She was so angry that she refused to accept any more blind dates from her friends, severely limiting the pool of potential mates.
She overheard a patient’s mother mention a dating service on the internet that seemed interesting. Not that Melanie had—or thought she would ever—consider such a service. How embarrassing would it be to have to explain to friends and acquaintances that she allowed some computer nerd’s algorithm to pick her dates for her?
But when you’re desperate…
She typed the name of the service into Google search and hesitated when it appeared in her phone’s browser window. Was it a stupid move? Was she letting her mother’s newfound happiness push her into doing something she would regret? What if this thing didn’t work like promised? What if it connected her to some loser who somehow found out she was a doctor and chose to use her? Some guys out there liked to seek out doctors for their own personal needs. How many guys had Melanie dated who asked her about odd spots on their skin, or called her for every sneeze and sore throat? Or that one guy she caught searching through her desk drawers for her prescription pad…
When she finally clicked the link to the website, her phone’s screen was immediately filled with promises. A test written by psychologists guaranteed a perfect match. Once a match was made, the participants had the choice to contact the other person. No personal information was ever given out by the service; if someone wanted to meet a match in the real world, it was up to them to exchange real world information.
Melanie liked that idea. She would be in control. She could talk to these people without them knowing anything more than what she was willing to reveal over the system’s private messaging system. That meant she didn’t even have to offer her real name, let alone give her profession.
But, again, it also meant the men she was matched with had the same options. Was that a risk she was willing to take?
Melanie sat back and looked out the window. All she could see were clouds, a perfect metaphor for her life at the moment. Cloudy. Unknowable. What did her future look like? Was she destined to spend the rest of her life alone, to be that pediatric surgeon who never had a child of her own? Or was there a Mr. Right just around the next corner, and she simply had to be aware enough, patient enough, to find him?
Was this stupid, embarrassing dating service really the answer?
And then she thought about something her mother said right before the wedding. “You never know what might happen until you try.”
***
The questionnaire required by the dating service was extremely comprehensive. Melanie worked on it a little at a time, answering questions while veg’ing out on reality television late at night. Some of the questions made a lot of sense, such as “Did you go to college?”, but others made little or no sense. One question wanted to know the title of the last book she read. And another asked if her parents were married or divorced, like that had anything to do with the kind of man she might chose to spend her life with. Besides, how was she supposed to answer that? Her parents never married, but they might have if her father hadn’t had the bad luck of meeting a drunk driver on the road one late night. But there was no guarantee they would have stayed together. He was, after all, married to someone else when her mother got pregnant.
But she continued to work at it, finally finishing it nearly a week after she began. She was kind of expecting to have a dozen matches appear in her profile the moment she hit the send button, but instead she received an email informing her it could take up to three weeks to find a match.
Three weeks? That’s what she was paying all this money for?
Melanie set it aside and forgot about it. It was a stupid idea, anyway.
Chapter 2
“You have to follow every word to the letter. You understand?” Melanie asked in her sternest voice.
Her patient, a five year old with a congenital heart valve prolapse, nodded gravely.
“You have to take your medication every morning, no complaining.”
The girl nodded again.
“And you have to rest when your mother tells you to.”
Another nod.
“And, finally, you have to eat at least one scoop of chocolate ice cream before bed every night.”
The girl’s eyes widened and she began to giggle. “Really?”
“Really.” Melanie held up her hand in a gesture of sincerity. “Doctor’s orders.”
“Thank you, Dr. Spence,” the girl’s mother said as she followed Melanie out the door of her daughter’s hospital room.
Melanie touched her arm lightly. “You’re daughter’s going to be fine. Like I said before, we’ll probably have to go in and replace the valve again when she’s a teen, but until then, she should be able to do just about anything a child her age does.”