself this way instead?”

“What I do in my own fucking time is my own fucking business.”

“You want to go there?” David said, and he didn’t sound like the calm one at all. “You really want to say that when we might have to go onstage tomorrow without you?”

“I’ll be fine by then.”

“Have you looked at yourself?” Noah demanded. “Your hands are shaking and you can’t even get out of bed.”

“Get back in,” Fox said, then swore as there was a small crash. “Satisfied now? You can’t do anything but destroy cheap vases.”

Abe’s response was too low for Molly to hear, but she could guess what it had been from Fox’s response. “You don’t get to pick and choose when we’re your friends. We won’t let you do this to yourself or to us again. Choose, Abe.”

“What?”

“The band or the booze, the drugs, whatever shit you want to shovel into yourself.”

A stunned silence.

Abe was the first to find his voice and it was a roar. “You can’t kick me out!”

“You’re kicking yourself out! How many times do you expect us to do this? Wait to see if you wake up? Get ready to call your mom to tell her in case you don’t?” Fox’s voice vibrated with unhidden fury. “Enough, Abe. You either want to live or you don’t.”

“I’m not trying to commit suicide for Christ’s sake!”

“You think she’d want this?” came Noah’s voice. “For you to wallow in a pool of self-pity because boo-hoo-hoo it’s too damn hard to be alive? She fucking idolized you, man.”

A charged silence, secrets hovering in the air.

“Enough,” David said quietly. “We all need to cool off before we say things that can’t be forgiven. I will not lose who we are together because of this.” A grim silence. “Any objections?”

There were none, and the three men walked out a few minutes later. Noah strode past without spotting her. David nodded and was gone. Wrapping his arm around her, Fox called up the two bodyguards he’d told to wait downstairs. “Stay here,” he ordered them when they arrived. “Watch him—and check everything that goes in and out. I find out he had any booze or drugs in that room, I’ll have your heads.”

Nodding, the two muscle-bound men took up position on either side of the door.

Molly kept her silence as she and Fox left the hospital via a loading dock not covered by the media. Everyone was whispering drug overdose, and the band had decided to let that stand. Abe’s problem with cocaine was old news, would soon fade from the screens and papers if they didn’t feed the story.

Given Fox’s mood, Molly didn’t think anything of it when he ignored a smartly dressed woman in the hotel lobby who said “Zachary” and made as if to walk toward him, her expression faintly supercilious. The elevator arrived before she reached them, and Fox nudged Molly inside.

“She didn’t look like a groupie,” Molly said, simply to break the strained quiet.

Fox’s lips twisted in a humorless smile. “They all want something.” He didn’t speak again until they were back in their room. “You okay?” Knees slightly bent, he brought himself down to her eye level.

It startled her that he’d remembered her past even in his current frame of mind. “I had a couple of flashbacks,” she admitted. “I guess it’s something I need to learn to handle. This environment—”

“No.” Fox’s voice was harsh. “You do not need to get used to this shit because it will not happen again. And never with me. Got it?”

Molly nodded. “I wouldn’t have fallen for you if I didn’t believe that.” Not after seeing up close and personal the damage substance abuse could do, emotional and physical.

“Good.” A hard kiss before he spun away and grabbed his acoustic guitar.

She left him alone by the windows, having learned he worked out his emotions through music. It was over an hour later, when the music went silent, that she took him a cup of coffee. “You’d never really walk away from Abe, would you?” Molly was fighting her instinctive revulsion to addiction to be a friend to Abe and she’d only known him a short time; Fox had known him years. “He needs you more now than ever.”

 “I’m so angry with him, Molly. We worked so hard to get him clean—we never let him down. Not once.” He set the guitar aside, the coffee forgotten on a side table. “Every time he called, day or night, we were there. Noah’s the one who rode to the hospital with him last time, and David drove his mother there when the doctors weren’t sure if he’d ever wake up.”

Fox’s voice was jagged as he continued. “She’s this tiny, fragile thing, and she cried until I had to carry her out of the room, away from the sight of her son lying motionless on the bed.” He shook his head. “Abe’s sister died as a child, and that day, it was like she was reliving every instant of the agony.”

A deep breath. “No mother, she said, should have to watch both her children die.” Hands fisted, his eyes stormy. “After that, after the detox and the rehab, he promised her he’d stay clean. Then he goes and does this?” Pain combined with the fury. “I can’t watch him go down this road again.”

Molly understood in a way no one who hadn’t lived with an addict could. At some point, the emotional drain snapped something inside you. “The third time I found my mother in a pool of her own vomit,” she said, confessing a secret not even Charlotte knew, “I hesitated before calling an ambulance.” It had only been a matter of seconds, but Molly would never forget who she’d almost become as a result of her mother’s addiction.

The hesitation shamed her, but Molly had long since forgiven the worn-out and scared teenage girl who’d had to act the responsible adult at far too young an age. “I just couldn’t take the cycle of remorse and promises, the one or two days of normality before the inevitable slide back into the bottle.”

“Ah, baby.” Fox stood to wrap her in his arms, his cheek pressed against her temple. “It wears you down until you start to ask, what’s the fucking point?”

Molly nodded, tears choking up her throat. “With Abe, he can’t have been drinking all this time,” she said, soothing him with slow strokes of her hand down the rigid line of his spine. “Close as we have to travel together, we’d have noticed. You’d have noticed.”

 “I hope to hell you’re right.” Exhaling a ragged breath, he tightened his hold and they just stood there, taking strength from one another in a brutal world.

Chapter 35

Discharged after a night in the hospital, Abe was back onstage the next night. Tension lingered in the air, but the band stuck together as the shows continued to go by. When—out of nowhere—David was hit with news that threatened to tear down the foundations of his world, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Fox, Noah, and Abe had his back.

The laughter took longer to return, but it came in time, with Abe going cold turkey on the booze. “I don’t know if I’d be able to stop,” he said one night to Fox while Molly was in the room. “So better I don’t start.”

Molly was hopeful he was telling the truth—that the descent into alcohol had been a one-off thing and not the sign of a new addiction. Determined to help in a way she hadn’t been able to help her mother, she cornered Abe before the Manhattan concert. “Want to go shopping?”

He rolled his beautiful dark brown eyes at her, ridiculously gorgeous lashes throwing shadows on his cheeks. “Don’t you have Fox for that?”

“Yes, but I want to buy something for Fox.” He’d worn the leather cuff at several concerts, a silent symbol of his pleasure, and she wanted to find other small surprises. “You’re his friend, you know what he likes.”