I thought about Jeanine Waites a lot in Chicago, the words she'd said to me at Earl's funeral.

"I did love him, you know, with all my heart. But there's a difference between giving up and knowing when you've had enough."

Jake never did call her.

I thought about a lot of things, laying on that mattress on the floor in that crappy little sublet reeking of mildew and cats.

Brandy, Buck, Earl. They'd all walked this path before, they'd all gotten stuck.

Jeanine and daddy, the ones who got away.

All the things I'd done these past months, the things Jake was still doing.

A month into our stay in Chicago, Corrine Willows died. She jumped off the roof of a parking garage near the Willis Tower on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.

We knew her from the club, a girl from Elkhorn, Nebraska who'd run from an abusive stepfather. Sweet and funny, she had a gimp second toe that had no feeling left in it following a childhood accident involving a corn seeder.

"C'mon Layla, put some muscle into it! Like really stab at it with that pen, I swear, I can't feel anything. Huh? Huh? Pretty cool, isn't it? It's my secret weapon for the Zombie Apocalypse."

Three years on her own, Corrine stripped, and when she needed to, slept with men for money. She was nineteen.

It broke me, showed me what we'd become, throwaway people with throwaway lives.

It takes a toll on you, not seeing the light of day for weeks on end, drinking too much, running on fumes. The emotional exhaustion of being surrounded by people who only wanted to use you, and letting them do it anyway. The bloodlust, the brutality of fight rings. Men.

I'd changed so much that I hardly recognized myself. Day by day, it grew increasingly difficult to look at myself in the mirror. So I got into the habit of keeping the lights off in the bathroom, and using the little mirror in my compact instead. Fragmented pieces of me was all I could stomach.

Oh, and Heaven. I hoped Heaven was a lie, that death was the end of it all, that daddy hadn't watched me turn into whatever it was that I'd become.

How quickly I'd fallen apart, how far I'd let things go.

He would've been so heartbroken.

I slept for three days straight following Corrine's death. When I finally opened my eyes, it was to a weak beam of yellow sunlight rippling through the smog stained windows of our bedroom. I'd turned to Jake and said "no more".

He'd said okay, don't worry, I can keep us going. I'd said, no, no, and begged him to quit too, for us to bury the monsters of the last six months and leave this place, find a home like we'd originally planned.

But with Jake, it was always one more fight, just one more fight.

He didn't drink often, but once, he did. And it had loosened his tongue. Drunk off his ass, he'd told me that he saw his father's face in his opponents when he was in the ring.

Towering over him, beating him bloody, beating his mother bloody, back when he was young and defenseless. He said it spiraled him into a rage that paralyzed his lungs, that he couldn't breathe until the other guy was down. And even then, it wasn't enough, Earl's voice kept taunting him back into the ring again, and again.

"Get up off that floor, boy. Try and stop me again."

I didn't know how to help him. The demons that drove him were too big, too many, too much. Violence was addicting too, worse than any drug.

Jake was on his knees and I ached for him, for the boy that he used to be, for the man I knew he could become. And I loved them both.

So I waited. Maybe I couldn't be the one to pull him out if his hell, but I would hold the faith. He would pull himself out of it, I knew he could, and I'd be here waiting for him when he did. We'd gotten in this mess together and we'd get out of it together.

I waited all of September and half of October.

During that time, I wandered. Rejoining the land of the living was terrifying- the kind of life we'd been living changed a person. It left you paranoid, colored the way you saw the world.

Everything seemed different at daylight, things as normal as breathing air that wasn't thick with the stench of tobacco and weed made me anxious, scared, the feeling of sunlight against my skin jarring.

It was so disorienting, it felt like I'd crawled out of an underground storm shelter after a hurricane only to find out that there was no storm, that everyone else's world had remained just as it always was.

Friendless and alone, I'd wandered the city, every day, a little bit longer, walking, petting dogs, making small talk with passerbys.

Then one day a man smiled at me. Just a random guy in a suit on his lunch hour, a friendly smile because our eyes had met, nothing more, nothing less.

But I'd burst into tears in the middle of the street, suddenly and completely incapacitated.

Four women rushed to my side, early twenties, urbane, sophisticated. They'd calmed me, cleaned me up, took me to a Starbucks just down the street.

Tell us what's wrong, they'd said, rubbing circles on my back, so concerned, so warm, so sympathetic. I supposed I still had some of my innocence left because I told them everything.

Oh, you should've seen the looks on their faces, how quickly their smiles had dropped, how they'd snatched their hands back as though I'd confessed to being leprous.

Just like that, I ceased to be human in their eyes, sullied, unworthy of compassion.

So I started explaining.

No, please, I'm not a bad person. I'm a good girl, really, I am.

We had no other choice, we were desperate.

You don't understand how easily it spirals out of control, how impossible it is to see outside when you're caught up in that life. The world becomes so murky, the lines so hazy, it's so easy to lose your grasp on reality.

It's like vertigo, how do you stay upright when everything around you is upside down?

It didn't matter. They'd made their excuses and left, leaving me more alone than I'd ever been in my life.

I'd rushed back to the apartment and didn't leave it for a week, wallowing in shame and sorrow.

Eventually though, life finds a way. I went back out, walked the city again. I went to Millennium Park, the Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, watched normal people doing normal things, living the life that I desperately wanted to live.

But I never talked to anybody again.

I went to the Planetarium a lot too, spent hours sitting in the theater with the stars projected across the ceiling.

And I finally got it. The stars bore witness to millenniums of humanity's sins and secrets. They'd seen it all so they could laughed it off.

Here, they said, rest a while beneath our lights, everything will be okay. They offered peace and serenity, maybe even forgiveness.

Sometimes I'd think about Peyton too, but not often.

That was a lifetime ago, and I was happy to keep him in the past, back where he belonged, up in the canyons, out by the lake. A happy memory of somebody that I used to know.

Back when Layla was good, when she was still Layla.

***

I thought everything would be okay as long as I avoided the clubs, that whole atmosphere, any situation that might set Jake off.

But when it happened, it happened just outside our apartment.

Different guy, different reason, same results.

Flashing lights, handcuffs.

Jake's eyes, staring at me from the squad car's rear window.

Jeanine Waites' voice in my head.

"I did love him, you know, with all my heart. But there's a difference between giving up and knowing when you've had enough."

I'd collapsed onto my ass, brushed the gravel off my bloodied knees and knuckles, injuries I'd sustained while trying to break up the fight.

The other guy's girl, five feet from me, doing the same.

Shit.

Anger eclipsed worry- Jake was off his probation, it'd been a fight as opposed to a beat down, and big city cops had better things to do than press charges on something like this. He'd be out in a few hours at most.

But then, they cuffed me, too.

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