Excerpt of The Favored One by Carol Rose

She’d always hated Jaxon Mercier. Now, as his grandfather lie dying in Room 413, Ivy actually felt compassion for the bastard she’d always resented.

Ivy glanced down the long hospital hallway as she followed her attending physician into yet another room. There an older woman lie in the hospital bed, struggling to breathe. As the attending began looking through the patient chart, Ivy wondered if Jaxon’s grandfather was their patient. Would they go into his room?

“Crawford!” Dr. Thornton snapped. “This is your patient, isn’t she?”

Jerking herself out of thoughts of her former rival’s imminent loss, Ivy replied, “No, Dr. Thornton.“

“I’m surprised.” Dr. Thornton’s response came out dry. “The way you’re always pestering me for patients.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Thornton. I don’t mean to pester you.” Ivy’s response was immediate and conscious-stricken. The last thing she needed to do was piss off her attending.

Dr. Thornton sent her an amused glance. “Never mind. Probably your Asian heritage and your tiger-mother.”

The group of students, the intern and the resident all laughed nervously at this modest and somewhat racist humor, but Ivy just smiled. She’d heard a bunch of “tiger mother” jokes and this wasn’t all that funny, but the man could still had control over her passing the rotation.

“We are a determined and maligned ethnicity,” Ivy responded. “Being involved in your kid’s achievements and encouraging her along isn’t a bad thing.”

“Simmer down, little flower,” Dr. Thornton responded. “Now, whose patient is this?”

The fourth year med student identified that the heavyset woman in the bed was his case before beginning a recitation of her condition.

Listening with half an ear, Ivy’s thoughts drifted back to Jaxon Mercier. From looking at the patient charts for this floor, she knew the case in Room 413 and it wasn’t good. Repeated bouts of cancer had left the old man wasted and ill-equipped for the heart condition that now plagued him. He couldn’t have more than a few weeks to live.

“Mrs. Romero has end-stage renal failure, the complications of uncontrolled diabetes…” the fourth year student continued reciting information.

Ivy pulled her notepad from her white coat and stared down at it, not really seeing the words scribbled there. Jaxon Mercier—her father’s mistress’ son—had come to see his dying grandfather.

It hardly seemed fair that he’d had a loving grandfatherly influence and her father, too.

***

“Don’t worry, Mama,” Ivy motioned to the cushion beside her. “Sit down. I’m not hungry.”

“You too skinny, you not eating enough with all the studying.” Cherry Crawford briefly brushed her daughter’s arm while she scolded.

Her dark, graying hair cut in a modest page boy, Ivy’s mother subsided onto the couch next to her. They’d always been close, always had one another’s back. Them against the world after her bastard father abandoned his wife and child.

“Trust me,” Ivy rolled her eyes, “eating isn’t an issue. I do plenty of it. The only thing keeping me from obesity and insanity is the exercise I fit into this crazy schedule. Med school is not conducive to living stress-free.”

Cherry Li Crawford examined her daughter. “You said you wanted this. Medical school. I not push you into this. Violin lessons, yes. Not medicine. Too late to quit now.”

Ivy resisted the sigh that threatened. “Nope. No quitting. I ploughed through the first two years, I’m going to make it through the next two. This isn’t going to whip me.”

Her mom jumped up. “I know. I have iced tea. You want some? It’s good.”

Watching her petite, energetic mother disappear through the kitchen door without waiting for a response, Ivy smiled. Almost before she knew it, her mom was back, plunking down a glass of iced tea on the battered coffee table in front of her.

“Mom?” Ivy wondered if she was making a mistake.

“Yes.” Her mother sat next to her again on the frayed couch.

“I saw Jaxon Mercier today at the hospital.” She looked up, her gaze scanning her mother’s face, automatically checking for the reaction that had always come when this subject was raised. Surely her mother had moved beyond her father’s betrayal.

“Elizabeth Mercier’s boy? Really?”

“Yes, the son of the whore.”

“I gonna wash your mouth out,” her mother threatened with no real intent.

Cherry Li glanced up. “You sure it him? You haven’t seen the boy in long time, since you were maybe nine.”

“Yes. It was him. Surprisingly he has changed—I mean I recognized him although he’s grown up nicely from what I saw. Broad shoulders, nice face. And I looked at the patient chart. I know it was him. Tom Mercier was the patient’s name. Jaxon was there to see his grandfather…and he certainly isn’t a boy any longer.”

Ivy ran a finger down the moisture condensing on her tea glass. “We knew from that ‘friend’ of yours that he graduated summa cum laude from law school.”

Cherry responded almost absently. “Yes. Must be twenty-seven or twenty-eight now.”

Reaching for her glass, her mother said with studied casualness. “Anyone else there?”

Ivy shook her head, her dark straight hair brushing her cheeks. “Not that I know of. Not that I saw.”

“Elizabeth not there?”

Ivy had known who her mother meant. The bitch who stole her married father and lived in sin with him until his death a few years back.

“I don’t know,” she responded after a few minutes. “Tom Mercier isn’t our patient.”

“Oh.”

They drank in silence and Ivy chastised herself for even mentioning Jaxon. It just brought everything up again and everything needed to lie dormant. It did no good to think about her father’s leaving his marriage for his high-class whore. There was even less to be gained thinking about his simply walking away from his only flesh-and-blood daughter. They could have starved, but he’d made sure none of his money went to Cherry and her little Asian girl. Even though his lawyer-ass had so much.

“Elizabeth go see her daddy if he’s in the hospital.” Cherry seemed to muse this to herself. “Just must not have seen her. He helped raise that son of hers when his no-good daddy left.”

“Then she had my no-good daddy to raise her son.” The words seemed to rise out of a very deep place in her chest. Ivy’s smile felt twisted on her lips. She’d hated Elizabeth Lambert and Jaxon Mercier for replacing her, but in her rational moments, she knew the biggest asshole here was the man who’d contributed to her DNA. Her own father.

She took another swallow of tea.

“When I looked at Tom Mercier’s chart I saw that his condition is pretty bad.”

Cherry made a tsking sound. “Hard on the family. Maybe he’s not so bad. It rough to lose a daddy.”

Ivy sat her glass of tea on the coffee table. “I wouldn’t think you’d care much about her after what Elizabeth Mercier did to our family.”

Her mother shook her head a little. “No matter. Still her daddy. You know how hard when your daddy died.”

Ivy snorted. “It was not the same thing, mom. I hadn’t seen my father—at his choice—since he left when I was nine.”

“Still hard,” her mother repeated stubbornly. “Hard for you. Hard for her.”

“I don’t know how you can be so concerned about her when she’s the bitch that broke up our family.”

Cherry smiled sadly. “Even bitches have daddies they love.”

“Maybe so,” Ivy responded, “but this particular bitch stole my daddy and your husband. I think maybe we should rejoice in her imminent loss, not feel sad for her.”

“No, Ivy. We not rejoice in her father’s death.”

“Even if her affair with your husband resulted in him leaving you to raise a kid in poverty? No help from his rolling-in-wealth lawyer ass? You still fight to make ends meet, even now.”

Her mother leaned over and hugged Ivy. “Not for long. You say over and over that when you out of medical school and residency, I’ll come work in your doctor office. We won’t be struggling then.”

“Maybe not.” Ivy conceded to this, “but I’ll still have a butt-load of loans to pay off…and he still died a jerk and an asshole--”

Cherry shook her head. “Shouldn’t say thing like that about him even if he is dead. He still your daddy.”

“—and the biggest, ugliest part of all this was that he paid for Jaxon Mercier’s law school. I know we heard about it in a roundabout, gossipy way, but I believe it’s true. He paid for his mistress’ son to follow in his footsteps in law school, but he wouldn’t pay for a pair of stinkin’ tennis shoes for his blood daughter.” Ivy made herself reach for the tea glass again. “That’s the worst of this and that’s why I’ve always hated Jaxon Mercier. My father abandoned me and took Jaxon in as his son.”