He sighed. “I’m listening.”
“Everything feels very…unevenbetween us.”
“What do you mean, uneven?”
“You talked about your childhood.”
“You talked about yours, too,” he pointed out.
“Yeah,” I agreed with a nod. “I did. But it’s not the only thing that I carry around inside me. There’s something else I want to share with you.” I paused, trying to summon the nerve. “I lost a kid on my table.”
I heard the scraping of the chair next to me, and then Boxer sat. I felt this warmth, but he didn’t reach out to touch me. I was glad he didn’t. I was afraid that if he touched me in that moment I’d shatter like a crystal vase.
“It was my second to last year of residency. He was badly injured, and I had to make a call. It was a fifty-fifty shot, but it was the wrong one, and an eight-year-old boy died right in front of me.” I exhaled slowly and forced myself to look at Boxer.
His eyes were full of sympathy but not forgiveness. No one could give me that. No one except me, and I’d spent years punishing myself for my mistake. I wasn’t sure I was capable of ever forgiving myself at this point. I’d lived with it for so long. I understood the burden I carried, but it wasn’t so easy to let it go.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” I said. “Sitting across from hopeful parents when you’re the one that has to tell them their child is gone. The light leaves their eyes, almost like they’ve died too.” I turned my face away and closed my own eyes, but all that did was force me back in time to the worst moment of my life.
I inhaled a few breaths and then continued. “They made me take a few weeks leave after my breakdown. I saw a shrink and went to grief counseling.” I opened my eyes. “That’s where I met Quinn.”
Shaking my head, I laughed softly. “We blew off grief group one day, got drunk, and talked. That did more for me than three weeks of counseling. I still don’t know why.”
I looked at Boxer, but still he said nothing.
“I came back to work, slapped a smile on my face, and pretended like each breath didn’t feel like a razor shredding my heart. It was too much, so I left Boston and went to Duke. I met a guy down there. Jeff. We lived together. My mother liked him. I felt…lukewarm about him. I felt lukewarm about everything, really. A few months ago, he got promoted and took a job in San Francisco. He asked me to go with him. I said no and moved here.”
I clasped my hands together and placed them in my lap. “I run from things. People. Myself. Something is broken inside me, Boxer. And it broke long before I…” I swallowed. “Before I killed that boy. I think it broke when my dad left. I stopped trusting. Stopped seeing the good in the world. I wanted to fix things in people that could be fixed. I want to help others because I can’t help myself.”
I felt like a grandfather clock that chimed the wrong hours.
“When I was nineteen,” he said after long pause. “I walked into my childhood home and saw my father strangling my mother. He had his hands wrapped around her throat, and it was obvious he was really gonna do it.”
His gaze was cold, steely. “I pulled him off her and while I was beating the shit out of him, she was sobbing next to me, begging for his life. The bastard was gonna kill her, and there she was pleading with me to let him live.”
I couldn’t imagine the horror of walking into the scene he described. I saw terrible things as a doctor, but to witness something that personal… God, he was stronger than I even realized.
“I beat his face until he went limp and pissed himself. I leaned down close to him, and he looked at me through swollen eyes when I told him if he ever touched her again, I’d kill him. I’ll never forget how he smelled in that moment, like cheap gin and fear.” He clenched his hands into fists, as if he was viscerally remembering the scene he’d witnessed.
“Something happens to men when they realize they’re nothing more than mediocre has-beens who’ve never amounted to anything. They take it out on the people that love them.”
He took a long, slow breath. “Later, when I walked into the clubhouse and told Colt and the others what I’d done. My knuckles were bloody and raw. And a few months later when they patched me in, they named me Boxer. It’s the most honest thing that I am.
“I haven’t seen my dad since that day. I doubt he’s dead. Some men are too fucking mean to die.” His smile was rancorous, and he looked straight at me. “Some people break and never recover from the things they’ve seen. They never figure out how to breathe deeply again. But you took the pain of your father leaving and turned it into something. You found a way to give back and do something good in this shithole of a world.”
He finally reached out and touched me, cradling my cheeks in his strong hands. “People die all the time. You tried to save a life. That’s more than what most people do. My old man was so miserable, he just wanted to spread it around. You spread good, Doc, because youaregood.”
“Boxer,” I whispered, but he wasn’t done.
“We’re all broken in some way. If you’re lucky, you might find someone whose broken pieces fit with yours.”
I leaned into his touch. “You live a dangerous life.”
“Yeah.”
“I just dug a bullet out of you.”
“It won’t be the last time,” he said with a rueful smile.