My Boyfriend Tricked Me Into Leaking Patient Data — He Didn’t Know I Kept Copies

Part 2

I stood frozen behind my apartment door.

Three months had passed since Arthur had walked out of the hospital, and I hadn’t thought about him in weeks.

My heart was beating so fast I could feel it in my throat.

I finally opened the door and let the two men escort me downstairs.

They drove me across the city in absolute silence.

We eventually stopped at a building I had never seen before.

The corridor inside was long and deliberately dim.

It was the kind of space designed to make you feel small before you arrived wherever you were going.

A door opened at the end of the hall.

There was a table, a few chairs, and a man sitting at the far end.

He looked at me with a terrifying kind of stillness.

It wasn’t the stillness of someone trying to stay calm.

It was the stillness of someone who had never needed to be anything else.

He told me his name was Daniel Hayes, and he was Arthur’s son.

He said his father had passed away two weeks earlier.

In his final weeks, Arthur had talked constantly about a nurse in Ohio who had sat with him on a hospital floor and treated him like a human being.

Daniel said his father hadn’t said that about anyone in a very long time.

Then he told me he had just one question for me.

The way he said it made it perfectly clear that my answer mattered more than I could possibly understand.

He asked me what I remembered about Arthur.

My mind moved fast but came up completely empty.

Hundreds of patients had passed through my care since then.

I was desperately pulling at threads when I suddenly remembered my notebook.

I remembered sitting in that hospital room, writing while Arthur rested.

I remembered the faded tattoo on his wrist.

I said the name “Remy” out loud.

The atmosphere in the room shifted immediately.

The men standing near the door exchanged a quick look.

Daniel went still in a completely different way.

He looked less controlled and far more human, like a sudden shock had passed through him.

He told the other men to leave the room.

When the door closed, he leaned forward and told me exactly why I was sitting there.

Greg had been pulling confidential patient records from our hospital system and selling them on the black market.

He had been doing it for months.

The buyers were using that information to locate and pressure people connected to Daniel’s family.

Arthur’s hospital admission had moved through that exact same pipeline.

Someone had learned exactly where Arthur was because of information that had passed directly through Greg’s hands.

Arthur had spent the last weeks of his life being followed by people who should never have even known he existed.

Greg knew about Arthur, and Greg passed it on.

Greg was the reason Arthur had died frightened and alone.

I sat in that uncomfortable chair and let the horrible truth wash over me.

I thought about two years of dinners, phone calls, and casual questions about my work.

I had answered every single one of those questions without a moment of hesitation.

I didn’t cry.

I didn’t shake.

What settled inside me was cleaner, colder, and completely certain.

I was not going to look away from this.

But as I sat alone in my dark apartment later that night, a new, much more terrifying realization dawned on me.

How long had the man I loved been using me to sell people to their deaths?