GLOUCESTER, Mass. — Kylee Moriarty recalls that on the night her father drove her to Gloucester to enter the Gloucester Police Department’s anti-opioid program, they were more than halfway there before he told her precisely where they were going.

“I told him, ‘Are you crazy? This is nuts,'” she recalls now, seven months drug-free and continuing to rebuild her 27-year-old life. “I couldn’t imagine going to a police station for help. I couldn’t help but think I was going to get in trouble.”

What Moriarty did not know was that after she reached out to her parents and told them she needed help, her mother had called the Gloucester police from the family’s home in Seabrook, New Hampshire, and asked about the new, so-called “angel” program and whether it would be available for her daughter.

The voice on the other end of the line encouraged the family to send her in, and within hours Kylee and her dad were on their way.

At the time, Moriarty knew she was already “in trouble” — not from police or the legal system, but through a four-year addiction to heroin, a descent into and the escape from an abusive relationship. She was also under a court order that had placed her then 7-year-old son Landon in the custody of the boy’s father and Kylee’s mother.

As she thinks back now, she believes her addiction was one that developed over at least seven years, and had some familiar roots.

“Realizing now what the disease of addiction is, I know now that I’d been addicted to something all that time,” she says matter-of-factly. But her life began to spiral down when she was prescribed painkillers — Percocet, morphine, Klonopin — after she underwent surgery. Then, she slipped from those painkillers into heroin, eventually reaching a depth where she was in no place to to continue providing or caring for her son, and felt cut off from her family.

A year ago, however, she reached out to her parents for help, and her trip with her dad to Gloucester and its new approach to opioid abuse was in the works.

After two months in treatment and recovery, however, she relapsed; she overdosed inside the “sober house” where she was staying, and was rushed to the hospital, where doctors told her she had actually “died” three times and been revived each time with doses of nasal Narcan, the drug now commonly used to reverse the effects of a heroin overdose or other opioids.

From her hospital bed, she called Gloucester Police Chief Leonard Campanello; he secured her a bed in Westborough, Massachusetts through the program, and three months later, she knew she had a new lease on life.

“I remember going back to the (Gloucester) police station, and (the officers) all saying hello to me and saying how proud they are of me,” Moriarty says. “That was so foreign to me. Nobody had ever said they were proud of me before.”

Clean for eight months now, she’s living at a sober house in Lynn, Massachusetts. She’s holding down a job at a bakery there, and she talks of seeking a human services grant through Massachusetts Rehabilitation to go to school and pursue work as an addiction counselor.

She has not regained custody of her son, but says she’s excited that he “is back in my life now,” as are her parents and other family members and friends.

“These are miracles that are happening,” she says with a smile. “I see this as the jumping-off point for the rest of my life.

“I no longer hate myself when I look in the mirror,” she adds. “I feel very hopeful about my future.”

Lamont writes for the Gloucester, Massachusetts Daily Times.