Chapter 08

Callie's POV

"Show me her file."

Michael said it before he even sat down properly. He had a coffee he was not drinking and Lily's medical summary spread across the small table between us and his eyes were already moving across the pages with a focus that made everything else in that parking lot cease to exist.

I sat across from him and watched him read.

He was quiet for a long time.

Not the polite quiet of someone being careful with their words. The deep quiet of someone who has found something in the numbers that they were not expecting and needs a moment before they speak.

That kind of quiet scared me more than anything Derek had said in the past two weeks.

"Michael."

He looked up.

"Just tell me."

He set the page down. "Dr. Anderson is not doing anything wrong. His protocol is correct and his team is good." He said it clearly so I would hear it properly. "But it is conservative. Which makes sense for a standard case."

"Lily is not a standard case."

"No." He folded his hands on the table. "She is not."

He told me about the trial then. A combination therapy. Early data only but the numbers were unlike anything the standard protocol was producing for cases with Lily's specific progression rate. Children with her profile who had gotten into the trial were showing response windows two to three times longer than projected.

I gripped my coffee cup.

"How do we get her in?"

He was quiet again. Shorter this time.

"The trial is not approved at this hospital," he said. "Getting Lily into it requires transferring her care partially to my facility. Which requires consent from both parents."

I looked at him.

He looked back at me.

"Derek will never sign that," I said.

"I know."

"He had you banned from her case before you even looked at her file. He is not going to sign anything with your name on it."

"I know that too." Michael picked up his coffee finally. "I am telling you anyway because you deserve to know it exists. And because things change. People change. Situations change."

I looked at Lily's file on the table between us. All those numbers and words that added up to three weeks and a birthday that had just been moved four days away out of spite.

"Thank you," I said.

"Call me anytime." He said it simply. "Day or night."

---

He was at my door at nine.

I knew it was Derek before I opened it because nobody else knocked like that. Three times. Hard and certain. The knock of someone who had already decided how the conversation was going to go.

I opened the door.

He looked different from how he had looked at the exhibition. Less controlled. His jacket was gone. His jaw was set. He had the particular energy of a man who had spent several hours being angry and had arrived somewhere to put it down.

"You met him," he said.

"Come inside. Lily is sleeping."

"I don't care where—"

"Come inside Derek."

He came inside.

I kept the kitchen light low and my voice lower and I stood on one side of the counter and he stood on the other and I waited for whatever this was going to be.

"I had you followed," he said. "For Lily's safety."

"You had me followed because Michael handed me a card and I did not throw it away."

"He is not supposed to be anywhere near her case."

"He is the only doctor in this city whose research is specifically designed for what Lily has." I kept my voice level. "You banned him before he even opened her file. You did not do that for Lily. You did it for yourself."

Derek moved around the counter.

Not fast. Deliberately. He stopped close enough that I had to look up to hold his gaze and I understood immediately that this was the point. The proximity. The reminder that he was still someone who took up space in my life whether I wanted him to or not.

"I still have a say," he said quietly. "In everything that happens to my daughter. Every decision. Every doctor. Every person you invite into her life." His voice dropped lower. "You do not get to cut me out and replace me with someone convenient just because we are divorcing."

"Nobody is replacing you Derek."

"Then why is he in a parking lot with her medical file?"

"Because you blocked him from the hospital." My voice finally cracked at the edges. Not from sadness. From fury. "Because the one treatment that might give her more time requires your signature and you will never sign it because his name is on the paperwork and you cannot see past your own ego long enough to—"

"Do not tell me about my daughter—"

"She has three weeks." My voice rose before I could stop it. "Three weeks and you are standing in my kitchen talking about what you own—"

"I said do not—"

A small sound from the hallway.

Both of us stopped.

Bare feet on the floor. The soft drag of Mr. Rabbit being carried by one ear.

Lily stood in the hallway in her pajamas. Her hair flattened on one side. Her eyes moving between us slowly the way they did when she was reading a room and taking her time about it.

She looked at Derek for a long moment.

Then in a voice that was small and clear and completely steady she asked:

"Daddy. Are you here to say sorry. Or are you only going to yell again."

Neither of us spoke.

Derek looked at his daughter standing in the hallway in the dark holding her rabbit.

And for the first time since any of this began he had absolutely nothing to say.