The False Fitting Note Met My Train Ticket To Springfield

My train ticket was not enough by itself.

"Someone could argue you bought a ticket and stayed home," Rina said.

"I checked in at the course."

"Then we ask the course office."

They sent a record of my badge scans, a signed attendance sheet, and the practice session roster. At 2:20 on March 14, I had been helping a teacher show how to check heel position. Four people remembered me because I had drawn a fox on a foam wedge.

One had kept it.

Preston had approved my travel expense of $386.40. His approval email sat in my personal expense folder, where company policy told us to save receipts.

I read the email three times.

He had known where I was.

Rina laid the travel record beside the delivery note. Then she covered both with a plain sheet of paper.

"We have enough to file your case," she said. "We don't need to solve every bad act first."

The complaint named the clinic and Preston. It described the lost wages, the false statements sent to families, and the fitting entry that used my name. We asked for damages and a correction. Rina filed it in Winnebago County.

My name on that first page looked strange. It was the same name on my license, but now it sat above a case number.

"Will this get me back to work?" I asked.

"It can get you heard. We'll work on the rest."

With Keiko's written consent, Rina sent the evidence to the insurer's investigation office. She also submitted a complaint through the state licensing complaint process. Those reviews were separate from my case. I could not trade them away or order them to stop.

For the first time since the suspension, I slept until morning.

Then the clinic's lawyer called.

He offered $12,500 if I resigned, withdrew my civil claims, and signed a statement that fit problems could have arisen from my judgment. The proposed agreement said nothing about correcting the letters sent to parents.

"That's not a settlement," I told Rina. "That's buying my name."

She sent back one sentence: The offer was rejected.

The clinic then sent its safety accusation to the licensing office. Rina filed my response with the travel records attached. Until that review ended, I had to explain an open complaint as well as a suspension whenever a job application asked.

By then, my second missed paycheck had passed. I canceled a new set of tires and moved $1,326 into the mortgage account. Luz brought groceries without asking whether I needed them.

"You can pay me back in meals," she said.

"I'm a bad cook."

"Then this could become a very long debt."

I tried drawing animals for a craft shop, but each fox made me think of an exam chair. I missed the children. I missed asking them to take six steps and turn around.

Rina told me to record the jobs I applied for. Two clinics had openings. Both asked why I had left North Bend. One stopped answering after checking my reference.

We added the emails to the damages folder.

I also wrote down the hours I spent waiting for calls. Rina said those hours were not all dollars a court would award. I kept them anyway. They helped me see that looking for work was work, even when nobody hired me.

Keiko kept her own folder. It held missed work slips, appointment costs, and the bill for an extra pair of shoes that had not fixed the wrong brace. She was not in my lawsuit. Rina referred her to another attorney so her daughter's needs had their own voice.

"You don't have to carry our case too," Keiko told me.

"I keep thinking I should have seen it."

"You weren't there. That's on the paper too."

On a Thursday, a courier brought Preston's demand for the plaster models. He called them clinic property and accused me of taking patient material.

Rina answered with the signed storage agreement. She offered a supervised inspection and secure copying of the coded records. She refused an unsupervised handover.

"He wants the shelves," I said.

"He wants control of what's on them. Those are different things."

The next threat came from somewhere else.

The lab received a request to remove closed job files from its customer portal. Mara refused to remove the preserved originals and sent Rina the request. That afternoon, a clinic clerk also forwarded an email about clearing old order data at North Bend.

The email had gone out after the preservation letter.

Rina sought an urgent hearing to protect the records. I wore my only dark suit. The collar pressed against my neck as we waited outside the courtroom.

Preston arrived with two lawyers and a face full of sorrow.

"This is what you wanted?" he whispered as he passed.

I did not answer.

Inside, Rina handed the judge the clerk's email. Its subject line was Routine Data Cleanup. The scheduled start was forty minutes away.

The judge looked up from the page.

"Who," she asked Preston's lawyer, "has the authority to stop this?"