She reached out for the hand that rested on the table. “Ted?”

Although he concealed his tears with his fingers, she could see he was distraught. He gathered up his strength from within, gave a cough and a little huff. “Ah,” he said. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat and looked at her through red-rimmed eyes. “You can’t imagine what I had to hear today. Do you know how Krissy got in this mess?” he asked.

“I assumed, the usual way.”

“I hope it wasn’t the usual way. My daughter has been in a lot of pain. Did it seem like that to you? Because I knew she could test my limits. I knew she could get in trouble. Fifteen-year-olds don’t have much common sense most of the time. But Krissy hasn’t been a normal teenaged girl. She was a girl with a plan. She was either going to have herself a baby or kill herself. And since boys her age are more than willing to cooperate with indiscriminant girls who are looking for sex, the baby idea won over the messy and painful suicide idea. And do you know why?”

Peyton, dumbfounded, just shook her head.

“Because no one loves her. Because in her whole life, she couldn’t think of one person who really cared about her. And she thought if she had a baby, that baby would love her. She assumed this because she loves her mother and father...even though she was sure we didn’t love her. And not just us—no one. Not an aunt or teacher or fellow student.” He shook his head. “I thought she was popular. I thought she felt well liked and...well, and loved.”

Peyton was not only not shocked by this revelation, she was disgusted that he was. “Teenagers are very fragile, Ted. They need a lot of consistency and support. All teenagers feel unloved and unaccepted from time to time in their peer groups, even the ones who are popular. Their maturity level is low and their insecurities very high.”

“Enough to kill themselves?” he asked in a desperate whisper.

She made a sad face. “It’s a growing problem.”

He sighed deeply, trying to compose himself. “I can walk into an exam room, and I can read a patient in seconds. I know if they’re lying, if they’re terrified, if they just don’t care. I can tell if they’re exaggerating, dramatizing or if they’re having symptoms they’re not talking about because they don’t want them to exist. If I can talk with them for ten minutes, we can almost always get on the same team. Hell, I don’t even need the patient—I can look at the chart, the blood, the tests, and I know if they were misdiagnosed or if they need more than I can give them.”

“You’re known for that. You dazzled me with your perception. I think that’s what I fell in love with—your sensitivity and brilliance.”

“But my own daughter is in life-threatening danger, and I didn’t see it.”

Peyton chewed her lower lip for a moment. She knew it was risky, but she decided it was time to be brutally honest. “I didn’t think you cared.”

“I care,” he said. “I love my kids.” Then he shook his head. “I didn’t see how to connect the dots, Peyton. What does making off with someone’s sweater or deleting their TV shows have to do with desperation? I thought you were overreacting. I thought they were typical kids, missing curfew, changing plans without telling anyone, resisting authority.”

“If you’d been here more, if you’d been the one whose personal property disappeared or whose shows were deleted, you might’ve asked yourself why they refused to follow the simplest rules, why they were acting out. They hated me because you loved me. They want their parents.”

“Olivia...”

“Uh-uh,” she said shaking her head. “You can try putting this off on Olivia, but that will only cost you valuable time. Right now, if you love them, you better figure out how to be a parent to them.”

“When you were leaving me, you said I was emotionally unavailable.” She nodded. “That’s what the counselor said. She said my daughter didn’t bring her problems to me because my door was closed. Is that true? That my door was closed?”

Peyton nodded. “The same way the door closes when you leave the patient in the exam room. You did your ten or fifteen minutes of assessment, gave them the protocol and the drugs and left. You don’t have to live with them, hold them while they cry, sit up at night with them when they’re scared—your job was done. You’re done until they show up in the ER or make another appointment.” She took a breath. “That’s not how you parent. Parenting is full-time.”

“I thought I was a full-time father. I took them to Disneyland.”

She laughed at him. “We took them to Disneyland. They had a blast. You should have seen them. But you were on your laptop or cell phone most of the time.”

He groaned.

“Listen, I understand you’re programed to have a lot of little minions taking care of the grunt work. There’s no other way you could have a practice as important and successful as you do—you need a lot of help. The thing is, you can hire babysitters and housekeepers and teachers—you can’t do it all. You can’t be aware of what’s happening with your kids all the time, but you damn sure have to perfect a way of finding out as much as you can, or you’re not only going to miss out, you’re going to miss something really important. Like Krissy’s desperation to be loved.”

“Did you see it?”

“No. But then, the kids didn’t reveal themselves to me—they pushed me away. They resented me so much. And when I tried to provide boundaries, you laughed me off. But, Ted, don’t worry now. You can get some training. Now, while there’s still time to help Krissy and time to keep from losing the other two.”

“You have no idea what it was like to hear my daughter say those things,” he said, his eyes growing watery again. “I had a mental image of seeing her dead.”

“You must have been terrified.”

“And guilty and ashamed and mortified. So filled with regret I couldn’t even speak. I don’t know what to do next. I don’t think they know I love them.”

“My mother always said there are only two things you have to tell your children. That you love them and you’re so glad you have them. But she also said, if you don’t make them do chores, you’ll ruin them. They won’t be able to live in the world. Her parenting philosophies are pretty simple, but she knows each one of her eight children down to the soles of our feet.”