Page 2 of Dr. Attending

Cassidy glances up at her friend. “Can you—”

“Yes, Cass,” Morgan interrupts, shaking her head as she walks away. “I’ll cover your patients. Don’t worry.”

When she reaches the door, she pauses to tighten her light-brown ponytail. Her body is angled so that I’m the only one who can see the concern etched on her face when she glances back at me—a silent question of if I can handle the situation without her.

I force a reassuring smile to my lips because Parker hasn’t tried to kill me . . . yet.

Cassidy laughs once the door closes. “You should have called me instead of Morg,” she says as she works to untangle a strand of hair from her stethoscope. “She isn’t a kid person.”

Parker steps back from the table and lets out an amused grunt as he reaches for the pager in his pocket. “That’s shocking, considering she acts like one most of the time.”

“Sorry, Cass,” I reply, shifting my attention away from my ex-best friend and toward my ex-girlfriend. “I didn’t know you were working.”

It’s a filthy lie. I was fully aware that she was working today, but I didn’t want to drag her into this. When I moved back to Atlanta, she asked me to respect her boundaries so that she could work on her relationship with Parker, and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to prove to myself—and to everyone else—that I really have changed. Which is why I asked Morgan to help me instead.

“Well, he seems to be doing okay.” Cassidy smiles up at me from the floor as my son very proudly bangs the tips of her stethoscope together. “What happened?”

“Climbed off the changing table when I turned around for some wipes, and I had to catch him mid-fall,” I explain, still thankful that the outcome wasn’t worse. “I was so focused on trying to make sure he didn’t hit his head that I must have snagged his arm a little too hard.”

I don’t add the reason I was terrified of having him hit his head. I already had to explain his maternal health history once today, and I’m not exactly itching to have to do it again.

“Was it broken?” Cassidy asks.

I shake my head. “Nursemaid’s elbow.”

Her brows knit like I’m speaking a foreign language. And just as I’m about to open my mouth to explain, Parker glances up at me with a smirk.

“Don’t act like you knew what it was . . . you thought he had a broken clavicle.”

I can’t argue because he’s right. I panicked. The rational part of my brain was misfiring, running on fear rather than medical logic. I should have taken a minute to breathe and assess my son calmly, but instead, I did the first thing I could think of—bring him to Midtown Memorial Hospital.

In retrospect, I could have easily taken him to the children’s hospital down the road. Nothing about what I said or did made logical sense—nothing except for paging Parker Winters. Because the truth is, when it comes to my son, there’s no one I trust more than him. Our friendship might be complicated, but he’s the best doctor I know.

“You gonna tell me what nursemaid’s elbow is?” Cassidy asks, narrowing her eyes on her husband with an unamused expression. “Or are you just going to keep trying to big dick him?”

Parker blinks a few times, like he’s surprised by her response. His voice dips so low that I almost don’t hear him when he replies, “I think you of all people would know who has the bigger dick,sweetheart.”

Cassidy cocks her head. “And I don’t think you want to know the answer to that . . .sweetheart.”

I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stifle my amusement so that I don’t destroy the progress Parker and I made this afternoon.

“While I wouldloveto finally hear the truth about which one of us is packing more heat,” I interrupt, trying to diffuse the tension in the room. “Can we please refrain from having this conversation in front of my very young, and very innocent son? Ialready took an L in the Dad category once today, and I’d rather not add another one.”

Parker fights a smile as he reaches up to pull the crisp navy scrub cap from his head. “I’ve got to run. You should be good to go.”

“Thank you.”

I stare straight into his eyes when I say the words because I want him to know how much I mean them.

Asking Morgan to page him was a gamble. He’s made it a point to avoid me at the hospital since I came back to work, and when he walked through the door this afternoon, I wasn’t sure how everything would play out. I hoped that he would help me, but there was a small part of me—the part that knows just how cold and clinical he can get—that expected him to cause a scene.

But he didn’t.

He simply listened and acted like he genuinely cared as I gave him a quick rundown of the past year. And when I finished, something in his expression shifted which made me hopeful that his resentment toward me might not be as deeply rooted as I imagined.

Parker gives me a crisp nod and runs his fingers through his dark hair before bending down to let Cassidy know that he’ll see her at home.

Once he closes the door, neither one of us speaks for a moment.

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