12. Unscheduled #3
Skipper had driven her here, walked her inside, and stood beside her without needing the rules explained twice. I was the man with a motel key in his pocket and grease still buried in the cuts across his hands.
Piper paused near the hallway entrance and looked back at me.
I could have said I was her husband. The title was still true on paper. That did not make it useful.
“I understand. Show me where to sign so I can get out of your way.”
The receptionist turned a clipboard toward me and pointed to the next empty line. “Right there, please. Printed name and signature.”
I set the pharmacy bag on the corner of the desk, took the pen, and bent over the registry. My palm stung where the pen pressed against the split skin, so I adjusted my grip and wrote my name anyway: Nolan Callahan.
No QB1. No MVP. No special notation beside it. Just a name on a visitor sheet.
I returned the pen and slid the clipboard back across the counter.
“Thank you for cooperating. There is seating available over by the window until she finishes her appointment.”
“Thank you.”
Piper lingered near the hallway for another moment. Skipper said something to her too low for me to make out, then held the door while she went through.
I stayed beside the desk. That was the line she had drawn, and crossing it would have turned every apology I had made into another lie.
The receptionist glanced toward the bag. “You can take that with you. Nobody will bother it over there.”
“Right. Thanks.”
I picked it up and looked toward the row of plastic chairs she had indicated. The place by the window was open, separated from the hallway by more distance than I wanted and as much as Piper had allowed.
I headed over.
Once there, I set the pharmacy bag on the floor beside my shoes. The seat gave almost nothing beneath me, and my lower back complained the second I leaned against it. Across the room, a clock ticked above a row of posters covered in smiling babies and pastel lettering.
The hallway door stayed closed.
There was nothing to do with my hands now. No hull to scrape. No rope to haul. No broken dock rail waiting for a hammer. I had spent the last several days proving things with work because work had rules I understood. “Sit down, stay out of the way, and wait” did not.
The man two chairs over glanced at me, then at the door.
“Long wait?”
“I don’t know yet.”
He nodded like that answer made sense. One hand rested on his bouncing knee, while his other lay on a folded pamphlet. A few seconds passed before he looked at me again, longer this time.
“Excuse me, but did anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like that quarterback? Nolan Callahan.”
For one strange second, the name sounded like it belonged to somebody else.
I had spent years making sure people recognized it. Reid had built whole campaigns around that face, that name, that version of me. Now I was sitting in a clinic waiting room with aching hands and a bottle of ibuprofen in a bag by my feet.
“I get that a lot, but you’re mistaken. I’m just a local guy waiting for his wife to finish her appointment.”
The man studied me again, then gave a small shrug.
“Could’ve fooled me. Same face.”
“Bad luck, I guess.”
That earned a laugh from him, and the subject should have ended there.
Instead, he shifted the pamphlet onto the empty chair beside him. “You here for a prenatal visit too?”
I looked toward the hallway.
“My wife is.”
“First kid?”
The question was easy enough to answer.
“Yes.”
His expression brightened. “Crazy resemblance, though. Hearing that heartbeat on the monitor for the first time is going to blow your mind.”
The clock kept ticking across the room. I looked down at the pharmacy bag, then back toward the closed door. Those two words—*first time*—were the part that stuck with me.
Maybe Piper had already heard it at an earlier appointment. Maybe today would have been another chance. I did not even know enough about her prenatal care to say.
I had missed appointments and ordinary moments, never bothering to ask about them because I had convinced myself there would always be time later.
The man beside me was only being friendly. He had no idea that the father he was talking to had managed to miss the beginning of his own child’s life while smiling beside another woman for cameras.
“It is our first. And yeah, I would give absolutely anything in the world to be able to hear it today.”
His smile faltered, catching the silence behind the answer.
“Hope you get the chance.”
“Me too.”
He turned back toward his pamphlet, doing me the kindness of letting it go.
The lights buzzed overhead. A receptionist spoke to someone near the front desk, and a chair scraped across the floor farther down the room. But no sound came from behind the door I cared about.
I stayed where Piper had allowed me to stay.
For once, there was no assistant I could call, no credential I could flash, no amount of money that could move me farther down that hallway. The only thing left was to wait until she decided I had earned anything more.
I sat beneath the harsh clinic lights and stared at the closed door Piper had disappeared behind.