A single dose and a course of doses do not look the same in a child’s blood.

The body converts these things at known rates and what you find at the end tells you about the shape of what went in, and what was in my daughter’s blood on that Wednesday afternoon told a toxicologist at a university laboratory that somebody had been giving her something, at intervals, for approximately five to seven days.

And then, on the second day, a nurse found the patch.

It was a transdermal opioid patch and it was on my daughter’s upper back below the left scapula, which is a location a person cannot reach, and it had been there some time.