by Timms, Lexy
“Shall we try them out then? It’ll take a few minutes for the burners to warm up and I can bring all the food out. We can make our own appetizers.”
“Let me help you.” Elijah offered. His face gave away nothing and it drove Charity crazy. She wished she knew what was going on inside that handsome head of his.
“Do we just need a light to get the burners going?” her father asked.
“Yes, I already filled them with oil and there are long matches on the buffet behind you.”
Elijah followed her into the kitchen. She opened the fridge and pulled a few plates of cut meat out. She began taking the saran wrap off of them. Elijah mimicked and stood across from her at the island.
Charity gathered a tiny bit of courage and took a deep breath. “Are we okay… for tonight?” She couldn’t look up to meet his gaze. She continued quietly so her father wouldn’t hear. “I just don’t… it’s awkward being here with my father… and you.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t say anything in front of your father.”
What did he mean by that? He planned on keeping their knowledge of each other a secret or did he mean he wouldn’t start a fight in front of her father? “Thanks,” she said instead of asking.
Three trips later the choice of food lay spread around the table and they each settled into a seat. Charity sat in the spot she’d always sat growing up; her father did as well. Elijah settled across from Charity and her mother’s chair remained empty. She brushed the thought away. “There are small squares of phyllo pastry if you want to make an appetizer.”
Her father tossed strips of steak and cut up mushroom and onions into his pan. He added some red wine with it. The tantalizing smell instantly hit the air.
Elijah threw a number of different things in his pan and kept adding to it. “I love this! I need to get me one of these as well.”
“Keep one of these.” Charity laughed at the boyish excitement on his face. “It’s your Christmas bonus from my dad.” She covered her mouth and pretended to look shocked. “Oops, I wasn’t supposed to give that away yet, right Dad? Did you still want to wrap it and put it under the tree?” She glanced behind him. “Speaking of which, you don’t have a tree.”
Her father harrumphed. “Silly to have one when you’re on your own.”
“I agree.” Elijah added more to his almost overflowing pan. “I don’t have one either.”
“That makes three of us actually. I’m treeless as well.”
Elijah held up his glass. “A toast to saving Christopher the Christmas tree.”
They all clinked glasses.
“I watched that as a kid. That’s an American tiny little Christmas story that never made it big.” Charity scooped some rice onto her plate and added her cooked chicken.
“Funny, I have no idea where my father found it, but so did I.”
The mention of Elijah’s father reminded Charity of what had happened last week. She could feel her cheeks warm and it had nothing to do with the small glass of wine she’d drunk.
Her father appeared oblivious and asked Elijah what he thought of a new procedure the hospital would be implementing in the New Year. They kept most of the conversation going over dinner, for which Charity was thankful.
She began clearing plates away as the burners ran down and bellies were filled. She finally poured herself a second glass. Getting through tonight sober seemed next to impossible but she had no intention of spending the night in this house. Plus she had to drive Elijah home. Funny, she had slept with the man but had no idea where he lived.
“Charity.” Her father motioned for her to sit down. “I was telling Elijah on the ride home that you were in med school.”
She glanced back and forth between the two men. She could just imagine the conversation. Probably similar to the way they dissected the new policy they had just been talking about. She pursed her lips; a loud breath escaped as she forced air through her nose. “Lovely.” The word came out curt, sounding more like a swear word instead of its actual meaning.
“You should go back and finish.” He had no intention of letting this be.
“Not interested.” She refused to look up from her empty plate.
Elijah stood. “Why don’t I grab us another bottle of wine?” He disappeared into the kitchen.
“You need to finish your degree. What if you want to go back? Finish it now. I can help get you into the program here at my hospital. You’ll probably have to do a full year and take the board exams.” He waved his hand. “Then you’d have it done.”
Charity had not expected this conversation tonight. It was bloomin’ Christmas Eve! “Who cares if I didn’t finish it?”
He tutted. “You care. I’m right on this. You’re wrong, but you just don’t see it. You’re going to regret it if you don’t.”
“Why do you always assume you’re the only one who is right?” Charity’s voice rose in frustration. She set her glass of wine down on the table, afraid her shaking hands would spill it. “You have this stupid wall around you which you think makes you so incredibly smart! The problem is you can never see things from someone else’s perspective.”
Elijah’s head shot up from behind the counter where he was pulling a new bottle from the wine fridge. His jaw dropped and he stood frozen.
Charity had just opened a cage full of angry monkeys.
Chapter 20
“Excuse me?” Her father’s face tightened and his eyes narrowed. “I’m a damn good doctor who spends all his time looking at everyone’s view and every possible perspective.”
She snorted. “Fine. Be a good doctor, but you’re a lousy father and you were a crappy husband.” Her voice rose louder as she spoke.
Her father straightened and crossed his arms over his chest. He looked beyond pissed. “You have no idea what kind of husband I was! Don’t you dare sit there and judge me!” He jabbed a finger in her direction. “You had everything your little heart desired growing up…”
He didn’t finish what he wanted to say, but Charity knew exactly what he was thinking. She knew she had a great childhood, but that was because of her mother. Her dad had always been on call or working. Just like when her mom took sick. He was never there. “And I’m such a disappointment to you now.”
“You’re the one who dropped out of med school.”
From the corner of her eye, she saw Elijah come to stand and lean against the archway between the kitchen and dining room. She should care he had to hear all this but at the moment, all she saw was red. “I left school to be with mom!”
“You were the best in your class! You could… You should be an unbelievable surgeon now!” Her father threw his hands in the air and began pacing. “You have no idea what it’s like to have doctors still asking what happened to my daughter. Half a year as an intern and everyone believed you were going to fill my shoes.” He stopped moving, except for the rise and fall of his shoulders as he huffed. “You were better than I was at your age! The things you could be accomplishing now!” He shook his head. “It’s like I lost my wife and daughter at the same time.”
Charity pushed her chair back and stood. No way would she back down from him tonight. Sorry Elijah. “How dare you say that!” She punched her fist into her palm. “I’m RIGHT here. I’m extremely proud of what I’ve accomplished. Mom would be too.” She tapped her chest. “I made my own choices, they are not your mistakes nor do you have any right to be ashamed of them.”
“I’m not ashamed.”
“Well you sure as hell aren’t proud. All you’ve ever cared about was Dr. Scott Thompson and then, when your ego couldn’t get any bigger, they had to name a hospital after you.”
He opened his mouth to speak but she wouldn’t let him. She kept on going. “Mom got sick. She had cancer. You ran and hid in your work like a scared rabbit in his hole. She needed someone. She needed me.” Tears started sliding down her cheeks. Charity angrily swiped them away. “She called me and asked me to come. I dropped everything because she de
served it.”
“I didn’t hide—”
“Bull shit!” She blinked, surprised at her own words. “You were never around. I drove her to chemo and after carried her back into the house when she was too sick to walk. I held her hair back when she couldn’t make it to the bathroom and could only lean over the side of the bed. I rubbed her back when she had nothing left and didn’t have the energy to stop dry heaving. I cleaned her puke while she slept so she didn’t have to see me do it. I changed her needles, monitored her temp, tried to hide the hair lying on her pillow.” She bit her lip and tried to stop the tears and the memories. The image of her mother, one moment so full of life and the next beaten by the disease, wouldn’t leave her brain. “Where were you?” she whispered.
Her father’s eyes glistened and the rims turned red. It shocked her as she’d never seen him come close to crying – ever. “I was at the hospital. Trying to find a cure.”
She scoffed. Really? That was his excuse? “A cure for cancer?” Did the man seriously think he was some kind of super hero? Resentment boiled over inside of her. “How’d that work out for you?”
“Charity.” Elijah’s tone carried a warning in it.
She glared at him. “What? Ohhh, you’re siding with him. He’s your boss. You want to stay little chief while big chief makes you beg for scraps at the table.” She was out of line. She knew it but was too angry to care.
“Charity!” Her dad barked. “This is not his fault.”
“And it’s not yours either, so it must be mine. I’m the terrible disappointment so blame me.” She turned to grab her purse, coat and boots. Neither man tried to stop her. She whipped on her coat and then yanked her boots up. “I know how much of a letdown I am to you and I don’t care anymore. You can think anything you want, but I don’t regret dropping out of med school. I don’t regret the hard moments with mom because there were tender moments worth a million impossible ones. I would do it all over again if it meant I could spend those three months with her again.” She pushed a coat button through the hole so hard it popped off and went rolling across the room. She huffed and turned to go. “Arggh! I’m SO GLAD I didn’t become a doctor.”
“For someone who hates doctors why the hell did you make sure your job kept you in a hospital? Why date a doctor? You know your mother wanted you to be one. She saw your potential when you were a child and she’s the one who pushed me to take you to the hospital so you could see what it was like. She would have wanted you to finish.”
Halfway to the door she turned around and came stomping back, inches away from her father. “Don’t you dare tell me what she would have wanted!” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I have those months with her. You don’t. You have nothing except guilt. So go ahead and be disappointed I didn’t become a doctor. Let it fester inside of you so you can’t look me in the eye or stand the sight of me.”
Elijah stepped toward her.
She held him off by holding her hand up. She looked her father in the eye. “I feel the same about you, Dad. I can’t look at you without seeing the coward who hid while his wife suffered and died.”
Her father stared at her. His shoulders dropped and he sank back into his chair without saying a word.
Chapter 21
She hurt him. Good. It’s about time he knows what it feels like. Except it didn’t feel good to her. She felt like a spoiled brat. Her father sat dejected and spent. She always imagined she would be the one to lose this argument because he was the hard, callous one. The words that flew out of her mouth were not true. She blasted them out in anger and wished instantly she could take them back.
She sank into a chair across from him, her head in her hands. She didn’t want to cry but silent tears dropped onto the table.
Elijah cleared his throat. “Why don’t I nip out and grab some coffee? Are your keys in your purse in the kitchen?” He didn’t wait for a reply; he went to the kitchen and came back a moment later with the rental car keys. As he passed her he gently squeezed her shoulder blade.
The door closed a few moments later. Charity sighed and brought her head up. She stared at walls of the home she’d grown up in. The house was too big for just her father, but he hadn’t moved. It still had all the touches and décor her mother had done. Framed pictures rested on the top of the large fireplace. They were new. Images of their family, each one included her mother.
Her father missed his wife. Realization sunk in. He hadn’t changed the house, moved or remarried because he still loved his wife. He still wore his wedding band.
She let her gaze travel from his ring to his face. “Why did you ask me to plan your sixty-fifth gala event? You don’t like parties.”
“Your mother loved them.” He sighed. “I wanted to see you. I didn’t know how else to get you to come home.”
Maybe try saying ‘sorry’? Years had gone by and he still couldn’t say it. “Inviting me might have worked.” She undid the button above the missing one.
He raised an eyebrow at her and tilted his head slightly. “Really? I get the impression you’re as stubborn as me.”
“Maybe. Probably a bit more.”
“I… I didn’t hide when Lily got sick. She had been sick for two years before she called you.”
Charity’s heart stuttered. “What?”
Her father pressed his lips together. “She was initially diagnosed with stage two color cancer. Because it was caught early and the spot on her colon was small, she didn’t want you to know. You were busy with school and she begged me not to tell you. She promised if it didn’t clear, she would tell you.”
Charity stared at her father in shock. It was impossible.
“You left for school and she scheduled the surgery for the day after. I had our best oncology doctor do the surgery and he was quite sure they’d removed everything. I oversaw the whole procedure and helped set up her chemo. She did a preventative chemo – radiation for twelve weeks. That’s the fall we told you we were going to a bed and breakfast for Thanksgiving. You came home at Christmas and we hid it from you. I took you to the hospital so your mother could rest.”
She knew exactly when it was. She loved that Christmas break. He’d taken her into surgery with him to observe and grilled her with questions after he did rounds with patients and took her along. Her mom had made this amazing dinner Christmas day and bought her a Pandora bracelet. They spent the day going over old photos and talked family holidays and growing up. She’d raced back to school the next day because of some silly New Year’s Eve party Julie and her had planned.
Her mom had looked thin and when Charity had commented on it, she said she’d been doing some cabbage diet and exercising.
Charity shook her head. “But you said you got everything.”
He shook his head. “Everything looked clear but that’s the thing about cancer, it’s a sneaky bitch. It must have spread to her lymph nodes and the sample the doctor took showed clear. The preventative treatment is useless if it’s already spread. By the spring it had spread to her lungs and liver. We tried trial chemo. I worked in the lab with a colleague to see if there were other possibilities.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Your mom responded great to treatments. She looked fantastic… no one could tell she was sick. She felt good as well. Her blood work showed high white blood cells, low platelets typical of chemo treatment, but her energy was still pretty good. We marked treatment on how she felt. It was working.”
“You should have told me.”
Her dad continued as if he hadn’t heard her, lost in the world of the past. “And then a year later it spread so fast and we were powerless to control it.”
Charity knew her mother had pushed for the trials, probably harder than her dad. He hated to lose a patient – more for the competition against death but her mother… Charity knew she would have done the same thing if she had been in her mother’s position.
“Then she called you. She was torn up for not telling you sooner and begged me to not say anything. Th
en you came home.”
“And you ran and hid.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. She had carried the anger and resentment for six years. She didn’t know how to let it go.
“I wasn’t hid—” he sighed and stared at his wedding ring. “Maybe I did hide. I was so sure you’d figure it out and hate me for it. Your mom wanted you to enjoy university. She didn’t want you to worry and we both thought we had control of the disease. I kept thinking we’d find something to fight it. Instead we just masked the disease and then it festered everywhere.”
The torment on her father’s face erased the anger she felt. “You didn’t kill her.”
It was a few moments before he spoke. He dragged his eyes off his hand and looked directly at her, guilt making him appear older than he was. “I couldn’t help her. Brilliant—completely useless—doctor. And then I failed as a father. You hated me and quit med school. I ruined your dreams as well.”
Charity came around the table and sat down beside her dad. Countless things ran through her head but the one thing she knew for sure, she needed to tell him. “I don’t hate you.”
His reaction was the last thing she expected. He turned and wrapped his arms around her. He hugged her so tight she couldn’t breathe. His grip loosened and she sucked in a gulp of air. “I love you, Charity,” he whispered so quietly she wasn’t even sure if he had actually said the words.
They were still hugging when the door opened. They jumped apart, each awkward and wiping their eyes.
Elijah stood by the door, three Starbuck coffees in a tray. His face betrayed nothing.
Her father’s face became similar to Elijah’s, his mask hiding everything that had been clear to Charity moments before. He cleared his throat. “I apologize, Elijah. I invited you over for a nice meal and instead you have to endure family drama.”
“It’s no problem.” Elijah spoke to Dr. Thompson with only one furtive glance at Charity. “I should probably—”
