The bowling alley parking lot.
Lila’s eighth birthday.
I was a teenager again. Black hoodie. Jeans. Sneakers.
Grandma had asked me to get Mom and Zach so we could sing “Happy Birthday” and cut the cake. I could still hear the noise from inside. Laughter and loud music.
Outside, everything changed and felt wrong somehow.
Mom and Zach stood next to his car and were arguing. She wore the yellow silk blouse she’d bought to please Dad, even though he couldn’t have cared less. The fabric shimmered in the parking lot sun. Zach wore a pink polo shirt, leather moccasins, and that $200k watch. Smug as always. So freaking arrogant.
Each step toward them tightened something in my chest. Something really bad was going on.
The closer I got, the harder I tried to hear what they were saying.
Was it “If—” Zach said, right before she grabbed him?
Was it “But Amanda—” Mom shot back, just before he shoved her aggressively?
Anger rose. How dare he touch her! My feet kept moving faster.
But just before I got close enough, Mom turned toward me.
The moment she saw me, everything changed. Her hands dropped, and she smiled. Even after this fight with Zach, her smile was the most beautiful thing in the world to me.
Then, like always, things grew foggy. Voices blurred until they felt distant.
And I woke up from my nightmare. The same one that visited me in my dreams almost every night.
Hospital machines beeped in the distance as the room came back into focus. A phone rang nearby as I sat up on the lower bunk in the residents’ room at the Mass State Hospital in Boston.
For medical residents, this place was a special kind of hellhole. The kind that offered old coffee and maybe a dry muffin after sixteen-hour shifts with no lunch breaks. Sometimes, if we got lucky, they stocked the countertops with ramen noodles, cookies, and soda.
But today was not one of those lucky days.
A few brown bananas sat on the counter, alongside the coffee machine that looked like it had given up on life sometime in the eighties.
After stretching the stiffness from my back, I walked over, passing the small table where two other residents sat scrolling on their phones. It looked like boredom, but I knew it wasn’t. It was burnout. Months of six-day weeks. Twelve- to sixteen-hour shifts. Shit pay, less than minimum wage.
One of the two residents was Erin. Blond. Skinny. Came from Boston old money. The kind filled with expectations and pressure. She was an internal medicine resident.
The other was Jamal, late twenties. Emergency medicine. Permanent tired eyes.
This was my first year as an oncology fellow. Mid-twenties was absurdly young for that title. But everything had moved fast after Mom died. Nothing could stop me.
I got my high school diploma at seventeen. No college parties ever. No dating either. Just studies. I’d rather have died than failed.
I looked at the large clock mounted on the wall—nine thirty. My twelve-hour shift should have ended four hours ago. Technically. But reality laughed at that. We were short of physicians. Short of nurses. It was Thanksgiving week. And, as a resident, you lost all human rights anyway. Complaining was frowned upon in a culture that felt closer to a Navy SEAL training camp than a hospital. Be tough, take the pain, or get the hell out.
“Dr. Rothchild is looking for you,” Erin said as I grabbed the coffeepot.
“Dear God,” I said. “Did I forget to line up his Sharpies in order of the color spectrum?”
Both of them laughed.
“I am sure it’s something like that,” Jamal said. “The bastard made me write a full-page apology letter to my badge when I forgot it the other day. Like, to my actual fucking badge. Started it with Dear Badge, I’m sorry—”
“No way,” Erin gasped, eyes widening.
