Preston staggered out of the OR into the patient’s furious husband, who dropped him with a single punch. Bloodied on the floor, he looked up to find his colleagues watching him with pure apathy.

He retreated to a squalid Bronx apartment he now shared with Khloe. Instead of comfort, he found her screaming about eviction notices. Frantic, he dug through his boxes until he found an old, frayed notebook—my surgical journal.

Tracing my handwriting, the reality of what he’d destroyed finally crushed him, and he sobbed into the pages.

Three weeks later, I stood in the shadows of the Grand Ballroom at the Plaza. The global medical summit. Harrison had dressed me in a tailored black velvet gown.

I was there to deliver the keynote.

Preston, in a wrinkled cheap suit, had snuck in to beg venture capitalists for a bailout. He was universally shunned. As the lights dimmed, the announcer introduced the new CMO of Sterling Medical.