Clarity 4: After the Storm by Loretta Lost Page B

disgust.
    The middle-aged woman chuckles at me. She
reaches into her pocket and tosses me a small packet. “Caffeine
pills,” she explains. “I couldn’t survive without them.”
    I nod, reaching for the stimulant
gratefully.
    “Gotta go,” she tells me, heading for the
door. “Oh, and Liam? Happy birthday.”
    I try to force a smile, but birthdays are a
sour subject for me.
    “Owen won’t shut up about the party he’s
throwing for you,” Jennifer says. “What are you now?
Thirty-five?”
    “Twenty-nine.”
    She whistles. “Jesus! Way too young to be a
doctor. When I was your age, I was still getting laid as much as
possible on campus.”
    I force a smile again as Jennifer leaves the
room. Of course she was. She came from a good family and never had
any problems with money. I had to work ten times harder than people
like her, and I’m still not where I want to be.
    Am I even in a position to be thinking about
marriage?
    Could I provide a good life for Helen? I
know she makes a little income from her writing, and her family is
loaded. But I don’t want her to depend on her father forever. I
want to be someone. I’ve never really had a penny to my
name. All my adult life, I’ve been buried up to my neck in filthy
debt. I’ve tried and tried to claw my way out by doing more than
any of my peers, and seizing every opportunity that came my way.
But where has that gotten me? I thought that once I finished school
and my residency and got a real job, things would
miraculously change.
    It turns out that I was wrong.
    All my life has been spent waiting. Waiting
and preparing for something that never came. Patience is simply not
my strong suit, yet I have been forced to exhibit so much patience
that I think it might drive me mad. It’s not enough that I had to
sacrifice my entire youth for a grueling decade of school. I took
no breaks, and crammed classes in as much as possible to make it go
faster, but it didn’t really make a difference. I still feel like I
spent the last ten years of my life in prison.
    Now that I’m finally free, I still need to
be patient enough to wait for each measly paycheck. After my
mortgage, car loans, credit cards, and student loans, each paycheck
disappears the moment it hits my account. How can anyone live like
this? I know I’m not the only one, but that doesn’t make it any
easier.
    Cracking the velvet box open, I study the
unusual ruby stone with a sigh. If my grandmother hadn’t given me
this ring before she died, I doubt I could even afford one. That
might have made things easier, no? If I didn’t have the ring, I
couldn’t even consider proposing.
    It’s the indecision that’s killing me.
    Life might be a little less hectic if I had
a private practice with regular hours. But that could realistically
be years and years away. What woman would be willing to suffer
through another decade of misery with me while I get my life
together? But Helen isn’t just any woman. She’s the one . If
I don’t ask now, could I lose my opportunity?
    Helen has been changing lately. She’s no
longer the hesitant, paper-thin girl that I met in the woods a few
months ago. Since her eye surgery, and her judo lessons, she’s
developed a new confidence and boldness that I find incredibly
attractive. But her newfound strength and enthusiasm for life makes
me afraid that she won’t need me anymore. What if she only needed
me to help her heal—and now that she has healed, there’s no room
for me in her life?
    Gazing down at the slender gold band in the
blue velvet box, I wonder if Helen would even like the ring. I
remember it resting on the hand of a kind old woman who loved her
vulgar son far too much. My eyebrows crease as I think of my
father.
    “ If you’re gonna ask a woman for
somethin’, boy, you better ask her on your birthday,” says the
muscular man, hoisting a rifle onto his shoulder. “Can you believe
yer mother let me get this gun? It’s a beauty, that’s for
sure.”
    “