My latest release, SECOND ACT, features a heroine who’s a veterinarian. By a strange coincidence, my Darling Daughter was in her final year of veterinary school when I was writing this book. The truth is that I probably couldn’t have written it without her, but the more important truth is that it was so much fun to work with her on the medical scenes.

I give Darling Daughter major credit for taking the time to answer my questions and check my accuracy when she was in the midst of crazy rotations, doing things like vaccinating evil, biting piglets or helping “dummy foals” (yes, that’s what they call them) learn how to nurse from their mothers on night shift at the ICU. Yet she was always patient with my inquiries and mistakes and cluelessness.

Darling Daughter admits that she enlisted her fellow vet students when I would set her a problem like this one: “What kind of ailment could a cat have that would require an emergency visit, would not kill the cat, but meant that the cat needed to stay at the vet for X number of days?” (I insisted that no animal would die in the making of this book.) Evidently, a group of students would sit around and brainstorm on these kinds of requests. Sometimes, the response was that nothing fit my parameters but here were some possibilities if I could be a little flexible.

The emails would fly thick and fast as we tried to work out a viable solution for my story line problem. I can’t tell you how exciting it was to see my child’s expertise at work, especially as she generously shared it with me.

Once we had the ailment nailed down, Darling Daughter would walk me through the problem and the treatment step-by-step. In the scene where Jessica and Hugh operate on a cat in the middle of the night, Darling Daughter made sure that I kept the procedure sterile and sent me photos of all the equipment that would be used. I even got a video of how to anesthetize a cat. Then she read the scene after I’d written it and corrected all my mistakes—of which there were many, sometimes in the service of the fiction. But Darling Daughter was not going to let me get anything wrong, although she did allow me to gloss over a few steps to keep the pacing swifter.

We spend so much time teaching our children as we raise them. It was such a joy to have the favor returned in spades as my child educated me.