For one breathless second, the entire waiting room at Saint Jude Medical Center seemed to freeze. I stood at the entrance of Emergency Bay Two with my stethoscope around my neck, my hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, wearing the fragile calm I had spent six months building after leaving him. I had trained myself to handle blood, fractures, terrified parents, and screaming monitors. I had learned to stay steady while other people’s worlds fell apart. But no class, no residency, and no sleepless night in pediatrics had prepared me for Elias standing beside a stretcher with fear written all over his face. Parentingadvice books
“Daddy, it hurts,” the little girl whimpered from the stretcher.
Elias’s expensive charcoal suit was wrinkled, his tie crooked, and his perfect hair falling across his forehead. He no longer looked like the powerful real estate mogul who once treated emotion like weakness. He looked like a terrified father who had just realized money could not protect the person he loved most.
I forced myself to breathe.
“I’m Doctor Adelaide,” I said, keeping my voice steady because the child needed me more than my broken heart did. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“Sophie,” she whispered. “I fell from the tall climbing frame.”
“At school?”
She nodded, pale and frightened. “Daddy got scared when I hit the ground.”
The irony almost knocked the air from me. Elias, the man too afraid to admit he loved me, was trembling because his daughter had fallen on a playground.
