Chapter 7

Spring semester settled into a rhythm neither of them had quite had before — not the constant vigilance of the fall, not the raw aftermath of January, just ordinary weeks stacking up one after another, classes and study sessions and Sunday dinners that didn’t require bracing for anything. By March, when the job postings for summer started going up on the pre-med department’s board, Soo Yi realized she’d gone almost six full weeks without once feeling like she needed to watch the room she walked into. It was such a small thing to notice, and yet it kept catching her off guard, the way a person notices silence only after a long stretch of noise.

The board outside the biology building was where most of the good listings ended up first, snapped up within days by students who checked it obsessively, refreshing the department’s email list like it might yield something better if they just looked often enough. Soo Yi had been checking twice a day for a week when she found it — a new posting, ink still practically wet, for a medical assistant position at a satellite family care center opening a few miles from her parents’ house. She read it three times standing right there in the hallway, half convinced she’d misread the location, sure there had to be some other town with a similar name that she was confusing it with.

“That’s basically your backyard,” Brad said, reading over her shoulder when she showed him that afternoon, both of them still in their lab coats from the afternoon session.

“I know. I didn’t even know they were opening a location out there.” She was already pulling up the clinic’s website on her phone, scanning for an application link, thumb moving fast. “It’s a brand new satellite office, which means they’re building the whole staff from scratch. No competing with someone who’s been there for two years already and already knows every doctor by first name.”

“You should apply tonight. Before someone else from this department finds it and beats you to it.”

She did, and heard back within four days — an interview the following week, conducted over video call by a physician’s assistant who seemed more interested in Soo Yi’s steadiness under pressure than her technical experience, which she didn’t have much of yet beyond a single first-aid certification and two semesters of pre-med coursework. Soo Yi found herself, unprompted, telling the story of the fall semester in careful, edited form — not the details, not the image itself, just the shape of what it had taught her, the part about learning to stay calm and clear-headed when everything around her was falling apart. The PA had gone quiet for a moment afterward, long enough that Soo Yi worried she’d overshared, and then said simply that was exactly the kind of person she wanted answering phones and calming down scared patients in a brand-new clinic still finding its footing. Soo Yi got the offer two days later, an email she read four separate times before she let herself believe it was real.

Brad’s search took a different shape entirely, mostly because his mother had strong opinions about it before he’d even started looking.

“You should just work for Dr. Whitfield’s clinic,” Catherine told him over spring break planning calls, in the tone she used when she’d already decided something and was merely informing him of it rather than asking his opinion at all. “Dr. Whitfield’s clinic is always short-staffed in the summer, half the assistants go home for break, and you’d be there every day watching real OB-GYN work instead of shadowing someone for two afternoons a month like most premeds manage. You’d actually learn something instead of just filling out a resume line.”

“You want me working alongside Kristen all summer?”

“I want you getting real clinical hours in a specialty you might actually love, instead of filing charts somewhere generic because it was convenient and close to campus.” Catherine hadn’t been wrong about much so far, and she wasn’t wrong about this either. Brad put in the application that same week, more out of curiosity than any real commitment, and Dr. Whitfield — who’d delivered both Kristen and, as it happened, Brad himself twenty years earlier — hired him almost on the spot once Catherine put in a word on his behalf.

Kristen, when she heard, found the whole arrangement endlessly funny. “You do realize you’re going to spend your entire summer surrounded exclusively by pregnant women and their various complaints,” she told him over the phone, not even trying to hide her amusement. “That’s the job. Hope you’re ready.”

“I’ve survived you and Mom for twenty years. I think I can handle it.”