Recovered

  Recovered

  Copyright © 2018 by Jennifer M. Voorhees

  All rights reserved.

  Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data has been applied for.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Jay Crownover LLC 1670 E. Cheyenne Mountain Blvd. Box# 152, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80906.

  Cover design by:

  Hang Le

  www.byhangle.com

  Editing by:

  Elaine York, Allusion Graphics, LLC/Publishing & Book Formatting

  www.allusiongraphics.com

  Proofreading & Copyediting by:

  Beth Salminen

  www.bethanyedits.net

  Interior Design & Formatting by:

  Christine Borgford, Type A Formatting

  www.typeAformatting.com

  Recovered

  GETAWAY SERIES

  Escape

  Shelter

  Retreat

  THE SAINTS OF DENVER SERIES

  Salvaged

  Riveted

  Charged

  Built

  Leveled (novella)

  THE BREAKING POINT SERIES

  Dignity

  Avenged (crossover novella)

  Honor

  THE WELCOME TO THE POINT SERIES

  Better When He’s Brave

  Better When He’s Bold

  Better When He’s Bad

  THE MARKED MEN SERIES

  Asa

  Rowdy

  Nash

  Rome

  Jet

  Rule

  Contents

  RECOVERED

  Also by Jay Crownover

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dedicated to first love.

  Also dedicated to anyone and

  everyone who was affected by Hurricane Harvey.

  Port Aransas was hit so hard in the storm,

  which happened shortly after this book was finished.

  I KNOW MOST of you are in my reader group or subscribers of my newsletter, so you’ve heard me talk about where the idea for Cable and Affton’s story came from, but for anyone who was waiting until publication day for this book, I want to go ahead and catch you up.

  Cable is based entirely on a real person. He is based on the boy who taught me all about love and loss. My first love. My first crush. My first taste of disaster and heartbreak. Pretty much everything about the way Cable acts and reacts to things is 100% taken directly from my actual experience dealing with my own broken boy. I throw that out there as a qualifier, because I want readers to understand this isn’t a book dealing with addiction and depression from a researched and documented place. This book deals with those things from the point of view of someone who was watching a train wreck happen right in front of her and was helpless to stop the crash or the carnage.

  I know there are no simple textbook symptoms for dealing with things like depression and anxiety, so I want to be clear that all the symptoms, outbursts, reactions, and emotions in this particular book are ones that I witnessed with my own two eyes and felt with my own young heart. I would never want to misrepresent the struggle associated with these issues, so this book is singular and unique to my own life experience.

  I’m writing fiction here folks. I will freely admit to taking creative liberty with some of the medical help Cable seeks along the way. I wanted a connection between my characters that I felt was important to Cable’s journey, so the representation of his relationship with his therapist is not the standard! I am aware. It was done on purpose to enhance the story, please don’t send me angry emails. (I put this declaimer in after all Beth, my copyeditor’s many-many notes about Dr. Howard’s unethical conversations about Cable’s mental health with characters who were not Cable. Lol. I know therapy is a safe space and this doesn’t happen in the really-real world.)

  I met my Cable when I was sixteen and had been living a pretty sheltered, quiet life as a small-town mountain girl. A mutual friend introduced us about a week after he was released from a court-ordered rehab program. The friend thought we’d be good for each other; he would get me to loosen up, and I was clean and uninterested in all the things that got him in trouble before. It was a terrible plan. We hated each other on sight. I was terrified of the way he lived his life like there were no consequences and no remorse. He hated that I wasn’t impressed by him, that I didn’t automatically think he was the coolest guy in the room. There was a lot of animosity between us for around a year, until he got in trouble again, did a stint in juvie, and was ordered back into a rehab program.

  When he got out the second time, he realized he was going nowhere fast and contacted me out of the blue one night to ask if we could give being friends a shot. All of his friends used drugs, drank, partied, and lived just as wildly as he did. He told me he needed someone around who would keep him on the straight and narrow, someone who wasn’t afraid of him. I was terrified of him, but I was even more afraid of what would happen to him if I turned my back on him. I was young enough at the time to believe that if I told him no and he overdosed or did something even more drastic like attempt to take his own life, it would be my fault. So, I agreed.

  It was ugly for the first three months. We didn’t like each other, and we weren’t very good at being friends. There was so much temptation around all the time, and it was a struggle to try and help someone who wasn’t exactly sure he wanted the help. Just when I was getting ready to bail, to tell him it was too hard─ I had my own life, my friends, my future to worry about─ something changed.

  Maybe he realized I had one foot out the door and I was the only person still fighting for him.

  Maybe it was the fact one of his friends died in a drunk driving accident.

  Maybe it was the night he got into a fight with a skinhead over something stupid and ended-up with a sawed-off shotgun shoved in his face.

  I don’t know what flipped the switch, but he went from night to day. He ditched the friends who were always urging him to jump back off the cliff. He went from pushing against me to actively trying to pull me deeper into his life. He got his GED and blew through his first year of college like it was a piece of cake. He woke the fuck up. He realized there was a whole lot of life to live . . . all he had to do was start showing up for it.

  Things changed with us as well. We went from always fighting to something else. I knew I was the center of his entire world and that his obsessive-compulsive tendencies had switched from drugs to me. It was never healthy. But when you’re young and this guy with all the charisma and all the right words tells you he needs you, that he can�
��t make it without you . . . man, it’s impossible not to fall in love with that feeling and get swept up in all that emotion.

  We were together on and off for a little over five years. We called it quits for good when he moved to New York and then Scotland after 9–11. He’s still the most enigmatic, complex, and compelling man I’ve ever known. More than a couple of decades later, I still compare every man who enters my life romantically to him.

  We weren’t meant to be in so many ways. But when I think about that all-consuming, overriding need to be with someone when it comes to first love, I wouldn’t give any of that time up for the world. I love that I get to write stories about that kind of love and passion.

  So, that’s it, that’s where Cable came from, and Affton . . . well, let’s just say she’s the person I wish I could have been back then. She does everything right, whereas I did everything very wrong . . . that’s about the only similarity between the two of us.

  This is the place where I make it clear that my mother is nothing like Affton’s mom. Affton actually has to deal with the loss of a family member to addiction in her life, so she’s very empathetic and compassionate when it comes to dealing with this particular disease. My mom is great, one day I’ll write her into a story, so I don’t have to put a disclaimer that all the terrible moms I write about are nothing like her.

  My mom is awesome. No doubt about it.

  This love story has history and memories on every single page. I sure hope you enjoy my first love as much as I enjoyed sharing him with you.

  (Yes, I’m going to email Ry—my Cable—and tell him I wrote a book loosely based on him. He already knows he’s the physical inspiration for Rule. I doubt he’ll be surprised.

  Affton

  I HATED CABLE James McCaffrey.

  I loathed him.

  I detested him.

  I despised him.

  My dad would tell me that it’s dangerous to wish ill upon someone, that it’s risky to borrow trouble by thinking bad things about a boy who had the means to buy and sell us both several times over. But I couldn’t help it. I really, truly hated him, and every single day it seemed like he did something else to justify my complete and utter disdain. The boy was a year ahead of me in school. When I was in the sixth grade, my dad moved us to Loveless, Texas. I’d shown up skinny, shy, and uninterested in the world and my new school. My world had flipped upside down, and though my dad viewed the move as a fresh start, all I felt was failure and loss. I wasn’t impressed by the tall, attractive blond boy who ruled the school. I wasn’t impressed by anything. I felt nothing when he smiled at me in the hallways. I was numb when that smile turned to a sneer. I didn’t want his attention or his scorn.

  I’d never been fond of his antics and total disregard for the rules, mostly because, even then, he got away with murder, since his family practically owned the entirety of this small Texas town. As we got older, the behavior that already bugged me got even worse and more outrageous. Cable’s indifference to authority and apathy toward common decency spiraled out of control. When I was a junior and he was a senior, I realized the reason he always rubbed me the wrong way.

  He was a user.

  He used his family’s status and wealth to do whatever he wanted; he wallowed in entitlement. He didn’t show up to class if he didn’t want to. He drove a car that was nicer than all of the teachers’ and parked it right out in front of the school—in employee parking—without any worry that it would be towed. He never adhered to the dress code even though the rest of us had no choice. I’d never seen anyone stop him from smoking as he walked across the campus, even though all tobacco products were strictly forbidden. There was no suspension or detention for the likes of Cable James McCaffrey. There was no worry the school would pull his parents in for a meeting about his behavior. The principal went out of her way to turn a blind eye to the boy’s antics, and in return, she got sizable donations from the McCaffreys every year to improve and enhance the school.

  He used girls . . . an endless string of them. It turned my stomach the way my female classmates couldn’t wait to take their turn going through the revolving door that I was sure welcomed them into Cable’s bedroom. He never stayed with any of them for more than a hot minute, and he acted like he couldn’t remember their names as soon as he finished with them. The dismissive and rude behavior didn’t stop them from rushing to do his homework when he asked, and it didn’t keep them from clamoring for his limited attention when he walked down the hallway. He was the closest thing our small town had to royalty, and he knew it. We were the peasants who existed in his kingdom, nothing more, nothing less.

  He used his friends . . . or the people who were foolish enough to think the bare minimum of attention and time Cable offered was friendship. He wasn’t nice. Not to anyone. He was short-tempered and rude. He was always surrounded by people telling him how great he was, how interesting and fascinating his every action was in their eyes. He didn’t make a move without a horde of admirers telling him he was the coolest and greatest thing to ever happen to Loveless High School. All they wanted was to be seen with him and score an invite to one of the legendary parties he threw every time his parents were out of town on business. The McCaffreys owned a sprawling ranch on the outside of town that was opulent and ostentatious. Both of his parents came from money and had made fortunes on their own along the way. Everyone in my school wanted the chance to get inside the mansion Cable called home to party, unsupervised, with unfettered access to his parents’ high-end liquor cabinet, heated pool, and unchecked debauchery. Several bragged they had even seen the real Van Gogh his mother had, and I was positive the only reason they knew it was a Van Gogh was because they had Googled it for bragging rights.

  But the main reason I never joined the Cable James McCaffrey fan club was that he was not only a user of people, but also used that which was scary and risky. He used in the literal sense. I don’t know if his teachers saw it, if the girls who couldn’t look away from him could tell, or if the boys who were so far up his ass they were looking at his brain stem recognized the signs . . . but I did.

  It started sometime during my freshman year when Cable was a sophomore. He’d always been moody and quick to fly off the handle, but almost overnight his behavior became even more erratic. The mood swings got dangerous and unpredictable. He took a swing at his history teacher, and while anyone else would face immediate expulsion, Cable got the week off from school and was welcomed back with open arms as soon as his parents offered to buy the school a new scoreboard for the football field. His man-whorish behavior also started around that time. He was searching for something inside someone else over and over again. The harder it was to find, the angrier he became. Which in turn made him callous to the person who he deemed lacking whatever it was he was looking for. There was always a new girl crying over him in the hallways, and each time I walked past her, I was so thankful I’d been immune to him that first time he smiled at me. My broken emotions had nothing to do with Cable, and as long as I had a say in the matter, they never would.

  The way he looked also started to change that year. Cable was tall for a teenager. If anything other than a good time and the frantic need to escape from himself motivated him, he would be perfect for our school’s sucky basketball team. He was long and lean with shaggy, dark blond hair and the brownest eyes I’d ever seen. He was good looking in a rough and unkempt kind of way. But that year and the next, his rumpled appearance turned gaunt and ragged. He lost weight. His dark eyes started to take up his entire face as his cheeks hollowed out and his jawline sharpened. Instead of being intense, forceful, and furious, he became twitchy and paranoid. It didn’t happen overnight, but the changes were significant and scary. The further away he drifted, the more I wondered why someone who loved him didn’t try and catch him before he was too far gone. I recognized the trip Cable was on and knew the final destination wasn’t anywhere I’d ever want to be again.

  I mentioned my suspicions to a friend of mine
when Cable appeared even worse at the start of his senior year. She looked at me like I was crazy and asked me why someone like Cable would need to use drugs to cope with the crap the rest of us had to deal with daily. He was privileged. He was beloved. In her mind, someone who had everything wouldn’t risk any of it by succumbing to something as common as addiction.

  I knew from firsthand experience that addiction didn’t discriminate.

  Addiction didn’t care about the square footage of your house or the kind of car you drove. It didn’t care about your pedigree or your GPA. Addiction was an equal opportunity life-ruiner, and I was positive that Cable was deep in the throes of it. I hated him, and I hated how he was carelessly tossing away his picture-perfect life. I shouldn’t care . . . but I did.

  I cared because I couldn’t not care. I’d had a front row seat to the kind of destruction addiction wrought, and there was no way I could stand idly by and let it get its grubby, gross, insidious, infectious hands on someone else in my orbit. Even if that someone else was someone I wanted to dropkick and throat-punch on a regular basis. Anyone rational would point out that I had no reason to loathe Cable the way I did. He’s never outright attacked me, embarrassed me, or victimized me. All he’d done was notice me when it was the last thing I wanted. It might not make sense to anyone, but it made perfect sense to me. I’d wanted to hide, but he had no trouble finding me. In my mind, that made him my enemy from day one.

  I’d never said a word to Cable James McCaffrey. In all the years we’d been in school together, never, not once had there been an occasion where I needed to converse with him. I watched him from afar and judged him endlessly. I watched him because he was impossible to ignore and because I knew I was on his radar. I was always waiting for the day he would finally try his luck, test the waters, even though he knew I was a shark that could tell he was bleeding out from a mile away. Cable wasn’t nice to the people who liked him; there was no way I wanted to find out how he treated the people who detested him. I had a couple of years left before graduation, and I wanted to get through them as quickly and quietly as possible. I did not doubt that Cable could shred the ease of my remaining high school days with minimal effort. So, I stayed out of his way until I felt I had no choice but to throw myself directly in his path. Someone had to say something to him before he slipped so far down the rabbit hole there would be no reaching him. Someone had to try and save him before it was too late.