Nic relapses and disappears after eighteen months sober

Nic Sheff’s relapse and disappearance after eighteen months sober turns apparent recovery into a renewed crisis. He stops answering David Sheff’s calls after admitting that he cannot stop thinking about a painful breakup. His family’s search follows a chain of missing-person reports, dead ends, and uncertain phone signals before Nic is found in San Francisco. The episode ends with his return to Los Angeles, but not with the certainty that the danger has passed: his admission that he is using meth and heroin makes clear how quickly a relapse can undo the appearance of stability.

The disappearance begins

A month after Nic and Randy had ridden bicycles together, Nic stopped returning David’s calls. In their last conversation, Nic had said that he was still reeling from the breakup. David initially had reason to hope that the silence was temporary: Vicki had seen Nic a day or two earlier and said he seemed fine. But when she went to his apartment at David’s request, Nic’s roommate had not seen him, and his bed had not been slept in.

The signs of absence accumulated. A coworker at Promises said Nic had not shown up for two days. Friends had heard nothing from him, including a friend who had arranged to meet him for lunch and a bike ride the day before. David called the police and hospital emergency rooms; Vicki went to the Santa Monica police station and filed a missing-person report. What had begun as unanswered calls became a search for someone whose whereabouts and safety no one could confirm.

At home, David and Karen delayed telling Jasper and Daisy, who were seven and nine, because they did not yet know what had happened. David describes the strain of trying to maintain ordinary family life while his mind filled with frightening possibilities about Nic on the streets at night. Repeated calls to Nic’s phone reached a deadpan voicemail, and Vicki had no news. The uncertainty was not simply an absence of information: it reopened a family crisis they had experienced before, making each quiet interval feel charged with the possibility of another relapse.

Signals, dead ends, and the search

A customer-service operator at the family’s shared cellphone company could not disclose Nic’s recent calls, but said she could check whether his phone was connected to the network. The phone first appeared to be accessing a tower in Sacramento. No one in the family or among Nic’s friends knew why he might be there or knew of friends he could visit. Two hours later the operator reported that the phone was still on, now in Reno. A police detective’s comment that Reno was a meth capital offered one possible explanation, but David recognized that Nic would not have needed to travel there to obtain drugs.

The shifting signal provided location without reassurance. After David asked the operator to disconnect the phone, telling her it had apparently been stolen, Vicki and David remained frantic. Vicki contacted Z., who had just heard from Nic: he had called her from San Francisco and was high. The news located him but did not bring him home or establish that he was safe.

David drove through San Francisco looking for him. Along Mission Street, he peered into shops, taquerias, and bars, repeatedly mistaking strangers for Nic. He then walked along Haight Street, checking head shops, bookstores, a pizza place, a café, and Amoeba, before returning to Golden Gate Park and the clearing where he had previously met a meth-addicted girl from Ohio. The search moved through places where Nic might be, but produced no encounter. Randy offered reassurance that Nic would not stay away long because he would not be enjoying himself, yet David continued to fear an overdose or lasting harm. Nic was gone for a week, and then another.

Confession and the choice not to rescue

When Nic eventually called, he told David that he had relapsed and was using meth and heroin. David had rehearsed a response that resisted the familiar impulse to go into the city and retrieve him. He told Nic that he could not solve the problem for him and that Nic had to act. He also explained that the police were looking for him: Vicki had reported him missing, and Marin County sheriffs were patrolling David’s home and the home of friends where Nic had broken in. David warned that Nic was headed for jail.

Nic asked for help. David directed him toward what he already knew from treatment: he should call his sponsor, Randy. He told Nic that he loved him and hoped he would get his life together, but did not promise to come and collect him. After the call, David wanted to call back and offer to go; he did not. His restraint was not calm certainty. It was an effort to follow a boundary while remaining frightened about what might happen if Nic stayed away.

Randy then called David. He had spoken with Nic and urged him to return to Los Angeles, telling him that he missed him and was waiting. Nic sounded ready to come back. David and Vicki were relieved, but both remained shell-shocked; agreement to return did not make the situation feel secure. That evening, Nic had enough money for a taxi to the airport and a plane ticket. Vicki picked him up in Los Angeles and dropped him at his apartment, where his roommate welcomed him home. Nic went straight to his bedroom and fell asleep. His roommate said he was sleeping off the drugs and would have to endure detox.

Return, renewed effort, and unresolved risk

The next morning, Nic described leaving San Francisco after following Randy’s advice and praying for help. He also said that April had tried to stop him from leaving, crying and clinging to his leg. Nic believed that if he stayed, both of them would die. He was distressed by what had happened and acknowledged that he had badly damaged his recovery. His return was therefore neither a simple reunion nor proof that the danger had passed: it was the start of another attempt to regain stability after a frightening period away.

Nic later described the relapse as a consequence of becoming overconfident during sobriety. After eighteen months, he had begun to think his life was manageable and that he could handle things without the humility recovery required. He was ashamed and said he was going to two meetings a day and restarting the steps. Randy helped him find a new job, and the two began working through the twelve steps again and taking long bicycle rides before or after work. These actions marked concrete efforts to rebuild a routine, but David measured progress day by day and continued to ask whether this time was genuinely different.

The episode also altered David’s understanding of his own position in the crisis. He describes living with the contradiction that an addict may not be responsible for the condition while remaining the person who must take responsibility for recovery. A parent can draw boundaries and still have to revise them; love and fear do not disappear simply because a boundary is drawn. David’s later cerebral hemorrhage did not erase his worry about Nic, and he came to reject the wish to remove Nic from his mind, even at the cost of pain. The relapse and disappearance thus stand not as a closed chapter followed by cure, but as another recurrence within a lifelong illness: Nic’s return allows renewed work, while the family remains aware that remission and effort do not guarantee a final resolution.