I Queued Three Hours for Her, But They Didn't Wait Three Minutes for Me novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Paid in Full

The email reached me on Sunday morning, in the middle of weighing a Labrador.

Dear Ms. Rinaldi, we are pleased to confirm that your deposit of $9,000 has been received and your place is secured. Payment by: E. Whitaker.

I read it standing at the scale with the dog's leash in my hand.

Then I read the name again.

I had told no one my applicant number except one person, in one screenshot, asking a question about fine print.

"Can you cover me?" I said to the tech next to me. "I need to go somewhere."

I took the bus to Pasadena.

I had never been to his hospital, and it was a low tan building with an ambulance bay and a smoking area at the side, where six people in scrubs were standing in the cold with coffee cups.

I knew which one was him from forty feet away.

He was talking to a woman with a clipboard, and when he saw me he stopped in the middle of a sentence.

"Bianca."

"Did you pay my deposit?"

The woman with the clipboard looked at him, and then she was gone.

The other five people did not leave.

They became very interested in their coffees.

"Yes," Eli said.

"Nine thousand dollars."

"Yes."

"Without asking me."

"If I'd asked you," he said, "you would have said no."

"Yes! That's what no is for!"

I heard my voice climb, and I didn't stop it.

"I told you I would figure it out. I told you I had a plan. And you looked at my life and decided what I could carry, and you signed for it behind my back."

"Your father said no to a loan. You had twenty-one hundred dollars and four days."

"Then I'd have had twenty-one hundred dollars and four days! That would have been mine."

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