They were a jagged puzzle of people who had nothing in common except a shared basement. In "Process Group," they stripped away the armor. Leo talked about the night he’d crashed his sister's car—not the metal and glass, but the look on her face when she realized he was alive, and her immediate, crushing disappointment that he was high.

He cried for the first time in years. It wasn't a cinematic sob; it was a messy, snot-nosed release of a pressure valve that had been stuck shut.

Leo sat on a vinyl chair, his heels drumming a frantic rhythm against the floor. In his pocket, his fingers traced the jagged edge of a house key he wasn't allowed to use anymore. He’d spent a decade blurring the world until it was a smudge of neon and regret, and now, at thirty-two, the silence of the woods surrounding the center was terrifying. "The first three days are the longest," a voice said.

"They do," she said, finally looking at him. Her eyes weren't pitying; they were level, like a horizon. "But then the feelings start. That’s the part they don't put on the brochures. You’re going to remember every birthday you missed and every person you let down. This place isn't just about stopping the chemical; it’s about learning to sit in the room with yourself without wanting to jump out the window."

On his last day, Leo stood at the same vinyl chair where he’d started. The shakes were gone. His hands were steady enough to hold a pen, which he used to write his number on a slip of paper for a newcomer who had just walked in looking like a ghost.