(Amelia)
The summit was the kind of thing I'd once have watched from the back of a hall, if I'd been invited at all. Now my name was on the program in the largest type. Keynote. Dr. Amelia Carter on advances in neonatal cardiac care. A ballroom full of the people who ran medicine in this city, come to hear what I'd learned in five years of pouring myself into work because work was all I had.
I wasn't nervous. That was the strange part. The woman who'd flinched at her own family's dinner table didn't flinch at a thousand strangers. I'd found, somewhere in Boston, that a full crowd was easier than an empty marriage. An audience only wanted my knowledge. It didn't want me to be smaller than I was.
Liam had Ethan for the afternoon. That let me stand backstage without splitting my attention,
