Chapter 3

I actually laughed. Me, suppress her?

An eighteen-year-old brat, and she dared to question me, a Master Surgeon?

I said mildly, "By your logic, you'll be a Master Surgeon yourself one day? You're a genius of the medical world, the rising star of the future?"

Winifred tilted her chin up, all arrogance. "Of course. You didn't make Master Surgeon until you were thirty. I'll be the next one before I'm twenty-five."

"Nothing's impossible in this world. We're both Dad's children, and my talent was always better than yours."

I lowered my head and flipped through her file. I saw that her first internship posting had been in acupuncture, so I asked, "When a patient has a seizure and you're placing needles, which points are appropriate?"

Without a second's thought, Winifred said, "The Baihui point, of course. Put the needle in and the patient recovers right away."

I pressed on. "Epilepsy comes in grand mal and petit mal. The points are completely different. If it's a grand mal seizure, which points do you choose?"

She froze on the spot, her face flushing red, stammering. First she said the Yintang point, then the Hegu point.

Not one answer was right.

I slapped the file down hard on the desk and turned a cold look on John. "So this is your daughter. This is the acupuncture skill she learned at your side?"

"With this level of ability, you still have the nerve to come to me and ask me to bend the rules and promote her to a medical doctorate. Do you really think that's possible?"

John panicked right there. He grabbed Winifred by the arm and hurried out without a backward glance.

Only Nat Lawrence stayed behind, coaxing me from the side. "Maybe the girl was just too nervous and got it wrong for a moment."

My eyes snapped up to him. "Got it wrong?"

"Is medical knowledge something you can just get wrong?"

"Remember a dosage wrong, and what the patient swallows is poison."

"Remember an acupuncture point wrong, and the needle you put in can kill someone."

"Nat, you're the dean of the College of Medicine. Do you want to treat patients like lab rats, let a half-trained fraud like Winifred practice on them, and not rest easy until she costs someone their life?"

Nat had nothing to say. He slunk out.