I Was Billed For Every Minute Of Their Love novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: Where It Went
"Where did it go?" I said.
I hated that my voice came out smaller than I meant it to.
Eli didn't answer in words.
He went to the bookshelf and opened the drawer where our two watches had lain together a week ago.
Under his steel one there was a plain manila folder, soft at the corners from being handled.
He set it on the table next to the ledger.
"The receipt is on top," he said. "Read it. Then read what's under it."
The receipt said sixty thousand dollars, received from E. Kearney, for the Uncompensated Care Fund.
It carried the date of the Wednesday he had texted me.
Under it was a printed list, forty-one lines long.
Each line had a patient number, a balance and the word cleared.
The balances ran from two hundred dollars to eleven thousand.
Beside several of them someone had written a small note in pencil.
Asthma, three admissions.
Burn, left arm.
Appendix, age nine.
"Those are the oldest unpaid bills in the children's ward," I said.
"The oldest ones with a parent still on the account. I asked the billing office to start at the bottom of the pile."
"The ward is in the old wing."
"I picked it on purpose." He kept his hands flat on the table. "The pavilion has your father's name on every door. I didn't want the money to pass through a door like that."
I turned the page over, looking for the catch.
There wasn't one.
"And your loans?"
"Still there. A hundred and sixty thousand now. I pay them out of a trauma salary, a little each month, and I'll be paying them when I'm fifty."
"You could have kept it."
"I couldn't."
"Why not?"
"Because I had already sold the one thing I couldn't buy back." He looked at me. "I'd sat across from you for three dinners. I was not going to keep the price."
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