There comes a time when offering your life for your child’s doesn’t work, when you realize that it’ll never be enough. 

The cold needle in his warm vein was a welcome comfort to my son at first. But then it became the monster that kept us apart. 

Heroin lied, and my son believed. It took him to a world where the last year didn’t happen, to a place where his father was still alive. What Beck didn’t understand was that it couldn’t bring his father back from the dead. It couldn’t take away his pain, not permanently. 

You think it can’t happen to you, that your kids, your family, will never be in this situation. 
I thought that too. But you’re wrong. 

Step into our world, and see for yourself. 
Watch my golden boy become a slave to this raging epidemic. Watch me try and save him. 

Drug addiction comes with a price. 
Trust me, you’re not equipped to pay it. 

Don’t miss this heartwrenching, evocative, yet hopeful novel—it will leave you forever changed.

Book Type:

Women's Fiction

Excerpt: Saving Beck

I was driving.

The heroin pumped pumped pumped through my blood now and it tamed the wild fury that boiled just beneath the surface. A minute ago my heart felt like a bird flapping its wings against my ribs, trying to get out.

But now my heart had slowed.

The heroin lulled me into a warm place, a safe place, and I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t because I was driving.

I liked this feeling.

For the first time in a year, it felt like everything might be okay.

How have I lived for the past year without this?

This is for me.

After I’d woven in and out of traffic and driven across town, I pulled over onto a dark side road and just sat, sprawled in my seat, and stared at the clouds and skyscrapers.

The clouds moved in artistic ways, in ways man never could. They bent and melded and morphed, and I wished I was among them. I’d float away and never come back.

That’s the dream.

Does everyone have it?

I didn’t know how long I sat pondering that.

I only knew that I’d drifted off, in and out of a warm haze. My fingers were relaxed, my legs were liquid, and my lungs filled with soft air. It came and went in velvet breaths, puffing from a dragon’s nose, and I’d never felt so fucking good.

I lifted my hand and stared at it, because it felt so weightless. I needed to make sure it still existed, that I was still here.

I was.

I traced the outline of my fingers and they were there and I was real.

I rested my hands on my legs, and the feel of the denim beneath my skin felt like heaven, so textured, so striated, so perfect. I stroked at it, and it was soothing.

At some point, though, my phone buzzed on the seat next to me, disrupting my serenity. I scowled at it, at that vestige of reality, but it persisted, buzzing again and again.

It used to be that when it called, I answered. I was glued to it, a prisoner. It was my master, and I was its slave. But now… now… things were going to be different.

By ignoring it, I felt like I was snipping a leash that used to keep me tied to the earth, tied to pain. It was an iron chain, and it was attached to an anchor and the anchor was me. But the thing about being an anchor, the thing that people forget,  is that if you’re an anchor, you drown.

I was not going to drown.

I was not an anchor anymore.

Fuck anyone who thought otherwise.

I drifted away, and imagined that I was on a raft in a dark, dark sea. I shoved away from shore, and I was floating and then gone, lost in the middle of the calm, my fingers dangling in the water.

I didn’t know how long I floated.

When I finally decided to sit up, it was dark.

I’d been there a while.

A long while. I’d been parked in the same place for too long, because there was a two-hour parking sign right in front of me, glinting in the dim streetlight. I had to move, even though rules felt so far away, distant things that applied to other people but not to me.