And the woman leaves because she has finally remembered that her own life is also a life worth saving — that the vow she made to strangers in an emergency department, the vow to protect the person in front of her, applies to herself too, and that she has been breaking it for six years.
Saving Gethin and leaving Gethin were not a contradiction.
They were the same principle, applied once outward and once inward.
I would not let him die on a table for the wrong reason.
And I would not let myself keep disappearing into a marriage that had required my erasure as its price.
Both were the act of a person who has decided that lives are not to be thrown away — not his, and, at last, not mine.