After Rejection, Divorced Luna Becomes a Famous Doctor novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: Bean

I took the address book from him.

The page was soft with age.

Next to the cross, in the same pencil, his father had written two more lines.

The name of a hospital in Philadelphia.

And underneath, smaller: V. says overdose. Ask about the ammonia.

"What?" Emerson said. "What does that mean?"

"It means your father didn't believe her either."

He went white around the mouth.

"Can you find out?"

"You can," I said. "You're a patient with a genetic disease. Your family history is part of your care. Your metabolic team can ask for his record, with your consent."

He signed the consent at my desk an hour later.

The record came nine days later, in early July.

The attending with the bow tie brought it to the Kitchen himself, in a manila envelope.

"I read it," he said. "I'm sorry. I had to. Call me after you do."

I read it alone in the back room, with the fish tank bubbling.

Then I called Emerson.

He came that evening and sat in the chair by my exam table.

I didn't make him read it.

I told him.

"Your uncle was twenty-eight," I said. "He went to a steakhouse with friends on a Friday night. By midnight he was confused and throwing up. By morning he was in a coma."

Emerson didn't move.

"They checked his blood for drugs. There were none. They checked his ammonia." I looked at the number on the page. "It was ten times the limit. Twice what yours was at the gala."

"Ten times."

"He died on the third day. The doctors wrote that it was most likely an inherited urea cycle disorder. They named it. Ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency. The same gene."

"Then why did everyone say overdose?"

I turned to the last page.

It was a letter from the hospital's genetics clinic, forty years old, typed.

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