Epilogue
IN OCTOBER, CALEB COMES home for a long weekend, and Molly drives up from Trinity on Saturday morning in the Honda Civic I bought her in August with money from the house sale. The kitchen table has three people at it and none of them are pretending to be fine.
Caleb is taller than I remember, which is impossible because he’s twenty and has been the same height since junior year, but something about seeing him in the doorway with a laundry bag over his shoulder makes him look like he grew an inch since August. Molly is thriving at Trinity, calling me twice a week with stories about her roommate, her intro to psychology professor, and the dining hall’s surprisingly good breakfast tacos.
She sounds exactly where she’s supposed to be.
We eat breakfast. Caleb makes eggs because he learned from a YouTube channel over the summer and now says things like “the key is low heat and patience,” delivered with the authority of four whole months of cooking experience.
Molly steals his bacon. I drink coffee that is better than Alma’s, which is not a high bar, watching my children exist in the same room in the cozy cottage I now call home.
The divorce finalized in March. Grey signed the settlement, the sixty-day period ran, and the decree came through on a Thursday that I spent at the clinic seeing patients.
I didn’t celebrate. I didn’t mourn. I updated my insurance beneficiaries, changed the locks on the house, and went to Dawson’s Oaxacan place on Friday, as had become our routine.
The enchiladas were good and the company was better.
Grey has an apartment in Stone Oak. He sees Molly on alternating weekends when she’s in town, and she goes because he’s her father and she loves him in the complicated, calibrated way that children love parents who have disappointed them.
She doesn’t talk about Sharon when she’s with me, and I don’t ask.
Sharon is still at Ridgeline. The partners didn’t fire her, because you don’t fire the physician who generates thirty percent of your revenue, and the malpractice carrier’s review concluded without formal action because the Whitfield incident was corrected before it became a claim.
Her standing with the partners has changed.
Pham chairs the quality committee now. Morales handles the NP supervision.
The scarf, as far as I know, stays in her office.
I only know that much because former colleagues seem to think I care enough to stay abreast.
I don’t.
Grey and Sharon, from what Molly has mentioned in passing, are no longer together.
Sharon distanced herself after the partner meeting, when the professional cost became clear, and Grey discovered that she chose him when the choosing was free and dropped him when it started to cost. I don’t know the details.
I don’t want them. The satisfaction is small, private, and I don’t pretend it isn’t there.
THE CLINIC IS RUNNING well.
My panel has grown to a hundred and forty workers’-comp patients and a steady flow of occupational health screenings.
Alma keeps the schedule full, the coffee terrible, and the pears eaten if they come in.
Dawson and I work side by side with the easy rhythm of two people who trust each other’s clinical judgment and don’t need to perform it.
We’ve been seeing each other since that first Friday on South Presa.
It’s slow, deliberate, and grounded in something that started with twelve years of referral paperwork and became something else when we stopped pretending it was only professional.
He’s blunt. He works too much. He forgets to eat lunch and gets impatient when the TMB sends paperwork that requires paperwork to complete the paperwork.
He’s a good physician. He’s a good man. He’s not a rescue, and I’m not a project.
What we have is built on the fact that I walked into his clinic with my own career in my hands and he respected me for carrying it.
On Friday afternoon, I pull up my schedule for next week.
Five days, full clinic, no gaps. Every slot filled with a patient who needs a clearance, an evaluation, or a medication adjustment, and every chart I write will be signed under a prescriptive authority agreement that exists because I chose it, not because I bent the knee to someone held it over me.
I close the laptop. Alma has already gone home. Dawson is in his office finishing a return-to-duty form by hand.
“Friday,” I say from the doorway.
He looks up. “Same place?”
“Same everything.” I lick my lips. “Do you want to come to my place after dinner?”
The pen stills. He looks at me, intrigued. “I’d love to, if you’re ready.”
“I am.” He looks chuffed. I smile quietly to myself and grab my things. I’ve been ready for the next step for a few weeks.
I drive home. The cottage is still. The guest room is empty until Thanksgiving, when the kids will come home. They’ll argue about who gets the queen bed in the guest room, and who gets the pullout sofa. Caleb will probably be a gentleman, and let her have the bedroom.
Maybe I’ll invite Dawson to join us for dinner. It’s part of the next step.
I open the fridge. There’s leftover Oaxacan food from last Friday, a container of Alma’s salsa that she gave me in a jar with a handwritten label, and the groceries I bought for myself on Wednesday, for one person, chosen because I wanted them.
I eat at the counter breakfast bar. Then I pour a glass of wine, the Tempranillo I picked up at the bottle shop on McCullough because the label had a drawing of a house on a hill and I liked it.
I take it out to the back porch and sit in porch swing I installed the first weekend after I closed on this place, huddle in my cardigan, and drink it slowly while the evening cools down.
The neighbor’s dog barks at something in the alley and the Texas sky turns the color of everything you forgot to appreciate while you were busy surviving.
I sit there until the glass is empty. Then I go inside, open my schedule one more time, not because I need to check it but because I want to look at it. Five days. Full clinic. My name at the top of every slot.
This next stage of my life is good.