Chapter 1

My father was a professor of traditional medicine at a national university, and he was a gifted physician.

The moment my mother was wheeled onto the operating table, I called him more than thirty times. He never once picked up.

On the thirty-first call, he finally answered, impatient: "So she's having surgery, so what? Don't interrupt me while I'm teaching."

"As far as I'm concerned, as long as your mother isn't dead yet, don't bother me. It disrupts my lectures."

To him, my mother's life meant nothing.

Except that in the background, a sweet young woman's voice came through the phone: "Professor Lambert, when are you actually going to come keep me company?"

Later I found out that his so-called lecture was a private date with a female student.

My mother died on that operating table, and after that my father never showed his face again.

Fifteen years later, I made something of myself. By thirty I was the top medical professor in the country, and people called me a Master Surgeon.

Then one day, Nat Lawrence, the dean of the College of Medicine, came to me with a file and asked whether I would grant a doctorate to an eighteen-year-old prodigy named Winifred Lambert.

I refused on the spot.

1.

Dean Lawrence looked baffled. He pointed at the file. "Why?"

I pulled out the doctoral thesis and said, flatly, "This paper doesn't read like something an eighteen-year-old girl could have written."

"And it says here she's completed three years of clinical practice. That's simply not possible."

"A fifteen-year-old treating patients? Working three years? If someone actually looked into it at the hospital, they'd find problems for sure."

But Dean Lawrence gripped the file, frowning. "Maybe she really is a prodigy. Starting to treat patients at fifteen isn't entirely out of the question."

I waved him off. "I'm called a Master Surgeon at thirty, and even I only barely made assistant physician at twenty. It took me four years before I dared treat patients on my own. You think she has more talent than I do?"

Nat bit his lip and tried again. "But what if she does?"

I smiled. "Then how about we just make this prodigy Winifred Lambert a Master Surgeon outright?"

Nat went quiet at once.

After all, I was the ceiling of medicine in the whole country. I was the authority.

He had no grounds left to argue.

I turned and left the university, but something sat heavy in my chest.

Because the father listed on Winifred's file was named John Lambert, and the mother was named Ruby Finch.

She was my half-sister, same father, different mother.

I had never imagined this was how we would meet for the first time.

On the way home, I called Aunt Marla.

"Aunt Marla, do you know what happened to me today?"

She asked what it was.

I said, "Today John Lambert's daughter was up for a medical doctorate, and I turned her down."

She kept saying I'd done well to refuse. No matter what, that heartless man's daughter must never be allowed to become a doctor. She'd never thought the wheel would come around like this, that it was finally our turn to get a little of our own back.

I said, smiling, that it wasn't about getting anything back. Winifred simply didn't deserve to be a medical doctor in the first place.