The journalist’s name was Claire Ashworth, and she had been writing profiles for the Times Magazine for eleven years, the kind of profiles that won awards and made subjects either grateful or cautious depending on which version of the story she decided was true. She had a reputation for thoroughness. I knew this because I had looked her up within twenty minutes of receiving her email, which arrived on a Tuesday morning in my hospital inbox with the subject line: *Feature inquiry: Dr. Seraphina Vale.*
The email was professional. She was working on a piece about the changing landscape of trauma surgery in America, she wrote, and the doctors redefining its limits. My name had come up repeatedly in her research. She listed my Edinburgh publications, my case outcomes, the viral surgery clip, a
