“It’s clear my daughter died because of these drugs coming through our border,” Susan said afterward, to a bank of TV news cameras, and then she returned to North Carolina, where the more complicated truth was that nothing about Toria’s death seemed clear. Susan, a former private investigator, was trained to work a case and then solve it, but this time, she kept going back over the story, looking again for causes, reassigning blame, interrogating her own mistakes as she tried make sense of one drug death in a national epidemic.

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