Two men.

One of them was finally seeing me.

And this, I think, is the single most important thing I learned from the whole ordeal, the lesson I would most want to hand to anyone still trapped where I was: that very often the problem was never the trait they criticized in you.

The problem was the person doing the criticizing.

For two years, Andrew had held up my deepest loyalty — my inability to break a promise, my refusal to abandon a patient, the very core of what makes me a good surgeon and a good person — and shown it to me as a defect. You always put others first.

You never put me first.