Two years after that phone call, I was again sitting in my office at St. Catherine’s before dawn, reviewing a surgical schedule with the city still dark outside my window, when my phone rang. For one irrational second, my chest tightened exactly as it had the night Ethan called from Mercy General. Trauma teaches the body before the mind can object. But when I looked down, it was just Ethan. Calling to tell me, with obvious excitement he was pretending to play cool, that he had received a grant for one of his research projects. We talked for twenty minutes. About his work. About river restoration. About bureaucratic stupidity at the EPA. About his plans for the future. At the end of the call, just before hanging up, he said something that brought the old pressure back into my throat.
“Dad,” he said, “I never thanked you properly.”
“For what?”
“For believing me. For fighting for me. For making sure what happened to me didn’t happen to anyone else, at least not from him.”
I leaned back in my chair and looked out over the city beginning to wake under the first weak wash of morning light. “You don’t need to thank me,” I said. “That’s what fathers do.”