Page 189 of Yearn
Medical knowledge made it too easy to envision.
Fifteen seconds of pressure.
Maybe twenty.
Oliver would be safe.
Teyonah would be free.
Scott would be gone.
My parents' faces flashed in my mind—Dad's steady hands performing surgery, Mom's gentle voice reminding me that our hands were for healing."First, do no harm, Dominic."
But what about when harm was the only way to prevent greater harm?
What about when a man brought cocaine into a house with children?
When he waved a gun around while high?
When he called the woman you loved a whore?
Didn't that earn harm?
I took a breath.
Then another.
Think. Don't feel. Not yet.
Killing him would feel good for exactly five seconds. Then Teyonah would look at me differently—not with trust, but with fear. The boys would grow up knowing their mother's boyfriend murdered their father. The police were already coming. One forensic tech would catch something, some detail that didn't fit the narrative.
And I couldn’t forget about Mrs. Patterson who would happily go to court and serve as a witness against me.
And I'd be gone.
Removed from their lives.
Unable to protect them.
Even though dead, Scott would still win.
No.
Revenge worked better cold than hot.
Consequences lasted longer than violence.
I swallowed the rage—pushed it down into some locked compartment where I kept every other thing that threatened to overwhelm me. My parents' death. The patients I couldn't save. The nightmares from the ER.
This joined them.
Not gone.
Just contained.
Strategy replaced fury.
The clinical part of my brain—the part that made me good at medicine—kicked back in.
