New York Times –

July 22, 2018 – Last year, on the day after Christmas, I picked up my phone to hear the mother on the other end of the line sobbing. “It’s the phone call I never wanted to make to you,” she said. “I’m so sorry to have to make this call.” For more than two years, I had followed Patricia Mehrmann and her daughter, Tess Henry, as they endured Tess’s struggle to get off, and stay off, heroin. I wrote about Tess in these pages, using the pseudonym Erica to protect her privacy, back when her privacy mattered.

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