Free Come Home by Lisa Scottoline Page B

Jill wasn’t surprised by Megan’s defending William, because she always did, which was why these conversations were no-win. “It’s not ‘follow your dream,’ like American Idol. You can follow your dream, but you have to be practical, too.”
    “So he couldn’t afford to pay for his dream.”
    “No, he didn’t really have a dream. His only dream was being rich, and that doesn’t count as a dream. That’s just plain greed.”
    Megan blinked.
    “Pretty soon I could see a pattern, and I knew it would never end. No matter how much money I gave him, it would never be enough. If I let him, he would bankrupt me.”
    Megan frowned. “So that’s it ? That’s all ?”
    Jill felt her chest tighten. “One day he asked me for a lot of money, for another business venture.”
    “How much did he want?”
    “$325,000.”
    “Wow.” Megan’s eyes flared, though Jill knew she had no idea how much or how little that was. If it was as much as an iPhone, it was a lot.
    “I said no.” Jill wouldn’t tell her that the money William asked for had belonged to Megan. It was her inheritance, since Gray’s parents had established a small trust for her after his death. Gray hadn’t had any life insurance; they both thought he was too young to die, and in fact, he was. “And when I said no, he asked me to take out a loan for it, and I refused. Then he did something that broke the camel’s back.”
    “What?”
    Jill hesitated, but maybe it was time. “He used to come to the office at night and bring you. He’d wait for me, and you’d play with the toys in the waiting room, then we’d go out to dinner.”
    “I remember, it was fun.”
    “I thought he came by to see me, but he didn’t. It turned out that he was stealing from my office.”
    Megan’s lips flattened, and Jill could see hurt flicker across her face.
    “Petty cash went missing, and drug samples. It took us a long time to notice, because we weren’t talking to each other about it, with all the work we had to do. He did it in small amounts, especially the pads.”
    “He took pads? Like school supplies?”
    “No, prescription pads. People sell them to other people so they can get prescription drugs, illegally.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes. You can get as much as fifty dollars for a blank prescription, and they’re usually bought by people addicted to pain meds, like Oxycontin and Vicodin. We didn’t know who was stealing ours, but it was William.”
    Megan fell silent, wounded, for William, and Jill kicked herself for starting the story. She decided not to tell Megan about the money William had taken from her purse, or his trick of using her ATM card before she was even awake, withdrawing amounts too small to notice, until too late.
    “You okay, sweetie?” Jill reached across the table and rested her hand on top of Megan’s.
    “How do you know he stole the pads? You could have been wrong.”
    Jill sighed inwardly. “No, actually, we caught him in the act.”
    “Really?” Megan asked, hushed.
    “He was caught in the basement, taking old pads out of the box. We left them down there, out of the locked cabinet, to catch the bad guy. We even set up a hidden video camera, which was my idea. I never thought the bad guy would be my own husband.”
    Megan set down her fork, stricken.
    “It was a terrible thing he did, embarrassing to me, and worse, it could have ruined me and all of the docs in our group. My colleagues, my friends. We could’ve lost our licenses.”
    “He didn’t have to go to jail, did he?”
    “No.” Jill felt touched, and saddened, that Megan was still concerned for William. “The group didn’t report it, out of kindness to me, but I had to leave the practice and I paid back every penny he took. I was lucky to get work anywhere else, after all the gossip. That’s why I took the job at Pembey Family. They were the only ones who made an offer.”
    Megan blinked. “Do you think he cheated on you?”
    “I don’t know, and I don’t