**Personal Diary Entry – Dr. Edward Whitmore**
She sat across from me in the consulting room—Amber Hartley, with her perfectly styled chestnut hair and that practiced flicker of eyelashes whenever a man asked her age. I’d seen it a thousand times.
“How old do you think I am?” she countered, tilting her head with that coy smile.
“Thirty-nine,” I said bluntly, though I shaved off a year out of kindness.
Her smile faltered. “You’re terrifying. Like an X-ray.”
“It’s my job to see clearly.”
She sighed, the façade slipping. “I can afford the best creams, treatments, personal trainers. But it’s exhausting, fighting every wrinkle, every extra pound. I just want to stop chasing youth.”
I studied her. She didn’t need surgery. “Why not let time do its thing? There’s beauty in every age.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re a man. Society lets you age gracefully. Women? We’re tossed aside the moment a younger girl walks in.” She laughed bitterly. “My husband’s secretary, for instance.”
Amber’s story unfolded—small-town girl from Blackburn, working dead-end jobs until she landed a wealthy husband in London. Now, at forty, she was terrified of losing it all.
“If he leaves me, I’ll have nothing,” she whispered.
I hesitated. “Surgery’s risky. Recovery takes weeks. You’ll look worse before better.”
“I don’t care.” Her voice was steel.
She signed the forms without reading them. That should’ve been my first red flag.
The morning of the operation, she lay on the table, bare-faced, suddenly vulnerable. The marker lines on her skin looked cruel.
Then—the anaesthetist’s shout. “Crash! Get back!”
Her heart stopped before I’d even lifted the scalpel.
The autopsy confirmed anaphylaxis—an allergy she’d hidden. Paperwork absolved me, but guilt lingered.
Then *he* stormed in—Richard Hartley, all pinstripe suit and simmering rage. “You killed my wife,” he seethed.
“She omitted her allergies,” I said evenly, sliding the report across my desk.
He left with a threat hanging between us.
The inquiry cleared me, but I resigned anyway. London no longer felt safe.
Now, I work in a small hospital in Cornwall. My wife—a nurse here—laughs when I forbid Botox. We have a son. A quieter life.
But sometimes, in dreams, Amber’s face fractures along those green incision lines, accusing.
I wake sweating, relieved it’s just a nightmare.
And then I hold my family tighter.
