The Secret Behind the Screen
Part Two of the Story… 👇
Medical Fraud Investigation
Abigail sat in the silence of her living room, her breath catching in her throat as she stared at the glowing phone screen. Naomi. The name was familiar, yet buried deep under years of faded memories. Naomi was Spencer’s former business partner—the quiet young woman who had walked away from his printing shop eighteen months ago after a sudden, unexplained falling out. At the time, Spencer had claimed Naomi tried to embezzle money from the company. Abigail had believed him without question, comforting her son while he played the victim. Now, looking at the message, the foundation of every truth she had ever accepted began to crumble.
Her hands trembled as she typed out a response: Who are you really, and how do you know about the lottery?
The reply came almost instantly, as if Naomi had been waiting by her phone for hours. I don’t care about the lottery, Mrs. Riley. I care about the fact that your son has been faking his medical condition for over two years, and the doctor treating him is his accomplice.
A cold chill ran down Abigail’s spine, sharper than the betrayal she had felt outside Room 12. She wanted to throw the phone across the room. She wanted to yell that it was impossible. She had watched Spencer faint in her kitchen. She had seen him pale, sweating, and weak, hooked up to monitors in specialized clinics. She had held his hand through countless tearful nights, promising that she would sell every last asset she possessed to keep him alive.
Before she could process the accusation, another notification chimed. It was an attachment—a PDF document containing bank statements, private emails, and altered laboratory reports.
Look at the signatures, Mrs. Riley, Naomi sent next. Dr. Julian Vance isn’t a specialist at St. Jude. He’s an unaligned consultant who operates out of a private clinic Spencer set up using your late mother’s inheritance money. Spencer isn’t dying. He has a mild, completely manageable dietary deficiency. Everything else—the fainting spells, the low blood pressure, the specialized intravenous treatments—was engineered using prescribed, short-acting medications designed to mimic severe illness.
Abigail’s heart pounded against her ribs like a trapped bird. She opened the attached documents. Pages of financial records scrolled past her eyes, showing hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing out of her life savings, her loans, and her pawned heirlooms directly into a secondary offshore account co-owned by Spencer and Dr. Vance. The money she thought was buying life-saving medication was actually funding luxury real estate investments and high-stakes trading accounts.
The cruelest revelation hit her as she read through a series of text logs between Spencer and Dr. Vance dated just three weeks prior.
She’s running out of assets, Spencer had written to the doctor. Find a reason to recommend that experimental treatment in Switzerland. She’ll sell the house to cover it.
Abigail slumped back into her chair, the weight of thirty-four years of maternal devotion crashing down around her. She had lived in poverty, skipped meals, and worn frayed clothes, all to keep her son alive, while he sat in air-conditioned rooms calculating how to strip away her final shelter.
Her phone rang, shattering the heavy silence. It was Spencer. She let it ring until it went to voicemail, then immediately dialed a number Naomi had provided at the bottom of her message—the personal line of Marcus Vance, a private investigator specializing in white-collar medical fraud, who happened to be the estranged brother of Dr. Julian Vance.
