Libby had only been a mother for three months the first time Amanda got sick. Doctors had told her it was just a stubborn cold, until one night Libby went to check on her infant daughter and found her wheezing in the crib. The baby was turning blue. She couldn’t breathe. Libby picked her up, blew air into her mouth and rushed her to the emergency room. They stayed in the neonatal unit for the next two months as doctors ran tests to see what was wrong. Finally Amanda had been diagnosed with a severe kind of asthma, treated and sent home, and for the next year Libby had stood over her crib for a little while each night watching her breathe.

Now she had spent 11 more years trapped in that cycle — expecting her daughter to die, sacrificing her sanity to save her, and doing most of it alone. She rarely talked to her ex-husband about Amanda’s addiction; her current husband was patient and supportive, but sometimes, as Amanda's mother, Libby felt that the responsibility was mostly hers. So Libby had gone by herself to heroin awareness rallies at the state capitol. She had forced Amanda to take monthly drug tests and locked her out of the house. She had gone through the medical records Amanda left lying around and cursed out the doctors, pill mills and pharmacists who continued filling her prescriptions. She had tried, most of all, to be loving and patient with her daughter and to remember what so many experts had told her, that addiction was not a choice but a disease, even as Amanda stole her checks and then her credit cards, running up more than $50,000 of debt.

And then, finally, nine years into her daughter’s addiction, Libby had come up with a plan to be done with all of it. She had put on a bathing suit beneath her beautician uniform one morning and driven out of the city toward Kensington Lake. She had been a competitive swimmer as a teenager, but now she was out of shape. If she could swim out for a mile or so, she would be too exhausted to make it back. Nobody would see her. Nobody would hear her. She sat at a picnic table and stared out at the water. She watched a family shove their canoe into the lake. She watched two kids throwing rocks. She sat for hours until the sun descended over the water and then she got back in her car and drove home, resolved to seek help. She met with a therapist, confided in her husband, consulted with a bankruptcy lawyer and started talking regularly with the mothers she’d met online.

“If I cut the cord with Amanda, would she recover faster?” Libby asked them now. “Would it be easier on both of us?”

“There’s no one right way,” Mary said.

“I worry about enabling,” Libby said. “But what if I kick her out and she dies in some abandoned house? How do I live with myself?”

Nobody answered. They sat in silence for a moment and Mary reached for Libby’s hand. “You’re doing everything you can,” she said.

“I don’t know where to draw the line,” Libby said.