His words hit like a defibrillator to my stalled heart. He was right. I grabbed a pen and slashed my signature across the contract. “Give me thirty days to take out my trash.

I’ll report on the first.”

“Welcome back to the living, Elena,” Harrison said, with a faint smile. “Sterling’s resources are yours.”

Meanwhile, Preston’s world was imploding.

Without me to ghostwrite his pre-op plans and navigate his politics, his incompetence was laid bare. Drafted into an emergency surgery for a hemorrhaging patient, he froze under the lights, hands shaking, no backup plan.

The chief of surgery had to shove him aside and finish the case. The patient lived, but lost her uterus.