four years sober, then the First Drink
A guy that had gone through the House back when Thrust did and had stayed sober in AA for four solid years had suddenly out of nowhere slipped up and took The First Drink the same day as the Lenz freakas, and predictably ended getting totally shitfaced, and went and fell off the end of the Fort Point pier
Context
The program's central terror reported as a passing bit of House news: four solid years sober, and then, out of nowhere, The First Drink — capitalized like a proper noun because it is the one the whole doctrine warns is never just one — and by the same night the man is drowned off a pier. Relapse anatomy in a sentence: the length of the sobriety buys no immunity, the slip has no visible cause, and the distance from four years clean to dead is a single day.