asked, leaning forward.
“I’ll go through the process with you and everything that I suggest you do for your business setup so that it’s as seamless as possible.”
“Excellent,” I said. I pulled out my legal pad and prepared to take Margery down.
A few hours later, Winnie and I stepped out of Mr. Jenkins’s office and back out into the California sunshine. It was a gorgeous eighty-one degrees in the middle of November, and I immediately stripped out of my blazer as we walked into the parking lot.
“This is actually going to work,” Winnie said in triumph.
“I think so.”
“I’m so excited. I can’t wait to see her face when she finds out we’ve started our own firm.”
“I hope I never see her face again, to be honest.”
Winnie tipped her phone at me. “Touché.”
“Okay, I have to head home. I need to take Taylor to a PT appointment soon.”
“How is she doing?” Winnie asked sympathetically.
“Well, it’s her first PT appointment. Mostly an assessment. She’s still in a lot of pain, and they don’t want to take it too fast, but you know, we’ll see.”
“And mentally?”
I breathed out heavily. “Worse than her leg, I think.”
Winnie nodded. “I’d suspect so.”
“She blames herself for what happened with her and her friend. And it doesn’t help that her friend’s parents won’t even update us on her progress.” I sighed heavily. “I don’t know. I think the mental side might take longer than the physical.”
“Doesn’t it always?” Winnie said with a sigh. “Well, good luck. Let me know if you need anything. I can pitch in.”
“Thanks,” I said with a smile and then walked over to my awaiting Mercedes.
It was nice to drive again. In New York, I never drove anywhere. There was no need. But I’d grown up, driving everywhere in LA. Sometimes, we just drove for fun to get out of the city and out of the traffic. It’d been six months since I was behind the wheel, and I suddenly didn’t want to give it up just yet to head home.
So, I drove.
I drove with the windows rolled down and my hair whipping around my face.
I drove like I was sixteen again, just figuring out how to live.
I drove, not even knowing where I was going until I was there.
I pulled into the old, familiar neighborhood. It looked smaller than I remembered. Grungier. As if the world had grown up around it, but this place had just sunken deeper and deeper and deeper. Growing into the ground instead of up out of it.
There were still three blocks ahead of me when I began to bring the car to a crawl. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood to leave a brand-new Mercedes idling. Not if I wanted to find it where I’d left it when I came back. But I couldn’t exactly park it in the driveway either.
I didn’t even know if I wanted to see my mom.
It had been nearly five years.
I could remember the day in its entirety as if it were a movie I’d watched over and over and over again. She’d begged me to come see her. To meet her at the house, so she could “fawn over” me. I’d gotten the job at Poise about six months before. Josh and I had only been dating three months. She pretended to be proud. Her little girl off to conquer the world.
But it was a pretense. I could see it in her eyes. It was the same look she’d given me as a kid when she thought she’d come in to some new money to pay for her problem.
And at first, it wasn’t her fault. When I was a toddler, only three or four years old, she’d gotten into a horrific car accident on her way to pick me up from daycare. They’d had to remove the doors to get her out of the car. I’d seen pictures of it. It was beyond comprehension that she’d lived.
What they hadn’t accounted for… was that she’d live with the chronic pain of the accident.
Like any good doctor, he wanted to manage the pain. But at that time, there wasn’t enough information about opioids. Or the information was a lie. And what had started out as managing pain turned into full-blown addiction within a couple years.
No matter how many times we tried to get her to stop, to treat the pain with marijuana or go to a rehab facility, the drug had her in its grasp.
And that day that I went to see her, she saw