Dad brought his hands together in his lap and looked down at the rug underneath our feet for a moment.
“You’re freaking me out, Dad.” The last time he was like this was when Mom got sick, and I really couldn’t go through something like that again. After that happened, I never took either one of them for granted again.
“Everything is okay,” he said quietly. “Nothing like that.”
I couldn’t stop myself from releasing a relieved sigh.
“I want to talk about you.”
“Me?” I asked incredulously. “What about me? My devilish good looks? Mom wants to make me the employee of the month? Is it—”
“Stop with the jokes. You’re compensating, and we both know it.” He raised his chin and looked at me, slightly angry, like my behavior actually annoyed him. “You think you’re fooling everyone with this act, but you’re not.”
I went quiet, and for the first time in my life, I really didn’t know what to say.
He faced forward again and closed his eyes, immediately remorseful of his harshness. “Son, you’re a surgeon. You aren’t some replaceable staff member at the concierge desk. I know everything that happened traumatized you and you needed some time—”
“I’m not a surgeon.” I spoke with defeat, my tone lifeless now because I was forced to think about the things I didn’t want to think about. I was forced to acknowledge a past I’d done my best to erase. “That’s not who I am anymore. I’m happy working here.”
“You. Are. A. Surgeon.”
I turned away, trying my hardest not to yell at my father, the man I admired most in this world. “Not anymore.” Catherine took me to court, took half my money, barely looked me in the eye as she did it, and I was never the same. I wasn’t sure what killed me more—losing her or losing her father on the table. Everything changed that day. I closed up my office, canceled all my appointments despite the pleas of my patients, and I asked my mom for a job because there was nothing I was interested in. Everyone in the family tried to talk me out of it, but I refused to listen. Dad and Derek protested letting me work for the concierge team, but Mom allowed it to happen. She seemed to be the only one who understood there was no going back. “I’m sorry that you’re disappointed in me, that I’m not the world’s best heart surgeon anymore, that I’m just some guy who works at a job—”
“That’s not how I feel, Dex. At all.”
“Well, that’s who I am now, so don’t try to change me.”
He released a heavy sigh as he faced forward. “Dex, even if that’s true, this isn’t who you are either. You have a moral obligation to use your brilliance to help people. You’re wasting your potential by updating laptops and whatever nonsense some guy at the tech store could do. Your brother sends rockets into space to further humankind’s exploration of the universe. I save as many lives as I can and think of methods of doing that in ways other people haven’t considered. I don’t save all of my patients, and yes, that fucking hurts. It’s devastating every single time. I’ve cried in my office and stayed late because it was too hard to come home. But that doesn’t erase the positive impact I have on so many people, those who either moved into remission and had an extra ten years on this earth, or those who completely beat the cancer. Dex, there are people out there who need you to do the impossible surgeries others can’t take on. You have a duty to these people.”
I stared at the floor and felt a mixture of a lot of things—guilt, pain, dread. In my heart, I knew my father was right, but I just couldn’t do it.
“You’ve been through a lot, so you needed some time to work through those problems. That’s okay. But this is not the long-term solution. You’re one of a kind, one of the few people who can make the impossible possible. Think of the people who needed you this last year but didn’t get your care. That is far worse than losing Allen, when that was not your fault—”
“Dad, stop.”
He went quiet and stared at the side of my face.
“That’s not me anymore. Period.”
He shook his head slightly. “Dex, I couldn’t care less what my kids do with their lives. If you wanted to be a grocery store clerk, your mother and I wouldn’t blink an eye over it. That’s not why I’m disappointed. I’m disappointed because you’re allowing someone to sabotage the rest of your life. I’m disappointed that you’re too afraid to do what you really want. I’m disappointed that you’ve hung up your cape—and have chosen to let people die.”
“Don’t fucking say that to me.” I rose from the couch and stepped away, not wanting to be close to my father anymore. The anger was consuming me, like a black hole that just kept pulling at me, letting nothing escape. “You have no idea—”