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“Ready, set, go,” Keats volleys back. “Let’s hear it.”
Stevie steals a glance my way so I fork a small bean and slide it between my lips, before I lie to the little one, “That’s five.”
“I need more time to perfect my poem.” She drops back into her chair. “Carry on with dinner, folks.”
Another round of laughter carries through the room.
I look at Eloise to find her smiling, but her gaze quickly shifts to Sinclair.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Stevie pushes the bowl of beans away from both of us.
“He doesn’t,” her dad answers for me. “Gaines is married to his work.”
That sends all eyes on the table in my direction.
“What fun is that?” Maren asks. “Even doctors need love in their lives.”
“He doesn’t need love,” Keats scoffs. “I’d bet good money on the fact that he’s having as much fun as he can handle.”
“Like playing games fun?” Stevie questions with a perked brow. “Do you still play basketball at the park?”
“Sometimes. When I find the time.”
It’s a pick up game with a bunch of people from the hospital at a community court not far from there. I’m part of a group chat that keeps us all updated on when a game is about to begin. If I have an hour or two to spare, I’m always there.
“You should find the time with Dad.” Stevie jerks her thumb toward Berk. “I’ve been playing with him. If I can beat him, I know you can.”
The sound of a phone ringing fills the air.
Almost everyone at the table drops their gaze to search for their device.
“It’s me.” Eloise is already halfway out of her chair. “I’ll take it in the other room.”
“It’s a boy,” Stevie surmises. “She told me that she broke up with Philip, so I think she’ll have a new boyfriend today or tomorrow. She’s so pretty.”
That she is.
I follow Eloise with my gaze as she disappears out of view.
I’m tempted to stand too with an excuse that I need to check on a patient, but I keep my ass where it is because Stevie has already dove into another pressing question from the list on a paper set next to her plate.
“Why did you become a doctor?”
Berk’s gaze meet mine and he tosses me a look that I’ve seen before. It’s apologetic and sympathetic at the same time.
He knows my past. He wasn’t always around to walk through it with me, but when I needed an ear, he made the time to listen, just as I did when he lost his wife and had to piece his life back together.
“He likes helping people,” he answers for me. “I was there the day he graduated from medical school.”
“You were?” Stevie’s gaze darts to her dad. “Do you have a picture from that day?”
“Plenty,” he says. “’I’ve got a great one of the four of us.”
Stevie looks beyond her dad to where Sinclair and Keats are. “You were there too?”
Sinclair is a decade younger than I am, but I remember fondly her gift on the day I graduated med school. She’s apublished writer now, but her love of the craft was present even then, so she prepared a mini handwritten autobiography for me of my life up to that point.
It wasn’t complete by any means because no one knows all the details of the life I’ve lived. Not even Berk.
