Chapter 9: Office Wi-Fi

Kipp pulled the Jeep onto the shoulder so fast the tires spat gravel.

He read both emails over my arm.

Then he read them again.

"Benzodiazepines," he said. "You. The girl who won't take Advil for cramps."

"Somebody reported me."

"Somebody." He laughed once, flat and ugly. "I wonder who."

I scrolled to the bottom of the hospital email.

They'd attached the complaint they received.

It came from an email address that was just a string of letters and numbers.

She steals her mother's prescription sedatives and has done so for months. Her family is trying to get her help.

Patients are not safe with her.

Her family.

I put my face in my wet hands.

Kipp didn't say anything funny.

He just put the Jeep back in gear and drove me home, and sat at the curb until my window went dark.

Dwight canceled the notary at breakfast.

He did it in front of my mother, with his reading glasses on and his voice soft and sad.

"We'll do the will when you're well, sweetheart," he said. "No rush now."

My mom cried into her coffee.

He rubbed her back and watched me over her head.

I didn't drink anything.

Torin's shop was a cinderblock unit in an industrial park off the 101, with two white vans out front.

His apartment was up a metal stair over the garage.

Downstairs smelled like solder and cold coffee.

The walls were lined with steel shelves of labeled boxes.

Every box had a date and an address in his small square printing.

"You keep everything," I said.

"Every install. Every log. Every clip anybody ever asked me to pull." He pushed his glasses up. "People lie. Files don't."

He sat me in the only good chair, at a workbench with three monitors.

He'd already been working since six.

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