The Full Audit Put A Price On His Paper Purchases

I left the check on his desk.

"My lawyer will read the agreement."

"Lawyers eat settlements, Carmen. You could have eighteen thousand dollars tomorrow."

"I couldn't have my name tomorrow."

He pushed the papers into an envelope. I took that, because Elena needed the exact words. I did not sign.

At eleven the next morning, she sent a refusal.

At twelve ten, Lucian suspended me without pay. His email said my presence could affect the audit.

I handed June my headset.

"Don't argue with him for me," I told her.

"I'm not," she said. "I'm keeping the pickup canceled."

Outside, the wind blew my coat open. I sat in my car until I could fit the key into the ignition without missing.

Being right did not make the mortgage smaller. It did not stop me from adding my checking balance three times before I bought groceries.

Isabel offered money. I accepted $600 as a loan and wrote the amount in my kitchen notebook. She rolled her eyes, then signed beside it.

"Now I know where you get it," she said.

The full audit took four weeks.

I answered questions in scheduled meetings with Elena present. June brought records under the auditor's written access plan. Nadine gave permission for her receipts to be used and answered the investigator herself.

She did not call to ask if I was frightened.

She called to ask if I had eaten.

One wet Thursday, Owen asked us to attend a findings meeting at Dr. Ward's office. Lucian came with a lawyer. I sat across from him, with my hands flat on the table.

There were no speeches. Owen gave each of us the same numbered report.

Of 312 loan records in the review period, 286 had been entered as permanent purchases without proof of a permanent delivery. The other twenty-six matched valid purchases or remained correctly marked as trials.

The false purchase charges totaled $1,389,960.

Patients had paid $817,430 against them. Another $572,530 remained on their accounts as money owed.

I checked the addition in the margin. Both numbers reached the total.

Owen explained that he had not counted the separate, agreed trial fees as false purchases. Nadine's $80 trial fee, for example, was listed apart from the $4,860 she had paid against the purchase entry. The audit kept those lines separate.

"We're returning money charged without a valid purchase," he said. "We aren't pretending no care was given."

I was glad he said it. The fittings had been real. So had the hours I spent helping people use the aids. Lucian had taken that care and attached another bill to it.

"These are not missing decimal points," Owen said.

The report listed repeated serial numbers, signed returns, warehouse records, and patient replies. There were no supplier orders for hundreds of new pairs. The same small pool of trial aids kept coming back to our cabinet.

Some had been listed as permanent deliveries after the patient had already returned them.

Others had been called permanent on one account while signed out on trial to someone else.

Nadine's delivery receipt appeared beside her return card. Her four payments appeared on the next page.

Heel Taps was still there, in my plain handwriting.

Lucian's lawyer spoke.

"Our client disputes the suggestion that this establishes intent."

Owen turned to a system-access table.

The purchase batches had been loaded through Lucian's billing account. My account had no rights to create sales, post payments, or run that import.

June had supplied an email in which Lucian told her to leave the conversion entries alone until after the sale. She had asked him why returned trials showed unpaid purchase balances.

"I thought he meant a repair to the system," she said. "I kept the message because the balances never changed."

The supposed billing contractor had never been hired. Lucian had now described the work as something he handled himself.

Dr. Ward closed the report.

"Those receivables were part of your asking price."

Lucian stared at the table.

He had thought my handwriting made me easy to erase. But I had kept the signed record of where his equipment had really gone. My arrows could be argued over. A patient taking a pair home, then signing it back in, had dates and witnesses.

"My notes weren't the source of these entries," I said.

Owen pointed to his conclusion.

"The records support that. I'll correct my earlier risk memo to say so."

Lucian stood.

"This meeting is over."

"The purchase is over," Dr. Ward said. "The records review isn't."

That afternoon, the investigator requested the full report through the clinic's lawyer. Elena sent my pay history and the proposed confession to Lucian's lawyer under a separate cover.

I went home with my copy of the report and put it beside Isabel's loan note.

For the first time in a month, I slept through the night.

The following Tuesday, Elena called before breakfast.

"The state has filed a civil complaint," she said. "There's a hearing in Dover. They want you there with the original loaner cards."