Chapter 5: Roses by the Hour

By Tuesday evening the video had six hundred thousand views.

In it, Dalton sat on a leather couch and said he had been hired to charm me.

He said he had fallen in love anyway.

He said my family was cold, and that he was the only one who had ever seen the real me.

The comments called him a hero.

Some of them called me a diva who had thrown away a good man over paperwork.

I read forty of them in the staff lounge with my stitched hand wrapped in a clean bandage.

It was the hand Eli had held.

I had noticed that I kept turning it over.

"Don't read the comments," Bev said, from the vending machine.

"I'm only reading the ones that call me a diva."

"That's all of them."

"I know."

She tossed me a bag of pretzels and sat down.

At six forty, the lobby phone rang for me.

The security guard sounded embarrassed.

"Nurse Sorensen, there's a gentleman here with a lot of roses. He says he's only going to take a minute."

I came down in my scrubs with Bev two steps behind me.

Half the day shift pretended they were leaving.

Dalton stood in the middle of the lobby under the big donor wall.

Two dozen red roses were in his arms.

His phone was held out in front of him on a little tripod stick, with the red light on.

He was live.

"Libby." His voice cracked on the first syllable.

A week ago I would have believed it.

"I just want one honest minute with you. For the people who believe in us."

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