My work had made me the single most dangerous kind of person they could possibly have crossed: someone who does not fall apart in a crisis, but goes cold and precise, and utterly unstoppable, until the patient is safe.

My daughters were the patient.

And I do not lose patients I can save.

And I want to say something to any mother reading this who has been made to feel, as I was made to feel, that her devotion to her work and her devotion to her children are somehow in competition — because that lie was the whole foundation of Blake’s scheme, and it is a lie told to a great many women, and it nearly cost me everything before I saw through it.

Blake’s entire plan rested on convincing a court, and very nearly convincing me, that a woman who worked long hard hours saving lives could not also be a fully present, fully devoted mother — that my scrubs and my children were rivals, and that every shift I worked was evidence against my fitness to raise them.