Police drew guns over a used car whose paperwork was wrong, and a night in jail turned his drinking. Sober, he lived on an air mattress and a $50 bicycle.

At six weeks sober her father died of a heart attack and she was certain she had caused it. She moved into a halfway house instead of drinking. That was 1981.

After a blackout drive he found two flat tires and switched on the news expecting to hear he had killed someone. It still took ten more years and a phone call.

He woke covered in blood with his chin cut to the bone. That night his son said call me when you’re sober, and left. Alan S. dialed a stranger instead.

At 158 pounds he caught his reflection in a shop window and didn’t recognize the man. Thirty-five years clean, he calls year one discovery, not recovery.

His counselor handed him a 100-day coin on day 99. He used that night. Eight arrests and a felony later, Stephen Hill said tell me what to do and meant it.

Two doctors, three prescriptions, a brain scan her therapist said looked like an ocean: no activity. The straight-A overachiever who could not study for life.

She said she had field hockey practice, then drove to a Detroit trap house in her school uniform. At 19 she walked into an intervention in her own living room.

Told he was adopted at a family dinner, Bob Wick drank for thirty years and failed four rehabs before one book broke him open. How he finally got sober.

Her husband said rehab or lose all of us, and she paused. That pause still haunts her. By then Nancy was nodding off at the table as her kids called her name.

She bought the textbooks and highlighted every page, then never went to class, at three colleges running. At 20 she spent seventeen days in a detox bed.

She pawned her mother’s diamond ring for under a hundred dollars. Months later her mother handed her twelve dollars, put her on a plane and stayed on the phone.

A stutterer since second grade, he sat at the far end of the room so nobody could hand him the book. The night it slid down the table anyway changed everything.

The power was off because he had the money but not the wits to pay the bill. Ryan was burning a dresser for heat the morning he finally decided to ask for help.

Three days into treatment a speaker said secrets keep you sick. He raised his hand in a room full of strangers, a married father of three, and said the words.

She meant to take the edge off at 5:30 in the morning in a parking lot. She came to three days later in a hospital bed, with her parents offering rehab or jail.

Eight days after moving to New York, cab drivers were delivering her cocaine. A friend asked her to a meeting on 70th Street, never showed, and Louise stayed.

Her neurologist handed her a list of everything she could never touch again. Cocaine was on it. Alcohol was not. Three empty months at home taught her the rest.

He moved to Napa to make wine and spent ten months alone drinking vodka and grape juice. Years later his father parked the car and asked what was going on.

His grandmother raised him in a town of 800 people. Years later the residents of the building where he worked the door were the ones who got him into treatment.