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Little Toy Bikers and a Woman on the Run
Chapter 154 Knock
After a couple of consultations, Tara had the day free. Instead of obsessing over Jax and what she was going to say to him, she played detective digging into the mystery of the hospital charging for services it wasn't equipped to provide.
It wasn't just Dr. Namid's patients that were billed for services that couldn't have been provided; it was almost all the patients including a couple of hers. She knew those patients' charts like the back of her hand. Someone was altering the charts to increase the billing amounts.
She wondered if the practice of billing for services that weren't being provided was limited to the Neo-natal unit of the hospital or if it extended throughout the entire hospital.
Finding out that it happened frequently in the Neo-natal unit only meant that the chart she'd seen wasn't a mistake. Someone was deliberating billing for non-existent services. Whoever was doing it had to be profiting from it in someway or he or she wouldn't be doing it.
Finding out who was responsible for the billings wouldn't be easy. It was going to take some thought to figure out how she was going to do it. She needed to follow the money, but she had no idea how to do that.
She needed to give it some thought before she followed through. No one would be happy except some insurance companies if she exposed the hospital's fraudulent billing practices.
What would happen if her discovery caused the hospital to close? She would actually become even more unpopular than she was already. Her lips twisted into a bitter smile. She kind of liked the idea if all the employees who watched her fight with Gemma lost their jobs, but there was a bigger picture to consider. If the hospital closed, it would hurt the community.
She drove home on her new route so she could go past Jax's house. It was a perfectly normal route and only a block or two longer than her previous route. Every time she turned down the street, her heart began to beat faster and her stomach knotted up.
His bike was there parked out in the driveway right in the middle. There wasn't room for Scarlett's car. Maybe that meant he wasn't expecting her, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to visit her.
She was so scared and nervous about seeing Jax that her hands shook as she tried to put the key into her front door. She'd take a shower and change her clothes and then she might go to Jax's. She still had the apology to deliver.
Never in her life had she felt such terror. Jax could crush her and destroy what was left of her heart. She loved him so much, she didn't know how she could go on knowing there was no chance of a future with him.
After a hot shower she pulled on jeans. She tried to put on a light blue blouse, but her hands were shaking too hard for her to button it. She switched to a red ruffled blouse that she could pull over her head.
She applied some blush because her skin was deathly pale. She added a little mascara and some red lip stain. It was the same that she used in high school.
Her stomach grumbled but she couldn't eat and risk throwing up on Jax. She'd done that once before. She smiled at the memory. They were drinking rum and coke when she vomited all over him. If she hadn't been so drunk, she would have been embarrassed.
Her hands had quit shaking, but now they felt numb. It was time to find out if she had make the biggest mistake of her life by moving to Charming. She couldn't throw up. Her stomach was empty. Short of losing control of her bladder, she should be able to get through a conversation with Jax without humiliating herself.
She climbed into her father's big old black Cutlass for the drive to Jax's. She drove past his house and continued on. Maybe the time wasn't right. Maybe she was too much of a coward to face him. Maybe she should just get the hell out of Charming and never have the relationship conversation with Jax. That last option was looking better and better.
She'd circled the block three times before she summoned up the courage to park her car on the street in front of Jax's house. Fear overwhelmed her, but she managed to get out of the car, lock it and walk to Jax's front door.
She knocked at the door and waited. She looked at her car and decided that she was going to make a run for it and leave the relationship conversation to a time when every pore in her body wasn't flooded with fear.
Too late. Jax opened the door.