Carly Fiorina wanted to say something.

Last month during the Republican presidential debate in Simi Valley, California, Rand Paul had been talking about the legalization of marijuana and the unjust imprisonment of certain users of drugs, and then Jeb Bush had responded, and now Fiorina was trying to get the attention of moderator Jake Tapper.

“Jake,” she said, “may I just say …”

And Chris Christie cut in, and he called the war on drugs a “failure,” and Paul wanted to respond to that, and Fiorina tried again.

“Jake,” she said. “Jake …”

Paul talked more, and then Christie talked more, and finally Tapper turned to Fiorina. It was her time to talk.

“I very much hope,” Fiorina said, “I am the only person on this stage who can say this, but I know there are millions of Americans out there who will say the same thing. My husband, Frank, and I buried a child to drug addiction, so we must invest more in the treatment of drugs.”

It was an attention-getting “moment” for Fiorina, who used the first debate to vault from the undercard to the GOP main stage and the second to affirm her status as a polished, confident talker, and went into the third hoping to reverse her recent sag in the polls.

Some viewers were stunned she said what she said in Simi Valley, but she already had chosen to discuss in this personal way this pressing issue, unavoidable at this point as the country’s drug scourge, from pain pills to heroin, has jumped from inner cities to outer suburbs. Fiorina dedicated her second memoir to her stepdaughter. “To Lori,” she wrote in Rising to the Challenge, published in May to coincide with the announcement of her candidacy, “who is forever in our hearts.” The first sentence of the book? “The two police officers stood awkwardly in our living room.”

Since the second debate, too, she has talked about her stepdaughter publicly and repeatedly—in the context of conversations about America’s drug problem, America’s prison problem and her faith in Jesus Christ, and even in a response to a question about human trafficking. “I lost a daughter to drug addiction,” she said in September at a luncheon of a Republican Women’s Club in Greenville, South Carolina. This month at a megachurch in Plano, Texas, she reiterated her debate language: “I have buried a child.”

But last week Fiorina said she didn’t want to answer my questions about her stepdaughter, said a campaign staff member. “I don’t think any of the family wants to participate,” spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores told me. She emailed a two-sentence statement: “Frank and Carly miss Lori every single day. They have said everything they’re prepared to say publicly about their daughter at this point and they hope that Americans will understand.”

Yet for Fiorina, 61, known foremost as the former celebrity CEO of Hewlett-Packard, it is also an important piece of her personal story on the campaign trail. It and her successful bout with breast cancer soften her image as an ultra-ambitious businesswoman, “Chainsaw Carly,” who laid off 30,000 people at H-P before she was fired in 2005 with a $21.4 million severance package.

The way she has told audiences about the death of her stepdaughter, dramatically but without specifying the nature of her addiction, gives people wide latitude to fill in the blanks and lets her pivot quickly to brief mentions of policies she supports—more money for addiction rehabilitation, leniency for those whose offense is dependency and not violence. She has suggested it is a major reason she is running for president. Largely, though, she has stripped the painful experience of its most painful details.

A fuller story can be seen and heard in public records in Virginia and New Jersey and interviews with two of her closest friends and others, all of which paint a picture of a friendly, bubbly honor student—and a two-year, alcohol- and prescription drug-fueled downward spiral, one that ended when Lori Ann Fiorina, 35, died in Morris Plains, New Jersey, sometime in late September or early October 2009, face up on the floor between a couch and a coffee table in a third-floor apartment she shared with her two Boston terriers and from which she was being evicted.

She used antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication, a friend remembers, but “it was a drinking problem,” Irene Easler, the mother of her biological mother, told me recently from her home near Pittsburgh. “She took pills, but that wasn’t the cause of her death.”

“She was so much fun to hang out with,” Marc Molinaro, one of her good friends, said from Florida, where he now lives. “It’s a friggin’ shame what happened to her.”

One evening last week, her best friend sat at the back corner of Poor Henry’s bar, in Montville, New Jersey, flipping through a photo album with tears running down her cheeks. “You see her face?” Natalie Basniak said. “She’s smiling! She was a happy girl. She was such a happy girl!”

***

She was born on August 3, 1974, to Frank Fiorina and his first wife, Patricia Fiorina. “A sweet little girl, a good girl,” Easler said.

Her parents’ divorce was finalized in December 1983, according to Virginia public records, when she was 9 years old.

“I had known her since she was six years old,” Carly Fiorina would write in Rising to the Challenge. “I fell in love with her and her big sister, Tracy, almost before I fell in love with their father, my husband, Frank.” He was a high-performing salesman for AT&T. “Lori had long blond hair and bright, sparkling eyes. We came into each other’s lives just when we needed each other the most. Lori was a bouncy, happy, and loving child. I was a manager at AT&T, eager for a family. In Frank and Tracy and Lori, I found my family.” She tried but could not, she has said, have “children of my own.”

The girls lived mainly with their biological mother, in Northern Virginia, where Lori Fiorina went to Osbourn Park High School in Manassas.

According to the school’s yearbook from 1993, the year she graduated, she was on the gymnastics team and the volleyball team and in the varsity band and the concert band. She was a member of the debate team and the Pom Pom Squad and the National Honor Society. She was active in the Future Business Leaders of America. She was involved as a senior with Students Against Drunk Driving.

She visited and vacationed with her father and her stepmother, who lived in New Jersey for their jobs with AT&T.

On May 15, 1994, less than three months before her 21st birthday, she was charged with possession of alcohol by a minor, according to court records in Manassas. That October, she pleaded guilty, losing her driver’s license for 90 days.

Carly Fiorina, a year before she became one of the top executives at Lucent Technologies, a lucrative AT&T spinoff, took her stepdaughter to tour colleges she might attend after she started at Virginia Tech but decided to transfer. “Lori,” Basniak told me, “valued very highly Carly’s opinion on things,” considering her “her second mom.” She picked Fairleigh Dickinson University, its Florham Park campus in Madison, New Jersey, not far from the stately, tree-shrouded house on a cul-de-sac in Morristown where her father and stepmother lived—and where she lived, too, while going to FDU.

She was a member of the Theta Phi Alpha sorority. She was a cheerleader. She was a bartender at Lone Star Steakhouse. “She did not want to ask for money,” Basniak said. “She wanted to make her own money.” Her family worried at times that she “drank too much in college,” her stepmother would write, adding that later “Lori began abusing prescription drugs” and “also struggled with bulimia for years,” things she hid from even her best friends. But in May 1998, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, she graduated from FDU as a psychology major, cum laude.

Dan Calcagnetti was one of her psychology professors. “I recall that Lori was a pleasant young lady with a smile on her face,” he told me, “and she was good in the classroom and engaged.”

“She was super smart,” Basniak said, “and very competitive when it came to her studies.”

“She knew she wanted to be successful. She knew she wanted to have a good job,” Molinaro said. “I definitely think she felt the pressure of who her stepmom was. Not that Carly put pressure on her. That’s not the case. She wanted to be successful.”

After she graduated, five months before Fortune put Carly Fiorina on its cover, dubbing her the most powerful woman in American business and paving the way to the H-P hire, Lori Fiorina started working selling pharmaceuticals for Express Scripts, living in a small brick apartment in Parsippany, New Jersey.

On weekends, she went out with friends, often watching football at Doc’s, the bar in a fading Holiday Inn on busy Route 46 in Totowa. She liked the Pittsburgh Steelers and Jack Daniel’s and Coke.

“We flirted with the bartenders,” Basniak said. “It was fun. We’d get free drinks.”

“We weren’t doing anything that normal people our age weren’t doing,” Molinaro said. “We were going out and having a good time. Normal stuff.”

She married Chris Feathers, whom she knew from high school, in a wedding at the Hilton in Parsippany, and they moved into a townhouse in Parsippany in 2002. She changed her last name, but to a hyphenated version, because she still “wanted people to know Fiorina,” Basniak said.

In 2005, as her stepmother’s controversial tenure as CEO came to an end, Lori Fiorina-Feathers moved to Richmond, Virginia, with her husband, whose job with Wells Fargo transferred him there. Two hours south of her biological mother and her older sister, and a day’s drive from her core group of friends in northern New Jersey, she stayed working for Express Scripts, from home.

***

“I was afraid to meet them,” Carly Fiorina wrote of her stepdaughters, in Tough Choices, her first memoir, published in 2006, her way of reintroducing herself to the public after her firing, “because I knew I’d be pulled deeper into his life. Tracy was grown up beyond her years and protective of her father. Lori was starved for affection. I fell in love with both of them too, over our first meal together—Chinese takeout. From then on there was no escape. Frank asked me to marry him as we sat in the car in his mother’s driveway on Easter Sunday. Tracy was discreet enough to be with her grandmother but Lori was bouncing up and down with great excitement in the backseat. She’d picked the ring.” On the day she married their father, in 1985, Fiorina said, “I gave each of the girls a delicate gold bracelet. I told them I would not try to replace their mother, but I loved them with all my heart and would be their special guardian.”

Now, as Fiorina was promoting her book and getting up to $100,000 for paid speeches around the country and world, her stepdaughter was having a tough time in Richmond.

“It wasn’t the same for her,” Basniak said. “She didn’t have her family. She didn’t have her friends.”

She was taking antidepressants and antianxiety medication, which she kept in a frosted-plastic box that was “filled, filled,” according to Basniak, but her friend didn’t know of any other prescription pill abuse.

Chris Feathers said twice that he didn’t want to talk to me. “No thank you,” Feathers told me the first time I called. “I think I made it pretty clear,” he said the second.

In 2006 and 2007, though, Feathers “was calling us,” Molinaro told me, “and really worried about her. … Chris was like, ‘I just don’t know what to do. She’s drinking all the time.’”

On July 3, 2007, a little before midnight, Lori Fiorina-Feathers ran a red light in her BMW, tried to make a right turn and drove over a median and ran into a Volkswagen.

“She continued to drive a little bit,” Bernice O’Donnell, the driver of the Volkswagen, told me on the phone. Then she got out and started to try to walk away. “I said, ‘Hey, where are you going?’” O’Donnell said. “She said, ‘Home.’”

She tried to exchange insurance information but was slurring her words, O’Donnell said, and what she had written on a piece of paper “was not legible.”

The police measured her blood alcohol content at 0.27, nearly three and a half times the legal limit, and she was arrested shortly before 1 in the morning, according to police records.

In the ensuing year and a half, according to court records, as Carly Fiorina traveled extensively as a surrogate for John McCain’s presidential campaign, calling herself a “change warrior” in her first political endeavor, her stepdaughter was in and out of courtrooms and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and rehab facilities—paid for by her father and her stepmother, Basniak told me. “Good ones. Nice ones.”

On January 3, 2008, Fiorina-Feathers was sentenced for her DUI to 12 months in the Richmond City Jail, but almost all of her sentence was suspended, allowing her to do 10 days of weekend community cleanup. She had to report for interviews at the jail the two subsequent weekends. She didn’t. She had to have installed in her car an “ignition interlock system” to “measure and record the blood alcohol content at each attempted ignition.”

In the early hours of August 6, 2008, a deputy for the Henrico Sheriff’s Office took her from the emergency room at St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond to the Richmond Community Hospital. It’s unclear from court records why she was in the hospital and why sheriff’s deputies transferred her, but her case manager the next day faxed notification to the judge in her case that she had failed to finish her treatment at the Capital Area Alcohol Safety Action Program.

Her marriage, according to her friends, was all but over.

Carly Fiorina and her father “pleaded with Lori to move closer to her family,” her stepmother wrote in Rising to the Challenge. “But as many addicts do, she literally ran away from the people trying to help her.”

“There were plenty of people who wanted to help her,” Molinaro told me. “Her parents were trying to help. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want help.”

“Sometimes there’s just no help,” said Easler, her grandmother.

She started planning a move back to New Jersey, close to the college campus where she had been a cum laude graduate, close to her old apartment and her old townhouse, close to the house where her father and stepmother had once lived, and where she had once lived, before they had moved to California to be near H-P’s headquarters. She hoped, said her friends, that the area could be for her what it had been before, even though most of her friends had gotten jobs, gotten married, moved.

On January 8, 2009, she emailed the property manager of the Highlands at Morris Plains, a brick-and-tan-siding complex with two buildings and a clubhouse and leasing center, around the corner from a 24-hour laundromat, a Dunkin’ Donuts and the local police station.

“I need to move quickly on this, please let me know,” she wrote from her Yahoo account. “Lori Fiorina.”

***

On February 11, 2009, according to public records in Virginia, her divorce from Chris Feathers became final.

Nine days later, in California, her stepmother was diagnosed with breast cancer, requiring chemotherapy as Carly Fiorina mulled over running for a U.S. Senate seat.

Not quite a month after that, on March 18, an employee at an Acme grocery store near the Highlands at Morris Plains called 911, according to police records, describing an adult female having a seizure. Paramedics showed up. Lori Fiorina refused medical assistance. It was 11:35 in the morning on a Wednesday.

A judge in Richmond, “having received notification from the Capital Area Alcoholic Safety Action Program that the defendant is in non-compliance,” revoked her driver’s license outright and set a court hearing for April 15.

On April 13, around 8:30 at night, Patricia Fiorina called the police in Morris Plains, telling them her daughter was saying she was “feeling ill.” Paramedics took her to Morristown Memorial Hospital. A social worker there faxed Patricia Fiorina a short letter, without mentioning specifics, confirming that Lori Fiorina was “hospitalized in the Intensive Care Unit.”

On May 1, from her apartment, Lori Fiorina called the police. She was feeling “dizzy” and “faint.” The paramedics returned. On May 30, she was found in the lobby of her apartment building, “passed out and shaking.” The paramedics returned.

Out of the hospital, back in her apartment, she called Basniak often, in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night.

On July 11, just after midnight, after having not heard from her for days, Basniak and Molinaro tried to buzz into her building. No answer. They called the police. Officers brought her down to the lobby, where her friends were waiting. “We were, like, ‘Oh my God, are you OK?’” Molinaro said. “This once-strong woman,” Basniak said, “she could do anything, and then she came back, and she was a completely different person.” After college, in her 20s, before she had gone to Richmond, Basniak said, “she could do anything. She was very confident, very confident, and then …”

Frank Fiorina called the police the next afternoon, asking them to please check on her. Her door was open. She was inside, according to the officer’s report, “intoxicated.”

The officer asked her if she wanted help.

She said no.

Later in July, her mother called the police, and her father called the police, asking them for welfare checks “on daughter who recently lost job and was described as being very depressed,” one report said. “Has been unresponsive to his phone calls,” another report said. Lori Fiorina didn’t answer her door.

On August 10, her mother called the police. An officer went to the apartment. Mail was sitting on the handle of the door. The door was unlocked. The officer opened the door and called for her. There was garbage on the floor, dog feces on the floor. Lori Fiorina “appeared,” the officer wrote in his report, “disheveled and nervous.” She told him she would call her parents “when time permitted.”

On August 26, the police at her apartment again, she “just asked to be left alone.”

The last time Frank Fiorina talked to his daughter was September 7, 2009.

The last time anybody talked to her, from what he told the police, was September 24.

On September 29, a month and a half after her apartment complex had initiated the paper work, a judge in Morris County issued a warrant of removal, an eviction notice.

Basniak, who had gotten used to the constant calls, when she was at work, when she was sleeping, noticed they had stopped again. She called Frank Fiorina. She called Patricia Fiorina. The police went back to the Highlands at Morris Plains, to her third-floor, two-bedroom apartment. They opened the door, which was unlocked. They saw her two Boston terriers. They saw the dogs’ excrement and urine on the floor. They walked into the kitchen, then into the living room, where they saw, between the couch and the coffee table, on her back and “obviously deceased,” Lori Ann Fiorina.

***

A brief obituary, saying she was from Manassas, Virginia, and once had lived in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, ran on October 15, 2009, three days after she was found, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

That day, Talking Points Memo linked to the obituary, and Carly Fiorina’s chief of staff sent a statement: “Carly and Frank Fiorina are deeply saddened by the loss of their youngest daughter, Lori. This is a difficult time for the family and they appreciate all good thoughts, prayers (and) respect for their privacy during this time of grief and healing.”

Three weeks later, Carly Fiorina announced she was running for the U.S. Senate. On November 4, in Garden Grove, California, she wore gray, close-cropped hair. “After months of chemotherapy,” she said, her opponent “Barbara Boxer’s not so scary.” She said nothing about the death of her stepdaughter.

In December 2009, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Fiorina had been “intensely private about her personal life.” About her stepdaughter’s death, the newspaper said, she had “acknowledged condolences” but otherwise hadn’t spoken about it in public at all.

Three weeks before Election Day in 2010, she brought it up. “We’ve had a tough couple of years in our family,” she said at an Italian restaurant in Sacramento, to a crowd of about 50 supporters, all women, according to the Associated Press. “We lost a daughter. I battled cancer. I lost hair.” She lost to Boxer by 10 percentage points.

By this year, though, Fiorina opted to open Rising to the Challenge with the officers in California telling them the news from New Jersey. She said “Frank collapsed in a chair.” She said she “sat on the carpet next to him, my arms wrapped around his knees.” She said they “leaned into each other and sobbed.”

“Virtually every minute of every day after those two police officers stood in our living room, Frank and I wondered what signs we had missed, what we could have done differently to help Lori overcome her demons,” she went on to write. “It is in the torture of second-guessing that every parent who has lost a child to addiction goes through. What breaks my heart the most, though, is the look that grew in Lori’s eyes as her addictions overcame her. There is an old saying, ‘The eyes are the windows to the soul.’ As Lori grew progressively sicker, the potential-filled girl I knew disappeared from behind her eyes. The light, the sparkle she once had, left her. What remained what a dull, flat void. It was the look of hopelessness. And that look is what haunts me most. …

“Later,” Fiorina continued, “when I ran for the U.S. Senate in California, I saw this look in the eyes of more people than I should have.”

She talked about unemployment and what she sees as the diminishment of the American dream.

“Some,” Fiorina wrote, “survey this bleak landscape and see the signposts on the road of the inevitable decline of America. … Me? I think of Lori, and I see an ocean of untapped potential.”

“Jake, Jake,” she said at the debate in September.

She wasn’t the only one on the stage in Simi Valley who was a parent of a person who had a problem with addiction.

Jeb Bush’s daughter was arrested in Florida in 2002 when she was 24 for trying to buy Xanax with a fraudulent prescription; nine months later, in rehab, she was found with crack cocaine. This past August, in Merrimack, New Hampshire, Bush said at a town hall that addiction is “a lifetime challenge,” then added, without using her name or detailing any of the circumstances: “And, look, I have some personal experience in this, just as a dad ….” At the debate, though, during the drug back-and-forth, he didn’t bring her up. He talked about his own use of marijuana as a teenage prep school student.

Fiorina dismissed the admission.

“We need to tell young people the truth,” she said. “Drug addiction is an epidemic, and it is taking too many of our young people, I know this sadly from personal experience.”

Two days after the debate, at a candidates forum in front of a big crowd at the Bon Secours Wellness Arena in Greenville, South Carolina, Nikki Haley, the governor of the state, said to Fiorina on the stage, “So now, let’s go mom to mom. You spoke very eloquently about the death of your daughter. We are seeing now in South Carolina and across this country heavy prescription drug abuse. We’re continuing to see alcohol and drug abuse. You didn’t have the opportunity to really get that out in the debate, and I wanted to just ask you about that, because I think so much of what we do is so our kids have a better life, and so much of what we do is so that future generations don’t have to go through the pains that we have. What can you tell us about that?”

Fiorina, dressed in a red suit, took a breath. She clutched the microphone.

“So our daughter struggled with all of those things,” she said. “Prescription drugs. Alcohol.

“When someone is addicted,” she continued, “you—you watch them disappear before your eyes. You watch the—I call it the demons of addiction. They are overcome by the demons of addiction. And in our daughter’s case, she simply did not have the physical strength to go on.”

She mentioned the “long, painful journey with Lori” and the need to “invest more in the treatment of mental illness, including addictions.” She talked about how “we have the highest incarceration rates in the world, and yet two-thirds of the people in jail are there for nonviolent, drug-related offenses. We are not helping people.”

She paused.

“Honestly,” Fiorina said, “the reason I am running for president is because I do not want to see hope fading from anyone’s eyes.”