A Whole New Crowd (A Whole New Crowd #1)(78)

I nodded. The pieces were beginning to connect and I said for him, “Like the girl who went back home and was killed. You thought Jace would get hurt like that.”
“Jace was just a kid to me.”
“Yeah.” I picked up my knife and stood it upright. The tip rested on the table, grinding into it. “He manipulated you.”
“Yeah.” His head bobbed slowly. “I can see that now. I think they picked me because of what happened with the foster girl.” He looked at me again. A shine of tears in his eyes. They were sitting there, but they never spilled. “He talked to me about Brian, his brother, and about you. He talked about their dad. How their mom left them. I was emotionally involved before I realized it. I cared for Jace like he was my own son. I started talking to him about Mandy and Austin. I told him about the other girl. Her name was Cara. God,” he laughed bitterly, “I can’t believe I even told him her name, but he knew. Thinking back, he never reacted. He knew all of it. He probably knew everything about my children.”
I gritted my teeth.
He kept going, “A lawsuit was brought against me. I messed up in a surgery, and the case against me didn’t look good. I was going to lose my practice. Jace picked up that something was wrong, and I told him about it.” He paused for a moment. Then another moment. I sat and waited. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse. “He took care of it. Just like that. The case against me was gone. I didn’t know what he did. I didn’t want to know, but it was gone and I still had my future.”
“That’s when you started working for him?”
He nodded. “It started with one prescription, for his brother. Then his cousin. Then his friend. Then there was a list of five every day. I panicked. I didn’t want to keep working for him.”
He stopped, and I waited.
“Then the money started coming in. He paid me in the beginning, but it was nothing compared to what he paid me after I tried to stop. They dumped money in my bank account. If I had gone to the police, I would’ve looked guilty. I already looked guilty with the lawsuit. I still don’t know what Jace did to get the case dropped against me. I don’t know if I could handle that on my conscious.”
“This kept going?”
He nodded. “Years. I got in so deep. I was too far in and there was no way out and then I got a call one day. Someone died and the overdose came from a prescription I wrote. I didn’t know the person, but I had to pretend I did.”
I frowned. “Who called you?”
“It was a family member. They didn’t know who I was. They were trying to figure out how their sister got a bottle of pills when their family doctor had referred her to a treatment facility.” He stopped again. His breathing was becoming labored and his hand went to the counter. It was balled in a fist, but he forced his fingers to flatten. “I panicked. I hung up the phone and called Jace. He—”
He cut himself off.
“Let me guess.” My tone was wry. “He took care of it again.”
He nodded. “The protocol was that I was supposed to be eliminated. One of the patients they sent to me dropped a notebook, and there were rules written inside. He came back the next hour in a panic looking for it, but I lied. I told him he hadn't left anything or if he did, the garbage had been taken out so he shouldn’t worry. He still did. I could see the fear in his eyes. The next time I saw him was in the morgue. He had my card in his pocket so I was asked to identify his body.”
My stomach clenched, but it was faint. As he kept going, a layer of dirt was laid on top of another, then another, then another. There were so many layers, I was growing numb.
“Keep going.”
“Yeah.” He let out a sigh. His shoulders were slumped so far down that his forehead was almost resting on the counter now. He looked like half the man he had been when he first sat down. “Jace took care of it. I don’t know what he did, what he could’ve done, but he did something. There were no emails in the morning. No more patients sent to me. It was like I had been let go. I didn’t work for them anymore.” He shook his head. “I didn’t ask Jace because I didn’t want to know. I’m ashamed of myself. I can barely look at my own children when I’m home. I can barely handle being in the same room as my wife.”
“Then Jace came to you about me?”
He nodded. “I was golfing with a few of my friends when he showed up. I almost pissed my pants when I saw him driving towards me in a golf cart. He didn’t give me a choice. He handed me your file, said I needed to adopt you, and we were supposed to move. There was even a back story of what I could tell Shelly if she needed convincing.”
“That Brian was violent.” I remembered Austin’s words.
“Once I said that, Shelly was all-in. You were her mission. She wanted to save your life, whether you wanted to come along or not.”
I glanced at the boxes now. “You were supposed to move?”
“That was the other deal. As soon as we got the adoption papers signed, we were supposed to move. Jace was furious when we didn’t go, but I couldn’t convince Shelly to go. We didn’t want to argue where Mandy and Austin could overhear, so we left. We’d go to a hotel and check in and just fight about it.”
“Those were some of your trips?”
“Some of them. I’d get another reminder from Jace that we had to move, so I would call her to meet me. She didn’t want to move. That was the one thing she put her foot down about. She didn’t want to upset Mandy or Austin’s social lives. She said their well-being was too shaky and she wouldn’t do any more emotional harm to our children.” A hollow laugh came out of him, sounding like it was being dragged from the bottom of his throat. “I told her the truth. Once the adoption set-up came out, I told her most of it.”