Chapter Twenty-Two
I resigned from Cascade Orthopedic Partners on a Tuesday.
Not resigned, exactly. I proposed a leave of absence, unpaid, indefinite, and my partners—four men and women I’d operated alongside for nine years—looked at me across the conference table like I’d suggested something obscene.
?
“You want to walk away,” said Dr. Patel, “during our busiest quarter, over a personal matter.”
“I want to be present for my son and my marriage in a way that isn’t possible doing eighty-hour weeks.”
“Every surgeon in this room has a marriage, Elias.”
“Every surgeon in this room isn’t rebuilding one,” I said, “after nearly losing it to the exact kind of decision this practice trains us to make. Quietly. Alone. Without asking anyone if we should.”
?
They granted the leave. They didn’t do it warmly.
Two partners stopped returning my calls within a week, and I understood, watching a professional identity I’d spent fifteen years building quietly recede, that this was a cost, a real one, not a symbolic gesture I could point to later and call sufficient.
Wren’s terms hadn’t asked for this. I’d added it myself.
?
I moved into the flat above the garage permanently and structured my days around a schedule Wren controlled completely.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, one hour, supervised by Jess, I sat in the nursery and learned my son in small, careful pieces: the particular way he startled at loud sounds, the four seconds of warning before he cried, the fact that he calmed fastest to a heartbeat sound, not a voice.
I recorded none of it for later. I made myself simply be there, without a record, the way I hadn’t let myself be present for anything that mattered in months.
?
On my third supervised visit, Jess sat across the nursery, arms crossed, watching me with the particular narrow focus of a woman who had once threatened, in a diner, to kill me carefully.
“You’re doing better than I expected,” she said.
“Is that a compliment?”
“It’s data. I collect data before I hand out compliments.”
?
I laughed, which surprised both of us. It was the first time I’d laughed in three weeks.
“For what it’s worth,” Jess said, not looking up from Theo, “she reads your therapy updates. Doesn’t say anything. Reads every one twice.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, except keep showing up on Tuesdays and Thursdays, at the hour I was allowed, for as long as it took.