Hello, my name is Calvin Draper. I’m thirty-four years old, single, and working as a doctor at Tanova Healthcare Harton, in a small Tennessee town tucked into the Appalachian foothills. Out here, the highways curve like gray ribbons between green hills, old pickup trucks sit in gravel driveways, and porch flags hang still in the heavy Southern air.
Tuloma isn’t anything like New York or L.A. The streets are quiet after nine, the main drag has a diner with bottomless coffee, a hardware store that still smells like sawdust, and a couple of little coffee shops where retired teachers and off-duty nurses sit under framed photos of high school football teams, talking about everything and nothing as the sun slides down behind the hills. I love this place, not just because it’s peaceful, or because a weathered American flag flutters outside the hospital entrance every morning I walk in.
I love it because this is where I finally found what my life was supposed to be—and also where I realized just how badly the people I called “family” had failed the one person who loved me most. Today, sunlight is pouring across the desk in my small apartment, catching the edge of my stethoscope and the stack of patient charts I brought home but haven’t touched. I’m scrolling my phone without really seeing anything when a Facebook notification pops up, bright and insistent.
“On this day, 16 years ago…”
I tap it without thinking. The screen fills with a picture: me and my grandmother, Hazel Draper, standing at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. Behind us, an American flag hangs from a high steel beam, just above a crowd of travelers and rolling suitcases.
I’m eighteen in the photo—too tall for my age, all elbows and messy hair. My arm is wrapped around my grandmother. She’s small and straight-backed in her cardigan and comfortable walking shoes, white hair neatly curled, smile so wide it almost hides the tired lines around her eyes.
We’re both grinning like the whole world is finally opening its doors to us. Looking at that photo now, my heart feels like someone’s squeezing it in slow motion. That day isn’t just a memory.
It’s a wound that never fully closed. The day everything shifted. The day I realized that “family” and “love” aren’t always the same thing.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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