Khloe Summers, hollowed out and weeping, was sentenced to seven and a half years in federal prison for fraud, forgery, and her role in the delivery-room assault.

Preston Pierce stood in an orange jumpsuit and heard the full ledger read against him: the forced procedure, the concealed Pitocin, the research fraud, the forged credentials, the garage attack.

His license was gone for life. He was ordered into custody, with a court-mandated psychiatric evaluation and treatment as part of his sentence—not as spectacle, but because the court, unlike him, still followed protocol.

As they led him out, he tried to catch my eye. I didn’t give it to him. Later, Arthur handed me a letter Preston had scrawled from his cell. I dropped it into the courthouse trash bin without opening it.

Late that December, the Sterling Center took in a mass-casualty interstate pileup. I stood in Trauma Bay 2, operating on a pregnant woman with a uterine rupture from the crash.

My team urged a hysterectomy. I refused. Sweating under the lights, working experimental B-Lynch sutures, I saved both her life and her womb.