Andrew called this choosing my patients over him.

But it was never a choice between him and my patients, any more than pulling a drowning child from a lake is a choice against the people waiting for you at dinner.

It was a choice between being a person who saves a life when she can, and being a person who does not.

I have never once been able to be the second kind of person, and I finally understand that a man who wanted me to be was never really asking me to love him more.

He was asking me to be someone smaller and worse than I am.