Chapter 2

Listening to Irene push her luck like she was owed something, my temper flared. I snatched my father's phone out of his hand and hung up.

Repaying a debt of gratitude? Who owed what to whom?

Justin reported him precisely so patients would lose their free option and have to go pay for treatment at his shop.

He'd taken all the help my father gave, and now he needed that road shut for good.

My father went into his study and took out the notebook from the drawer, the one filled edge to edge with his own handwriting: Clinical Notes on Acupuncture for Bone Disease.

He locked it into the very bottom of the cabinet.

That notebook recorded every one of Justin's follow-ups, the changes in his pulse, the progress of his recovery.

Five years. More than seven hundred pages.

Justin was a case study, and he was my father's heart's blood.

And now that blood had turned on him.

I leaned against the doorframe and watched him, my fists clenched.

Dad, don't worry. This debt, I'll keep the account for you.

Later, as the talk of my father's "illegal medical practice" kept spreading online, the director simply told him to go home and rest for a few days.

Which was to say, suspension.

That night, my mother carried the food out from the kitchen and saw my father sitting on the couch without touching his chopsticks. She knew right away something was wrong.

Once she'd heard the whole thing, she set down her bowl, her eyes going red in an instant.

Then she shot to her feet.

"How did Justin's wife kneel at our door back then?"

"Has she forgotten?"

I didn't know whether she'd forgotten or not. I hadn't.

It was December, snowing hard.

Irene knelt on the concrete outside the building entrance, knocking her forehead against the ground.

"Dr. Gilbert, please, save him."

"We really have no money left."

"We sold the house. We can't even borrow enough for our kid's tuition."

"If he ends up paralyzed, the three of us will just turn on the gas."

"And now look,"

my mother's voice was shaking,

"the man's back on his feet, opened a physical therapy shop,"

"and he's afraid other people will come to you for free treatment and take business away from him."

"What do you call that? That's eating out of the bowl, then cursing the cook the second you set it down!"

My father didn't say a word. He got up and went into the study.

I slept badly that night.

I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and saw light leaking through the crack under the study door.

My father sat at his desk, the ashtray heaped with cigarette butts.

I went back to my room, turned over and over, couldn't sleep, and pulled out my phone to scroll the local news.

I saw a video posted by a local city account, titled:

"Miracle in Bone Disease!"

"Justin Kane Therapy Center Holds Grand Opening, Local Business Leader Cuts the Ribbon in Person!"

In the video Justin stood at the door of his shop, glowing as he spoke to the camera:

"The reason I can stand again is my own willpower and my refusal to give up."

"Now I want to share this experience with more bone disease patients!"

"Don't give up, everyone. Come to my therapy center, and together with me, beat this illness!"

The comments below were a string of "inspiring," "so positive," "good for him."

I stared at the screen and laughed, furious.

His own willpower? His refusal to give up?

Back then he'd screamed and wailed from the pain, and my father pulled him back from death's door one needle at a time.

Countless times he'd knelt in front of my father and said:

"I'll slave for you like an ox for the rest of my life."

Now it had become "his own willpower."

Five years of my father's heart's blood, more than seven hundred pages of case notes, wiped away by him just like that, without a second thought.

One report, and it was wiped clean.

Early the next morning, my father went to the hospital and turned in his resignation.

The director talked him out of it with a smile that wasn't a smile:

"Otto, it's a small mark on your record. Give it a couple of years and it'll be gone."

"You walk out like this, and your whole retirement package goes with you."

My father shook his head. All he said was:

"I'm tired. I can't do it anymore."

As he walked out the hospital's front doors, he turned and looked back at the building where he'd spent thirty years.

The sunlight fell on his graying hair, and all at once I saw how much older he'd become.

Those patients he couldn't let go of, he called them one by one that night to go over their aftercare instructions.

He broke his years of experience down into steps and dictated them to each person, but he stressed again and again:

"Don't come to me for acupuncture anymore."

On the other end of the line, someone was crying.

Someone else was cursing Justin:

"That animal."

Justin's physical therapy shop, on the other hand, was booming.

Irene posted videos every day, filming Justin "examining" his customers.

But I knew: some debts aren't never repaid.