Nic’s injection drug use is exposed when Julia calls David from her family’s home in Virginia and tells him that Nic stole hypodermic needles and morphine. The disclosure transforms a relapse David had not recognized into a crisis involving concealed theft and injection drug use. Julia’s warning, informed by her sister’s addiction, challenges the impulse to help Nic materially; David’s shock, meanwhile, makes the distance between his hopes for his son and the facts newly clear.

The Call and the Disclosure

The call comes the morning after David realizes that Nic has turned twenty. Nic is gone, and David has been replaying the possibility that he should have tried to find him or prevented him from leaving. Then Julia, whom David met the previous winter in Boston, calls from her family’s home in Virginia. Her voice breaks as she tells him that Nic took hypodermic needles from her mother’s house during a visit the previous month. The needles had been intended for her mother’s cancer medication. Nic also stole morphine.

David’s immediate response is disbelief, expressed in a brief question about the needles. Julia confirms what she has found out. The exchange is spare: she cannot say much more, and David does not know what to say. The facts nevertheless establish a sharp change in what the family understands. Nic is not merely absent or suspected of having relapsed; he has obtained needles and morphine from his girlfriend’s family, and he is injecting drugs.

Warning Against Material Help

Julia tells David not to help Nic and not to give him money. She expects that Nic may try to persuade David to help, and then turn to his mother. Her warning is based on her family’s experience with her sister’s addiction: in her view, assistance can hasten harm rather than protect the person receiving it. She also tells David to take care of himself, advice that she connects to what her family learned through the sister’s illness. David urges her to do the same.

The warning gives the call a practical consequence. The discovery does not bring a new plan for rescuing Nic; instead, Julia argues for withholding money and looking after oneself. She speaks not as an outside observer but as someone whose family has already faced addiction. Her experience supplies a counterweight to David’s impulse to interpret help as protection, while his response recognizes that she, too, needs care.

Hope, Secrecy, and the Family

David admits that he believed Nic was doing better and thought he had remained sober through the school year. Julia replies that she wanted to believe him too. Their shared hope is not presented as proof of recovery but as a reason the deterioration remained difficult to see. The news exposes the limits of what either of them knew about Nic’s drug use while he was away.

That painful gap connects the event to the family’s wider struggle with secrecy and stigma. David had kept the addiction private partly to protect Nic and preserve other people’s good impressions of him. Later, attending Al-Anon with Karen, he recognizes how much speaking about the addiction and hearing other families’ accounts can help, even while the meeting’s principle that relatives did not cause, control, or cure the addiction remains hard for him to accept. The telephone disclosure is a personal instance of that larger problem: silence and hope can leave family members without a reliable understanding of what is happening.

The Two Worlds Afterward

David says that the revelation stuns him. He recalls Nic’s arms not only as the arms into which the drugs are being injected, but as the arms that once threw baseballs, built Lego castles, and held on to him when he carried his sleepy son in from the car. The contrast joins the present crisis to ordinary memories of Nic’s childhood without making those memories an answer to the crisis.

The following day, the family is supposed to take the younger children to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The planned outing and the news about Nic occupy the same family life, but seem to belong to incompatible realities. David recognizes that both continue to coexist. Rather than wait at home for a call that does not come, he acknowledges that waiting will not resolve what Julia has revealed. The episode’s force lies in that unfinished division: the information is now undeniable, but it does not tell David where Nic is or what will happen next.