The badge read: Head of Pediatric Emergency Medicine.

Dr.

Evelyn Vance.

Arthur had always known, in a vague and dismissive way, that I was a doctor.

What he had never bothered to learn, what he had never considered worth his attention, was what that actually meant.

He did not know, for instance, that two weeks earlier I had been appointed Medical Director of this exact emergency department, the very one his grandson had just been carried into barely conscious.

For years, Arthur had waved my career away as a kind of indulgence, a hobby a woman took up to feel important.