The hot rock star kept asking Dr. Andy Kumar out on a date.
She wished he would stop.
Patients and pediatric patients’ parents are often grateful for a doctor’s help and are at a very vulnerable time of their lives. Doctors listen to their patients when no one else wants to hear about their pain. Patients mistake this for intimacy. Doctors care for patients to the best of their abilities, ease pain, and touch patients in ways that no one else will. Patients often mistake this for love.
Andy was very aware of the dangers of getting involved with patients and their parents. Everyone was aware.
And of all the parents that she knew, Cadell Glynn was particularly problematic.
If you don’t date someone unsuitable, you can’t fall in love with them and want to marry them. If Andy had asked to marry someone unsuitable, her parents would disown her. It would have been a miracle if they didn’t, and Andy was a surgeon. She didn’t believe in miracles.
Cadell Glynn was entirely, eminently, thoroughly unsuitable.
The first time that Dr. Kumar had seen Cadell Glynn—all six feet, four inches of him, tribal tattoos winding around his arms, fingertips deeply callused from years of pressing patterns on steel guitar strings, dressed in leather pants and a tee shirt ripped at the neck that let the tattoos on his muscular shoulders peek through, blue-tipped black hair spiraling in curls and swaying near his shoulders, and fear and helplessness filling his dark eyes at the sight of his sick child hooked up to two different IVs and crying—Andy had known that he was going to be trouble.
Other parents meekly accepted her advice on treatments.
Mr. Glynn had interrogated Andy and the other surgeons, asking why, and when, and how, and would it hurt Emily too much.
He had calmed down some after that first week.
Some.
After a few weeks, when Emily had stabilized, Mr. Glynn had backed off from the third degree, but he had begun to mention that there were other things in life outside the hospital.
The first time he had offhandedly mentioned such a thing, he had talked about the new, hot restaurant in Manhattan, said that he could get a table if she wanted one. The time after that, he had offered to take her to a rock concert, his or someone else’s, or a symphony performance. The last time Cadell had been in town, he had mentioned that he knew a great place where they could go dancing and have a drink.
His dark eyes took on a sexy twinkle when he asked her these things, so different than when he was worried about his daughter.
She always said no.
It would be unethical to get involved with him. Besides the fact that any feelings of his probably weren’t love but just gratitude, the hospital had ethical standards about getting involved with patients or parents. There were too many opportunities for coercion, and a personal relationship might cloud her professional judgment when lives were at stake.
Andy couldn’t help but smile at Mr. Glynn, though. Even though she couldn’t accept his invitations and would never have accepted anyway, it was flattering to be asked out by the hot rock star daddy.
Dr. Kumar left Emily’s hospital room and examined the chart of the patient in the next room, another child with end-stage liver disease.
All of Andy’s patients had a diagnosis of end-stage liver disease of some sort or another. She treated them with science and medicine, making sure their parents were apprised of every setback or benefit in their treatment. She didn’t believe in miracles, and she didn’t talk to vulnerable parents about hope if there was none.
Her very prestigious fellowship was allowing her to train to be a liver transplant surgeon, specializing in pediatrics, and she only had eight more months before she would finish this fellowship.
There had been rumors, dire rumors, of position cuts. The hospital had indulged in some creative accounting, and the whispered rumor was that the government was going to declare they had committed Medicare fraud.
The chart on the tablet was for another patient, a child who was only in the hospital overnight for a reevaluation of his PELD score, the Pediatric End-stage Liver Disease assessment. This child was far less sick than Emily, only a ten on a scale that spanned from six to forty, and Boyd Westerfield would be sent home with slightly different medication that afternoon.
Little Emily Glynn was one of Dr. Kumar’s most problematic patients. She had presented with biliary atresia, a common condition where the liver’s bile ducts didn’t develop correctly in utero and always resulted in a liver transplant. In Emily’s case, it had been when she was three months old, in Missouri. She had been referred to the transplant clinic at Saints Simon and Jude Children’s Hospital eight months ago, when her rock star father had taken responsibility for her. Thus, there was suddenly enough money and insurance to move her to New York and onto the transplant list. The Missouri hospital where she had been a patient had declined to place her on the list because, back then, her PELD score had been quite low and because they hadn’t wanted to be responsible for the exorbitant costs associated with a liver transplant for an indigent child.
Emily’s quality of care at the Missouri hospital had been rather less than what she would have received at Saints Simon and Jude. This had accelerated her decline. Substandard care was always problematic. Andy fretted about the disparity of care within the US and around the world far too often, her father said. Worrying would put lines on her face. It would make her hair thin and gray.
Emily Glynn’s rock star guitarist father was even more problematic.
Not that Andy was looking. Or thinking about him. That wasn’t the type of thing that a woman such as herself did.
But she was thinking about him far too often.
Cadell Glynn had come in with the patient when she had been transferred from Missouri.
That first day, he had blustered about, insisting on learning everything that he could about biliary atresia and being informed of every step of her care and every twitch in her prognosis. His assertiveness bordered on aggression and arrogance, but Emily received the best care that any patient had ever gotten in Saints Simon and Jude. Her medical care had been suspiciously similar to the very high standard of care that all pediatric liver disease patients received, but a nurse had turned the cafeteria upside-down to find the child a vanilla pudding cup for her and to placate the father.
During that initial, panicked week, Cadell Glynn had been all sturm und drang until Emily had stabilized. Finally, exhaustion and relief had turned him into a model parent, making informed, considered decisions and supporting the child as best he could. He was even stoic, maybe introverted, and spoke quietly when necessary.
Unless someone crossed Emily.
An unsympathetic nurse who had yelled at the child and tried to muscle her down to take a blood sample had had to be reassigned after Cadell had gotten through with the administration.
Andy only saw him when he was with Emily, when he was a quiet musician and father, caring for a sick child, but she had heard about the way that he had gone up the chain of management to make sure that woman was never near his child again.
His nickname among the nurses was The Glorious, Cocky Bastard.
When he wasn’t around, Emily liked to look at pictures of him on her tablet, swiping across to see new ones. He video-chatted with her several times a day.
When Emily wasn’t in the hospital, she lived in Cadell’s home in New Jersey with a rotating staff of nannies. Sometimes, the paid minders didn’t live up to their end of the bargain, a situation that haunted Andy because, as she had been told by her father and uncles, she had too soft of a heart to be a surgeon.
They were wrong, of course. Andy had no problem with cutting to cure. She just worried about Emily, a toddler alone in a mansion, cared for by unreliable nannies and her footloose father who video-chatted with her when he was free.
But, even Andy had to admit, Cadell Glynn did everything he possibly could.
Whenever he was in town, he left Emily’s bedside only to sleep and shower. He had bought a house near the hospital for her.
Several times, he had breezed in, exhaustion darkening the hollows under his warm, brown eyes and with mascara and eyeliner running down his face. His normal black curls, tipped with sapphire blue somehow, had been flat-ironed straight, but sweat and time had allowed his hair to start curling on his forehead and around his ears.
After only a few hours with Emily, he’d had to board another plane to meet his band for their next concert in another city.
But he had come.
And he kept coming.
That had rather surprised Andy. For a young man who had been presented with a paternity test and a sick, motherless child, he had made a herculean effort to be a part of the child’s life.
Even if he was a musician in a rock band.