I Was Billed For Every Minute Of Their Love novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Final Invoice
At her engagement dinner Libby's father toasts the fiance he hired, and the invoice lands by her plate. She puts down the ring and walks out, and her father's text prices the exit.
My father stood up at my engagement dinner, tapped his glass, and said it was time to read the bill.
Forty guests laughed, because forty guests knew my father.
Howard Sorensen ran Sorensen Time Partners, and he charged companies nine hundred dollars an hour to learn what he had taught me at six.
At six, I got three hours of my parents every month.
A school play cost me forty minutes of it.
A fever cost me an hour.
When my appendix burst at twelve, my mother sat by my bed for ninety minutes and apologized to the nurse for the overage.
I had smiled through every one of his toasts for twenty-two years.
I smiled through this one too.
"Libby, my darling girl," he said, and opened a leather folder.
"Your statement. Nine hundred and ninety-six hours of parental time, at a family rate of one hundred fifty dollars."
My mother, Estelle, was already laughing behind her napkin.
"That comes to one hundred forty-nine thousand, four hundred dollars."
The room gasped on cue.
"Which I now cancel, in full," my father said, and tore the page in half.
People clapped.
Dalton squeezed my knee under the tablecloth.
He was the best thing that had happened to me in a year.
We met at a charity auction fourteen months ago, and he was early to every date after that.
He never once looked at his watch, and I had loved that about him.
"And a final thank-you," my father said, "to the young man who made this possible."
He lifted a second sheet and held it up.
"Dalton Pierce, whose last invoice cleared on Friday."
The guests laughed again, harder.
They thought it was a bit about the firm's rates.
My father walked the page down the table, and someone passed it hand to hand until it reached my plate.
I looked down.
The letterhead said Pierce Consulting.
Under it, in small type, it said Vendor 2.
Bill to: Howard Sorensen. Re: Elizabeth Sorensen, courtship.
Then the line items, each with a date, and I knew every date.
Introduction dinner, three hours.
First kiss, half an hour.
Weekend in Door County, forty hours.
Proposal on the Stone Arch Bridge, two hours.
Bonus on acceptance, twenty-five thousand dollars.
At the bottom was the total, seventy-four thousand, six hundred and eighty dollars.
Two hundred seventy-six hours, at one hundred eighty an hour, plus the bonus.
I read the page again.
Nobody at the table was laughing at me yet.
They were watching my face to see if I would laugh first.
"Libby." Dalton leaned in and kept his voice low and warm. "Babe. It's your dad's joke. Look at his face."
"Is it a joke?" I said.
"It's a joke."
"Then it won't hurt you if I ask."
I turned the page toward him.
"What did the first kiss cost?"
"Ninety dollars," Dalton said.
He didn't look at the page.
He didn't blink, either.
My mother's smile slipped at one corner and she fixed it.
"Elizabeth," she said, in her kind voice. "Dalton did a wonderful job. You've never been so happy. Does the paperwork matter?"
"Did you pay him to say he loved me?"
"We paid him to be reliable," my father said. "You would have wasted another five years on dating apps. I saved you three hundred hours."
He said it.
He was handing me change.
Dalton took my hand.
"I fell for you around hour forty," he said. "I swear. Everything after that was real."
The ring on my finger had been his grandmother's.
That was what he told me when he proposed.
I took it off.
It came off easily, which surprised me.
I set it in the middle of my father's leather folder, on the torn halves of my own bill.
Then I folded Dalton's invoice in thirds and put it in my purse.
"Sit down, Elizabeth," my father said. "You're four minutes into a tantrum."
I stood up.
I looked at all forty faces, the partners and the cousins and the woman from the club who had cried at my engagement photo.
"Put the dinner on my account," I said.
So I stepped out.
The February air outside the restaurant hit my face.
I had my coat over my arm and no idea where I was going.
My phone buzzed before I reached the corner.
It was my father.
"Early termination of the engagement carries a fee of $9,000, due Monday. Note that the Sorensen Pavilion funds your unit's night pay. Time is money, Libby."
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