My name is Thomas Morrison. I’m thirty-seven years old, and for most of my life, I’ve been the person who fixes things. As a neurosurgeon, I fix brains—tumors the size of plums, aneurysms waiting to burst, compressions that steal people’s ability to move or speak or remember their children’s names. I live between a locker at Palmetto General Hospital and a suitcase in an apartment I see maybe three nights a week. I track my existence in four a.m. pages and surgical schedules that stretch out like assembly lines. I save almost everything I make, not because I’m miserly but because I grew up understanding what happens when you don’t.
I was ten years old the first time I had to translate adult panic into something manageable for my younger sister. “It’ll be fine,” I’d say, sitting on the threadbare carpet of our rental house while Mom cried over a stack of bills she couldn’t pay, while Dad worked his second shift and Julia asked why we couldn’t go to McDonald’s like her friend’s family. “We’ll figure it out. We always do.”
I learned early that emergencies have a particular taste—metallic, like fear mixed with adrenaline—and a particular shape, usually rectangular and printed with red ink: “Final Notice.” I learned to be useful, to anticipate problems, to fix things before they broke completely. It was the only way I knew how to make the anxiety stop, even temporarily.
Two weeks ago, my parents celebrated fifty years of marriage. Fifty years of somehow staying together through financial catastrophes, health scares, my father’s layoffs, my mother’s depression, my sister’s endless drama, and my own obsessive drive toward achievement. I wanted to give them something real, something that would feel like a victory after decades of just barely surviving. I wanted them to have a place where the air smelled like salt and possibility instead of stress and stale coffee. Where the floors didn’t creak ominously. Where they didn’t have to worry about the landlord raising rent or selling the property out from under them.
I spent three months looking for the right place, driving down to the coast on my rare days off, walking through houses that were either too expensive or too run-down or too far from hospitals in case Dad’s heart acted up again. Then I found it: a small blue cottage perched above the water in a quiet neighborhood south of Charleston. The paint was weathered but charming, the structure slightly crooked with age but solid. It had a white deck that wrapped around two sides, two palm trees leaning companionably in the front yard, and windows that seemed to sing when the ocean breeze pushed through them.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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