The Daughter They Abandoned Is the Doctor They Can't Reach novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Dinner

On Saturday the hospital held its dinner in a hotel ballroom, with round tables and a screen showing a slide of Dr. Holm at forty.

My father was upstairs on the cardiac floor with a new stent in his artery and a nurse who disliked him.

He would live, and the cardiologist had told me so in a hallway, in plain words, without being asked.

I had thanked her and gone to put on a dress.

Dr. Holm was sixty-nine now.

She had retired from the emergency department two years ago, her hair was nearly white, and she still wore her badge clipped to her belt out of habit.

She stood at the edge of the stage when I came up, and she looked me over.

"You look like you haven't slept."

"I was on at five this morning."

"Good. Nobody who sleeps is any use." She put a hand on my arm and took it away. "I heard about Thursday."

"Who told you?"

"Your cousin. She calls me, you know. On holidays."

"She never said."

"She's learned from you." Dr. Holm adjusted her glasses. "Let's get this over with."

The hospital's chief of medicine gave a long speech about the scholarship's ten years of graduates.

Forty-one students, he said, had gone through the Brightwater Pathways program since it started, and twenty-nine were now practicing.

Then it was my turn.

I walked to the podium with a card in my hand, and I put the card down.

"Good evening. Dr. Holm told me I could have three minutes, so this will take two."

They laughed, and she did not.

"Eleven years ago I sat across a table from her in a borrowed blazer," I said. "She asked me why I wanted to be a doctor. I told her about a night nurse who explained a monitor to me when nobody else would."

← Chapter 20 · All chapters · Chapter 22 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend