While the New York Times online is still free, see Leah Carroll’s poignant account in ‘Modern Love’ of a child left behind. This story is local, the Providence Journal is part of it.

I felt a nervous flutter at finally seeing him, but my tension was not romantic. He wasn’t a love interest but rather a journalist who had written years ago about my mother’s murder, and about the men who murdered her. And about the economic decline and culture of despair in early-’80s Rhode Island that contributed to her dying as she did, at the hands of crazed drug dealers who suspected her of being a police informant instead of the mere addict she was.

A crime like murder kills more than an individual. It kills relationships and leaves a hole in a family. Leah Carroll makes it real.