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Chapter One

“Will you marry me?”

Haley Wright smiled fondly at the man who had just popped the question—for the third time that week “It’s sweet of you to ask, but I’m afraid I can’t”

He sighed heavily “Already married, huh?”

He responded that sale” It was the saet ht now”

“I could reat cook I can even do the laundry”

“Asa note on the pad in her hand, “I still have to decline”

Edgar Eddington, a sixty-two-year-old Caucasian estive heart failure and cirrhosis of the liver, nodded in resignation against the pillow of the hospital bed in which he lay “Can’t bla doctor”

S, Haley looked over her notes toshe needed when she presented her patient to the other students, the residents and the attending physician when theyherself that she had checked everything she was supposed to know about Mr Eddington for that —she hoped—she held her notebook at her side and smiled at the patient “I’ll see you in a little while, Mr Eddington”

He winked, a flirtatious sed face “I’ll look forward to it, doctor”

She had told him several times that as a third-year medical student, she wasn’t yet entitled to be called doctor, but his answer to that was always, “Close enough” Many patients on her internal medicine rotation tended to call anyone in a white coat “doctor,” th white coats and the physicians’ longer coats, which fell almost to the knees While she had been instructed to politely correct the ue with the more stubborn patients