Dirty Stack (The Devious Games Duet 2)

Apparently he fancies himself some sort of laboratory afficionado and it’s been spread far and wide to steer clear of his drugs because they’ve been fucked with. He experiments. And it often goes wrong.

I could’ve left that alone, but I intervened partly because Amber’s mother contacted Alana after she got the news of her daughter’s death and said that the girl had been there just two days before, sobbing, vowing to change her ways and said she planned to call me to take me up on my rehab offer. The mother gave her my business card, which was found in her jeans pocket according to the cops.

Apparently, Amber was on the outs with the boyfriend and the mother thinks the boyfriend was knocking her around and maybe even gave her the bad drugs intentionally.

I should have no loyalty to Amber for the shit she pulled. Besides, the only thing worse than drugs is bad drugs, so less of that on the street is better. Amber was just an employee, not even someone I was particularly tight with, but she used to serve my table often when we first hired her, and she reminded me of Gina Ricci from the old building who used to help me out with Will.

Gina wound up taking a wrong turn in life and I heard through the grapevine she died of a drug overdose almost two years ago,

Gina showed at my new apartment several months after I moved there. She was wasted and tried throwing herself at me. I shut the door in her face. A few months after that she came to me, telling me she was desperate for money for an abortion. I gave it to her for old times’ sake, but told her she should get into rehab. It was obvious she had turned to drugs. She denied having a drug problem. I told her I was done with her, not to come to me for favors again unless she’d been clean a year and if she got there, I’d help her get a job. She flipped me off, told me I was making a mistake, that no one would love me like she could. I never saw her again.

So maybe I’m taking the Amber case a little more personally than I would’ve otherwise. Because she reminded me of Gina.

Just like maybe I took Violet being abused by Iadanza more personally than I might have if my mother hadn’t been knocked around time and time again until her asshole boyfriend kicked her head in.

Yeah. I take things personally. If I believed therapy would help me and actually went, that’s bound to be what they’d tell me, that my childhood trauma and the murder of my mother have left me with some issues. Blah, blah, fuck off.

I can see this myself and save myself thousands in therapy. What do I need to do to move on in a healthy way? Maybe that’s not having access to Iadanza to work out my frustrations. Is denying myself access to him this past week a step in the right direction for me? That remains to be seen. Maybe the fact that my wife left me will help me find a way to fix my shit. That remains to be seen, too.

My brother has called twice in the past week to try to get together, but I’ve made excuses. There was supposed to be a family dinner here this week that Violet was organizing so her family and Will could meet. So her family could see where she lives. Obviously, that’s not happening right now, either.

I love spending time with my brother and wouldn’t generally sluff him off for anything. He’s a solid guy with a big heart. But I don’t want to make excuses about Violet. I don’t want to talk to anybody about her. And I don’t feel like being sociable and pretending I’m not the lowest I’ve ever felt in my fucking life.

Susanna Gagne called me a couple times too and left voicemails about stepping up my game in getting Violet to forgive me for ‘whatever the fuck it was’ I did.

Then she showed up here two days ago, demanding the answers she wasn’t getting through the phone. She slipped in with another building resident, which doesn’t make me happy about the security around here (and I called building management to complain about that and tell them to pick up their socks).

“She’s looking broken. She’s with you so she’s not supposed to look broken. What happened?”

“You didn’t ask her?”

“She won’t talk about it. She says she can’t. That she needs me to let it go. She’s shutting me out when she promised she’d never do that again, but here she is doing it. She’ll go to dinner with me, she’ll take my calls, but she’s not really there. Why? Why does she look like she’s mourning you?”