Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 75705 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75705 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
There wasn’t even a place to type in the passcode. It required a fingerprint ID.
Fuck.
I did not have the technical skills required to try to break into a laptop, even if it had a password as simple as one, two, three, four. There was no way I was going to be able to get into a computer that had biosecurity.
I set the laptop on the desk and dug through the drawers—but found nothing in the front middle drawer other than a few pens and pads of paper.
Carefully, I put the laptop back in that drawer and closed it. The ones on the side held more office supplies as well as a bottle of lubricant and a few condoms. I didn’t want to think about what he had done on this desk before.
Putting all of that back, I went to the other side. The smaller top drawer opened, and it looked like there were a few leather portfolios. I pulled them out, set them on top of the desk, and went through them.
He had a background check on my notes about doctor visits from over the years, including notes from my psychiatrist when I was sixteen. But these notes had been changed.
When I was fifteen, I had been riding a horse that stepped into a gopher hole and broke his leg. The fall shattered my arm, and I’d watched as a new ranch hand fresh from Wyoming or somewhere came over to my prize-winning horse and shot him in the head.
The ranch immediately fired him, against my wishes, because of the way he’d handled it. According to my father, I shouldn’t have had to witness it, but I was glad I did.
Butterscotch was my horse, and it was my job to calm her and assure her as she passed.
After that incident, I was given painkillers for my arm, and my parents insisted that I get checked out by a psychiatrist to make sure there were no lasting effects from the trauma of seeing my pony die.
I was sad, but I understood what happened. I understood that killing the pony was doing it a service because his leg would never heal right. The horse would have spent the rest of his life in excruciating pain.
It was a hard lesson to learn, but I’d learned it with the grace and poise that was expected of me.
The notes I read in front of me were something completely different. They insinuated that I had not taken the incident well and that I had coped by abusing my pain medication.
It was ridiculous, but it didn’t matter.
The doctor’s signature was at the bottom of the page, right under where it diagnosed me as having an addictive personality and a problem with impulse control. The forms were fake, but they looked real.
If the wrong judge saw this, and if this was what Lucian used, then there was no way I was going to get out of this situation.
This information was dangerous for a woman like me.
Women nowadays joked about hysteria and being medicated, lobotomized, or any number of other gruesome things that men used to do to get rid of women.
Most women didn’t realize that for the elite class, the class that had old money that came over on the Mayflower with a fortune already intact, these practices were still very much alive.
No, they no longer manually stimulated a woman in a doctor’s office to reach orgasm and cure her of impure thoughts, at least not at any of my appointments.
However, there were repeated keywords that doctors used. Hysteria had now become manic episodes, or depression, having a nervous disposition, unbearable fatigue, hormonal imbalance, anger issues, the list went on and on.
I’d thought it was a thing of the past, too, until my mother’s friend Dorothy Howard’s husband had decided to leave her, trading her in for his secretary.
He’d wanted a divorce. She’d said okay. He forgot that the vast majority of his wealth came from her. When he saw how much of the estate she would get to keep, the house in the Hamptons, the jet, and even the vacation home in the Bahamas that his mistress loved so much, instead of divorcing her, he had her committed.
My mother and I visited her a few times. The grounds were beautiful, the staff was pleasant and attentive, but she was gone. They had her on so many medications the bright, funny woman I had called Aunt Dorothy had disappeared.
Lost somewhere in a haze of drugs and red Jell-O.
She died within the year.
The official diagnosis was suicide. They said that she had been storing her medications and then took them all at once, overdosing.
That was an interesting side effect they never told you about taking antidepressants. If you weren’t depressed, or if they gave you the wrong dosage or the wrong medication, it could make you depressed.