After simply praying she would find her way and trying to detach gently, I found some peace. She and her partner, Dave, were missing again, or in jail, or on the road, or God knew what. They came in and out of sobriety so often, it just became something I got used to. After about a year of this, I was at home when the phone rang and it was Terry on the other end. She would not tell me what happened, only that she was in the ER and asked me to come to her.
When I got to the ER, I completely expected to find Dave, along with any number of other people we knew in common. No one was there. Of all the contacts she had, she called only me. She looked like she’d been to hell and back—bruised, hollow, unclean, unkempt. For all of that, though, to me she looked innocent, a victim of the disease of
