Chapter 3

When I got home, my wife was cooking in the kitchen.

Our daughter was practicing piano in the living room.

Hearing the door open, she ran over excitedly and wrapped her arms around my leg.

“Dad! Why did you get home so early today?”

“My exam is next month, and my teacher said the registration fee is three thousand dollars.”

“You promised me when you got paid last month!”

I looked into my daughter’s hopeful eyes.

Thinking about the fine and bonus Richard Cole had taken from me, my throat felt tightly blocked by something.

I couldn’t say a word.

My wife came out of the kitchen carrying a plate of food.

She immediately saw that something was wrong with my expression.

She quickly coaxed our daughter back to her room to practice piano.

Then she walked over and took the cardboard box from my hands.

“Alex, what happened?”

“Why is the box full of things from your office?”

“Did something happen at the hospital?”

I collapsed onto the couch and covered my face with both hands.

I told her everything that had happened at the hospital that day, exactly as it had occurred.

Her eyes immediately reddened when she finished listening.

But she didn’t complain about me even once.

She came over and hugged me tightly by the shoulders.

“If you don’t want to work there, then don’t!”

“You’ve worked at that hospital for eight years and all you’ve gotten in return is a body full of problems.”

“You have severe cervical spine issues and chronic stomach ulcers. When was the last time you got a good night’s sleep?”

“To hell with that hospital and those rotten administrators. We don’t need them!”

“Don’t worry about our daughter’s exam fee. We still have some savings.”

Hearing my wife’s words, I was a forty-year-old man, but my eyes still burned with tears.

This was my family.

What did enduring a little mistreatment outside matter when I was doing it for them?

I gritted my teeth and made a silent vow.

For this month, I would stay home and spend time with my wife and daughter.

Whoever wanted to clean up the hospital’s mess could do it!

For the next three days, I completely turned off notifications from the hospital’s work chat.

Every morning, I got up early to buy fresh vegetables at the market.

At noon, I cooked lunch for my wife.

In the evenings, I practiced piano with my daughter.

It felt as if I had never been this relaxed during the past eight years.

There were no sudden, life-or-death calls in the middle of the night.

There were no more endless, high-intensity surgeries.

But a heavy stone remained lodged in my heart.

There were simply too many critically ill patients in cardiothoracic surgery.

Those complicated conditions could change at any moment.

Could Ethan Cole, who barely had any experience as a lead surgeon, really hold the department together?