Page 57 of Doctor Daddy

I led the way into the dining room from the kitchen. Three places were already set. I stared at the empty chair where Brooke would normally sit. I had a sense of constricting emotion in my chest. I shouldn’t ask, but I had to know.

“I haven’t seen Brooke around lately. Did she get a new job?” I asked.

“I don’t know if you remember she was applying to graduate schools this spring,” Karen said.

I nodded, vaguely remembering that cover-up story well. She used it as one of her excuses to sneak around with me. She told her parents she was doing grad school research, or writing application essays with her friend, but she was really with me. It looked like she really had been doing both, applying to graduate school and seeing me.

“She and her friend were both accepted into a programme, and they moved to Chicago.”

I froze for a second. Uncertain that I had heard her clearly. “Brooke is going to graduate school in Chicago?”

She hadn’t said anything about either of those to me. Was that why she had gotten so upset? Had I somehow missed an important goal for her?

“What is she studying?” I asked.

Karen gave a little shrug. “It’s an MBA program. So, business, I guess. I don’t know much beyond that.”

“I didn’t realize she was interested in business management,” I said casually. I wanted to find out more information. But I wasn’t exactly certain how to approach it without sounding too nosy.

“Well, we didn’t know she was interested in that either,” Peyton said. “The girl has had focus problems when it comes to school. Who knows if she’ll follow through? I thought getting her to graduate was the end of higher education for her.”

“We didn’t know she had lofty goals until she announced she was moving to Chicago with her friend, and that they would both be attending this program.” Karen sounded slightly bitter about the whole thing.

“Is she liking it?”

“As far as we can tell,” Karen started. “She seems to be liking it. It fits in with her schedule.”

“So she’s got a job?” I could stop myself from asking more questions. I needed all the information on Brooke that I could get. I was like a dry sponge soaking up all the moisture it could find.

“Peyton has a colleague at Chicago Memorial and managed to help her get a similar job there that she had at your hospital.”

I nodded and paid attention to everything they could tell me about Brooke. I barely paid attention to the food I ate. I may have dated Brooke, but I clearly had known nothing about her, no wonder she had been upset with me.

26

BROOKE

As much as I was beginning to hate having an apartment on the third floor, I had to admit it was doing great things for my butt and my legs. I didn’t need to join a gym; I had my very own Stairmaster between the front door of the building and the front door of my apartment.

With a sense of relief having made it to our floor, I slid the key in and opened the door. I was home. After our first few weeks here, it was already starting to reflect our personalities. It was far from luxurious, but it was ours. I looped the strap of my purse on a hook and tossed my keys on the small table by the door.

“You look exhausted,” Angela said, looking up from her laptop as she sat studying on the small table we had by the window.

The table and the chairs were a brand-new purchase while the couch I flopped on was new to us. It had been a rather unattractive old brown floral design. We threw a bright blue slipcover over it, and it changed its appearance completely, as well as brightened up the mood of the room. One of the tenants moving out as we were moving in asked us to help them haul it to the dumpster. Instead, we asked if they would mind helping us haul it to our apartment, which they did so happily.

I propped my feed up in the upholstered tuffet, a thrift store find that we used as a coffee table and looked around our living room. Between thrifting and a side trip to Ikea, we had successfully furnished the place. It looked like a real home and not some glorified dorm room. We incorporated a few old dorms decorating tricks, specifically using cinder blocks and pine boards to create long low shelving that we put Angela’s large screen TV on. I brought up one of Rhys’s old X-Boxes so we could stream internet channels and play DVDs.

The once blank white walls were now covered in art prints, and a full spider plant hung from a ceiling hook in the corner by the window.

“I am exhausted. But I got some good news today,” I announced.

It was nice to have a place that felt like home and not like I was living in somebody else’s house. This was my place; my name was on the lease. I had to admit I experienced a sense of fulfilment almost every day that I came home. I was an adult. I had my own place. I may have been an adult, but I was tired and whiny most of the time.

“Oh, yeah? Tell me.” Angela shifted in her chair to face me.

“I quit my job!”

The truth was I had been looking for another job as soon as we had gotten somewhat settled. I didn’t like the idea that my parents had contacts at the hospital. I felt like I was being watched. It was a paranoid reaction to my own guilt. I had run away from home because I was pregnant. Sure, I wanted to discover what life on my own was like. But I couldn’t face the constant disappointment of my mother. And I definitely knew I wasn’t going to be able to deal with the constant attempts to get me to confess who the father was.

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