At the very least, Leigh should thank Callie for making her job easier.
And then Leigh should go fuck herself for making Callie climb into Buddy’s attic.
Business Suit had finally reached the coffee urn. Callie waited for him to finish, then poured herself two cups because she knew the meeting would run long. There were no cookies. She guessed that was the pandemic at work, but considering what most of these people were willing to do for booze, there was a low risk that a cookie would be the thing that killed them.
Or maybe not. Statistically, ninety-five percent of them would quit the program within a year.
Callie noticed that Sidney had left her purse under her chair. She found a seat opposite, then one back, which would make it easier for her to keep an eye on her prey. Callie put her purse on the floor beside her extra cup of coffee. She crossed her legs. She looked down at her calf, which still had a nice shape to it under the tight jeans. She let her eyes travel up. The fingernail on her right index finger was ripped down to the nailbed from trying to claw Andrew’s face off. She had thought about covering it with a Band-Aid, but Callie wanted a visual reminder of how much she despised Andrew Tenant. All she had to do was think about Maddy’s name coming out of the twisted fucker’s mouth and the rage threatened to explode again like lava spewing from a volcano.
Seventeen years ago, when Callie had first realized she was pregnant, she had known that she had choices, just like she had known that heroin was always going to win. The appointment with the clinic had already been booked. She had mapped out the bus route, planned her convalescence at one of the southside’s finer motels.
Then a Christmas card had arrived from Chicago.
Walter had clearly forged Leigh’s signature, but what Callie had found remarkable was that he cared enough about his girlfriend to try to keep her from completely breaking away from her baby sister.
And by that time, Walter was more than familiar with Leigh’s junkie pain-in-the-ass baby sister. Callie had gone through detoxes where Walter had forced her to drink Gatorade and she had thrown up on his lap and then down his back and Callie was pretty sure at one point she had punched him in the face.
The one consistent fact that had penetrated her misery was the knowledge that her sister deserved this good, kind man, and that eventually this good, kind man was going to ask Leigh to marry him.
There was no question in Callie’s mind that Leigh would say yes. She was profoundly, stupidly in love with Walter, her hands flitting around him like a butterfly because she always wanted to touch him, her head going back as she laughed too hard at his jokes, her voice nearly breaking into song when she said his name. Callie had never seen her sister like that before, but she could predict based on past behavior exactly where it would end. Walter would want a family. And he should, because even then Callie had known he’d be a fantastic father. And she had known that Leigh would be an equally fantastic mother because it wasn’t Phil who had raised them.
But Callie also knew that Leigh was never going to let herself be that happy. Even without the well-documented history of self-sabotage, her sister would not trust herself enough to have a child. Either getting pregnant or staying pregnant would’ve been rife with fear and trepidation. Leigh would’ve fretted about Phil’s mental illness. She would’ve grown too anxious about Callie’s addictions tainting her DNA. She would not have trusted herself to do all of the things for a baby that had never been done for her. She would’ve talked about the what ifs for so long that Walter would’ve either grown deaf or found someone else who would give him the family that he deserved.
That was why Callie had white-knuckled through sobriety for eight excruciating months. It was why she had moved to a god-awful city that was either too cold or too hot and too noisy and too dirty. It was why she had lived in a shelter and let herself get poked and prodded by doctors.
Callie had fucked up so many things in Leigh’s life, including bringing her sister to murder. The least—the very least—Callie could do was move to Chicago and grow her sister a baby.
“One minute .” An older woman in a pink tracksuit clapped her hands for attention. She had the demeanor of a drill sergeant, though no one at AA was really supposed to be drill-sergeanty. Tracksuit glanced out the door. She repeated the countdown in a lower voice to Sidney. “One minute.”
Callie pressed her thumb into her ripped fingernail. The pain reminded her why she was here. She looked at the masked strangers in the circle around her. Someone coughed. Someone else cleared their throat. Tracksuit started to close the door. In the hall, Sidney’s eyes went wide. She whispered something into the phone, then darted inside before the door shut.