Desmond stood up slowly, walked back over to the bed, and I handed Nora carefully into his arms for the second time that afternoon.
He looked down at her for a long moment, his hands considerably steadier this time than they’d been the first time he’d held her.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, to her this time, not to either of us. “I’m sorry I scared everyone. I’m sorry I let something that happened to your grandmother almost cost you the first hour of your own life with your parents actually in the room. I’m not going anywhere, Nora. I promise you that.”
Renee started crying again, differently this time, and I watched something in the room finally start to settle, the raw panic of the last twenty minutes slowly giving way to something more like exhausted relief.
“I think,” Dr. Voss said gently, from where she’d been standing quietly near the door, giving the family space to work through what needed working through, “that it might be worth connecting you with a grief counselor as well as the dermatology referral, Mr. Calder. What you just described — the flashback, the panic — that’s a real and fairly common trauma response, especially given how directly it connects back to your mother’s own diagnosis. It doesn’t make you a bad father. It makes you a person who’s still carrying something that never got fully processed.”
