“I didn’t mean to.” How could I explain to him the pain of knowing how badly I had hurt Kylie? How seeing her rage at me had sliced every wound that had started to heal wide open? “I was alone and no one was answering their phone. It was sitting there and I wasn’t going to, but then I just wanted to dull the anxiety a little. Only when I did a shot, nothing happened. The room was so quiet and I felt so anxious . . . I took another shot. Then I started to feel a little rush, and it was such a relief that I had one more and I tried to paint and then I don’t know . . .”

I didn’t know.

It was just like before, only this time I had risked never waking up.

I started to cry, and Phoenix set the pan down and pulled me against his chest. “Baby. Shh.”

His arms felt good, strong, and I breathed in his scent. “You might have saved my life.”

His fingers gripped me tighter, but he didn’t respond.

“Kylie knows, and she hates me,” I said.

“She’ll get over it. Just give her some time.” He rubbed my back. “Now I’m going to go get the doctor and tell him you’re awake, so hang tight, okay? I’ll send Rory in.”

For a second I gripped him tighter, not wanting to let go, but then I fell back against the pillows and nodded. My body felt shaky and weak.

When Rory came in a minute later, I tried to smile, but I was too embarrassed to say anything, do anything. “Hey,” was all I managed.

“Hey,” she said, her face concerned, hair slipping out of its ponytail. “I’m so freaking glad to see you awake and talking. You really scared me, Robin.”

“Thanks for taking care of me.” I picked at the tape on my IV. It was pulling my skin. “I wasn’t trying to pass out, I just want you to know that. I just didn’t want to hurt so much. Seeing Kylie’s face . . . I just wanted that image to go away.”

“I know.” Rory took my hand in both of hers and squeezed my fingers. “We shouldn’t have left you alone with a bottle of vodka. That was stupid.”

But I shrugged. My problem wasn’t anyone else’s. “It’s not your job to babysit me. And everyone left in an unexpected hurry. Did Kylie confront Nathan? Is she okay?” I couldn’t get the picture of her screaming and crying out of my head.

“No, she’s not exactly okay, but truthfully, I think she is way more hurt by Nathan than by you. I mean, those texts were brutal. He was just blatant in his desire to cheat.” Rory looked behind her at the curtain separately us from the staff area of the ER. “Listen, just so you know everything that went down, Phoenix hit Nathan. He would have probably put him in the hospital if Tyler hadn’t dragged Nathan away. Then he took a tire iron to Nathan’s car. He smashed literally every window and light and left dents and scrapes all over it. We all saw him doing it and it was actually kind of scary, I’m not going to lie. It was like he wasn’t in control of himself.”

I remembered him telling me that he only beat the shit out of people who deserved it, and I knew he hated Nathan on principle, but I didn’t entirely get the rage. Maybe my brain was still too foggy. “He knew about Nathan. I told him a few weeks ago. So I have no idea why he would go ballistic like that. He didn’t get in trouble, did he?” That was my main concern, if anyone had called the cops. Phoenix would go back to jail, no question about it.

“No. It’s okay. But my God, what a night. I think we need to stop doing Girls’ Night.” She gave me a smile. “Too much drama.”

“It wasn’t Girls’ Night. It was me. All of it.”

“No, it wasn’t all you. Don’t take Nathan’s guilt on to yourself.”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now,” I said, because I didn’t. Guilt had become so familiar to me, it was odd and scary to have my secret shame out there in the open, for my friends to discuss and question.

I already knew what I had to do—what I had been planning originally, before I had met Phoenix and let Tyler convince me that I needed to pretend nothing had happened. I needed to move out. There was no place in that apartment for me while Kylie was trying to recover.

“You didn’t call my parents, did you?” I asked, the thought sending me into a panic. My mother would be shocked, my father would be so disappointed. My grandmother, well, she would be disgusted. “What time is it anyway?”

“It’s six a.m., and no, I didn’t call your parents. We left your phone at the apartment by accident, and it was the middle of the night and it looked like you were going to be okay, so I didn’t go back for it. Should we have?”

I shook my head. “God, no. This would destroy them.”

Phoenix came back around the curtain with a nurse then, and Rory stepped back to let her check my vitals.

After she went through a whole round of questions, she said, “The doctor needs to stop in, but you can leave at any time if you’d like to go home. We’ll go over the instruction list for home care, and I have some information for you to take home about the dangers of binge drinking and resources available to you.”

There was no judgment in her voice. She was smiling and rubbing my arm. It actually made me feel worse. If she were bitchy about it, I could get defensive. But there was nothing there but the kind concern of a total stranger.

“Thanks,” I said, as she gently pulled the tape back on my IV. She had short, spiky red hair and hot pink scrubs.

“I have kids who are in their late twenties. College has too many keg parties. Hopefully this was a lesson learned for you.”

“Yeah,” I said, because I was supposed to. And it was a lesson. But then so had waking up naked with Nathan, and yet I’d done it again. That scared me to the point that I felt numb. I wanted to ignore all of it, I wanted to lie on my couch for a week straight, eating cereal and watching TV, painting every canvas I could get my hands on with shades of deep, bruised purple.

“It won’t happen again,” Phoenix said, and something about his tone had me glancing toward him. That sounded weird. Like he planned to put an ankle bracelet on me or something.

“You can change back into your clothes.” She put a bandage where the needle had punctured my wrist. “Be back in a flash with the doctor.”

Rory reached for the clothes they had obviously removed from me at some point. I was still wearing my bra and panties, so I sat up and tried to slip out of the arms of the gown without flashing both Phoenix and Rory.

“Oh, God, this dress is still wet,” Rory said, blanching a little.

I was so exhausted, I didn’t care. I just wanted to get home and sleep. Except that it stunk. “Gross.” But I pulled it on anyway, because I didn’t really have a choice, and hey, it was my own puke. I supposed I deserved it. The gown fell away as the dress slid down into place, damp and smelly.

Phoenix, who had been standing there silently, his body completely still, suddenly started and yanked the curtain back with more power than was needed. “I’ll go pull the car around. Rory, let me have the keys.”

It was totally obvious that he wasn’t processing any of this any better than I was.

Ten minutes later I was climbing into the back of Riley’s car on shaky legs, sighing as I sunk down, my eyes closing. The physical discomforts—the pounding head, the dry mouth, the tremor—gave me a focus on something other than my thoughts.

But one kept coming to the forefront anyway—that I didn’t want to risk death. That if guilt drove me to that place, then I was going to have to figure out how to let go of the guilt.

To forgive myself.

Ultimately, I couldn’t control if Kylie or my other friends did or not. But I could control my own feelings. And I could control my actions.

But first I wanted to sleep, for days and days, until my head no longer felt so heavy and my thoughts so sluggish.

Phoenix helped me up the stairs to the apartment and into the living room, his firm arm around me, taking the bulk of my weight as I leaned heavily on him. The two flights of stairs wiped me out, and I said, “I can’t walk to my room. I need to rest on the couch.”