My name is Lucas Ramirez. I was thirty years old that spring. I had a medical degree, a white coat with my name stitched on the pocket, and student loan payments that still made my stomach tighten every single month.
Becoming a doctor was all I’d ever wanted.
When I was nine, my grandmother got sick. A doctor at the county hospital in El Paso sat with her for an hour, holding her hand and explaining everything in Spanish, so she wouldn’t be afraid. He didn’t have to. Nobody made him.
I decided right then.
My parents couldn’t help much with tuition. My dad runs a little hardware store. Ramirez Hardware, on Mesa Street. My mom does the books for it. We were never poor, but there was never anything extra either.
So I studied all week, and I worked every weekend. All through college. All through medical school. Stocking shelves at my dad’s store. Delivering pizzas. Tutoring organic chemistry to rich kids for twenty-five dollars an hour.
By the time I finished my residency, I owed two hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars.
I had an app on my phone that reminded me every month. A little red notification. Payment due.
By the time I met Alicia, I thought the hardest part of my life was behind me.
I was wrong about that.
She was eighteen years old. She’d been on the oncology floor at University Medical Center for two months when I rotated onto her care team.
Leukemia. Acute myeloid. She’d been diagnosed the week after her high school graduation.
And she was the funniest person on that entire floor.
Even exhausted from chemo, even when she could barely lift her head off the pillow, she could make a nurse laugh while they were changing her sheets.
The first morning I walked into her room, she looked up at me from the bed.
“You’re the new one,” she said.
“I’m Dr. Ramirez.”
“Dr. Lucas,” she said. “That’s what the nurses call you. They say you’re very serious.”
“I’m not that serious.”
“Dr. Lucas,” she said, “you know smiling is free, right?”
I tried to keep a straight face. I really tried.
She waited. She just looked at me, eyebrows up.
She waited until I lost.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.