Chapter 24 - Lily
Lily
Kyle: I think we were always wrong about Jeremy. He doesn't like your brother.
Lily: But that doesn't make sense.
Kyle: Does anything that's happening right now make sense to you?
Lily: I hate to agree with you.
Kyle: You love doing it.
"And that's all for today, Miss Rachel," I said to the patient in front of me. She was a middle-aged woman who came every week to have a diabetic wound treated on her foot and for general checkups.
"Thank you so much, sweet Lily. I don't know what I'll do without you when you leave. You're the only one who really cares about me leaving here happy."
A smile appeared on my lips. I loved it every time someone was satisfied with the care I was giving them.
"Good work, Lily," a voice behind me said as I finished cleaning the area.
She was the unit supervisor, Mrs. Henderson.
"Thanks, but I was just doing my job," I replied.
"If you knew how difficult it is for someone to just do their job, you'd understand why I'm grateful that every patient of yours leaves satisfied."
"I hope one day I can understand it." But I already knew it. I have been working for years already. This was not something new in my life.
"With that in mind, I'd like you to consider continuing with us after your volunteer time is over. You have incredible talent. With the correct guidance and the education you'll receive at college, you're someone we'd want to keep around long-term."
I was speechless. This hadn't happened the first time, and I was completely happy that my efforts had yielded a different result.
But I knew I wasn't going to be a doctor.
That after this, I was going to choose accounting because my life was going to be such a disaster that I didn't want a career that involved being so involved with people.
"I don't know what to say. It would be an incredible opportunity, but I don't know if I'd ultimately choose medicine as a career. "
"But promise me you'll think about it, it would be a shame to waste a natural talent like yours."
"I will, thanks."
I watched her walk away and was left alone with my thoughts, confused as to what decision I should make now.
The first time I lived through this moment, I didn't pay much attention to all the cases we encountered here at the hospital.
This was just another requirement I had to fulfill to graduate and get into a good university, but it wasn't something I wanted to focus on at the time, believing I had all the time in the world to learn medicine later.
Now it's the complete opposite. I find myself enjoying each case, helping others as much as I can, and simply feeling like I belong here among the medical staff.
I was too immature back then to understand how incredible it was to be able to help someone in need, but now my mind craves these types of situations.
I love serving others, healing, and feeling the satisfaction of knowing someone could be better because of my care.
Being an accountant paid the bills, but it felt like a job I had to do, and that was it. Not something I'd do just for the fun of it, like being here helping others for free.
This is something I hate about real life: how we are forced to choose a career at such a young age without really having a shred of what real life is like. You have to stick with a career you might hate for the rest of your life because it's what you chose when you were barely 18.
But how do we know at such a young age what we want to do for the rest of our lives? We barely know what it means to be an adult.
The worst part is changing careers as an adult. Others judge you because "you have no direction", that "you're not stable." That "they don't trust you for wanting to do something different."
But changing careers should be the most normal thing in the world, especially between your 20s and 30s, when you already know what you really want in life.
Now that I knew what it was like to be an accountant and how much I enjoyed being in a hospital, I probably wouldn't have chosen the career I did.
Will I be here long enough to make a change?
The thought of having to go through it all again frightened me. Kyle and I hadn't spent any time figuring out how to get out of this situation, knowing we had other, more important priorities to focus on, but eventually, we had to consider it.
Which made me think about what Kyle had texted me last night.
"I think we were always wrong about Jeremy. He doesn't like your brother."
How was that possible?
In our present, Jeremy tries to talk to me about my brother as little as possible. I'd always thought he felt guilty about everything that had happened and didn't want me to feel bad, but now I realize it might be because of something else entirely.
Sometimes, I wish I'd been more open with everyone about what happened during that week so that I wouldn't be so lost right now. But some things from the past can't be changed, and we're left to live with the consequences of how we choose to handle them.
Now I realize my mistake in how I reacted to everything back then. I tried to forget it had happened so my mistakes wouldn't haunt me. I tried to act strong, like it didn't hurt at all, hoping that if I pretended long enough, I'd start believing it myself.
I tried to act like life had given me a second chance and that I should take advantage of it by becoming someone completely different, all while ignoring the fact that everything had really affected me.
I buried my pain so deep I convinced myself it didn't exist. I built walls so high I forgot there was a world beyond them.
And now I'm here, realizing that none of what I did really worked, not even for myself. Now, I have an actual second chance, and I don't know how to help my loved ones because by avoiding all that pain, I became someone who might harm them again through ignorance.
For ten years, I thought moving forward meant forgetting.
I thought strength meant never looking back, never acknowledging the wounds that shaped me.
I convinced myself that if I just worked hard enough, achieved enough, and controlled enough of my environment, I could outrun the girl who'd lost everything that mattered.
But you can't build a life on the foundation of denial. You can't heal wounds you refuse to acknowledge exist.
I spent all this time trying to move on by pretending it never happened, when I should have been learning how to make it right.
And that's what I'm going to do now. Every mistake I made, every moment I chose fear over courage, every time I let my pain make me smaller, I won't hide from any of it anymore.
Because my mistakes aren't something to be ashamed of; they're proof that I cared enough to try, even when I didn't know how.
After finishing cleaning my workspace, I headed to the lobby to see who was next on the patient list, and I saw a very familiar name.
Florence Reynolds. My English teacher. The person who took Oliver's phone and, through her carelessness, had someone spread my brother's video all over the school.
Knowing that she was part of the disaster that caused the transformation in my life made my head spin, so I did the most sensible thing someone my age could do in this situation: I ran to the break room and locked myself in there.
But just as I took a deep breath, I looked in front of me and found Kyle sitting on a sofa across from me, his arms crossed, staring at me blatantly.
"So getting us locked in at work just to make out, huh? I have to admit, I kind of like it."