My First Love Returned, His Stand-In Begged Me to Stay novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Night Nurse

Selah's POV

Bree drove the three hours to Lake Wren with her hands at ten and two and a travel mug of terrible coffee between her knees.

"I'm calling in sick for you on Monday," she said. "I've already done mine."

"You're a paralegal. You can't just say we're ill."

"I'm a woman with a fever of a hundred and four. Look how tired I sound."

I laughed, and it came out wrong.

The hospital at Lake Wren was smaller than I remembered.

I stood in the entrance with my coat buttoned to the neck and could not make myself walk in.

The smell was what stopped me. Floor wax, soup, and a trace of something clean and sharp.

Bree took my arm.

"We can do this from the car," she said. "I'll go in."

"No."

I made myself walk to the front desk.

The clerk was a young man with a lanyard. He said the volunteer records from ten years ago were archived in another building, and nobody was allowed to look.

He said it kindly.

Bree leaned on the counter and asked, in her best legal-assistant voice, who had worked the night shift on the eye ward that summer.

He didn't know.

But a woman mopping the floor behind us said, "The old night nurse would know."

She leaned on her mop.

"Retired now. Lives on Cedar Street, the yellow house with the ducks."

The ducks were ceramic, on the porch rail, wearing tiny rain slickers.

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