“So you picked me,” I said.
He rubbed his forehead.
“I told myself it might be good for you too.”
“Did you ever ask?”
“No.”
Then I asked why medicine bothered him so much.
“It doesn’t.”
“You spent months trying to talk me out of it.”
“I spent months trying to keep you close.”
My acceptance letter had destroyed another future Dad had imagined—one where I eventually worked beside him and Mom.
“I treated what I wanted as if it were what the family needed,” he admitted.
“Yes.”
He still disliked the rigidity of my program.
I said, “Then don’t pay for it.”
He looked at me.
“I want you to help because you want to help me, not because it buys you a vote.”
That ended the meeting.
Not warmly.
But clearly.
I moved into the dorm in August.
Mom came with me.
Dad did not.
He sent one message that morning.
***Drive safely.***
My first semester was harder than anything I had done in high school.
Chemistry moved fast.
I scored seventy-four on my first biology exam and called Mom crying from a stairwell.
She did not tell me to come home.
Instead, she asked:
“Do you want advice or do you want me to listen?”
That was new.
“Listen.”
So she did.
Elliot and I remained friends.
Not romantic friends.
Our parents had tried to turn a normal friendship into a business arrangement, and neither of us wanted that to define what came afterward.
Dad and I repaired things more slowly.
At Christmas, he asked if I wanted to tour Sloan Med-Pack’s new clean-room expansion.
I said yes.
We walked the production floor together.
