Newark, New Jersey, functions in the book as a supply point in Ashlyn Keikilani Kessler’s heroin-trafficking route between New Jersey and Roanoke, Virginia. It is both the destination of repeated long-distance runs and a city where heroin was immediately accessible, linking a bulk source to buyers in communities around Roanoke.

A City on the Supply Route

Kessler’s dealer brought her into a connection in Newark through a relative with access to a source willing to sell heroin in bulk. The trips began with bundles of thirty bags and progressed to bricks of fifty. Kessler said the bricks cost $100 each and were resold in Roanoke for six or seven times that amount. The Newark connection therefore supported a supply chain extending well beyond the city, toward buyers in Cave Spring and Hidden Valley.

The route demanded repeated, fourteen-hour round trips. Kessler made the journey three or four times a week, with her dealer’s girlfriend often accompanying her to watch her. Kessler was known to steal bags from their shared supply and inject heroin at rest stops on the way back to Roanoke: the same journey served as both a commercial operation and an extension of her addiction.

Easy Access and Concealment

On her first arrival in downtown Newark, Kessler had barely left her car when a man approached to ask what she was looking for. The encounter conveys how quickly she could obtain drugs there, without suggesting that Newark was the only source or describing the city beyond this brief street-level episode.

Kessler later wrote that her dealer recruited her in part because she was a young, white woman who spoke well and drove a nice car, making her less likely to attract suspicion. The Nissan Sentra enabled the trips, while her appearance helped disguise their purpose. Newark was thus not simply a distant marketplace: it was the far end of a route made possible by a seemingly ordinary driver and vehicle.

The Return Route and Arrest

In 2014, Virginia State Police stopped Kessler on I-81 just north of Roanoke, about ten minutes from the end of another Newark–Roanoke round trip. Drug task force officers had tracked her movements with a GPS device hidden beneath her car after a former classmate overdosed on heroin she had sold him, survived, and informed an undercover officer in exchange for avoiding jail time.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents searched the trunk of the Nissan and found 722 bags of heroin in her Vera Bradley purse; Kessler and a friend had already used half a brick. Her arrest took place on the Virginia return leg, not in Newark, but the seizure exposed the scale of the supply moving along the route. The city’s role in her story is consequently defined by the connection and repeated journeys that fed the Roanoke market—and by the long return trip on which that operation finally came into view.