I Regret Loving You for Five Years novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: The Last Sunset

"Use mine," Harriet said.

She turned her laptop around on her desk so it faced me.

"Your personal email goes through Wexler's satellite link like everybody else's. So does mine. But mine's the station manager's account, and they'd have to explain to the Program why they were reading it."

"They might read it anyway."

"Then they'll read a station manager forwarding a medical report to a nurse. That's my job."

I typed Gwen's address in Harriet's window.

Gwen Trimble had been the charge nurse on my shifts since I was an intern, and my best friend for almost as long.

She was the only person I'd told about the courthouse.

She'd said, "Thea, a man who marries you in secret will divorce you in secret."

I'd stopped speaking to her for a week.

I attached every photo.

I wrote: Can you run these lot numbers against the hospital's pharmacy records? Don't tell anyone why. I love you. I'm sorry about the courthouse thing. You were right.

Harriet read it over my shoulder.

"You can take out the last part," she said. "It's a long winter. She'll know."

I left it in.

***

The sun had been going around the sky for weeks, a little lower every day.

On March twenty-first it sat on the horizon like a coin on a table.

The whole station had dinner together for the last sunset of the year.

The cook made prime rib with one gloved hand and supervised the rest from a stool.

Somebody had hung paper lanterns in the galley.

Harriet stood on a chair and read the names of all forty-one of us out loud, one at a time.

Everybody cheered for everybody.

When she got to me, the cheer was louder than I expected.

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