While he kept his hands busy, his mind reached out again to the recurring thought he’d been having for the past few weeks. She was dead. He knew it, yet couldn’t believe it. He’d been a counselor for over fifteen years. He’d spoken to people from all walks of life who dealt with one type of addiction or another, and he felt that in the past five years, he’d gotten very good at judging who would crawl through the s**t and come out clean on the other end, and who would not. Sheela had been one of those he’d pegged as making it through. She hadn’t looked like much when she came to her first meeting, the court-mandated ones never did, but she’d held on with a grim determination. She’d truly wanted to get well, for reasons pure or not didn’t matter, and she’d dealt with her s**t and come to ter
