Page 122 of Last Chance Love

This place could have been home if I had just given it that chance. Now though? Now, I realized what I was set to lose, and I didn’t know if I could ever get it back. Despite Leon’s desperate hope for this endeavor, there was no indication it would work out.

It was depressing to realize what you had only when you’d lost it.

“Ah, here,” I said, pulling myself out of my thoughts as the programfinallyloaded. The program was shut down near the end of every shift, and then, on the new one, it was loaded back up again. Mostly so the computers could be restarted, the damn thing tended to eat up cache and, after a few hours, would inevitably drag the computer down to?—

“Uh, Reed?”

“Sorry, thinking to myself.”

“Less thinking, more typing.”

There was a certain irony to the fact that I was using Dr. Gideon’s login when I had supposedly been doing that to commit my crimes. It would be just my luck that his account had been used to cover ‘my’ crimes in the first place. If that were true, it was bad luck that made me look even more guilty in Mona’s eyes, or it was someone who knew I disliked the older man and had used it. Which narrowed the list even further…or indicated the man himself.

Nah, that would require way too much effort, so I was pretty sure he was in the clear as a suspect.

“Alright, let’s see here,” I said, feeling a sense of trepidation while I typed his information into the system correctly. I could have used Alice’s or another doctor’s, but Dr. Gideon was on-site today. The last thing I needed was to leave behind evidence that someone else was in the clinic tonight. “Let me do some digging.”

“Looking up the symptoms that would match addiction?”

“Not really addiction, but overuse of them specifically.”

“Is there a difference?”

“The difference between someone who would obviously be going through serious withdrawal and those who are just abusing the pills.”

“That…you know what? I leave that up to you.”

“Good man.”

Thankfully, as clunky as the damn program was when it came to navigating basic things, there were some advantages to its bloated demands. I could run multiple searches in different windows to compare. Thankfully, since the system was recently rebooted, it was fresh and ready to run searches without taking as much time as it took to get it up and running.

“Okay, I’ve got things pulled up to show me those who repeatedly showed the symptoms over the past year.”

“A year?”

“I don’t know how long this has been going on. I think Mona would have taken action if it had been sooner than that.”

“Or whoever did this finally screwed up badly enough to raise the alarm.”

“Also possible, but going too far back would make it more confusing.”

“Again, I'm just going to trust whatever you say.”

“Good, now let’s see here.”

I began sorting through the names, trying to move quickly without risking missing something. The clock was ticking, and I knew we needed to head back soon. Max might have been willing to let Leon have some private time with me, but that didn’t mean he would be content to allow us to roam around. I didn’t know if he’d end up reporting us if he found us out, but at the very least, we could prevent him from needing to make that choice.

“There are a handful of patients, but…mmm, I can take some of them out of the mix because they aren’t chronic, but…damn.”

“What?”

“It’s not a very large list.”

“No?”

“Looks like I was right about Dom. He’s right there on the list, but man, Dane too.”

“What? No way!”

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