Forbidden Doctor - R. S. Elliot Page 0,6

my face and stepped out into the Bostonian sunshine. I felt guilty for the money I had to spend, but if I didn’t want my father to completely disown me, I would have to get a cab. It seemed ridiculous, since walking the trip would only have taken fifteen minutes. But by the time I’d left the house, I was ten minutes late to meet my father. The taxi cut that from an extra fifteen minutes to only seven.

I tried my best to look put together when I gave my name to the maître d'. Apparently, I didn’t raise any suspicion, because they led me over to a table. I could see my father’s broad back as I approached, and a shiver went down my spine. I had to brace myself for the next few hours of him proudly showing me off and peppering backhanded compliments into his conversations with me.

Like I had expected, there were other people at the table that I didn’t recognize. It would be far too much effort for him to spend time with me alone. There had to be a purpose. When I reached the table, my father stood, smiling his most charming smile.

“Stephanie!” he said happily, hugging me briefly.

I winced at his use of my full name, and the hug felt foreign. I tried to remember the last time he’d hugged me, and it was in his own hospital when I was five years old. In the memory, I was sitting on the edge of a hospital bed in a small yellow gown. A few doctors were talking, and at that age, I had hoped the hug meant he cared that I was sick and that he had worried about me. I had been too young to know it was all about him.

So yeah, the last time my father hugged me was when I had my appendix out.

He pulled away from me, and I pasted a docile smile on my face. He was clearly relieved that I was willing to cooperate. I could play the good daughter, especially when my head was pounding and all I wanted was some water.

“Hello, Father,” I replied.

My father turned me so I could see everyone around the table. There were three men, not including my father, two women, and two empty chairs. These were, without a doubt, my father’s colleagues. Given the inequality of the sexes, I was struck again with just how male-dominated surgery was as a profession, and I prepared myself for an onslaught of people believing I wasn’t capable.

Surprisingly, they were all a relatively enjoyable group to have brunch with. Once my father introduced me, I was received with smiles and welcome. I was placed between a Dr. Howard Toyah, and a Dr. Jonah Milward, the heads of General and Orthopedic Surgery, respectively. I kept glancing at the empty chair, but no one seemed to mind that it was there. Perhaps, someone else would be arriving?

“I hear you’re quite the prodigy!” Howard was saying to me. “Top of your class at Harvard, graduated a year early from high school, and a year early from college!”

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” I replied with a laugh. “People don’t tend to take younger students seriously and being two years younger than my class in med school gave them the impression that I was incapable.”

“Nah,” Jonah chimed in. “They were all just jealous that they couldn’t be Doogie Howser.”

“It’s easy for you to say,” one of the women interjected from across the table. “You were at John Hopkins before you could legally drink!”

“Angela!” Jonah replied. “You can’t tell people! I prefer them to think I have a mysterious secret to looking this young!”

The woman—Dr. Angela Wong, head of Neurosurgery—laughed at this and turned back to her conversation with my father. I was bemused.

“Before you were twenty-one? That means you must have—”

“Yeah. I graduated high school at fourteen, skipped a year of college, and finished medical school at twenty-two.”

I was gawking at the man, amazed. I had thought he looked young but put it down to a good skin-care regime and his dark complexion being naturally blemish free. He couldn’t have been older than thirty-one or thirty-two, and he was already the head of Orthopedic Surgery?

“Wow.”

Jonah rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully, and I turned my head away. I didn’t want him to be embarrassed. I wasn’t quite the boy genius he had clearly been, but I knew what it was like to be spotlighted because