Chapter 5 - The Pictures He Shouldn't Have Had
I stared at the hospital photographs for so long that the office lights switched off automatically around me.
In one image I lay asleep with my injured arm suspended above the bed. A number was written on a board behind me. In another, Evelyn sat propped against pillows in a brace, looking toward a window. The photographs weren't from any public news report I remembered. Some were taken from a hallway, others through a partly open door.
Dana asked me to handle the prints as little as possible and document how I received them. She advised me to contact the hospital's privacy office with copies and the circumstances, and to make a report about the unwanted encounter. We didn't know who took the pictures or how they were obtained. Assuming Grant had breached a medical record system would have been a leap the evidence didn't support.
The next day I received an email from Maureen asking me not to "create unnecessary attention". She said Grant was concerned about Cole's career and wanted everyone to reach an amicable arrangement. I forwarded it to Dana and did not reply.
Evelyn looked at the photos that evening. Her fingers stopped on the picture of herself in the brace.
"I remember this day," she said. "My sister had just told me the doctors thought I'd be able to walk with aids. I'd been frightened I would never leave that bed."
"I don't understand how Grant got these."
"Maybe somebody sent them during the original investigation. I want to know. But I don't want us to spend the rest of our lives reacting every time he produces a new piece of paper."
She had a point. We needed a plan that wasn't controlled by Grant's timing.
Dana arranged for independent counsel to review Evelyn's position and begin an evaluation of any remaining avenues for compensation. The insurer responded that an older adjuster file had been located in archival storage. Dana requested its contents through proper channels rather than trying to force access.
Meanwhile Cole called me once, through Dana's office. He said he had learned that his cousin had been keeping copies of the original claims correspondence in a safe at the family company's headquarters. Grant controlled that safe's access and was now claiming he had never seen the accident photographs.
"Why would he keep them?" I asked.
"He handled our insurance issues for years. He was supposed to be the responsible one."
"Responsible for whom?"
Cole looked away through the video screen. "The company. Me. The family name. I thought those things were the same."
I told him how the hospital photographs had arrived. He looked shocked, but I had learned that shock wasn't evidence. I asked him to tell his lawyer and the investigators what he knew, then ended the call.
The studio director asked whether I wanted to take leave. I loved my job helping communities design accessible parks and walkways, but concentration had become difficult. I was making small drafting mistakes and staying late to correct them.
"I don't want to disappear because a man is trying to frighten me," I said.
"Then don't disappear. Change the schedule. Work from home on the days you need to. You've done that for other people. You're allowed to accept it yourself."
I spent a weekend revising plans for a coastal overlook with a gentle ramp. Each slope had to work for someone pushing a wheelchair, someone walking with a cane, a parent using a stroller, and a person who simply tired more easily. Designing those paths had become a way to transform the years I'd lost to medical appointments into something another person could use.
On Monday Dana called with news from the insurer's archive. The old file included an internal note recording that a witness had identified a damaged Bennett company pickup near the crash site. That identification had been deemed inconclusive, and no named driver was established. More important, the file contained a later letter from a Bennett company representative denying that the pickup had been used that evening.
The letter was signed by Grant.
I asked Dana what it meant.
May you like
"It means we have another contemporaneous statement to evaluate against the new evidence," she said. "And we need to know whether he had a factual basis for making it."
I looked out the window at a path my team had drawn across an empty field. The curve had never been the whole story. Somebody had decided what the investigators were allowed to see afterward.
