Tess Henry

Tess Henry is one of the book’s closely followed subjects: a former honors student and young mother whose opioid dependence began with prescribed medication, developed into heroin use, and repeatedly collided with treatment systems and family efforts to help. Her trajectory—from a carefully managed suburban childhood to addiction, motherhood, loss of custody, and death in Las Vegas—makes visible both the personal costs of the crisis and the institutional gaps through which families tried to navigate it.

Identity and Background

Tess grew up between two homes after her parents, Patricia Mehrmann and Alan Henry, divorced when she was ten. One was in an affluent part of Roanoke, Virginia, near mountain-bike trails and the Blue Ridge Parkway; the other was on Bald Head Island, North Carolina, reached by ferry. She was the quietest of Patricia’s four children, a high-school track and basketball standout who earned honor-roll grades. She studied French at Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina–Asheville but did not complete a degree.

Before addiction took hold, her interests included poetry, painting, reading, and singing to Koda, her black rescue dog. Patricia remembered Tess as a child who walked the dogs with her and searched the beach at low tide for sand dollars. At the same time, relatives recalled anxiety from an early age, including a panic attack during a car ride home from the beach. The book places those memories beside, rather than in place of, Tess’s later achievements and choices: her childhood was neither a simple explanation for addiction nor a guarantee against it.

Tess’s mother wondered whether addiction ran in the family, noting alcohol use among relatives on both sides. Her older sister had been in recovery for more than five years and attended Alcoholics Anonymous. Tess herself knew that her daily opioid compulsion began in 2012, but the events that preceded it included both experimentation in college and a routine visit to urgent care. The account does not settle on a single cause; instead, it traces the transition from access to prescription drugs to an increasingly difficult dependence.

From Prescriptions to Heroin

At twenty-two, Tess received two thirty-day opioid prescriptions during treatment for bronchitis: codeine cough syrup and hydrocodone for throat pain. When the prescriptions ran out, she sought pills through a dealer connected to a fellow waitress. The withdrawal symptoms she experienced led her to search online for an explanation; she recognized that the symptoms and the drugs she had taken might mean she was addicted. At first, she snorted about five pills a day, including Dilaudid, Roxicodone, Lortab, and Opana.

Several months into this routine, the supply of pills became harder for her dealer to obtain. Tess connected that change to the 2014 reclassification of hydrocodone combination medications from Schedule III to Schedule II. Under the revised rules, prescriptions were limited to intervals of thirty days or less and could not be refilled; patients who needed more had to return to a doctor. The book sets her experience within that broader regulatory change, without suggesting that it alone caused her addiction or her later turn to heroin.

Tess moved from pills to heroin and continued waitressing at an upscale restaurant. She concealed track marks beneath long sleeves and could still remember orders without writing them down. She did not consider herself a true addict until she began injecting heroin, six months after first snorting it. After three injections, she understood that she would not return to snorting. She later showed the scars inside her right elbow and described learning to inject with her left hand so she could use a vein in her right arm.

Even while earning about $800 a week, Tess needed more money as her tolerance and dependence grew. She began middlemanning: recruiting new users and selling to them in exchange for a share of the drugs. She was arrested twice early in her addiction. In one case, an unprescribed OxyContin was found in her pocket after she was stopped for public drunkenness; the felony charge was reduced to a misdemeanor, and she received probation and a weekend in jail. A later arrest involved theft of gift cards. Her father, Alan, believed the first case should have led to drug court, but Tess’s route through the legal system did not initially become a sustained path into treatment.

Pregnancy, Treatment, and Motherhood

On May 15, 2015, surveillance cameras at a Roanoke Lowe’s recorded Tess taking a copper plumbing implement. She was arrested before leaving the store and said she was already in withdrawal. A routine urine screen led jail staff to give her a low dose of acetaminophen with codeine to prevent the fetus she was carrying from undergoing sudden opioid withdrawal. Tess was twenty-five, weighed 120 pounds, had not had a regular period in two years, and did not know she was near the end of her second trimester. In jail, she and the baby were temporarily protected from the immediate dangers of withdrawal.

After leaving jail in June, nearly seven months pregnant, Tess spent a month at Patricia’s home and tried living with the baby’s father. That arrangement failed. Her family found a private treatment program two hours away that would accept her during the final month of pregnancy. The Life Center of Galax was among the few Virginia facilities that accepted patients receiving medication-assisted treatment. Tess took Subutex, a buprenorphine medication that was then considered safer for some pregnant patients because it did not contain naloxone. Private insurance paid most of the $20,000 cost; Alan paid the $6,500 deductible using the remaining money in Tess’s college savings.

By early 2016, Tess had a cheerful five-month-old son. The author drove her and the baby to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and accompanied her through the difficulties of trying to find support. Tess had attended both Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous before, but she felt stigmatized for taking buprenorphine. Although Narcotics Anonymous officially accepted medication-assisted treatment, members asked to sponsor or mentor her declined. The rejection exposed a divide between a treatment prescribed by health professionals and some recovery communities’ ideas of what it meant to be clean.

Relapse, Family Conflict, and Custody

In February 2016, Patricia believed Tess was using again. Items, including a laptop, disappeared from the house, and Patricia found empty heroin baggies in the bathroom trash, while Tess denied returning to heroin. The family disagreed about what help should look like. Alan urged her to enter a year-long faith-based residential program, but it barred cigarettes and medication-assisted treatment, both of which remained part of Tess’s life; Tess was also an atheist. Her older sister encouraged her to follow the Twelve Steps, while Tess rejected the suggestion. When Tess later asked her sister for money to buy buprenorphine, the sister offered to take her to a meeting instead, concerned that the money might go toward heroin.

The strain extended to caring for Tess’s baby. Patricia described finding him alone on a couch while Tess was in the bathroom applying makeup and appeared to be intoxicated. A guardian ad litem became involved, and by late March a judge awarded shared custody to the grandmothers. Tess could no longer live at Patricia’s home, though she could visit her son when Patricia was present. That spring, she moved into a cheap motel and had no car. To regain custody by July 18, she needed to find work and housing and demonstrate sobriety.

At the same time, access to treatment was precarious. Tess was enrolled in Medicaid and trying to transfer to a Suboxone doctor who accepted it, but that physician had reached the federally mandated patient limit. She also owed money to a psychiatrist and cash-only medication-assisted treatment provider, and could not be seen again until she paid. With only about a week’s supply of medication remaining, the gap between wanting treatment and being able to obtain it was immediate. The book does not reduce the custody decision to a single disagreement or portray family support as an uncomplicated remedy: her relatives differed over boundaries, while the options available to Tess were limited by cost, provider availability, and the conditions imposed by programs.

Nevada and the Ending

In February 2017, Patricia and Jamie Waldrop helped arrange Tess’s transfer from a hospital to residential treatment in Nevada. Tess had lost her identification, so Patricia persuaded a hospital employee who was a notary to make a replacement that would allow her to fly. A Hope Initiative volunteer coordinated transportation to the airport. The Nevada center did not accept patients on medication-assisted treatment. Tess had stopped Suboxone months earlier, after losing Medicaid coverage when her son was removed from her care, and was using crack and heroin. She became the Hope Initiative’s fifth person sent to residential treatment, though the account leaves open whether this attempt would be her last.

Patricia continued trying to locate Tess after she checked herself out of the Nevada program, including through Facebook Messenger and prostitution websites. A journal entry written sometime between November 2016 and February 2017 records Tess’s fear that she was going to die. The book presents these details as part of an unsettled period in which family members struggled to know where she was and what kind of intervention could reach her.

On Christmas Eve 2017, a homeless man searching for cans found Tess deceased in a dumpster at a Las Vegas apartment complex. She was inside a plastic bag, and the bag and her body showed partial burns. The stated cause of death was blunt head trauma. Police identified her through fingerprints and tattoos, including a Tree of Life on her shoulder. Her death became national news, and Patricia spoke with reporters, hoping to convey both the severity of addiction and her daughter’s strength. Other relatives were uncomfortable with the attention, and the family continued to revisit disagreements about enabling, help, and tough love.

Narrative Role

The author began reporting on the heroin crisis in the suburbs of Roanoke in 2012, when many families were too ashamed to speak on the record. Tess entered the reporting narrative later, in 2015, and the author followed her through interviews and contact with Patricia until the book went to press. The resulting account places a young woman’s history within the book’s broader portrait of a crisis that crossed class lines: Tess had grown up in affluent settings, excelled at school and sports, and still encountered addiction, criminal charges, interrupted treatment, and loss of custody.

Her story also shows how stigma operates at several levels. Patricia initially struggled to accept that Tess could be addicted while maintaining a job; Tess encountered judgment for using buprenorphine at recovery meetings; and family members disagreed over whether assistance enabled continued use or preserved a chance of recovery. These conflicts unfolded alongside gaps between health care and criminal justice, and practical barriers such as treatment costs, provider limits, insurance loss, and programs that would not accept medication-assisted treatment. Tess’s ending does not resolve those disputes. It leaves her family’s repeated efforts, and the systems they had to work around, as part of the explanation for why care could remain so difficult to secure.