Unfiltered & Unraveled Read online

  UNFILTERED &

  UNRAVELED

  Book Six of

  the Unfiltered Series

  ~ Payge Galvin & Danni Pleasance ~

  Unfiltered & Unraveled © 2014 by Payge Galvin and Danni Pleasance

  Excerpt from Unfiltered & Undressed © 2014 by Payge Galvin and Meg Chance

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  OTHER BOOKS IN THE UNFILTERED SERIES:

  Unfiltered & Unlawful

  Unfiltered & Unknown

  Unfiltered & Unsaved

  Unfiltered & Unhinged

  Unfiltered & Undone

  Unfiltered & Unraveled (coming May 15th!)

  Visit us at our website here or sign up for the Unfiltered newsletter here.

  —◊—

  For my friends, who made writing this book so much fun

  -Danni

  —◊—

  From the back cover of Unfiltered & Unraveled:

  After a night-shift shooting of a drug dealer in The Coffee Cave, twelve strangers each walk out with more than $100,000 in dirty money, a pact never to meet again, and the chance to start over…

  As usual, Violet Laswell's lifelong friend, Allie, had gotten her into a mess. It started out with Allie following tradition by getting Violet drunk for her twenty-first birthday… and ended with illegally disposing of a dead body and racking up her very first DWI.

  Violet’s first unwitting walk on the wild side lands her in court, and – at her parents’ insistence – rehab. She has thirty days to resolve her non-existent issues with alcohol or she’ll be pruned from the family tree. Ever-helpful, Allie researches the very best and most expensive recovery center in the state, New Beginnings, where twelve-step meetings are mixed with spa treatments and equine therapy.

  But Violet's refusal to lie about past step one, admitting that she’s an alcoholic, labels her a “problem case” among the staff, particularly recovery counselor Cameron Wentworth. Violet is a puzzle to Cameron--someone who truly doesn’t have a substance abuse problem, stuck in rehab. He’s perversely drawn to her snarky irreverence for the work he's so passionate about. And Cameron’s grumpy professor persona makes crawling into his lap and asking for “tutoring” seem like a perfectly reasonable option to Violet. But, even though Violet is technically assigned to another therapist, relationships between all staff and patients are strictly forbidden.

  Can Violet face her actual addiction – chronic people-pleasing? Can her friendship with Allie ever be repaired? Or does Violet simply need the kind of deep therapy Cameron and his all-too inviting lap seem quite happy to provide?

  Chapter 1

  First there was sex, and then came death…

  As I sat in the passenger seat of my so-called best friend’s car, glowering up at the gate of New Beginnings, I realized that my real problems had nothing to do with illegally disposing of a dead body or accepting a share of stolen drug money. My real problems were my so-called best friend and my parents’ ability to quietly arrange ambush interventions.

  ‡

  “What the hell do you mean I need rehab?” I exclaimed, turning on Allie. “You started drinking when we were fifteen. Hell, you mixed peppermint schnapps with your post-prom milkshake at the Freez-E Shack.”

  “Violet, this meeting isn’t about me,” Allie said, her blue eyes all wide and guileless. “Your parents asked me to come.”

  I groaned. Of course they did. Somehow, my parents had managed to gather assorted family and friends in our living room, all ready to pounce on me the second I got home from sentencing for my first-ever drunk driving charge, and get them to read me letters about how my “shameful crime” had affected them. My aunts couldn’t trust me to babysit. My parents couldn’t trust me with their car to run errands for my grandparents. They couldn’t depend on me to work at the family funeral home anymore because everybody would know their office girl was a criminal. And no one wanted to trust their financial information and funeral plans to a criminal.

  That last gem came from my parents, who stood on the opposite side of the circle, grim expressions firmly in place. My father’s tense posture was a far cry from the usual comforting persona he wore like a carnival mask while working with grieving families. He was, however, dressed in his crisp blue Tuesday suit, because he had standards to maintain, after all. “Violet, you will accept our terms. You will complete a thirty-day program in this rehab facility or you will no longer be considered a member of this family.”

  “What?” I cried.

  “Whoa.” Allie backed out of the trust circle. Once again, she had failed to predict exactly how bad a situation could get, and how quickly.

  “I can’t believe you would even use that as a threat, Dad!” I glanced around the circle to the aunts, uncles, cousins and friends who suddenly didn’t want to make eye contact with me. Cowards.

  “You’ve given us no choice, Violet!” he hissed. “You have humiliated us. You will seek help for your problems, or you will find a new place to live within thirty days. You will find a way to pay rent, board, insurance, and all of your expenses. And you’ll have to find some other way to fund tuition for your senior year. We will disown you. You’ll be on your own, permanently and completely. It will be as if you were never born into this family.”

  I stared up at him, my mouth hanging open in shock. Not because he’d made the threat, sadly, but because he emphasized the financial parts of his “sentence” over them pretending that I was never born. I couldn’t believe he thought pulling money out from under me was a bigger threat than kicking me out of the family. Money, I had. Granted, it was ill-gotten drug money I’d stolen from a dealer’s corpse. But it would secure my own apartment, my expenses and tuition if necessary.

  Still, it would be cold comfort if my mom and dad never spoke to me again. They weren’t the cuddliest parents ever, but they were all I had.

  “Don’t you think that’s a little unreasonable considering it was my first offense?”

  “I think you should be grateful that the judge only suspended your license and didn’t send you to jail,” my father snapped.

  “Dad, it was just one mistake,” I said. “I’ve never been in trouble before. Not once. And I haven’t had a drink since the arrest.”

  “One mistake that could have had serious consequences,” my mother noted, in a tone just as cold as my dad’s. “We want to know that you understand the danger you put yourself in.”

  “And this is not just ‘one mistake,’” Dad added. “We may not have caught you before, but we know that this is part of a pattern concerning alcohol, a pattern that we will not tolerate.”

  “Trust me, Mom, I understand the serious consequences that some choices can have,” I said, giving Allie a pointed look. She was blissfully unaware, talking to one of my cousins about this awesome pearly purple nail polish she’d just found. As usual. “Can’t I just go to AA meetings or outpatient therapy or something?”

  “No,” Dad said sternly. “We won’t negotiate with you. It’s the in-patient program or nothing. Don’t disappoint us, Violet.”

&nb
sp; “I can’t believe you’re doing this.” At this point, I dropped into a nearby chair, completely dumbfounded.

  Allie knelt in front of me and patted my hand. I knew I couldn’t have an issue with will power, because I resisted the urge to smack her. “I know I was a bad influence on you when we were younger, but I’ve changed now, Violet, and I want to help you change, too,” Allie intoned solemnly. “I did a lot of research on rehabs for your parents and I think I found a really nice one. They’ve approved. They even helped me fill out the admission paperwork. You can leave right now to start your thirty days. Won’t you please accept this offer of help?”

  I groaned, tilting my head back to stare at the ceiling, and then thinking better of it when my equilibrium shifted dramatically. “I hate you so much right now.”

  ‡

  On the drive to Tucson, I ignored Allie like it was my job. I crossed my arms over my chest and stared pointedly out the window, so I was able to appreciate the fine Arizona landscape - cactus, cactus, sand and dirt, more cactus. I caught a glimpse of a girl in the mirror, a girl with dark circles under tired brown eyes, dry, chewed-over lips and windblown curly blond hair. I slid on my sunglasses and looked away from that pale, exhausted shadow of Violet past.

  I couldn’t believe that my parents had packed my rehab to-go bag and handed me off to Allie – the same girl they used to call an “anchor friend” who dragged me down into her problems. It was like my parents considered me Allie’s problem now that their daughter wasn’t the picture-perfect, reliable girl that smiled beatifically from their mantle-piece photo display. One night was all it took.

  “Come on, Violet. It’s not going to be that bad.”

  “It’s thirty days, Allie. On top of having a suspended license until I complete a state mandated ‘alcohol education program’ for a drinking problem that I don’t have. You have screwed me. As usual.”

  “It wasn’t my idea to send you to rehab. It was your parents’ idea. You’re lucky I found this place. Your mom and dad were about to send you to some mountain camp in Tennessee with outdoor showers and six hours of Bible study every day. Bible study, Violet. Bible study.”

  “I wouldn’t have even been there the night of the arrest if it wasn’t for you, Allie. If you’d just kept your word and stayed sober. If you hadn’t been so drunk, we would have been safe at home instead of the coffee shop. I wouldn’t have had to drive and I wouldn’t have been arrested for DUI after dropping you off while driving home from illegally disposing of a body.”

  “I was there too,” Allie said a quiet, pious tone of voice that made me want to punch her. “You act like I wasn’t affected by what happened.”

  “You don’t have the nightmares that I do,” I shot back. “You walked out of the room when we shoved that body into the crematory. You weren’t even in the car when I got pulled over. And what you were there for, you only half-remember because you were drunk off your ass. As usual.”

  “I remember everything from that night!” Allie insisted as we pulled past an elaborate stone and wrought iron gate labeled NEW BEGINNINGS RECOVERY CENTER. The house building rose from the horizon; wide, low-slung and built in the hacienda style, all slate and faux adobe and subtly Spanish metal accents with a wide rounded and capped turret that took up most of the front side. A dozen smaller, round huts trailed behind the main building, like a crop of squatty toadstools against the desert backdrop. It looked like any number of buildings from the “new wave” of post-millennial construction in Arizona, but somehow, knowing that I might not be allowed to leave it for the foreseeable future, made it seem ominous as all hell.

  Allie pulled her car to a stop right in front of the sweeping, curved staircase.

  “See? This place is great!” she chirped, opening her door and sliding out into the sizzling June heat. She rounded the car and when I didn’t move to follow, she knocked on the window. In her crazy candy pink shorts, she looked like a confection on the verge of melting. “Please get out of the car, Vi. In three minutes, I’ll be nothing but a puddle of sweat on the sidewalk.”

  “This is your fault,” I rolled down the passenger window and snapped. “You should be checking in here, not me. You’re the drunk, and we both know it.”

  “I heard you the first four thousand times, and I’m still very, very sorry. But your parents are the ones who put you here. I just drove because… Because I still have my license.”

  “You did not just…” My mouth fell open in disbelief. She had actually gone there. She was talking about my “legal consequences” like she had absolutely nothing to do with them. Some petty part of my brain started to suspect that Allie might be enjoying her position as the “non-screw-up friend.”

  I shook my head and asked quietly, “What color were the dead guy’s shoes?”

  “What?”

  My voice shook and I forced my brain not to spiral back to the night everything fell apart. “What color were his shoes? You remember everything from that night, right? So you remember his blood spreading all over the coffee shop tile like an oil slick. You remember watching those black snakeskin boots through the crematory window as they melted and burned. You remember checking the crematory tray for chunks of the body that might not have been incinerated. You remember all of that, right?”

  Allie blinked at me. “Um…” She closed her eyes. “I remember holding your hair back. And two people were kissing on the floor. A redhead and a guy in a leather jacket. I remember my shoes, because they were really your shoes, and I remember coffee beans crunching beneath them. You almost fell, but I can’t remember whether that was because of the beans or the blood. But I’m sure the dead guy was wearing brown hiking boots.”

  “You almost fell, but I caught you. And they were black snakeskin boots,” I shot back. “The girl on the floor had blond dreads, and the guy she was kissing wore a suit jacket, not a leather jacket. But honestly, I’m surprised you remember being there at all, considering how drunk you were. Well, I fucking do remember it. I remember all of it, because it’s seared into my brain. I have nightmares about it almost every night. I have anxiety attacks every time I walk into my own family’s business. I will carry that around with me for the rest of my life. And it’s your fault. As usual.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m a total bitch,” Allie admitted flippantly, hauling my giant floral print suitcase from the trunk with a grunt. “And you’re saying ‘fuck’ a lot more lately, by the way. But the truth is that you aren’t here because you drank, or because I drank. You’re here because you drove, and I know you had a really good reason, even if the specifics are a little hazy….”

  “A little hazy?” I leaned out of the window, hissing as I burned the crap out of my arm on the metal casing.

  Allie slammed the trunk and I could hear her struggling to pull my enormous suitcase out of the trunk. Under normal circumstances, I would jump out of the car to help her. But getting out of the car meant admitting that I was stuck here at New Beginnings. And I just wasn’t ready to admit that any of this was real yet.

  I didn’t have a problem with rehab as a concept. In fact, I admired people who could surrender their whole lives temporarily in order to get treatment for their substance issues. But I wasn’t one of those people, and I deeply resented my expected surrender.

  “We’re not talking about my problems right now. The fact is that regardless of how and why it happened, you got caught drinking and driving.” She lifted the enormous bag and penguin-walked to the front of the car. “But I’m on your side here, Vi. I will gladly haul this bag of boulders back into the trunk and drive you wherever you want to go. You don’t have to stay here. The court said ‘therapy.’ Your parents are the ones who decided on in-patient rehab, but they’re not the boss of you anymore. You’re twenty-one years old. You have the money. You can walk away any time you want.”

  “I can’t just… Ahhhgh!” I bit off a growl of frustration and leaned out of the window, careful this time not to burn myself. “They’re
my family, Allie. You may not care about yours, but I care about mine, and I care what they think of me. If I don’t stay, I won’t have anyone to go home to. I won’t have anybody to… I won’t have anybody. “

  “You’ll have me.”

  I squinted into the sun shining behind Allie’s head, giving her dark hair a strange, burnished halo. I’d gone too far, bringing her family into this, and I was instantly sorry for it. But I was just too damn mad to back-peddle now. “That’s not enough for me. This isn’t enough for me anymore, Allie. I can’t spend the rest of my life cleaning up after you any more than I can spend it without my family. I have to stay.”

  Allie shrugged, though the weight of my bag made it hard for her to move her shoulders. “That’s your call. Honestly, it could be a lot worse, Vi.”

  “Don’t … How can you even…?” I finally got out of the car and slammed the door behind me. I turned to yell, “This could not possibly be worse.”

  I marched toward the over-sized redwood doors, letting Allie deal with the car and the suitcase. She needed to learn to handle this stuff without me.

  “Don’t worry!” she called after me, clip-clopping against the slate driveway in her wedge sandals. “I got the bag!”

  I swear it was all I could do not to flip her the finger as I walked away.

  ‡

  It seemed wrong to be seething with rage while standing in the peaceful, luxurious lobby of New Beginnings. I was staring at the high cathedral ceilings, the expensive tooled leather furniture, the enormous stone fireplace flanked by a flat panel TV. Small distressed redwood desks marked, “Intake,” lined the back of the room.

  Employees in royal blue polo shirts manned the desks and the registration table. It seemed odd that I couldn’t see any “guests” in the lobby, but I could only guess that the patients weren’t allowed this close to an exit. They were probably locked in the back, strapped into chairs, being forced to admit they had a problem through some messed up Clockwork Orange brainwashing tactics.