New York does not welcome you back. It simply resumes, as though you never left, as though the years you spent elsewhere were a minor administrative error now corrected.
I had known I would come back. That was never the question. The question had always been when, and on what terms, and as whom. I had spent six years answering all three, and the answers had brought me to a Monday morning in September, standing outside the glass entrance of Manhattan Central Hospital with a badge that said *Dr. S. Vale, Trauma Surgery* and a son in a new school twelve blocks north and a life built so deliberately that no one could call it luck.
I went in.
The position was the kind that did not come to people who applied for it. It came to people who had published four times in the right journals, who had
