“Don’t phrase it like that.”
She turned toward him.
Something moved between them—an old habit, perhaps.
The instinct to maintain a unified story.
But the lobby had become too quiet for rehearsed sentences.
Sigard folded his arms.
“Why now?”
Neither answered.
He waited.
My father glanced around the hospital.
There were polished walls, physicians passing through, administrators disappearing behind glass doors.
The building itself seemed to answer for him.
Sigard did not let him escape into silence.
“You knew I existed when I was a baby.
You knew enough to return my photograph.
You didn’t contact Mom for twenty years.
Then my picture appeared in the paper, and you called that evening.
Why?”
My mother tried first.
“Seeing your accomplishments made us realize how much time we’d lost.”
Sigard nodded once.
“What am I interested in?”
She blinked.
“What?”
“Outside medicine.
What am I interested in?”
She looked at my father.
Sigard continued.
“What’s my middle name?”
No answer.
“What was my first job?”
Silence.
“What hospital did I train at before Springfield Memorial?”
My mother’s eyes filled with frustration.
“We haven’t been given the opportunity to learn those things.”
Sigard’s voice stayed level.
“You were given twenty years.”
My father’s hand closed into a fist at his side.
“This interrogation is unnecessary.
We came here in good faith.”
Lance glanced at the stack of messages inside the folder.
“Did you?”
My father turned toward him.
“What now?”
Lance removed several printed emails.
When my parents began contacting me, I had forwarded every message to Lance, partly because the sudden attention made me uncomfortable and partly because Elena had trained me never to ignore a paper trail.
At first the messages sounded sentimental.
Family should heal.
Life is short.
We should not allow old pain to deprive Sigard of his heritage.
Then the language changed.
My mother asked whether Sigard would attend a hospital foundation dinner.
My father mentioned people in their social circle who would be “very interested” in meeting him.
Another email suggested that a public reconciliation could “restore the Harrison family name in the community.”
Sigard read that line twice.
“Restore it?”
