My ID badge read **Dr. Kirsten Sinclair, Chief of Pediatric Oncology**, and a heavy digital tablet packed with critical patient charts rested beneath my left arm. I had a multidisciplinary board meeting in twelve minutes and every professional intention of walking right past them.
Then Connor saw me.
“Well,” he said, raising his voice so the nurses at the station and three waiting families could hear every word. “Look who it is.”
Several people turned their heads. The soft hum of the wing’s air filtration system suddenly felt extraordinarily loud.
I stopped walking. I didn’t flinch. I turned to face him, adjusting my tablet beneath my arm.
“Hello, Connor.”
His jaw tightened slightly. He seemed genuinely disappointed that my voice was a flatline—devoid of tremor, sorrow, or rage. During our seven years of marriage, Connor had fed on my emotional reactions. Tears, defensive arguments, desperate pleading, suffocating silence—anything he could twist, document, or weaponize to prove to his wealthy family that his brilliant, doctor wife was secretly “unstable.”
Emergency medicine and pediatric oncology had taught me a fundamentally different discipline. I had learned to keep my hands completely steady while frantic parents screamed, and to maintain an absolute, soothing calm when an entire room was falling apart.
Connor glanced down at my badge with a condescending smirk. “Still working sixty hours a week, I see? Still prioritizing strangers over a home?”
I almost smiled. That accusation had survived our bitter divorce proceedings. *Too many hours. Too much ambition. Too much of a life outside the small, manageable box he had built for me.*
“I love my work, Connor,” I answered quietly. “It saves lives.”
His grin widened, weaponized and sharp. “Oh, I know. You always loved playing god.”
