They Chose the Daughter I Found, So I Called In Their Loans novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Name

My father came out of the cath lab with a stent in the main artery of his heart.

His pulse was strong enough that a first-year could have read it from the doorway.

I waited outside the cardiac unit until midnight, in my scrubs, with a paper cup of vending-machine coffee.

The hospital board chair found me there.

She was a gray-haired woman in a navy suit who had been at the lunch, and she shook my hand with both of hers.

"Dr. Selwyn," she said. "I want you to know I watched two hundred of my donors see what you did. Three of them have asked me your name. One has asked me for a lunch."

"Thank you."

"The Selwyn Foundation may feel differently," she said, lower. "I'm not going to pretend it won't come up. But I'd say it was a good day for this hospital."

Down the hall my mother stood with Clary beside the unit doors.

My mother had heard every word.

She turned her back.

At one in the morning a nurse came for me.

"He's awake," she said. "He's asking for you. Just you."

My father lay propped on three pillows with a monitor beeping beside his head.

He looked a good deal smaller than he had at the head of the table.

His red color was gone, and his big hands lay open on the blanket.

"Jacqueline," he said.

"Dad."

His mouth moved.

"I'm told you were the one," he said. "On the stage. They tell me I was dead for some minutes, and you brought me back in front of the entire Foundation."

"Yes."

"I won't pretend I understand it."

"I'm a doctor," I said. "I'm a third-year resident in emergency medicine."

"Since when?"

"Since I was twenty-five. You were at my graduation."

"I thought it was an administrative degree." He closed his eyes. "You never said."

"You never asked."

He didn't argue.

After a while he opened them again.

"Well," he said. "Now we're even."

I stood very still.

"I took you in when you were three, and I put you through school, and tonight you saved my life," he said. "That's a fair account. Neither of us owes the other. It makes things easier for Gwen."

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