The flowers were Melvin’s idea.

Not roses — he wasn’t a roses kind of guy. Not carnations either, because his mom always said carnations were what you brought when you didn’t really mean it. He had stood in the grocery store floral section for eleven minutes, picking up arrangements and putting them down, until he settled on a mixed bouquet with sunflowers and something purple he couldn’t name.

He held them now in the green room backstage, stem-end down, petals up, the way you hold flowers when you still believe they’re going to work.

He also had a poem in his pocket. He had written it himself. It was four stanzas long, and he had practiced it in the bathroom mirror three times that morning, and he was reasonably proud of it, the way a person is proud of something they made with their own hands even when the thing they made is slightly crooked.

The show’s producer had asked him: “Are you nervous?”

“Nah,” Melvin said.

He was extremely nervous.

Because what he was about to do — what he had driven forty-five minutes through Ohio traffic to do, flowers and poem in hand — was tell one woman he was leaving her, and ask another woman to be with him instead.

And the entire chain of events that had led him here had started in his sleep.

 

 

 

The dream was the kind of dream that doesn’t feel like a dream while you’re in it.

It was the kind where the lighting is right and the air has weight and the other people in it are warm in a way that you can actually feel — not the flat, watercolor warmth of something imagined, but the specific, textured warmth of skin and presence and being genuinely close to someone who makes you feel good.

Melvin had those dreams sometimes. Most people do. But this one was different.

In the dream, he and his girlfriend were together, hanging out the way they always did on a Friday — takeout on the coffee table, something on TV that neither of them was fully watching. Then she had to leave. He couldn’t remember why, even now. Something had come up, the way things do in dreams, no explanation required, and she was gone.

And that’s when Samantha walked in.

Sam. He had known Sam for a while — the way you know someone in your friend group who’s always slightly on the edge of something more, always just at the periphery of a feeling you never quite let yourself name. She was funny. She was easy to be around. She had this laugh that came from somewhere genuine and made you want to be the reason for it.

In the dream, she came over. They talked. They went to his garage and smoked a little, the way people do on a warm evening when there’s nothing urgent and nowhere to be. And then they went back inside and they looked at each other and something clicked — some frequency aligned — and he went in for the kiss, and she accepted it.

And then it went exactly where you’d expect it to go from there.

When Melvin woke up the next morning, he was still in his own bed. His girlfriend’s side was empty — she’d left for work already. The sun was doing that thing through the bedroom curtains where it cuts in at a low angle and makes everything look more serious than it is.

He lay there for a long time.

Then he picked up his phone.

He broke up with his girlfriend over text message.

Six months together. One hundred and eighty days of dinners and disagreements and making up and the specific low-grade comfort of knowing someone’s schedule, someone’s coffee order, someone’s way of falling asleep. Six months of a real, physical, documented relationship with a real, physical, documented woman.

He ended it in a text.

Because of a dream.

“I just felt like it was a sign,” he would tell Jerry Springer a few weeks later, the flowers still in his hand. “Like the universe was telling me something.”

“The universe,” Jerry would repeat, in the tone of a man who has heard many things attributed to the universe.

“Yeah.”

But that morning, text sent, he didn’t wait for a response. He got up, got dressed, and texted Samantha.

She came over.

And here was the part that Melvin would never fully be able to explain, the part that would cement everything that followed: it went exactly like the dream. They sat outside. They talked. They went back in. They looked at each other.

The click happened again.

In real life. In waking, undeniable, fully conscious real life.

That was the bet Melvin placed on everything. Not the dream itself — but the fact that reality had confirmed it. The dream had been a preview, and the preview had been accurate.

He was certain. He had rarely been certain about anything, but he was certain about this.

The flowers, the poem, the trip to the studio — they were all downstream of that certainty. That one morning in his bedroom when the real world matched the dream world and he decided that meant something.

The question was whether Samantha had decided the same thing.

Jerry Springer had the patient expression of a man who has been surprised by nothing since approximately 1998.

“So let me make sure I understand this,” he said, leaning forward slightly in his chair. “You had a dream about this woman —”

“Vivid dream,” Melvin said. “Like, genuinely vivid.”

“A vivid dream. And in the dream, you two —”

“Yeah.”

“And then the next morning, you —”

“Broke up with my girlfriend. Over text.”

“Over text,” Jerry confirmed.

“And then hit up Sam.”

“And then hit up Sam,” Jerry confirmed again.

“And it went exactly like the dream.”

“It went exactly like the dream,” Jerry said, and now he was doing the thing he did — repeating phrases back with the cadence of a man underlining sentences in a document he’s going to reference again later. “Okay. And now you want to —”

“Break up with my girlfriend,” Melvin said. “The one I got back with. And get with Sam.”

“Right.” Jerry looked at the audience. The audience looked at Jerry. “You’re right. It is a crazy story.”

Melvin nodded. He seemed to take this as a compliment.

“And you brought flowers,” Jerry said.

“And a poem,” Melvin said.

Jerry looked at the flowers. He looked at Melvin. He had the expression of a man recalibrating his expectations in real time.

“Let’s bring out Samantha,” he said.

She came out to applause the way everyone comes out to applause on that stage — slightly blinking, slightly adjusting to the lights, navigating the gap between the wings and the chair with the self-consciousness of someone who knows they’re being watched and has decided to pretend they don’t mind.

Samantha was twenty-four. She had dark hair and an open face and the particular ease of someone who is comfortable in their own opinion of things. She sat down across from Melvin and looked at the flowers with an expression that was not quite what he had been hoping for.

It was the expression of someone doing rapid mental math.

Melvin, apparently immune to this signal, stood up.

He cleared his throat.

He read the poem.

“Samantha, with my eyes closed tight, you’re always in my sight. When I dream about you, it makes my night. You’re the girl of my dreams. I know that for sure. My love for you, I will always endure. Dreams of giving you a morning kiss. I could get used to this. Oh, what a glee if my dreams could be a reality. When I close my eyes, I hope to see you again. And I hope you want to be more than friends.”

The audience applauded. Genuine, warm applause — the kind that recognizes effort even when it’s not sure about the outcome.

Melvin held out the flowers.

Samantha looked at the flowers. She looked at Melvin. She folded her hands in her lap.

“No,” she said. “I don’t like you like that.”

The audience made a sound. Not cruelty — more like the collective exhale of people watching someone step on a rake they’d been warned about.

Melvin absorbed it with the expression of a man who has been physically hit before and recognizes the sensation, even when it arrives as words.

“Why not?” he said. “I mean —”

“You’re fun,” Samantha said. She had the tone of someone who has thought this through and is going to say it cleanly and completely. “You’re fun to be around. But you’re lazy. You’re unmotivated.” She paused for one second — the pause of someone deciding whether to say the last part. “And the sex wasn’t even that great.”

The audience erupted.

Jerry turned to Melvin with the expression of a man watching a building collapse and making detailed mental notes.

“That broke your heart a little bit,” Jerry observed.

“Yeah,” Melvin said. “Yeah, that broke my heart a little bit.”

He was still holding the flowers.

The sunflowers. The purple things he couldn’t name. He had held them stem-end down for forty-five minutes of drive time and four minutes of poem-reading and one devastating assessment of his performance in the bedroom, and he was still holding them, because putting them down would mean something final and he was not ready for anything final yet.

He had broken up with his girlfriend over text for this. He had gotten back with his girlfriend, proposed without a ring, gotten naggy-ed into frustration, and driven here with flowers and a poem — for this.

“She’s not wrong,” he said, mostly to himself.

“What’s that?” Jerry said.

“Nothing,” Melvin said. “I’m okay.”

He was not entirely okay. But he was still holding the flowers, which counted for something.

“Your girlfriend has been watching all of this,” Jerry said.

Melvin turned his head slowly.

He had the specific look of a man who has just realized he walked into a room he cannot walk back out of.

“Let’s bring her out,” Jerry said. “Here’s your girlfriend.”

Her name was Kayla, and she came through the door the way storms come through a town — not with a single dramatic moment but with a pressure system that changed everything about the room before she’d said a word. She was twenty-three, with natural hair pulled back and the eyes of someone who has been processing something for the last twenty minutes and is ready to stop processing and start speaking.

She looked at Melvin.

She looked at Samantha.

Something happened on her face that was not quite the expression anyone in the room had been expecting.

“I’m done with you,” she said to Melvin.

“Wait,” Melvin said. “You two know each other?”

Because Kayla and Samantha were looking at each other the way people look at each other when they share a history the room doesn’t know about yet.

“Yes,” Kayla said.

The audience stirred.

“Oh,” Jerry said. “So you two are friends?”

“Not friends,” Kayla said. She pressed her lips together. “I tolerate her when she’s around our mutual friends. That’s different.”

“Right,” Jerry said. “But you know each other.”

“We know each other.”

He turned to Samantha. “So why would you sleep with him if you knew they were together?”

Samantha didn’t look particularly troubled by the question. She had the composure of someone who has already decided how she feels about her decisions and is not in the process of reconsidering.

“We’re really not friends,” she said. “I just — I tolerate her. But she told me herself how much she loved her boyfriend.” She glanced at Melvin. “And then she goes and cheats on you with Robert.”

The room tilted.

Melvin’s head moved like a compass needle that has just been introduced to a magnet.

“Who’s Robert?” he said.

“Robert is my boyfriend,” Kayla said.

The sentence arrived in the room and did not leave.

It sat there — five words, present tense, declarative — while the audience processed it and Melvin processed it and even Jerry, who processed things for a living, took a half-second longer than usual before speaking.

“Your boyfriend,” Jerry said.

“My boyfriend,” Kayla confirmed. She did not look away from Melvin. She had decided to say this thing and she was going to say it in a direct line, no swerving, no softening.

“So —” Melvin started.

“I’m done with you,” Kayla said again, and this time it was quieter, which made it heavier.

“Here’s Robert,” Jerry said.

Robert was not what anyone had pictured.

He was tall — taller than Melvin, broader in the shoulders, with the posture of someone who had spent time doing physical work and hadn’t lost it. He wore a plain gray t-shirt and dark jeans, and he walked onto the stage the way people walk into a situation they’ve already decided how to handle: not fast, not slow, each step deliberate.

He looked at Kayla first. For a long moment, just at Kayla. Then he looked at the floor. Then he looked up again, and when he spoke, his voice was controlled in the way that voices are controlled when the thing underneath them is anything but.

“You’re seriously going to do that?” he said. “I gave up my traveling job for you.”

Kayla opened her mouth.

“I didn’t ask you to —” she started.

“It doesn’t matter if you asked.” He shook his head slowly. “It’s a factor. I did it. I wanted to make you money. I wanted to take you all over the world.” He paused. The pause was the kind that holds a lot of compressed weight. “It didn’t matter to you, did it.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Out of the entire time we’ve been together,” he said, “you cheated on me. And you don’t even — it doesn’t even look like it bothers you.”

Kayla looked at the floor for the first time.

“I cheated once,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter that it was once.” Robert’s voice stayed even, which was the most devastating thing about it — the evenness, the control, the sense of a man who has rehearsed staying calm because going the other direction would cost him something he can’t afford to spend. “It’s the principle. When you’re with somebody, you’re with that person only. If something’s wrong, you say so. You don’t go outside.”

“I was planning to tell you,” Kayla said.

“There’s no plan,” Robert said. “The fact is what it is. The fact should have been called out.”

“You went out with your friends,” Kayla said, and her voice shifted — not defensive exactly, but the voice of someone who has their own accounting of events and needs it acknowledged. “You ditched on me. So yeah, I went and found someone else.”

“Five months,” Robert said.

He said it quietly, and the quietness made the room listen harder.

“Five months out of almost a year together — I stopped hanging out with my friends because it caused fights between us. I stopped seeing my stepdad, who I only see once every two months.” He stopped. Something moved across his face. “And you of all people know how important that is to me. You know how far I’ll go for somebody I care about.”

Five months of giving things up. Five months of choosing her over everyone else. And she had still gone looking somewhere else.

The number sat in the room the way numbers do when they’re not abstract — when they represent actual mornings and weekends and phone calls not made, and choices made instead in the direction of someone who didn’t end up choosing back.

“Do you still want to be with him?” Jerry asked Kayla.

She looked at Robert. She had looked at him since he came through the door with the particular attentiveness of someone recalculating something in real time — adding up what she’d done against what he’d just said, running the math with a different variable than she’d been using all morning.

“I do still want to be with him,” she said. “Yes.”

The audience made a sound — not applause yet, just acknowledgment.

Jerry turned to Robert. “And you? Do you still want to be with her?”

Robert was quiet. He looked at Kayla. He looked at his hands. He had the expression of a man arriving at a conclusion he had already reached privately and is now making public, which is always harder than it sounds.

“I’ve been with this woman for almost a year,” he said.

He pulled something from his pocket.

It was a ring box.

He opened it.

The audience went from murmuring to absolutely still.

Not the performed stillness of a crowd watching something staged. The organic, involuntary stillness of people who did not expect this and are now recalibrating everything they thought they knew about the next thirty seconds.

“I love her to absolute hell and back,” Robert said. He was looking at Kayla and not at the room and not at Jerry and not at Melvin, who was still somewhere over his left shoulder holding a bouquet of flowers that had become increasingly symbolic as the afternoon progressed. “I bought this without anyone knowing. I didn’t tell anyone. I just —” He stopped. “I wanted to propose to you.”

Kayla’s hands went to her face.

“And now you’re going to treat me like that,” Robert said, and his voice finally cracked at the edge — not broke, cracked, like a line appearing in something that was under too much pressure for too long. “I still love you. That’s the saddest part about all of this. No matter what, I still love you. Because all the bad we’ve been through — all the things we’ve put each other through — I still want to be with you.”

He held the ring box toward her.

“Things you’ve suffered to deal with me,” he said. “Things I’ve definitely suffered to deal with you. I still want to be with you.”

The audience erupted.

Not politely. Not with the moderate appreciation of people watching something mildly touching. With the full, generous noise of a crowd that has been through a lot in the last forty minutes and has arrived somewhere it didn’t expect and is glad to be there.

“Both of us have to work on it,” Robert said, over the noise. “Both of us.”

“Amen,” said someone in the audience, and Jerry nodded, and even Samantha — who had called the sex not that great and was still technically responsible for at least one layer of this catastrophe — looked at the ring and said nothing.

Kayla was crying.

Not the dramatic, performative crying of someone who wants to be seen crying, but the small, contained crying of someone who is trying not to cry and has lost the argument with themselves. Her hands were still covering the lower half of her face. Her shoulders were doing something careful.

“This is very messed up,” she said, from behind her hands.

“Yes,” Robert said.

“This is a really messed up way to say I love you. You couldn’t just tell me — you had to bring me on a show and tell me you’ve been cheated on and then —”

“Then let me find out,” Robert said. “That’s what I should have done. I know that.”

“The ring should come after the conversation,” Kayla said. Her voice was still unsteady. “Not during.”

“You’re right,” Robert said.

“You can’t just give someone a ring and expect that to —”

“You’re right,” Robert said again, and the repetition was not concession — it was certainty, the specific certainty of a man who knows exactly where he is and is not confused about it. “But here’s what I also know. No matter through the bad or the good — I love you. I am in love with you. And I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

Kayla lowered her hands.

“You have a really messed up way of showing it,” she said.

Robert almost smiled. “I know.”

“But —” She stopped. She looked at the ring. She looked at him. She took a breath that seemed to contain about four separate decisions. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said. “But we are going to work on a lot of things.”

“Both of us,” he said. “I know.”

The audience applauded so hard the floor vibrated.

Over in the corner of the stage, mostly forgotten by now, Melvin was still holding the flowers.

The sunflowers. The purple things.

He had brought them for Samantha, who did not want them. He had written a poem for Samantha, who had told him the sex wasn’t that great, which is a sentence that lodges itself in a specific part of a man’s memory and stays there for an uncomfortably long time. He had broken up with Kayla over text for Samantha, and then gotten back with Kayla, and proposed to Kayla without a ring, and then driven forty-five minutes to this studio to break up with Kayla again for Samantha.

And now Kayla was engaged to someone else.

A man who had bought a ring in secret and given up a traveling job and stopped seeing his stepdad for five months and still, still, looked at her the way Robert looked at Kayla and said I love you to absolute hell and back.

“Sam,” Samantha said, from the chair beside him. Her voice was quieter than it had been earlier. The dismissiveness was still there, but underneath it now was something that sounded like it might be reconsidering its position.

“Yeah,” Melvin said.

“You can’t do this.”

“I know.”

“Like — this is literally insane.”

“I know that too.”

He looked at the flowers. He had been holding them for so long that his hand had cramped slightly around the stems. The sunflowers were still bright. The purple things — whatever they were — were still purple. They looked exactly like they had in the grocery store when he’d stood there for eleven minutes trying to decide if they meant something.

The flowers were the bet. The poem was the bet. The whole impossible, circular, deeply ill-advised afternoon was the bet. And it had not paid off in any of the ways he’d anticipated.

He put them down on the chair next to him.

Just set them there, stem-end on the seat, petals resting against the back, the way you put something down when you’re ready to stop carrying it.

Jerry glanced over.

“You okay?” he said.

“Yeah,” Melvin said. “Yeah, I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“I’m good.” He looked at the flowers one more time. “I think I just — I think I needed to see that.”

“See what?”

“What it looks like,” Melvin said. “When someone actually —” He stopped. He was not a man with a large vocabulary for emotional things, but he was trying, in the particular earnest way of people who know they don’t have the right words and are going to find their way to the meaning anyway. “When someone actually shows up for somebody.”

Jerry Springer had a closing monologue he gave at the end of every episode. It was called the “Final Thought,” and it ran about ninety seconds, and in it he said something quietly wise about whatever had just happened on the stage behind him. He had been doing it for years. He was very good at it.

But sometimes — not often, but sometimes — the episode said what it needed to say without him, and the Final Thought was just a formality, a way of organizing the exit.

This was one of those times.

Because the story had already made its point, and the point was not a comfortable one. It was not a point about dreams or destiny or the universe sending signals in the night. It was not a point about flower choices or poem quality or whether a bouquet from a grocery store means anything.

The point was about Robert giving up five months of his social life and a traveling job he loved and regular dinners with his stepdad — who he saw once every two months and loved enough to sacrifice for — and still buying a ring in secret and still showing up and still saying I love you to absolute hell and back.

The point was the ring box, opened on a talk show stage in front of an audience of strangers, with all the dignity and all the exposure that entailed.

The point was what it looked like when someone actually showed up.

Backstage, while the audience was still filing out, Melvin sat in the green room with the flowers on the table beside him. A production assistant had brought him a bottle of water and a bag of chips, the kind with the ridges, which he ate mechanically without tasting.

His phone had notifications he wasn’t reading.

He was thinking about the dream.

It had been so vivid. That was the thing he kept coming back to, the thing he had led with when Jerry asked him why, the thing he had built this entire afternoon on: it was so vivid and so real.

And it had been. He wasn’t lying about that. He had felt the dream the way you feel a real afternoon — the air, the warmth, the specific weight of another person’s attention. He had woken up and the feeling had been so strong that it eclipsed six months of actual, waking, documented reality with Kayla. He had sent the text before he’d brushed his teeth.

He thought about Samantha now. Her exact words: You’re lazy. You’re unmotivated. And the sex wasn’t even that great.

He thought about Robert. His exact posture: upright, steady, the posture of a man who had decided what he was doing and was doing it, regardless of how the room looked at him.

He thought about the flowers on the table.

They were still bright. Sunflowers were like that — they held. You could leave them in a room for hours and they would still be facing the light, still doing the thing they were built to do, still looking like a good idea even when everything around them had changed.

He reached out and touched one petal. Just touched it, the way you check that something is real.

It was real.

So was the dream, probably, in whatever sense dreams are real.

So was Robert opening a ring box on a talk show stage. So was Kayla crying with her hands over her face. So was five months of choosing someone every single day, not because the choosing was easy, but because the alternative was unthinkable.

Melvin had been looking for confirmation. He had found a dream that matched a reality and interpreted it as a sign — the universe speaking, the cosmos aligning, something beyond ordinary probability pointing him toward Samantha and away from everything else.

He understood now, sitting in the green room with his chips and his water and his flowers and the specific quiet of aftermath, what he had actually been looking for.

He had been looking for a reason.

Not a sign. A reason. Something outside himself that could authorize the feeling he’d already had — that feeling of wanting something different, something new, something that didn’t have the settled weight of six months of real relationship with all its textures and complications and demands.

The dream had given him the reason. The dream had said: this is allowed, this is destined, this is the universe’s plan.

But the universe hadn’t sent the text. He had sent the text. The universe hadn’t driven to Samantha’s house. He had driven to Samantha’s house. The universe hadn’t stood on this stage with a bouquet from a grocery store and a poem about eyes closed tight.

That had been him.

All of it, him.

He picked up the flowers.

He thought about leaving them. He thought about giving them to the production assistant or leaving them on the green room table for whoever cleaned up after, some anonymous act of not-quite-letting-go.

Instead he tucked them under his arm, the way you carry something you’ve decided to keep even though you’re not sure what for, and he walked down the hallway toward the studio exit.

He passed the door to the stage. Through the wall he could still hear the audience leaving — chairs scraping, voices overlapping, the ambient dissolve of a crowd dispersing back into individual lives.

He pushed through the exit door.

Ohio afternoon. Parking lot. His car, third row, halfway down, the bumper still slightly dented from where he’d backed into a trash can six weeks ago and kept meaning to fix.

He got in. He put the flowers on the passenger seat. He looked at them — the sunflowers, the purple things — and they looked back at him with the patient, unreasonable brightness of flowers that do not know they were supposed to mean something and ended up meaning something else instead.

He started the car.

He did not have anywhere specific to go. His girlfriend — his ex-girlfriend — was presumably wherever she was, probably with Robert, probably looking at a ring on her finger that he had not put there. Samantha was probably in a cab back to wherever she lived, already composing the version of this afternoon she would tell her friends tonight over wine and laughter.

He had no one to call. No plan. No dream telling him where to go next.

Just him in a car in an Ohio parking lot with a slightly dented bumper and a bouquet of flowers and a poem in his pocket he was never going to read out loud again.

He thought: I need to get a job.

It arrived the way obvious things arrive — not as an insight but as a recognition, a thing that had always been true and was now impossible to look past. He needed to get a job. He needed to fix the bumper. He needed to call his mom, who he hadn’t called in three weeks. He needed to do the things that people do when they’re not spending their energy on dreams and poems and flowers chosen at the grocery store for someone who didn’t want them.

He needed to start building the kind of life that meant something when you showed someone a ring box.

He had watched Robert do that today. He had watched a man who had given things up — real, specific, named things, five months of Sundays and stepdad dinners and a job that took him places — open a ring box on a stage and mean every word of it. And the woman had cried. And the room had gone still. And the applause had been the kind of applause that meant something because the thing it was applauding was real.

That was what he wanted.

Not a dream. Not a confirmation. Not a sign from the universe arriving in his sleep and telling him it was okay to take the easy path and call it destiny.

He wanted to be the person in that room who had earned the moment.

He put the car in reverse.

He backed out carefully, watching the mirror, avoiding the trash cans.

The flowers sat on the passenger seat, still bright, still facing the window, still doing what sunflowers do — turning toward the light with a reliability that had nothing to do with dreams and everything to do with showing up the same way every single day.

Jerry Springer’s Final Thought that day was short.

He sat at his desk after the audience had gone, the stage empty behind him, and looked directly at the camera the way he always did — steady, warm, slightly tired in the good way, the way a person is tired who has been genuinely paying attention all day.

“Dreams are real,” he said. “Dreams tell you things. Sometimes they tell you the truth.” He paused. “But here’s the thing about dreams. They happen while you’re asleep. And at some point, you have to wake up.”

He let that sit for a moment.

“Love is what you do when you’re awake,” he said. “It’s the job you keep. The friend you call. The ring you buy in secret because you know, without anyone telling you, that this is the person.” He looked down at his desk, then back up. “You can’t dream your way into that. You have to build it.”

He smiled the small, genuine smile he saved for moments he actually meant.

“Take care of yourselves,” he said. “And each other.”

The screen faded.

In the parking lot, Melvin’s car turned onto the highway and disappeared into the Ohio afternoon, the sunflowers on the passenger seat, the poem still in his pocket, and one more thought — just one — forming at the back of his mind as he drove.

Tonight, he was going to call his mom.

Tomorrow, he was going to look for a job.

And the next time he had a dream — vivid or not, realistic or not, the kind that feels so real you can still feel the warmth of it when you wake up — he was going to lie there for a moment, feel it, and then get up and do something with his actual, waking, imperfect, fixable life.

The sunflowers were still on the seat when he got home.

He brought them inside.

He put them in a glass of water on the kitchen windowsill, the way you take care of something just because it’s still alive and you can.

They lasted four more days.

Every morning they were still facing the light.