Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 68500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
If there was one person in this world who I loved with my whole heart, more than each of my sisters and brother, more than anything in the world, it was Felix Kent.
Now Dr. Felix Kent.
He was the light to my dark, the sunrise and the sunset. The best damn thing that’d ever happened to me, that my dad helped me throw away.
“Are you lost, sweets?”
I looked up to see Keene staring at me with a look of sadness on his face.
Keene was the lone person who knew what I’d left behind when I’d agreed to abandon my medical career. He’d done much the same, leaving behind a military career that he adored, just so we could make this circus thing work.
Yet again, one last fuck you from our father to continue to make our lives a living hell.
Well, he couldn’t accomplish that anymore.
Keene and I would no longer let him.
I’d ruined the best thing I’d ever had because of my father; I wouldn’t let him take my career away, too.
“These shoes,” Simi said as she came up with a red pair of New Balance shoes with animal print accents. “Good?”
I nodded, then sat down on the couch and slipped into them.
“I’ll get you more of these while you’re at work today,” Zip called out as she fingered my scrub top. “You look great, Val. You’ll love it.”
I hoped so.
I really, really hoped so.
I left with a bag of donut holes in my backpack.
I had no intentions of eating them.
I was too nervous.
Like first day of school, I’m about to have my world shatter right in front of me nervous.
I didn’t worry that I wasn’t smart enough to finish up my residency so I could become the doctor I always wanted to be.
Truthfully, that had never been my issue—academics.
What had been my issue was social interaction of any kind.
Which was hilarious considering what I did for our family circus.
I was the tarot card, palm reader, and bullshitter extraordinaire.
How did I become that when I was a social interaction avoider, you ask?
My father, the mean bastard that he was, knew every one of his children’s weaknesses.
He’d seen mine the moment that I turned eleven and had balked at schmoozing with the crowd of eleven hundred people while they fixed technical issues backstage. From that moment on, he’d gone out of his way to make me as uncomfortable as he could, and that equaled me doing the tarot card reading at first. Then the palm reading, and shortly after, the woo-woo whatever that people just loved to experience.
From that moment on, anything and everything that had to do with the circus had become one of those mandatory jobs that felt like you were in a repetitive car wreck you couldn’t ever correct.
Each night after a show, I would leave exhausted and drained.
What extroverted people didn’t understand was that introverted people had a meter just like them. Where their meter went up with social interaction, introverted people’s went down. And once we were out, we were mentally and physically exhausted. There would be no coming back once we hit our limit.
I knew today was about to be very hard.
I just didn’t understand how hard.
Not until I walked through the doors and went in search of the man who would be my attending for the foreseeable future.
Initially, my entire life goal was to become a pediatric doctor. Felix’s had been to become an ER doc.
I’d always given him shit about all the originality he had.
But as I was trying to force myself to come back to this life—being out of the game was terrifying—I’d channeled Felix. Going through medical school, he’d been my ultimate supporter. The one person I could count on no matter what. The person who encouraged me, pushed me, and ultimately let me go because he knew that I would be better off without him.
I’d thought maybe that was what I needed. To be close to him. And what better way to do that than to become an ER doctor like him—I’d followed his life until I couldn’t stand crying every hour on the hour anymore and let him go—and maybe a little bit of his confidence and support would reach me vicariously through the ghost of who he used to be to me.
Though, he’d suddenly switched his specialty half-way through his residency, going from neuro to the ER. I was just happy he’d chosen his original path, but that’d been the last time I looked him up.
I stopped on the way to the ER and dropped off five dozen donuts for the nurses and doctors I was about to be working with and headed for my new life.
I’d just breached the door to the room I was supposed to be meeting my attending—along with a few other residents—when I saw it.