Chapter 118 When Good Feels Like Good
Crew's POV,
The meeting was at seven AM in a church basement in Kitsilano.
Same burnt coffee smell as every NA meeting I'd ever been to. Same fluorescent lights that made everyone look slightly worse than they actually were. Same collection of plastic chairs arranged in a circle, half of them already occupied when David and I walked in.
I'd been coming to this particular meeting for over a year. I knew most of the faces. The retired teacher in the back corner who always brought his own mug. The young woman with the sleeve tattoos who cried every time she shared and then laughed at herself for crying. The older man who'd been sober longer than I'd been alive and had a way of saying exactly the right thing with exactly the right number of words.
David found us two chairs near the middle.
"How are you feeling?" he asked quietly.
"Honestly?" I looked around the room. "Good. Which still feels strange to say out loud."
"It gets less strange." He handed me a coffee cup from the folding table near the door. "Eventually good just feels like good."
"When does that happen?"
"Different for everyone." He sat down. "For me it was somewhere around year three. Woke up one morning and realized I wasn't waiting for the other shoe to drop anymore. Just living."
I thought about that.
……
The meeting started. James — who'd been leading this particular group since before I arrived — opened the way he always did. Simple. No performance. Just a man who'd been through it telling the truth about what that meant.
People shared. The teacher. The woman with the tattoos. A man I didn't recognize who was new, shaky, clearly in the early weeks where everything feels like standing on a floor that might give way. I remembered that feeling. The way the world had this constant low hum of wrongness when you first got clean. The way your own body felt like a stranger's.
When it came around to me I didn't plan what I was going to say.
I rarely did anymore.
"My name is Crew and I'm an addict," I said. "Today I'm celebrating eighteen months– "
I stopped.
Looked up.
Corrected myself.
"Sorry. Today marks something significant for me. I had to stop and think about the number because I don't actually track it the way I used to." I paused. "That felt important to say."
A few nods around the circle.
"When I first got out of treatment I was obsessed with counting. Days, weeks, months. Like the number itself was proof that I was doing it right. Like if I could just get to some specific milestone everything would finally feel safe." I turned the coffee cup in my hands. "It doesn't work like that. Most of you know that better than I do."
The older man in the corner — Henry — was watching me with that quiet attention he had.
"What I know today that I didn't know when I started is that sobriety isn't a destination. It's not a number you hit and then relax. It's just… choices. Every day, the same choice. And some days the choice is easy and some days it's the hardest thing I do and the difference between those days has almost nothing to do with how long I've been clean."
I thought about Tyler in the weight room. About Rose saying dada in the hallway. About Harper in the VGH parking lot telling me her data was working.
"What keeps me making the right choice isn't willpower," I said. "I used to think it was. I used to think I just needed to want it badly enough and that would be enough. But willpower runs out. What actually keeps me choosing right is…. I have something worth choosing for. Every single day I have a reason to stay. And when the hard days come, I just have to remember what I'm protecting."
I stopped there.
Didn't bother about adding anything that would make it sound more resolved than it was.
James nodded. The circle moved on.
Afterward, outside on the steps while the November air came off the water sharp and clean, David stood next to me with his hands in his coat pockets.
"That was good," he said.
"I meant it."
"I know. That's why it was good." He looked out at the street. A cyclist went past. A woman walking a dog. The ordinary morning of a city that didn't know or care what had just happened in that basement. "How's Harper?"
"Good. Really good. She's building something at the hospital that I think is going to be significant. You can see it happening; she's got this look she gets when something's working." I smiled thinking about it. "Like she's trying not to get too excited in case it falls apart but she can't quite hide it."
"And Rose?"
"Rose is–" I stopped because there wasn't a quick answer for Rose. "Rose is the best thing I've ever seen. She said a new word yesterday that she definitely learned from Harper and has been saying it constantly ever since."
David laughed. "What word?"
"Menace."
He laughed harder. "Perfect."
We stood there for another minute, not needing to fill the silence. That was one of the things I'd come to value most about David — the absence of pressure in his company. He didn't need me to perform wellness or gratitude or progress. He'd seen enough of the real version to know the difference.
"I want to ask you something," I said.
"Sure, ask."
"When you coach your kids–" David had three, all teenagers now, all apparently deeply unimpressed by their father's minor league hockey history — "...do you ever worry that you're doing it wrong? Like fundamentally, structurally doing it wrong and you won't know until it's too late?"
David was quiet for a moment. "Every day."
"That's not reassuring."
"It's not meant to be reassuring. It's meant to be honest." He turned to look at me. "The worry doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. The worry means you care enough to question yourself. The parents who aren't worried are the ones I'd be concerned about."
I thought about the team. About Tyler, about the younger players who were starting to come to me with real questions. About the way coaching felt different than I'd expected — less about hockey and more about the specific complicated work of helping people become who they were trying to be.
"I think I'm actually good at this," I said. Like I was admitting something slightly embarrassing.
"Coaching?"
"Yeah."
"Of course you are." David said it like it was obvious. "You spent your entire career being coached badly and coaching yourself to compensate. You know exactly what works and what doesn't because you lived both sides of it."
I hadn't thought about it that way.
"Also," he added, "...you give a shit. Which is rarer than it should be."
We walked back toward the parking lot. The morning had fully arrived now, grey and cool and typically Vancouver. I had film review in two hours. Harper had back to back patient sessions. Rose was at daycare discovering new words to weaponize.
At my truck I stopped and looked at David.
"Thank you," I said. "For everything. Since the beginning."
He knew what I meant. Not just this morning. All of it; the parking lot conversations, the late night calls, the meetings, the years of showing up.
He shook his head. "You did the work."
"You showed up while I was doing it."
"That's what sponsors are for." He opened his car door. "Now go coach your team. And tell Harper I said her data better be good enough to change that hospital's mind."
"How do you know about her data?"
"You talk about it every week." He got in his car. "Every. Week."
He drove away.
I sat in my truck for a moment before starting the engine. The street was fully alive now. The city doing what cities do; moving, grinding, building, breaking, putting itself back together one ordinary morning at a time.
I pulled out my phone and opened my texts.
Crew: Hey.
Harper responded in under a minute, which meant she was between patients.
Harper: How was the meeting?
Crew: It went well.
Harper: Sure?
Crew: Yeah. David says to tell you your data better be good enough to change the hospital's mind.
Harper: You've been talking to David about my data??
Crew: Apparently I talk about you constantly. Shocking information.
She paused for a while. Then:
Harper: (sent an emotional looking emoji)
Crew: Don't get emotional you have patients.
Harper: Too late. Go coach your team.
Crew: Already on my way.
I started the engine and pulled out into the Vancouver morning, t
he city grey and familiar around me, the heater running, the radio low.
Choices, I thought.
Every day, the same choice.
And every day; easier than the last.