And so it was that, four years after I had first run away from home, I found myself with my family again. My father and grandmother nursed me back to health not with pills or herbs or chicken soup, but with butter. Butter-soaked focaccia bread was their palliative of choice. They stuffed my face with pure fat trying to get my weight back to normal.

The sum total of my gratitude was zero. My heart was still lying on the floor of the apartment Jack and I shared, where four days before I had been hours away from failing the game of life. All I did was vomit and cry myself to sleep over Jack. It was impossible to separate where the depression from meth withdrawal ended and the depression from Jack withdrawal began. My entire adult life, up until this moment, had revolved around him. I was down to seventy-five pounds, and for every two bites of soggy focaccia I digested, I spit one back up. I was so weak that my grandmother had to walk me to the bathroom whenever I went.

When my senses began to return, I told my dad what had happened. Everything. His eyes were wet when I finished. Being on the run had given him time to think about the things he regretted. And one of those regrets, he said, was not being a good enough dad. When my mother had died, he had no idea what to do with the two kids who were suddenly his sole responsibility, so he let us run wild while he busied himself with his vigilantism.

“I tried my best,” he said. “But the best I could do was not very good.”

Now, seventeen years later, I had given him the chance again.

I lay in bed for two more weeks. Slowly, my hair became less brittle and the color returned to my skin. I eventually regained enough strength to get up and walk to the kitchen by myself. My grandmother, who had loaned me her bed while she slept on the sofa, would feed me chicken fingers while my dad sat in the corner of the room in silence. I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t keep the food down.

Tony and Selena were also living at the house. As the depression began to lift, it dawned on me: he was no longer a frigging monster. He was clean. My brother was back again. Leaving Las Vegas was the best thing that had ever happened to him, because he knew no one in Reading to buy drugs from. Soon, he started coming into my room and we’d play cards and laugh about how fucked up we’d each gotten. It was as if no time had passed since the days when we were so close.

More than anything, I wanted to know what had happened to Tony and Dad, and why they had left home and run around the country like a couple of fugitives. But I didn’t ask. I had enough problems of my own at the moment and didn’t want to burden myself with theirs. I knew that my brother and father had been in league in something bad, but I also knew they wouldn’t be comfortable talking about it.

Six weeks into my recovery, the phone rang. No one was home, so I answered it.

“Hi, Jenna.”

It was Jack. “What do you want?” I asked.

“I’m back in the apartment, baby,” he said. “It doesn’t feel right without you here. When are you coming back?”

“I’m not, Jack,” I said. “I just can’t.”

“What are you talking about? Listen. Everything is going great. I’m making a lot of money at the tattoo shop, I’m going to get cleaned up, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’d really like to try this again.”

“Listen, I’m a different person now. I can’t go back there. That’s not me anymore.”

I really meant it. Going back to Jack would be like returning to the Crazy Horse: I couldn’t go backward. I had let myself become out of control and weak with him. I never wanted to be that person again.

Jack begged, pleaded, and yelled. It felt good to know that not only was my physical strength returning, but so was my emotional strength, which I had lived without for so long.

My father and grandmother would have been glad to nurse me forever. They were happy to have something to do. But I couldn’t sponge off them forever. I needed to kickstart my life. And there was another person who had offered to help me when I was down. It seemed like so long ago since I had last seen her: Nikki Tyler.

The next day, my dad drove me to the airport. I had cried when I first saw him at the gate nearly two months ago, but this time I cried a very different type of tear. “Jenna,” he said as we hugged good-bye, “just don’t fall. Don’t fall.”

As I sat in the window seat watching Reading recede to a crisscross of streets and shrubbery, I thought, “I’m never going to let that happen to me again.”

L.A. beckoned.

“Oh my God, baby girl! What happened?”

Those were the first words out of Nikki’s mouth. I had gained fifteen pounds but, evidently, I still looked like a corpse. Dark sunken circles sagged around my eyes, and my pelvis jutted out of my sweatpants like the handles of a baby stroller.

“We are going to get you back on track,” she said as we walked into her apartment. “You’ll be fine.”

She showed me to my bedroom: the couch in the living room where we had first fooled around. Always motherly, she helped me get my body back and my head straight. After a month of binge eating, I was ready for magazine work again. But even now, when I look back at the pictures, I’m repulsed by how skinny I was.

Whenever I changed into an outfit to go out, Nikki laughed at me. My suitcase was full of tank tops, rolled-up boxer shorts, zipper-covered jackets, spandex pants, and black Lycra dresses. I looked like a heavy-metal groupie who had been living on a tour bus for a month. It was time, Nikki said, to complete my transformation from hoochie mama to full-grown woman. She gave me magazines, took me shopping, and drove me to auditions for bathing-suit pictorials, which were hard to come by at first because I was so skinny.

But I didn’t want Nikki just to be my mother. I wanted her to be my girlfriend. After Jack, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to open up to a man again and allow myself to be that vulnerable. After working at the Crazy Horse for so long, every man in my mind was a cheater, a liar, and a shitty human being. I was angry, and more than ready to become the heartbreaker tattooed on my ass. Add to this my experiences with Jennifer and Nikki, and I was pretty sure I was gay.

The slight hitch in my plan was that Nikki had married Buddy. And, though we continued to fool around, my efforts to separate her from Buddy were useless. She insisted that she wasn’t gay. I insisted that she was in denial.

I was broke, so Nikki put me in touch with a manager at the Riviera Hotel, who flew me into Vegas for a week and booked me in the spotlight revue of their Crazy Girls show. Suddenly, I found myself in Sin City again —the hellhole I thought I’d escaped. But even though I was there physically, my mentality was different. My body was clean, my head was clear, and I was independent. When I caught a whiff of meth in the dressing room one night, it served only to remind me of the sadness that had been my life just a few months before.

On the last night of the show, Jack showed up unannounced. He looked terrible: his beautiful chestnut hair was completely shaven and he was so emaciated that his bones were practically ripping through his flesh.

After the performance, he asked me out to lunch and I accepted. I knew that I was over him like a butterfly is over a cocoon. He said everything he could to win me back. But when I looked into his eyes, I didn’t feel a thing.

When I left him that afternoon, it was a turning point in my life: the insecure sixteen-year-old tagalong who first had a crush on him was dead. And he had killed her. I now had the confidence to rebuild my life by myself.