Step 9

**Sensitive content warning for blood, death, and substance abuse**

Step 9: Make direct amends with the people you’ve harmed. Unless attempting to make amends would hurt them or someone else - The 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous

Smack, the letter plopped onto the floor from the letterbox and interrupted his nightly meditation. David, looking puzzled by who would be outside at this hour, rose from his seat. He pulled back the window curtain to see his desolate street sopping in the rain. The letter mushed in his hands. He gently unsealed the envelope and the ink cried down the page to read “I know what you did”. His face went white. Who could possibly have known? He was on a back country road two hours away when it happened. No cameras, no witnesses, let alone anyone in this neighborhood.

David opened his door and ran into the street. He looked left and then was stunned by the noise of his front door slamming shut. He rushed back to the door. David frantically jingled and then heaved on the handle, but it was locked from the inside. His breath became shallow and sharp. The hair on the back of his neck stood straight up in the cold as he felt someone was watching him. His eyes darted to the upstairs window where he saw the curtain abruptly pull closed.

“Who’s there!?”

David ran to his back shed and pulled out a baseball bat; he was getting whoever was in his house. He tried to open the backdoor, but it was also locked. He took the end of the bat and smashed the door window, then he reached into the lock, slicing his arm in the process. Blood slid down his forearm and onto the bat as he stood in the doorway faced with the shadow of a person in his kitchen. David held the bat up and flicked on the light, no one. He heard footsteps on the stairs and promptly followed, slamming on every stair so whoever it was knew he was coming for them. He jumped around the corner into his bedroom and swung at the shadow in front of him.

CRASH. Pieces of his now broken mirror lay scattered across the floor where in the shards he was able to catch movement behind him. David spun around and cracked the intruder in the head. He then held up the bat to their chest and pushed them to the floor. They writhed underneath him pushing both arms against the bat and started choking. He shoved the bat up and under their chin and locked his gaze on, what had once been lifeless, dark eyes to realize the intruder was her. David jumped to his feet dropping the bat. How was this possible? He hit her with his car five months ago.

She had no pulse.

***

Driving drunk wasn’t unusual for David because David was always drunk. It started with three days of binging and sleeping after his break up and it led him to be a person who cracked open a nip in the car from time to time. So he didn’t think anything of driving back home after his cousin’s farmhouse wedding. He didn’t even want to go in the first place, considering his ex, Amy, was the maid of honor. It had been two years since they called off the wedding after she cheated on him with her boss, but two years felt too soon. So he spent the night near the bar and offered to drink with anyone who came up to him. Then the bar cleared for a slow dance and he saw Amy, dancing with her boss. Amy looked at her boss the way she looked at him when David asked her to marry him. That’s when he decided to leave. He stumbled out the front doorsteps, scuffing his shoes, and muttered obscenities to the night sky as if someone was going to answer him back.

The winding back country roads churned his stomach and his eyes grew heavy. The scenery around him started to blur into his dreams. Just at the moment his eyelids shut, his foot grew heavy on the acceleration and BOOM! His head snapped backwards as he felt something big roll over the vehicle. The cracks in the windshield created a spiderweb of blood blurring his vision as he stopped the car. David rolled out and saw a figure laying in the road illuminated by his hazards.

“Is that a deer?” He thought.

He creeped closer to get a better look and when he realized it was a woman he vomited on his suit. David dropped onto the dirt road, rocks pressing into the soft parts of his knees. He shakily pushed her blood-soaked hair away from her neck and checked her pulse, nothing.

“Fuck,” he cried staring at the crimson halo forming around her head.

David grabbed both of her arms and dragged her into the brush, leaving one of her sneakers behind in the process. He got into his car and vowed never to speak of it again. The next day, he drove himself to an AA meeting.

***

“David,” she wheezed. “Why did you leave me?”

“I-I,” David stepped backwards until his back was against the wall.

David looked to the ceiling searching for that God he was supposed to give himself over to in Step 3. She crawled forward and grasped him in a white knuckled grip, “Tell me.” Her fingernails burned into his ankle. She slunk up to meet his gaze, her breath hot on his face. Her lips parted and David shut his eyes tight. Sweat was cascading down his forehead, and he opened his eyes to the sound of a smack.

David was back downstairs in his chair and not even the lull of his meditation music could stop his trembling. His fingers clenched so tightly they stretched the fabric of the armrest.

Everything was exactly the way it was before. Just as he stopped hearing his pulse in his ears he realized someone pushed a wet letter through the letterbox.