After hearing Amber’s heartfelt lesson, Juan stilled for a moment, and although he agreed with her sentiments, he was reluctant to give in. He instead obstinately pursed his lips and murmured, “If only my father were as open-minded as you are.”
“Why not tell him?”
“If I did, he’d kill me!” Juan hugged his head as if in pain, an agonized expression surfacing onto his face. “All I do is annoy him, and all he focuses on are my grades. He never praises me for doing well, and he always criticizes me for doing badly.
Doesn’t he know that I want to work hard too? I don’t know why, but whenever I look at those big numbers on the blackboard stating how far we are from the target, I become so nervous that I can’t pay attention to anything the teacher’s saying.
And even during exams, even though I know how to do all of those problems, I somehow get them all wrong! I’m so worried that I’ll just keep doing worse and worse!”
A phobia of exams brought on by anxiety. Juan’s condition was probably caused by excessive stress.
Now that Amber had deduced the root cause of his illness, she was able to help him relieve his stress in a much more targeted fashion. After they chatted and ate lunch, they even played a cooperative game together. When Juan noticed that it was almost afternoon, he said, “I think that I should go back now. He’s still not back yet.”
He really is such a thoughtful child, Amber thought as she said, “It’s alright. If you want to stay, that’s fine too.”
He shook his head. “No, it’s really fine. It was already very helpful to just have this day to play and relax. I feel a lot better now.”
“That’s good.” Amber looked at him. He truly did seem much less agitated than when he had first come in. At the very least, the anxiety and gloom on his face had diminished considerably.
Amber wrote him a note as a reminder of their conversation. It contained three questions ‘Why does one study? What is the purpose of studying? How important are grades?’
When she handed it over, she said, “When you have time, look at this piece of paper and ponder your answer to these three questions carefully. All I can tell you is, there are many paths in life, but you only have one life.”
When she finished, she called Ruby. Thankfully, he was close by.
When he heard that she wanted him to send Juan home, Ruby was slightly surprised. “Why’s Juan over at your place? That brat, isn’t he taking the exams this year? Is his uncle so lax that he’d let him come out and play?”
He ran over quickly, and didn’t even bother going upstairs into Amber’s apartment. “I’m not going to go up. Otherwise, if that boyfriend of yours sees me, he might deliberately try to find fault with my engineering project.”
Ruby then put on a saccharine tone as he playfully bemoaned to Amber, “Engineering’s such a hard discipline. In front of my boss, I have to act like an obedient little kid. It’d be good if you married quickly. That way, I’ll have a big tree that’ll shield and shade me.”
Not waiting for Amber’s reply, he threw her a sickeningly coquettish glance before taking Juan far away.
He left Amber behind in a plume of dust, who was thinking about how she was going to transplant that tree that had just walked away.
***
Amber didn’t feel like she had done anything wrong. As a doctor, she’d do her best to humor her patients, but as a girlfriend, she needed to have her own personality. This was a natural part of any relationship; both partners would have to learn and adapt to each other’s habits and behavior.
Amber didn’t go back inside. Instead, she remained outside and called Ian, but his phone was off. When he stormed out, he probably hadn’t brought anything with him, and his phone was probably somewhere in her apartment still. Amber could only think to call Silvia and demand, “Give me Billy’s number.”
Silvia harrumphed. “You swindled me in the morning. First, tell me about what you did with your Director Axton last night.”
“We had a big battle that lasted over three hundred rounds. Is that enough for you?”
Silvia chuckled and was finally willing to give her Billy’s number. But when Amber called Billy, he said that he hadn’t seen Ian yet, and he even laughed at her desperate moves. “My, it seems that Chief Ian’s skills aren’t bad. You’re even missing him before nighttime! Yup, Dr. Camille, I know that you miss him. You don’t have to explain, I understand.”
Amber couldn’t even formulate a response.
Given Billy’s offensive mouth, how had someone like Silvia ended up liking him?
And then, with an inordinate amount of patience, she managed to wrangle Ian office’s phone number from Billy. It was during this ordeal that she suddenly realized that she really didn’t know very much about Ian.
She didn’t know the phone numbers of his close friends and family, his frequent haunts, what he’d do when he was angry. She knew absolutely none of these things.
She reflected on this missing portion of their relationship.
And as she reflected, she continued looking for him. It turns out that he hadn’t gone back to the Axton household or to his office. Then, perhaps the only place he could go to was his own house?
Amber took a taxi there, but was still unable to find him.
In the end, she even reached out to a police officer for help, and he reminded her, “Is his car still parked where it was earlier?”
Amber was speechless that she had missed such a crucial detail.
Ian’s car was lying quietly in the district’s parking lot. Amber caressed her forehead, feeling like she had wasted her entire afternoon.