She felt a panic attack creeping up on her, the kind that before would have had her reaching for the Vicodin. But she couldn’t do that, wouldn’t. She had to learn how to handle emotion on her own, without chemical intervention. She sucked in another deep pull of air. She hadn’t expected to feel the clawing scratch of anxiety from flipping through these papers, but there was something about the casual disregard of everyone in the articles for Anne Donovan, the woman. She almost seemed an afterthought, a happy means to air their grievances, concerns, but not worth noting beyond the gruesome, sensationalist aspects of her death. They seemed to take delight in mentioning how she’d been mutilated, but no one bothered to say where she came from, how she had found herself in the position of prostitute, or if she had left behind a grieving family. It was so much like the media coverage of her own mother’s murder that the parallels scared Sara. That had been difficult for her to learn to deal with, to let go of the hatred, disgust, annoyance, when the newspaper turned her mother’s case into an opportunity to blast the prosecutor.
