“We’re so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you. It’s been…” He looked up at them with tears in his eyes. “You think you’ve seen everything life can throw at you until you lose a child.” Shaking his head, he wiped away tears. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Sam tried to be patient with him as she waited for him to continue.

“As I said, he lived in the pool house, but he was in and out of here all the time. That day, my wife, Kathy, thought it was odd that he didn’t come in for coffee before leaving for the hospital. He was finishing his training as a physician’s assistant, had just signed a lease on his first apartment and was doing so much better than he had been.”

“You said he’d been an addict for years?”

Gerald nodded. “He did four trips to rehab. The last one seemed to have finally worked, but he was under a lot of pressure at work. The last stages of PA training are rigorous, and he wasn’t sleeping much. We were concerned that the stress would threaten his recovery, but when we brought that up with him, he didn’t want to hear it. He said he had things under control and that we had to learn to trust him.”

His expression was a cross between a grimace and a grin. “That was hard for us after what he’d put us through over the years.”

“What was his drug of choice?”

“Oxy and then heroin when the Oxy became too expensive.” He cleared his throat. “We… We had to cut him off from all resources, but somehow, he still found a way to score. I hope you can appreciate… It was just a fucking nightmare of never knowing when we were going to wake up to cops at our door telling us he was dead. And we were so, so hopeful after this last rehab. He was different after that. More determined than we’d ever seen him to stay sober and finish his training. He was regularly drug tested at work, and that gave him the incentive to stay clean. We were so encouraged by his progress.” He sighed as his eyes filled again. “Sorry, it’s so hard to talk about this.”

“We appreciate you sharing it with us.”

“So that day, when he didn’t come in for coffee, Kathy went to check on him. He was… He was on the floor next to his bed, like he’d been crawling and just collapsed or something. She could tell by his coloring that he was dead, but she called 911 anyway. She called me at work and was so hysterical, she couldn’t breathe, and I knew. I just knew he was gone. It was like I’d been waiting all this time for that news or something. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but that’s how it was. It was like a self-fulfilling prophecy or something.”

Sam’s heart broke for him and his family and the terrible ordeal they’d endured. “We believe someone is selling laced Oxy. Cory would be the sixth person that we know of who’s overdosed recently. We expect there could be more.”