Chapter 9 - THE SISTER WE CALLED CRAZY
Olivia drove from Richmond the next morning.
I had not seen her in almost two years.
She stood in my hospital doorway holding coffee and looking like she wanted to hug me but didn’t know whether she had permission.
I opened my arms.
We both cried.
Not because we were suddenly close.
Because we had both spent years living inside Derek’s descriptions of the other.
He told me Olivia was unstable.
He told Olivia I thought she was jealous.
He told Joanne Olivia wanted control of the company.
He told me Olivia wanted to destroy it.
Two women kept apart by one man’s interpretation.
When I was discharged, Olivia came with me to Simone’s office.
Then she told me what she had never been able to tell me while I still worked at Holloway Medical Transit.
She had gone to federal investigators.
Not immediately.
First she documented duplicate trips.
Then she requested an outside audit.
Then Derek removed some of her system access.
Joanne sided with him.
Olivia resigned.
Afterward, she contacted the HHS Office of Inspector General through counsel because some disputed transports involved federal healthcare programs and VA-related billing.
Investigators later coordinated with other federal authorities.
“I wasn’t trying to destroy the company,” she said.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
She looked at me.
“I wanted someone outside our family to tell me whether I was crazy.”
That sentence hurt.
Because I knew exactly what she meant now.
“What did they find?”
“I don’t know everything.”
She had cooperated where requested.
Provided documents she lawfully possessed.
Answered questions.
Then stopped talking publicly.
“The target letter?”
“Derek’s lawyer learned prosecutors considered him a potential target.”
“When?”
“Last week.”
The same week Derek became increasingly desperate about my interview.
The same week he accused Mason of being part of some plot.
The same week Joanne kept asking me not to “put family matters in strangers’ hands.”
I asked Olivia:
“Did Derek know you were the source?”
“He probably suspected.”
“Then why focus on me?”
Her expression hardened.
“Because I was already discredited.”
I stopped.
She continued.
“Rachel, he spent two years telling everybody I was unstable. By the time investigators took me seriously, the family had already decided anything I said came from resentment.”
“And me?”
“You were still credible.”
That was the answer.
Derek needed my credibility neutralized before I spoke.
The affair story.
The concerned texts.
The claims I forgot things.
The declaration shifting responsibility to me.
And now the crash story.
Three different systems.
Marriage.
Medicine.
Federal investigation.
One objective.
Make Rachel unreliable.
That was the deeper crime inside the violence.
May you like
Not merely hurting me.
Trying to own the meaning of the injury afterward.
