Some mornings Ellie would join me for a walk down Pine Street, all the way to the Delaware River, or we’d do workout routines in the basement of the row house where I’d rented an apartment back in Philadelphia. Dave had found his own place, just a few blocks away. He’d kept the fancy treadmill; I’d found one on Craigslist, along with hand weights and a step bench. Together, Ellie and I had downloaded free fitness videos, and gotten various ten-, fifteen-, and twenty-minute workouts from magazines. We would do jump squats and mountain climbers. We’d lunge our way back and forth across the basement, and do planks and push-ups, V-sits and donkey kicks, all while playing word games. I’d start with a letter of the alphabet; Ellie would give me a classmate at her new public school whose name began with that letter . . . and then, typically, a rundown as to why she didn’t like that particular kid. (“D is for Dylan, who is nice sometimes but would not let me have the window seat on the bus when we went to the art museum.”)

In the grocery store, I looked Ellie in the eye. “Ellie. Remember how we talked about using a respectful inside voice?”

She pursed her lips. “Yes, except I wanted a COOKIE and you said NO COOKIE.”

“I said no cookie until after dinner.”

“And now I want lipstick and you are saying NO and ALL YOU EVER SAY IS NO.”

“Oh, honey.” I held my arms open. After a minute, Ellie let me hug her. “I know things feel hard sometimes. But there’s good stuff, too.”

“Ma’am?”

I straightened up. The clerk was holding my maple candle and the jug of on-sale moisturizer I’d selected. “Do you want your non-food items in a separate bag?”

“Sure,” I said, and gave him a smile.

“You,” said the peacoat woman, “are a saint.”

I smiled at her. “Believe me, I’m not.” She was maybe five years younger than I was, her hair bundled in a careless ponytail at the nape of her neck, a diamond sparkling on her left hand. I wondered, as I always did when I met strangers these days, whether she was one of them or one of us; one of the earthlings, who could take or leave a glass of wine, or a joint, or a Vicodin or an Oxy; or one of the Martians, for whom, as the Basic Text said, one was too many and a thousand was never enough. You never can tell, Bernice said, and, from the people in my group, I knew it was true—pass any one of them on the street, and you’d have no idea that they were drunks and druggies. Well, maybe you’d guess about Brian, who had the word THUG tattooed on the fingers of his right hand, and life on the fingers of his left. But you’d never guess about Jeannie, a lawyer, who came to meetings in smart suits and leather boots, and who’d lost her license after blacking out and plowing her car into a statue of George Washington on New Year’s Day. Gregory looked like your run-of-the-mill fabulous gay guy, in his gorgeous made-to-measure shirts and hand-sewn shoes. Maybe you’d think that he liked to party on weekends, but you’d never imagine that he’d done three years in prison for drug trafficking. I wondered how I looked—to the clerk, now ringing up my yogurt in slow motion, to the young mother behind me, pushing her stroller back and forth in angry little jerks. Probably no different from the rest of the earthlings, with my hair in a bun, in my workout pants and zippered black sweatshirt. I still wore my wedding ring, and Dave still wore his. We’d never discussed it, which meant I didn’t know whether I was wearing the platinum band out of hope or nostalgia or just so creepy guys in the dairy aisle wouldn’t ask me for help in picking out heavy cream.

“Ma’am?” After what felt like another five minutes’ worth of wrangling—debit or credit? Cash back? Tens or twenties?—I gave Ellie the little bag with the candle and the moisturizer and slung the bigger one over my shoulder, along with my purse, and the two of us walked onto South Street. I’d drop her off with Dave, then go to the five-thirty meeting of what had become my home group, the AA meeting I attended every week. He’d grill the turkey, I’d make rice and asparagus to go with it when I got back, and the three of us would share dinner together before Ellie and I went home.

No big changes for the first year was what they told us at Meadowcrest, but Dave and I had had to downsize, moving to modest apartments in the city and putting the big house on the market, especially after it became clear that my job, at least for the first little while, would be staying sober, with blogging a very distant second. I had struggled with it mightily, complaining to Bernice that there was no box on the tax return that read “not taking pills.”

“I hate that this is what I do,” I told her and the other seven members of my outpatient group, the one I attended four mornings a week, two hours at a time. I was desperate for my world to return to the way it had been before I’d gone to rehab, before I’d started with the pills. “I want my life back. Does anyone else get that?” Fabulous Gregory had nodded. Brian had grunted. Jeannie had shrugged and said that her pre-sobriety life hadn’t been all that great.

“Tell us what you mean,” Bernice prompted.

“I mean,” I said, “I wake up. I take Ellie to school. I get some exercise. I come here for two hours. I go to AA meetings for another hour or two, and I don’t take pills, and I don’t take pills, and I don’t take pills.” I raised my hands, empty palms held open to the ceiling. “And that’s it. God, can you imagine if I had a college reunion coming up? ‘What are you up to these days, Allison?’ ‘Well, I don’t take pills.’ ‘And . . . that’s it?’ ‘Yeah, it’s pretty much a full-time gig.’ ”

“Why you so worried ’bout what other people gonna think?” Bernice could switch in and out of ghetto vernacular—or what she referred to as “the colorful patois of my youth”—with ease. When she was talking to me, she’d alternate between her brassiest round-the-way tones and her most overeducated and multisyllabic. “You really worried about what the tax man’s gonna think? Or some made-up person at some college reunion you don’t even have coming up?”

“I don’t know,” I muttered. “I just feel useless.”

“Useless,” said Bernice, “is better than using. And if you use . . .”

“You die,” the group chanted. I hung my head. I still wasn’t entirely convinced this was true, but I’d heard it enough, and seen enough evidence, to at least be open to the possibility. There would be no one more pill or just one drink for me. That way lay madness . . . or jails, institutions, and death, as the Basic Text liked to say.

The night of Ellie’s birthday party, when I’d gone back to Meadowcrest, I was humbled. More than that, I was scared. In that moment, in the bathroom, I’d seen a version of my life unfolding, a path where I faked and glad-handed my way through the rest of the twenty-eight days, and then went home and picked up my addiction right where I’d put it down. Soon, of course, the pills would get too expensive, and, probably, I’d be making less money, assuming I’d be able to work at all. Maybe it would take years, maybe just months, but, eventually, I would do what all the women I’d met had done, and trade the pricy Vicodin and Percocet and Oxy for heroin, which gave you twice the high at a quarter of the cost. I pictured myself dropping Ellie off at Stonefield in the morning, then driving my Prius to the Badlands, where even a straight white lady like me could buy whatever she wanted. Philadelphia Magazine had done a special report on the city’s ten worst drug corners and, of course, I had firsthand recommendations from the various Ashleys and Brittanys. And maybe I’d get away with it, for a little while. Or maybe I’d get into a car accident with a thousand dollars’ worth of H stuffed in my bra, like one of the Meadowcrest girls. Or I’d get arrested, dragged off to jail, and left to kick on a concrete floor with nothing but Tylenol 3, like an Amber had told us all about.

Dave would divorce me—that part, of course, was nonnegotiable. Worse, I would lose Ellie. In a few years’ time . . . well. You know how they say you never see any baby pigeons? I remembered Lena asking in group one day. You know what else you never see’s an old lady heroin addict. Or, Shannon had added, one with kids.

Back in my room, my Big Book was still open on my desk and my clothes were still in the dresser. “Ohmygod, where were you?” Aubrey demanded as she stormed into my bedroom, followed by Lena, who was still wearing the mascara mustache she’d donned to appear in our play. “We were so worried,” said Mary. She twisted her eyeglass chain. “The RCs wouldn’t tell us anything, but they were all on their walkie-talkies, and they made us all sit in the lounge and watch 28 Days again. They thought you ran away!”

“I did,” I confessed. Sitting cross-legged on my bed, the expectant faces of the women who’d become my friends around me, I couldn’t remember ever feeling so scared. Admitting you had a problem was the first step—everyone knew that—but admitting you had a problem also left you open to the possibility that maybe you couldn’t fix it. “I got Dave to pick me up, and I went to Ellie’s birthday party, and we dropped her off at her friend’s house, and I was in the bathroom, and I looked in the medicine cabinet, and I was thinking, Please let there be something in here, and then . . .” Shannon took my hand in hers.

“What is wrong with me?” I cried. “What’s wrong with me that I can be at my daughter’s birthday party, having a perfectly nice time, and the only thing I can think about is where am I going to get pills?”

Lena made a face. Mary patted my shoulder. But it was little Aubrey who spoke up. “What’s wrong with you is what’s wrong with all of us,” she said. “We’re sick people . . .”