Up We Go

The chandeliers at the Evergreen Resort drip crystal light across marble, and wealth hums through the ballroom in hushed, reverent tones. Michael’s hand finds the small of my back, the steady pressure of his palm an anchor.

“Breathe,” he murmurs, surgeon’s eyes doing what they always do—assessing, reassuring. “We earned our place here.”

Leo tugs his bow tie like it’s a snake. “Mom, this thing is trying to choke me.”

I kneel and loosen it, smoothing the satin flat. “Just a little while, buddy. Behavior now, pool later. Deal?”

He nods. A gap-toothed solemnity only six-year-olds can pull off.

The crowd parts, and my heart—traitor that it is—stops. The woman with the champagne flute, the tilt of her head, the way she leans forward when she laughs. Eleven years evaporate. My body remembers before my mind agrees. She turns, and our eyes lock across a stretch of marble crowded with strangers.

 

 

Grace. My sister.

The flute trembles. Somewhere a violin keeps playing, but a bubble of silence unwraps itself around us. Behind her, my mother’s face drains then flushes; my father moves instinctively to create a wall with his shoulders, as he did when we were children—always between, never with.

“What are you doing here?” my mother hisses, loud enough to earn curious glances.

For a heartbeat, I’m twenty-one and rain-slick, a suitcase at my feet and a front door closing like a gavel. Then Michael steps half a pace forward.

“My wife is a guest,” he says, voice firm. “She’s the CEO of MedNova. We were invited by the groom.”

MedNova ripples outward. Heads turn. A woman in burgundy squeezes her date’s arm. “That’s Amber Collins.”

Dr. Daniel Brooks, groom and darling of the cardiology panels, appears with a smile and a crease between his brows. “You know the CEO of MedNova?” he asks my parents, then to me: “We’ve been trying to partner with them for months. Your system is changing post-op care.”

Grace attempts a smile; it fractures. My parents exchange glances that carry twelve different strategies and a single panic.

I could make a scene. I could unfurl eleven years of lies—how they told our town I’d failed out, pocketed my tuition for Grace’s Cancun spring break and then her “accelerated program,” used me as cautionary tale while she learned to nod just so. The power to do it sits somewhere near my sternum, warm and pulsing.

“Hello, Grace,” I say. “Congratulations.”

It lands like thunder. Michael’s hand returns to my back, that silent question: stay or go?

“Is that lady in the white dress your friend?” Leo whispers.

Daniel hears “sister” and looks between us, suspicion dawning.

As he introduces his new bride to a cluster of physicians—“Stanford graduate and the brilliant mind managing her family’s practice back in Vermont”—I watch the pearl earrings catch the light when she tilts her head. It’s a tell. She does it before she stretches truth.

 

 

“The Collins Clinic has served our community for thirty years,” Grace says, voice pitched between pride and humility. “We specialize in family medicine with some geriatric care.”

A silver-haired doctor in an elegant pantsuit has read my nametag. “Your presentation at the summit was brilliant,” she says. “Your system is changing recovery protocols across… what, three states now?”

“Four,” I correct gently. “Northwestern came on board last week.”

Across the room, someone asks Grace about platelet therapy trends. “I thought Stanford moved away from that three years ago,” the doctor adds.

Grace laughs a note too high. “Well, you know… academic debates.”

Daniel’s arm slips from her waist. He is noticing.

“Amber,” my father says behind me, in the voice that used to send me scurrying to answer phones while Grace practiced piano. “You need to leave. You’re ruining her day.”

Michael straightens, but I steady him with a touch. “Daniel invited me,” I say. “Perhaps ask why that upsets you.”

“The medical conference featured your daughter as keynote,” Michael adds evenly. “Her systems are in twenty-seven hospitals.”

Whispers swell. The room is recalibrating. My mother flutters like a trapped bird, trying to redirect conversations away from us. Too late. Recognition moves faster than panic.

“Stanford?” Leo says in his inside voice that carries. “You showed me the red buildings in your pictures.”

Grace’s makeup hardly shifts, but something behind her eyes cracks. Daniel’s colleagues drift closer, pulled by the gravity of truth. “You told me she dropped out after a semester,” Daniel says, not bothering to lower his voice. “That she couldn’t handle the pressure.”

“I graduated summa cum laude,” I say, “while working three jobs.”

“Three?”

“Mornings at a coffee shop, evenings at a hospital front desk, weekends at a call center.” I don’t say lumpy couches, YWCA showers, ramen for textbooks, or the humbling of asking a professor for an extension because the triple shift swallowed me whole. I don’t say the night I met Michael—a resident who stopped at my desk to ask why I’d mapped Kellerman’s patient flow theory in the margin and where I said, “It’s flawed. The bottleneck’s interdepartmental documentation.” He pulled up a chair. The next day he brought coffee. By spring we had a prototype.

“MedNova?” Daniel asks, and I can see the surgeon in him weighing, measuring. The man in him is listening, too.

“We started in our apartment seven years ago,” I say. “Last quarter revenue was just under four hundred million.”

My parents hover like sentinels over a crumbling border. They will try to separate us soon. Michael’s phone sits innocently in his hand, lens pointed nowhere and everywhere. We’ve learned to document hostility while taking up very little space.

My mother arrives with her social smile lacquered on. “Daniel, someone from Boston General is dying to meet you.” To a passing guest: “Amber has always been so jealous of her sister’s accomplishments.”

“What advantages did she have?” Michael asks mildly. “Three jobs? Sleeping on friends’ couches? Or was it the part where you spent her tuition on Grace?”

The silence is purer than a shout. It’s the kind people sit in when they realize they’ve been standing wrong.

“Are those people your family?” Leo asks, voice small and devastating.

“They’re relatives,” I tell him. “Family is different.”

My father puffs himself bigger, as if he can become the door he once slammed. “You can’t just waltz back into our lives.”

“I’m not interested in walking back into anything,” I say. “You made me build my own.” Rain on a dorm window. A bank statement with a hole where my future should be. The relief of having nothing left to lose and realizing that can be a beginning.

“Thank you,” I add. They blink. “For not giving me a chance. You made me do the rest.”

We leave when we are ready—no theatrics, just the quiet power of walking away whole. In the lobby, Leo spins, cape flaring. “Pool time!”

“Ten minutes to change,” Michael says, and when we pass the mirror I see us: three reflections, solid.

Through the ballroom doors, I catch Daniel watching us go. He turns back to his new bride with new questions in his eyes.

A month later, sunlight slants across polished concrete in my office. Boston Memorial’s proposal lies open—eight figures for a system that reduced their post-op complications by thirty-seven percent. Numbers are honest. They don’t play favorites.

“Dr. Daniel Brooks is here,” Meredith says over the intercom.

He comes in like a man carrying invisible weight. He doesn’t sit until I gesture.

“I can’t stay long,” he says. “I’ve… consulted an attorney about an annulment. Everything Grace told me was fabricated. She never attended Stanford. She never managed the clinic. She’s the receptionist.”

I nod. I am not surprised.

“They’ve been billing Medicare for procedures never performed,” he adds. “Outdated codes used deliberately. It’s been going on fifteen years.”

“Right around when I left for college,” I say. He winces.

“I came to apologize for my role in reconnecting you to… all that.” He glances around at the view. “And to ask if you plan to get involved.”

I could end them. One call, and the investigation accelerates. The old ache pulses; then it passes.

“No,” I say. “I built my life separate from theirs. I’ll keep it that way.” Then, because I remember the patients who trusted them, I add, “But I’ll forward copies of the records from when I worked there.”

Relief loosens his shoulders. “Thank you.”

After he leaves, my phone buzzes. Michael: Picking up Leo early. Zoo day? A voicemail from Grace too—her third this week. Begging, then threats, then… delete. It is astonishing how final a small action can feel.

“What will you do?” Michael asks when I call.

“Just the facts,” I say. “No more, no less.”

“I’m proud of you,” he says. The hawk outside my window rides the thermals like a benediction.

Six months pass. The cone flowers lean, heavy with sun. Leo runs between the raised beds in a Batman cape, sloshing water over pepper leaves. Michael brings lemonade with a flourish, surgeon’s hands delicate over a tray.

“Davis Board approved,” he says casually, meaning fifth major chain this year.

“That’s number five,” Leo announces, fingers spread. “Mom helps the sick people get better faster.”

The doorbell rings. A certified letter sits fat on the hall table. Grace Collins Brooks in careful loops.

Michael watches from the doorway while the envelope breathes on my desk for seventeen minutes. When I open it, a single page slides out.

Amber,
The clinic closed last month. Not because of anything you did—because of everything Mom and Dad did. The investigation found billing irregularities going back fifteen years.
Daniel left me. He was right. I’m not writing to ask for money. I’m writing to tell you: you were never the problem. I was raised to believe your intelligence threatened mine, your independence undermined my security. I believed them when they said cutting you off was necessary. I was wrong. They were wrong. I’m sorry.
—Grace

“What will you do?” Michael asks.

“Nothing dramatic.” I type a letter—brief, uncluttered—and slip it into a MedNova envelope with an internship application. Two weeks later, at a medical tech conference in Chicago, I spot her near the education pavilion in pale-blue scrubs. She listens to a talk on entry-level coding certification. She holds the application like a lifeline. Our eyes meet. No drama. No gasps. Acknowledgment, not absolution.

We don’t approach each other. Some relationships are completed, not continued.

That evening, I sign paperwork establishing the Collins First-Generation Medical Scholarship—my name reclaimed for something better. Twenty students without family support will receive tuition and mentorship next fall.

Back home, I kneel in the dirt and press a seed into soil. Leo pats earth around a tomato start with grave care.

“Some plants don’t grow well right next to others,” I tell him. “They need space to thrive.”

“Like people?” he asks.

“Smart boy,” I whisper, kissing his forehead. “Yes. Like people.”

Michael moves through the kitchen window light; dinner smells like garlic and safety. The sun spills gold across the fence. Some roots you’re given. Others you get to choose. And up we go.