A/N: Words quoted from "Foolish Games" by Jewel
Part Eighty-Two
Helen picked up the very bulky file out of her rather overcrowded desk and opened it with a feeling of weariness. The brown manila folder contained a whole sheaf of interview details, the most recent of them hers but others going backwards in time right back to the creased hand-written first pages. Jesus, this was half a life which was stolen away from this woman, step by self inflicted step from when she first dabbled in the drug scene. There was a pile of doctor's reports stretching back fifteen years or more and the usual assortment of medical records stretch going back further to an age of innocence. Unlike the prisoner's files that used to pass through her hands, there was no escape, no release, no freedom outside the prison walls. It was her interviewing the people she dealt with from day to day and writing up the reports and not the prison officers who used to work for her.
One she had conscientiously scoured through the file, it was evident that this woman had built high security fences round herself leaving no exit, all the more secure because of the woman's high intelligence. This last quality was obvious, despite the damage that years of addiction had done to her. If she was that intelligent, she ought to have had the sense not to have landed herself in her present predicament. She knew that such logic had nothing to do with life's chances of a man or woman of this type. Despite all this, she was a survivor despite the naïve vulnerable manner she used to protect herself with. There was a couple of hospital reports due to admissions for overdosing and the one attempted suicide many years back. She teetered on the edge of disaster miraculously without falling off the edge.
Her name was Alison, mother of three children. From the picture she proudly showed her, they all inherited her looks, carefully brushed hair, some air of quality about them and that same thin aquiline nose and slightly arched eyebrows. That was the mark of her hereditary that she had passed down to them along with who knows what personality traits.
She sighed to herself as the very polite, inaudible knock on the door announced her arrival, ten minutes late. "Come in, Alison," Helen's firm tones greeted her cheerily.
Instantly, she took in her physical presence, slim, five foot six with long blond hair, short black jacket and black trousers and bangles round her wrists. She was carrying her trademark very large handbag, which she knew to be stuffed with an ill-assorted jumble of personal belongings. Her makeup was almost over elaborate to present the appearance she wanted to make on the world and to conceal the many lines on her face. At her age of late thirties, you didn't get that many lines so early in life.
"I'm ever so sorry I'm late, Miss Wade," she started talking in her fairly well educated accent, "I was poorly this morning, you know how I can be some times, and I had a row with my boyfriend and I didn't notice the time till late. I got a lift from a friend of ours………." Helen listened politely as this woman rattled away. Things had happened to her that diverted her away from what she protested many times over from what she really wanted to do. She had a real problem of looking her in the eye, which was a quirk of hers.
"We were talking last week about the choices that all of us make in our lives. I know that you say that you still find periods when you can't get out of bed in the mornings, as your methadone prescription is set too low." "……Oh yes, if it isn't too much trouble. I'm really struggling on the amount of medicine that I'm on," Began Alison in a very hesitant fashion, daring Helen to be brutal with her in denying her request. Helen picked up on the choice of word to describe the drug that Alison was dependent on but did not let herself be gently drawn into the obvious trap. "…….but you have to look at the choices you have to make in your life. You know, Alison, that increasing your prescription will only put you further away from the goal you said that you had been aiming for when I first met you." Alison's heart sank at the perceived rejection. In her mind, how could she tell this woman that her position started off from an entirely phony basis when she had first talked to her, that she had been buying Phiceptone tablets to boost her prescription? She said nothing but Helen felt that very loud inaudible something that was trying to make her feel guilty in denying her something that would, after all, make her happy. She spoke as softly and as gently as she could even though she knew that these words felt to an addict that they were as blows from a fist. She smilingly and gently brushed aside that hidden but very real request by every addict that she had come across in her professional life. Tough love, even in an entirely and strictly professional form, required her to resist her and all her experience also taught her that all drug addicts pulled that stunt in some shape or form somewhere along the line. "……you have to look at the choices that you have in your life when you are well. You can do it, Alison. On your file, you've got a stack of O Levels, A levels and one time you were studying for a B Ed teaching degree. You did that, no one else…." Alison looked disconsolate at the well-meaning words from this woman, somebody whose life chances had favoured her as her own had run against her. She might have been sitting in Helen's chair. What dragged her self esteem down was what everything that she might have been but wasn't. It was her choice in seeking out the more interesting disreputable man around, when she first got pregnant in the middle of studying for her degree. Being led into becoming "queen of the drug scene" was an easier option that she slid into and it was only later when she discovered that while he was "fashionably sensitive" he was also "too cool to care" as the song had it except that, unlike the author, she had somehow stuck with that man despite all the many dramas and temporary separations. She might have written Jewel's song "Foolish games" for her. She might have written a book about her life if she had the chance if she weren't stuck in a council house, the only one in the respectable street, where the few neighbours that were around looked down their noses at her.
"How about your kids, Alison?" Helen's kind smile and those words conjured up the one thing that Alison could enthuse about and made the deadness in her eyes flicker back into life.
"My youngest daughter Rachel is doing marvellously at school and she's already becoming a good cook at home. She understands when sometimes mummy is poorly…." Helen let Alison chatter on, missing nothing as to the euphemisms of her lifestyle that she was coming out with. It was not unknown in her experience for children to take over the running of the house and becoming mini adults to the still childish grown ups. The signs were here already in a small way. On the other hand, it was clear that her love for her children was absolutely genuine. Whether that love would be good for them was another matter. She gave her time to talk about the one positive thing in her life that she clung desperately to.
In Helen's mind, she reflected on the fact that if Rachel Hicks and Zandra Plackett had lived and got out of prison and brought up their children, they might well be in the situation that Alison is in now. How easy it had seemed long ago when she had talked passionately to Zandra that she would help her get her baby back when she got out of prison. This part of her job made Helen feel that she worked off every facet of her psychology degree and that being Wing Governor of Larkhall was, in this one respect, comparatively easy.
"So why did the latest drugs test show positive for amphetamine?" Alison's face hardly moved a muscle in reply to Helen's gentle question before the story came out in a roundabout fashion. Helen had to concentrate hard to glean the essentials of the story as opposed to the rationalisations and frequent shifts in her style of conversation. By some unaccountable chance, a friend of hers called Steve had turned up with his guitar. The children all loved him and his outgoing talkative fashion raised all their spirits.
"Come on, Alison. Let's share this whizz. It's really pure stuff and it will put a smile on your face." At that one moment, falling off the wagon wasn't a conscious, deliberate act but a reaching out to whatever was automatically was to hand in one blind, compulsive trance-like action.
"So what was going through your mind when he offered you the stuff?" Helen pursued.
Only the fidgeting of her hands revealed her discomfort at such a question. She was deeply ashamed of what she had done the very next day and did not want to revisit that experience.
"………only that if I didn't, I would have felt that I would be imposing my misery on everyone else and that would have been selfish. I'd done that all day with my children after an argument with Greg, my partner, first thing…….." Her account of what had done had deeply exposed how she had felt, like exposing raw wounds, inviting Helen's sympathy with every syllable. The problem was that, once you accepted the basic premise, which may only be thirty degrees away from reality, everything else followed in a kind of skewed logic. The basic problem was that she felt that she was a prisoner of her situations and perpetuated them in an endless cycle. Yet how different would a serial philanderer have described that moment when he happened to be in the wrong bar at the wrong time, when some nameless woman had appeared offering that same fatal temptation. He, too, needed to find that same dysfunctional way to feed his own inner emptiness.
"How would you sum up what happened now you look back on it?" The other woman's mouth twisted slightly in self-contempt and then an attempt to push it away, to distance herself from it.
"Just as a tragic set of circumstances that happened to me. If I had felt better that day, it might not have happened." "Is it the way you really want me to look at it?" "Just as something I'm really, really sorry for…….I was up all night and lay in bed the next day. I had to tell the children that I couldn't take them to the pictures as I'd promised them. They understood." I bet they did, thought Helen a little cynically. This woman doesn't see that her eldest children are on the edge of their teens and won't be so understanding forever. She can hear the bomb ticking but, the way she talks about her own feelings of inadequacy, will blank out her own children will be feeling. A part of it was to recoil from what deep down, she knows is the truth. Yet she does love them, in that earth mother way of hers. That was obvious from the one holiday snapshot she had seen of three tiny children wrapped up in her arms on a golden beach and blue water in the background. "We were talking last week that you were going to sign up for an assertiveness course. You were very enthusiastic about it and spoke a lot about what it could do for you." "Oh," came the surprised reply as she looked away from Helen and paused for a second.
"I thought you were going to arrange it for me. I got it fixed in my mind that you were going to write to me and I kept wondering why I hadn't heard anything about it." Helen refrained from comment. She could guess the extraordinary amount of planning what supplementing her drug intake from doing favours for friends that everything else fell by the wayside. She knew from interviewing her friend Steve who was one of those lonely single men who needed to latch onto Alison, to do favours for her in return for which, she would help him out from time to time. That was the common euphemism amongst drug circles for selling some of her prescription. "The idea was for you to take a positive step for yourself in fixing up the place on the class by yourself. It has to come from you, you must understand." They fell into a discussion about what the idea of the course meant to her. Last time, she sounded utterly convinced and was very eloquent to follow up the ideas which Helen had floated at her. In fact, her perceptiveness had both surprised and pleased Helen who permitted herself the luxury of thinking that, at long last, she was beginning to turn the corner in her life. This time, Helen felt let down by the not very convincing imitation of what Helen had discussed with her. The words came out fluently enough but she sounded as if on automatic pilot. Helen wasn't sure if it was one of her games to defuse what she had done wrong and to play the game Helen wanted her to play. Either way, it didn't ring true.
"So, you will definitely make the appointment?" "Yes, definitely," Came the pat reply while her eyes swivelled round in all directions.
The conversation dried up temporarily until Helen took another tack.
"How lucky do you feel in everything that has happened in your life?" Alison's mouth twitched at the thought.
"Everything bad seems to happen to me. I seem to attract all the bad luck that there is." Helen turned to the place in her file where she had placed a bookmark. "What about the time nearly four years ago when you were nearly sent down for dealing amphetamine? If that had happened, would your children have been taken into care if there was no one to look after them? You told me once that your mother would have been willing to look after them if you went into a drugs rehabilitation unit but her second husband, your stepfather, would be totally opposed to it." Helen pursued with a marked edge in her tone of voice.
"I don't know……I had a good solicitor and I had three very young children…." "And…….?" "I suppose my middle class upbringing went in my favour when I took the stand and I suppose I was lucky." "Do you know just how lucky?" "I don't know what you mean?" "I can assure you that a normal woman's prison is highly unlikely to prescribe you anything like the amount of methadone you are being prescribed right now. You would have found it totally different as it is completely cut off from the outside world. You would need all your strength to survive, as it can be very dangerous…." "How do you know?" "I told you, my number one rule is that I don't talk about anything personal in my life. Take it from me, I know what I am talking about. You don't need to know more than accept that what I am saying is the solid, unvarnished truth." Helen's concentrated gaze fixed the wavering attention of the other woman for the longest amount of time that she had been able to pin her down to but she had that sinking feeling that Helen's own direct and very real experience was completely lost on Alison. After all, her life was hardly a bunch of roses and it was patently clear how she was unable to imagine that life could get a lot worse than it is now. Paradoxically, she had teetered her way along that tightrope without the perception of what it was to fall off it.
"So you'll make the appointment and, next time when I see you in two weeks, you'll tell me how you got on. You really will find it will help you, trust me." Helen's slightly severe expression melted into an encouraging smile as she made one last plea.
"Yes, Miss Wade, of course I must go ahead and just do it." She spoke with a little more conviction but whether it was enough was anyone's guess. She politely picked up her huge bag and a book fell out of it. It was a grey coloured book called "Trainspotting". It was very creased already and the pages were folded.
"I like to read by myself when I'm not well." "Hey, that's something I didn't know. I want us to talk about this next time. I'm interested in what you like reading and what it means for you." Helen spoke with real surprise. It was most unusual to find addicts capable of that level of concentration but perhaps it was the shattered remnants of her past life showing through and giving some cause for hope.
Helen sighed as she watched her go. The woman exasperated her beyond all reason because, if she devoted a fraction of her sense of will and determination to an ordinary life instead of pursuing her addiction, she would advance by leaps and bounds. She Mused on her obvious intelligence, which was massively flawed. If she could display the level of perception that she could sometimes display, she could think and will herself out of her situation with that iron determination with which Helen had battled the crises in her life. But if that really were the case, Alison wouldn't have become an addict, would she and not one with such a colossal habit?
The next patient was a young man well into the start of his addiction. He caused her more stress than Alison Gregory as she knew his family and this came closer to home. She reached for a cigarette, her own mild form of addiction, and smoked it before she had to press her buzzer and let him in.
Part Eighty-Two
Helen picked up the very bulky file out of her rather overcrowded desk and opened it with a feeling of weariness. The brown manila folder contained a whole sheaf of interview details, the most recent of them hers but others going backwards in time right back to the creased hand-written first pages. Jesus, this was half a life which was stolen away from this woman, step by self inflicted step from when she first dabbled in the drug scene. There was a pile of doctor's reports stretching back fifteen years or more and the usual assortment of medical records stretch going back further to an age of innocence. Unlike the prisoner's files that used to pass through her hands, there was no escape, no release, no freedom outside the prison walls. It was her interviewing the people she dealt with from day to day and writing up the reports and not the prison officers who used to work for her.
One she had conscientiously scoured through the file, it was evident that this woman had built high security fences round herself leaving no exit, all the more secure because of the woman's high intelligence. This last quality was obvious, despite the damage that years of addiction had done to her. If she was that intelligent, she ought to have had the sense not to have landed herself in her present predicament. She knew that such logic had nothing to do with life's chances of a man or woman of this type. Despite all this, she was a survivor despite the naïve vulnerable manner she used to protect herself with. There was a couple of hospital reports due to admissions for overdosing and the one attempted suicide many years back. She teetered on the edge of disaster miraculously without falling off the edge.
Her name was Alison, mother of three children. From the picture she proudly showed her, they all inherited her looks, carefully brushed hair, some air of quality about them and that same thin aquiline nose and slightly arched eyebrows. That was the mark of her hereditary that she had passed down to them along with who knows what personality traits.
She sighed to herself as the very polite, inaudible knock on the door announced her arrival, ten minutes late. "Come in, Alison," Helen's firm tones greeted her cheerily.
Instantly, she took in her physical presence, slim, five foot six with long blond hair, short black jacket and black trousers and bangles round her wrists. She was carrying her trademark very large handbag, which she knew to be stuffed with an ill-assorted jumble of personal belongings. Her makeup was almost over elaborate to present the appearance she wanted to make on the world and to conceal the many lines on her face. At her age of late thirties, you didn't get that many lines so early in life.
"I'm ever so sorry I'm late, Miss Wade," she started talking in her fairly well educated accent, "I was poorly this morning, you know how I can be some times, and I had a row with my boyfriend and I didn't notice the time till late. I got a lift from a friend of ours………." Helen listened politely as this woman rattled away. Things had happened to her that diverted her away from what she protested many times over from what she really wanted to do. She had a real problem of looking her in the eye, which was a quirk of hers.
"We were talking last week about the choices that all of us make in our lives. I know that you say that you still find periods when you can't get out of bed in the mornings, as your methadone prescription is set too low." "……Oh yes, if it isn't too much trouble. I'm really struggling on the amount of medicine that I'm on," Began Alison in a very hesitant fashion, daring Helen to be brutal with her in denying her request. Helen picked up on the choice of word to describe the drug that Alison was dependent on but did not let herself be gently drawn into the obvious trap. "…….but you have to look at the choices you have to make in your life. You know, Alison, that increasing your prescription will only put you further away from the goal you said that you had been aiming for when I first met you." Alison's heart sank at the perceived rejection. In her mind, how could she tell this woman that her position started off from an entirely phony basis when she had first talked to her, that she had been buying Phiceptone tablets to boost her prescription? She said nothing but Helen felt that very loud inaudible something that was trying to make her feel guilty in denying her something that would, after all, make her happy. She spoke as softly and as gently as she could even though she knew that these words felt to an addict that they were as blows from a fist. She smilingly and gently brushed aside that hidden but very real request by every addict that she had come across in her professional life. Tough love, even in an entirely and strictly professional form, required her to resist her and all her experience also taught her that all drug addicts pulled that stunt in some shape or form somewhere along the line. "……you have to look at the choices that you have in your life when you are well. You can do it, Alison. On your file, you've got a stack of O Levels, A levels and one time you were studying for a B Ed teaching degree. You did that, no one else…." Alison looked disconsolate at the well-meaning words from this woman, somebody whose life chances had favoured her as her own had run against her. She might have been sitting in Helen's chair. What dragged her self esteem down was what everything that she might have been but wasn't. It was her choice in seeking out the more interesting disreputable man around, when she first got pregnant in the middle of studying for her degree. Being led into becoming "queen of the drug scene" was an easier option that she slid into and it was only later when she discovered that while he was "fashionably sensitive" he was also "too cool to care" as the song had it except that, unlike the author, she had somehow stuck with that man despite all the many dramas and temporary separations. She might have written Jewel's song "Foolish games" for her. She might have written a book about her life if she had the chance if she weren't stuck in a council house, the only one in the respectable street, where the few neighbours that were around looked down their noses at her.
"How about your kids, Alison?" Helen's kind smile and those words conjured up the one thing that Alison could enthuse about and made the deadness in her eyes flicker back into life.
"My youngest daughter Rachel is doing marvellously at school and she's already becoming a good cook at home. She understands when sometimes mummy is poorly…." Helen let Alison chatter on, missing nothing as to the euphemisms of her lifestyle that she was coming out with. It was not unknown in her experience for children to take over the running of the house and becoming mini adults to the still childish grown ups. The signs were here already in a small way. On the other hand, it was clear that her love for her children was absolutely genuine. Whether that love would be good for them was another matter. She gave her time to talk about the one positive thing in her life that she clung desperately to.
In Helen's mind, she reflected on the fact that if Rachel Hicks and Zandra Plackett had lived and got out of prison and brought up their children, they might well be in the situation that Alison is in now. How easy it had seemed long ago when she had talked passionately to Zandra that she would help her get her baby back when she got out of prison. This part of her job made Helen feel that she worked off every facet of her psychology degree and that being Wing Governor of Larkhall was, in this one respect, comparatively easy.
"So why did the latest drugs test show positive for amphetamine?" Alison's face hardly moved a muscle in reply to Helen's gentle question before the story came out in a roundabout fashion. Helen had to concentrate hard to glean the essentials of the story as opposed to the rationalisations and frequent shifts in her style of conversation. By some unaccountable chance, a friend of hers called Steve had turned up with his guitar. The children all loved him and his outgoing talkative fashion raised all their spirits.
"Come on, Alison. Let's share this whizz. It's really pure stuff and it will put a smile on your face." At that one moment, falling off the wagon wasn't a conscious, deliberate act but a reaching out to whatever was automatically was to hand in one blind, compulsive trance-like action.
"So what was going through your mind when he offered you the stuff?" Helen pursued.
Only the fidgeting of her hands revealed her discomfort at such a question. She was deeply ashamed of what she had done the very next day and did not want to revisit that experience.
"………only that if I didn't, I would have felt that I would be imposing my misery on everyone else and that would have been selfish. I'd done that all day with my children after an argument with Greg, my partner, first thing…….." Her account of what had done had deeply exposed how she had felt, like exposing raw wounds, inviting Helen's sympathy with every syllable. The problem was that, once you accepted the basic premise, which may only be thirty degrees away from reality, everything else followed in a kind of skewed logic. The basic problem was that she felt that she was a prisoner of her situations and perpetuated them in an endless cycle. Yet how different would a serial philanderer have described that moment when he happened to be in the wrong bar at the wrong time, when some nameless woman had appeared offering that same fatal temptation. He, too, needed to find that same dysfunctional way to feed his own inner emptiness.
"How would you sum up what happened now you look back on it?" The other woman's mouth twisted slightly in self-contempt and then an attempt to push it away, to distance herself from it.
"Just as a tragic set of circumstances that happened to me. If I had felt better that day, it might not have happened." "Is it the way you really want me to look at it?" "Just as something I'm really, really sorry for…….I was up all night and lay in bed the next day. I had to tell the children that I couldn't take them to the pictures as I'd promised them. They understood." I bet they did, thought Helen a little cynically. This woman doesn't see that her eldest children are on the edge of their teens and won't be so understanding forever. She can hear the bomb ticking but, the way she talks about her own feelings of inadequacy, will blank out her own children will be feeling. A part of it was to recoil from what deep down, she knows is the truth. Yet she does love them, in that earth mother way of hers. That was obvious from the one holiday snapshot she had seen of three tiny children wrapped up in her arms on a golden beach and blue water in the background. "We were talking last week that you were going to sign up for an assertiveness course. You were very enthusiastic about it and spoke a lot about what it could do for you." "Oh," came the surprised reply as she looked away from Helen and paused for a second.
"I thought you were going to arrange it for me. I got it fixed in my mind that you were going to write to me and I kept wondering why I hadn't heard anything about it." Helen refrained from comment. She could guess the extraordinary amount of planning what supplementing her drug intake from doing favours for friends that everything else fell by the wayside. She knew from interviewing her friend Steve who was one of those lonely single men who needed to latch onto Alison, to do favours for her in return for which, she would help him out from time to time. That was the common euphemism amongst drug circles for selling some of her prescription. "The idea was for you to take a positive step for yourself in fixing up the place on the class by yourself. It has to come from you, you must understand." They fell into a discussion about what the idea of the course meant to her. Last time, she sounded utterly convinced and was very eloquent to follow up the ideas which Helen had floated at her. In fact, her perceptiveness had both surprised and pleased Helen who permitted herself the luxury of thinking that, at long last, she was beginning to turn the corner in her life. This time, Helen felt let down by the not very convincing imitation of what Helen had discussed with her. The words came out fluently enough but she sounded as if on automatic pilot. Helen wasn't sure if it was one of her games to defuse what she had done wrong and to play the game Helen wanted her to play. Either way, it didn't ring true.
"So, you will definitely make the appointment?" "Yes, definitely," Came the pat reply while her eyes swivelled round in all directions.
The conversation dried up temporarily until Helen took another tack.
"How lucky do you feel in everything that has happened in your life?" Alison's mouth twitched at the thought.
"Everything bad seems to happen to me. I seem to attract all the bad luck that there is." Helen turned to the place in her file where she had placed a bookmark. "What about the time nearly four years ago when you were nearly sent down for dealing amphetamine? If that had happened, would your children have been taken into care if there was no one to look after them? You told me once that your mother would have been willing to look after them if you went into a drugs rehabilitation unit but her second husband, your stepfather, would be totally opposed to it." Helen pursued with a marked edge in her tone of voice.
"I don't know……I had a good solicitor and I had three very young children…." "And…….?" "I suppose my middle class upbringing went in my favour when I took the stand and I suppose I was lucky." "Do you know just how lucky?" "I don't know what you mean?" "I can assure you that a normal woman's prison is highly unlikely to prescribe you anything like the amount of methadone you are being prescribed right now. You would have found it totally different as it is completely cut off from the outside world. You would need all your strength to survive, as it can be very dangerous…." "How do you know?" "I told you, my number one rule is that I don't talk about anything personal in my life. Take it from me, I know what I am talking about. You don't need to know more than accept that what I am saying is the solid, unvarnished truth." Helen's concentrated gaze fixed the wavering attention of the other woman for the longest amount of time that she had been able to pin her down to but she had that sinking feeling that Helen's own direct and very real experience was completely lost on Alison. After all, her life was hardly a bunch of roses and it was patently clear how she was unable to imagine that life could get a lot worse than it is now. Paradoxically, she had teetered her way along that tightrope without the perception of what it was to fall off it.
"So you'll make the appointment and, next time when I see you in two weeks, you'll tell me how you got on. You really will find it will help you, trust me." Helen's slightly severe expression melted into an encouraging smile as she made one last plea.
"Yes, Miss Wade, of course I must go ahead and just do it." She spoke with a little more conviction but whether it was enough was anyone's guess. She politely picked up her huge bag and a book fell out of it. It was a grey coloured book called "Trainspotting". It was very creased already and the pages were folded.
"I like to read by myself when I'm not well." "Hey, that's something I didn't know. I want us to talk about this next time. I'm interested in what you like reading and what it means for you." Helen spoke with real surprise. It was most unusual to find addicts capable of that level of concentration but perhaps it was the shattered remnants of her past life showing through and giving some cause for hope.
Helen sighed as she watched her go. The woman exasperated her beyond all reason because, if she devoted a fraction of her sense of will and determination to an ordinary life instead of pursuing her addiction, she would advance by leaps and bounds. She Mused on her obvious intelligence, which was massively flawed. If she could display the level of perception that she could sometimes display, she could think and will herself out of her situation with that iron determination with which Helen had battled the crises in her life. But if that really were the case, Alison wouldn't have become an addict, would she and not one with such a colossal habit?
The next patient was a young man well into the start of his addiction. He caused her more stress than Alison Gregory as she knew his family and this came closer to home. She reached for a cigarette, her own mild form of addiction, and smoked it before she had to press her buzzer and let him in.