He had said as much to Julian, more than once, that his son should have married a woman more devoted to home and hearth, a woman who understood that a family needs a mother present, not a mother playing at medicine.

I had swallowed those comments for years, for Julian’s sake, for the sake of keeping the peace at holidays.

And there was a bitter, exact justice in the fact that the career Arthur had spent years belittling was the very thing that now stood between him and any hope of controlling what happened next.

The mother playing at medicine ran the hospital his grandson was carried into.

The demanding little hobby had made me a physician who understood, precisely, what he had nearly done, and an administrator with standing in the very institution now documenting his crime.