“I don’t want to be anywhere but here,” I say. “So? How did it go with Alexa?”

He makes a face. “Hard. Brutal. But it’s done.”

“It’s done done?” I ask. There’s some reason, after all, to believe that Alexa Himmel has a hard time letting go.

“I told her it was over and that was that. I wasn’t going to change my mind.” He raises his hands. He doesn’t know if the breakup will stick with Alexa, if she’ll accept it or resist. He—no, we, we will have to be prepared to deal with it either way.

His cell phone, resting on the window ledge next to him, buzzes. The screen lights up with the word Alexa. He looks at me and shrugs.

“How many times is that?” I ask.

“Third call since I left her about an hour ago,” he says.

The phone stops buzzing and goes dark. A moment later, a small robotic noise comes from the phone, and it lights up again. 3 new voice mails, it says.

His office phone rings, his direct line that he doesn’t give out to almost anyone. There was a time when only Joel Lightner and I had that number. Alexa became the third one.

“So this is tough for her,” Jason says, an understatement of the patently obvious.

Made more obvious still when the office phone stops ringing, and his cell phone buzzes and lights up again: Alexa. Then: 4 new voice mails.

“It’ll take her some time,” he says. He comes over and takes me in his arms. It’s what I’ve wanted him to do since I walked in. But I don’t want to push. We’re together, whatever that means, whatever that entails. That’s all we are right now. I’m having his baby. Will there be more? Neither of us is ready to ask that question, much less answer it.

“Now for the even harder part,” he says. “My return to normalcy.”

Fortunately for Jason, I’ve been doing research, a little at a time every night when I needed a mental break from trial preparation, about addiction and recovery.

“I haven’t looked closely at which rehab clinics are the best,” I tell him. “But I do know that there are some that special—”

“Shauna,” he says, “I can’t go into rehab right now. Not right now. Joel and I are trying to hunt this guy down. I have to keep mobile until then.”

I’m sure my facial expression says it all.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says. “I’m ready to do this. I’m going to do it. Starting right now. But not in a clinic. I’m not making an excuse—”

“You are, actually. That’s exactly what you’re doing. This has to be your number one priority—”

“It will be tied at number one with stopping this guy. Look, Joel’s people are doing most of the grunt work, anyway. I can focus on rehab. But I can’t be hidden in some clinic somewhere without phones or a computer. I have to be reachable and ready to act, whatever ‘ready to act’ means.”

I don’t like this. This isn’t how you dive into detox. This is dipping a toe. Is he as ready as he thinks he is to start his recovery?

“I’ve thought about this.” He pulls me to the couch and we sit. “If I tried to go cold turkey right now without help, it would be murder. It would be a losing battle. But there’s a middle ground here, between nothing and what I was doing.”

“You want to wean yourself off.” The Internet tells me that some people do it that way, ramp down the medication, spread out the doses, slowly rebuild their defenses. But that’s under the care of a physician.

“I’ll wean myself off. I’ll cut down to—I was thinking a pill every six hours. And without crushing them between my teeth first. It will be a huge change for me, believe me. It will get me started on the process, but not take me completely out of the box while that asshole is out there killing women.”

As much as I don’t like it, I can’t deny his reasoning. He can’t very well turn his back on a serial killer roaming the north side. And just as important, I have to understand that this isn’t my decision. I can’t force Jason to do anything. He has to want to do this. I really have no choice but to accept his terms or walk away.

“Every six hours,” I say. “Not one minute earlier.”

“You hold the pills. You’re the key-master.”

He hands me the vaunted tin of Altoids. We look at each other. It’s a real moment for him, I realize. A torch has been passed.

“And you’re going to be intense and focused on what?” I ask. “If you just stew in your juices, sitting around thinking about ‘James Drinker’ all the time, you’re going to be reaching for those pills a lot sooner than every six hours.”

He looks off a moment, then smiles, really smiles, not a polite grin but a happy smile. I haven’t seen that expression on his face in ages.

“Exercise,” he says. “I’m not going to have much strength, but I’ll exercise myself to exhaustion.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Go for long walks. And I’ll go for long rides in the car. Read books. I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”

“It’s going to be really hard,” I tell him. “The hardest thing you’ve ever done.”

He nods, turns back to the window. “I know,” he says. “Just . . . hang in there with me, okay?”

83.

Shauna

Monday, July 29

I peek my head into the bathroom. My bathroom, my condo, two blocks away from Jason’s town house. A thousand square feet in all, one bedroom, one bathroom, a decent kitchen, and a great room with a spectacular view of the high-rises in the commercial district to the south. The condo of a successful single woman.

For Jason, it must feel like prison. We made a decision that he should leave his house and stay with me during this interval of time. Change everything, completely alter the landscape, remove any associations that enabled his problem.

“Hey,” I say.

The toilet is in mid-flush. You can hear everything from everywhere in this place, so it wasn’t hard to hear the guttural sounds from his throat, his stomach lurching, his dry retching, the gasps of breath in between. Jason looks better in the sense that he seems more lucid, more self-aware. He looks worse by any other criterion. He hasn’t slept more than two hours at a time, always waking with a cry of some sort, ready for the fix that isn’t going to come. His eyes are dark and cloudy. His skin has a greenish pallor, the permanent look of someone who’s about to vomit. He moves fluidly at times, with a halting, hesitant gait at others. Every six-hour interval between pills is its own adventure, from contentment to discomfort to agony. But he has stayed true to his plan to exercise his way out of this, to let the adrenaline be his drug. He’s speed-walked outside (I never thought the day would come that Jason, jock extraordinaire and marathon enthusiast, would do any exercise that included the word walk) and jogged on my fold-up treadmill inside the apartment. Not wanting to completely trash his knee all over again, he’s gone to aerobics, too. He has hit the indoor pool in my condo building no less than five times in the three nights he’s been here. He does push-ups and sit-ups and leg lifts on the floor, anything he can do to tire himself out and churn the adrenaline. He has little energy and no stamina, and what little reserve he does possess, after months without exercise, is easily spent. That’s the point, to continually tire himself out and occupy himself with the physical exertion.

Realizing that all of this exercise is just making him drop more weight—not that this is his primary concern—he’s tried to eat. He does the cooking, anything to keep himself occupied, but he hasn’t held down a single meal yet. In between the episodes of vomiting, I’ve seen him double over in pain from the cramps, mostly in the abdomen and thighs. Not that he realizes I’ve seen it. He tries to hide it from me, the pain, the struggle. That’s as much a sign as any that Jason is back, the heroically stoic routine. So instead of saying, Shauna, my legs are cramping so much I’m going to scream, he just asks for a hot bath—the preferred short-term remedy for cramps. I’ve drawn more hot baths in the last few days than I’ve taken all year.