That is not a thing that would frighten a child away from medicine.

It is a thing that would call her toward it.

Lily is not running from what happened to her father.

She is walking, with her eyes open and her father’s steady heart in her chest, straight toward the place where families meet the hardest days of their lives, because she watched her mother and father turn one of those days into the beginning of everything good, and she has decided to spend her life helping other families do the same.

Marcus did not leave her a wound.

He left her a calling.

And a light bright enough to see it by.