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lived. If your name ended with I-A-N you were instantly assumed to be a local Armenian and treated as such, regardless of the truth. Josie’s coloring was similar to his, dark brown hair and eyes, but otherwise there were no similarities. She was petite, and he was a solid foot taller. She would easily fit under his arm, an image that flickered past his mind’s eye, briefly and unasked.
    What is she doing here? he wondered. Was she working as a nurse? Or with her friend? Or her wife? And who were the two guys with them? Deeply curious, Alex closed the chart and looked up, startled to find a pair of big, wide green eyes lasered right in on him. It was Lisa, one of the nurses who had a crush on him—one that was absolutely unrequited.
    When he’d started here ten months ago she’d asked him out for coffee. It had gone about as well as a root canal performed by a sadist with Parkinson’s. Since then, she’d stalked him as much as was professionally possible without losing her job. He’d struggled to find ways to be kind, finally resorting to completely ignoring her. Cruelty would be the next step, and he really didn’t want to reach that point unless he had to.
    Her eyes tracked Josie as the group loaded onto an elevator headed, he knew, for labor and delivery. “Do you know her?” Lisa asked. She was about the same size as Josie, but a good fifty pounds heavier. Like Josie’s lovely pregnant…associate…Lisa had blonde, wavy hair and green eyes, though a completely different profile. Where the woman he’d just seen come in with Josie had a kind, open face, plump, sweet cheeks, and frightened but beautiful eyes, Lisa had a much more closed-off look, a pinched face, and something to her features that spoke of scarcity, of life as a zero-sum game.
    That had been the problem on their one and only date. All she wanted to do was complain about the coffee, the pastry, schedules at work, supervisors, her student loans, her cat—pretty much everything. Who the hell complains about their cat – and on a first date? More importantly, who cares? It had seemed to be her main mode of communication and Alex, who was sometimes working hundred-hour weeks, didn’t want his precious free hours spent listening to that .
    “As a matter of fact, I do,” he said, absentmindedly. “I’m going to go and head up to labor and delivery and see if they need some help.”
    “But you have charting to do,” Lisa said in a clipped tone, pointing to the seventeen or so charts stacked in front of him.
    He waved his hand and broke eye contact, marching toward the elevator, decision made. “I’ll deal with it later.”
    “But- but…” she sputtered as he walked away, the sound of her voice receding along with his tension.
    For the past six months, he’d taken his grandpa, Ed, to the Alzheimer’s research trial at the nondescript medical building in Boston where Josie was the nurse in charge of clinical data and interviews. Alex would wait for thirty minutes or so before Ed would emerge with a big grin on his face and some sort of a small reward like a gift certificate to a coffee shop or a new set of golf balls, and then they’d go out to lunch. Alex enjoyed the carved-out time away from the craziness of the hospital.
    His mom had asked Alex to make that one promise, that once a month he’d take an hour out of his schedule and help out. And with rare exception he’d managed, happy to take some of the burden off his mom, his aunts, and his grandpa’s girlfriend. It seemed like such a small gesture. The first time he’d taken Ed, he had been in the bathroom when Ed’s name was called. The second month he’d missed because of a work commitment. But on month three he had gone and seen Josie for the first time and that had made him resolve to be there every month.
    She probably wouldn’t know him from Adam, because every time she came into the waiting room to call Grandpa Ed’s name, she barely looked up from her paperwork. And