The second morning was harder than the first.
The body had used up its reserves.
The body had been running on the tail of whatever it had stored, and now the tank was empty and every system was asking for fuel that wasn’t coming.
The craving woke him at four, not two, earlier, meaner, more specific.
The body wanted what it wanted, and it was beginning to understand that it wasn’t going to get it, and the understanding made it angry.
He rowed anyway.
He was at the boathouse by five, in the water by five-fifteen, pulling against the dark current with a body that felt like it was made of sandbags.
The catch was sloppy.
The drive was weak.
The recovery stroke lagged.
Every meter was bought with effort that the day before had cost half as much, and the fairness of this — the absolute biochemical indifference of his own nervous system to his intentions — was the first real lesson of recovery.
The body did not care about the plan.
The body didn’t care about the sheriff or the calendar or the trap.
The body cared about homeostasis, and its homeostasis required cocaine, and until it learned a new normal it would make him pay for every hour of its deprivation.
He paid.
He rowed until the sky turned silver and his shoulders were on fire and the craving had been ground down to something manageable, and then he sat on the dock and stared at the water and felt nothing.
That was the anhedonia.
The gray flatness.
The thing nobody warned you about until you were in it.
The anhedonia was the withdrawal’s quietest and cruelest symptom.
It wasn’t pain.
Pain he could handle.
Pain was physical and therefore tractable.
The anhedonia was the absence of reward: the brain’s pleasure centers, starved of the dopamine they’d been flooded with for months, going dark.
Nothing felt good.
Nothing felt like anything.
The water was beautiful: the light on the water was objectively beautiful, a silver sheet rolling toward the sound, and he could see that it was beautiful but he couldn’t feel that it was beautiful.
The gap between knowing and feeling was a canyon.
He sat with it.
There was nothing else to do with it.
He sat with the flat gray nothing and let it be there, and after a while Reynolds came down to the dock with coffee.
“Day two,” Reynolds said.
“Day two.”
“Day two is the worst one. For the body.” Reynolds handed him the coffee.
“Day three’s the worst one for the head. After that it gets easier.”
“You talking from experience?”
“I’m talking from twenty-three years of watching boys burn out and a few who didn’t.” Reynolds sat down beside him.
The bench creaked.
“The ones who didn’t — they all did the same thing. They built a schedule. They showed up whether they felt like it or not. They rowed when they didn’t want to row, ate when they didn’t want to eat, slept when they could sleep. The schedule was the scaffold. You take away the scaffold, you fall.”
He drank the coffee.
It was hot and bitter and his taste buds registered it without pleasure.
“Five-thirty every morning?”
“Five-thirty every morning. Plus afternoons, if you can. And the weight room — nothing heavy, just maintenance. Keep the body busy. The body wants to be busy. The body wants to be used.” Reynolds looked at him.
“You’re not sleeping.”
“No.”
“Eating?”
“Not much.”
“Okay. That changes. You eat something small every three hours. You drink water until your piss runs clear. You sleep when you can — ten minutes here, an hour there — and you don’t beat yourself up when you can’t. The body doesn’t owe you a good night’s sleep. The body owes you survival. Everything else is a bonus.”
The advice was practical and specific and it came from a man who had clearly thought about this before.
Reynolds had thought about this because Reynolds had seen it before: the Cameron heir wasn’t the first rich kid to crash against the rocks of his own chemistry, and Reynolds had decided, at some point in the last twenty-four hours, that this one was serious.
That the boy on the dock was actually trying.
That the water and the long look weren’t wasted.
“Okay,” he said.
“Schedule. Scaffold. Eat every three hours.”
“And you come to afternoon practice. The team needs a seven-seat, and you’re better than anyone else who wants it. Show up. Row. Don’t talk about it.”
“Don’t talk about what.”
“Whatever it is you’re not talking about.” Reynolds stood.
“I’ll see you at three.”
The boathouse emptied.
The morning team arrived and the morning team launched and Reynolds was busy with them, and MC was just the kid on the dock who had been there since five, which was becoming less strange by the hour.
He was the kid who showed up now.
That was the story.
He would let that be the story.
At the marina, later, the card hesitated.
He was fueling the boat.
Rafe’s boat, a center-console that the body knew how to handle and the mind was learning, and when he swiped the Cameron card at the fuel dock the machine thought about it.
Not long.
A second, maybe two.
The screen said PROCESSING and the screen hung on PROCESSING and the marina attendant, a man in his sixties named Dale who had been fueling Cameron boats since before MC was alive, glanced at the screen and then at MC.
“System’s slow today,” Dale said.
“Sure.”
The charge cleared.
The fuel pumped.
The moment passed, and on the surface nothing had happened, but the hesitation was a data point.
The hesitation was the spigot.
Ward’s spigot, the Trust Fund, the invisible leash that ran from every Cameron purchase back to the man who controlled the accounts.
The spigot was tightening.
Not by much: the card had cleared, the charge had gone through, but the hesitation was a signal, and the signal said: Ward is watching the money now, not just the man.
The spigot mattered now.
Every purchase that looked like the old Rafe, fuel, club tabs, casual Kook spending, refilled STANDING.
Every purchase that looked like the new Rafe, charity, lawyers, anything that wasn’t a Cameron-heir performance, would trigger a flag.
The flag would reach Ward.
The spigot would tighten.
The card would hesitate longer next time, and eventually it would decline, and the decline would be public and humiliating and Ward would claim it was an oversight, an accounting error, the bank’s fault.
He fueled the boat.
He took the boat out for an hour, running it through the sound at half-throttle, letting the wind and the salt spray do what the anhedonia wouldn’t let anything else do.
The boat was fast.
The boat was a Cameron asset.
The boat was, technically, not his: it was the estate’s, like everything, like the car and the house and the name, but while he was on it, the boat was his.
He took the boat back to the marina.
He tied it off.
He walked past Dale with a nod and got in the car and drove back to Tannyhill, and the whole way the anhedonia sat beside him in the passenger seat like a passenger who didn’t talk and didn’t move and weighed three hundred pounds.
The flat gray days.
The schedule was the scaffold.
The scaffold would hold.
The body would learn a new normal, eventually, and the pleasure centers would come back online, and the water would be beautiful again, not just known, but felt.
In the meantime he would row.
He would eat every three hours.
He would drink water until his piss ran clear.
He would show up at five-thirty and at three and he wouldn’t talk about what he wasn’t talking about.
At Tannyhill, Wheezie was in the kitchen.
She was making toast and her phone was on the counter and she looked up when he came in.
“You’re back,” she said.
It wasn’t a question.
“I’m back. How was school?”
She blinked.
The question landed wrong, or right, depending on how you measured it.
The question landed like something no one in this house ever asked her.
She blinked again and then she answered.
“It was fine. Biology test. I think I did okay.”
“Good.” He got a glass of water.
The glass was heavy in his hand.
The tremor was still there, a fine low-grade shake, but it was fainter now.
The rowing was working.
The scaffold was working.
“I’ll see you at dinner.”
“Yeah,” Wheezie said.
“Sure.”
She watched him leave the kitchen.
She watched him the way Reynolds watched him, as if he were a variable in an equation she was trying to solve.
He didn’t try to help her solve it.
The solving was hers.
The scaffold was his.
The schedule would keep them both upright until the flat gray days were over and the water was beautiful again.
hey — quick one before you close the tab.
if the cliffhanger is killing you, the future already exists.
you just need a ticket through.
see you in the next loop.
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P.S.
— in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com.
just saying.
that timeline also has more chapters.