I Queued Three Hours for Her, But They Didn't Wait Three Minutes for Me novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Lion's Den

Eli's POV

On Monday night a man in a tire shop jacket knocked on my door.

I looked through the peephole.

Biscuit looked too, from the floor, and growled.

I opened it.

Bianca's brother stood in the hall, very big, with his hands hanging open at his sides.

"You're the nurse," he said.

"I'm Eli."

"I'm Tony." He swallowed. "I shoved her out of the car. I want you to hear that from me."

"I know who you are."

"Then you're allowed to hit me."

"I don't hit people who show up at my door and say it first," I said. "Come in. The cat will hate you."

He sat on my couch with his knees apart and his elbows on them.

Biscuit walked over, sniffed his boot, and sat on it.

"Huh," Tony said.

"He's fond of the guilty."

I put a glass of water in front of him, and he drank all of it.

"She told me not to come," he said. "I'm not here to ask you to do anything. She said she doesn't want help, and I'm trying to listen for once."

"Then why are you here?"

"Because Mom's scared." He rubbed his face. "She thinks Dani's going to have one of her episodes at the table on Christmas Eve. She keeps saying she wishes there were a nurse. A real one."

"And you thought of me."

"I thought of nobody else." He looked at me. "Dad won't let Bee bring anybody. Dad won't let her bring a friend. But Mom would let a nurse in her house if Dani's heart was on the line."

I sat down across from him.

It was a cheap lever, and it would open the door.

It would also put me in a room where Bianca hadn't asked for me.

"No," I said.

Tony blinked. "No?"

"Not in the room. I told her the slower one sets the pace, and she's the slower one." I turned my glass in my hands. "If I walk in as a nurse, I walk ahead of her. I did that once with nine thousand dollars. I'm not doing it with a front door."

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