“Hello?” The door creaked open, an inch at a time. Nate peered inside. In front of him was a living room decorated in shades of brown and yellow. The ceiling bulged with damp, the plaster cracked down the middle.

Somebody was sitting on the couch, facing away from Nate, a TV flickering quietly in front of them.

“Mr. Martinez?”

He pushed the door open a little more. A sudden prickling oozed over his neck and back, a headlong rush of fiery adrenaline kicking inside his veins.

That’s when the smell hit him.

CHAPTER 3

TUESDAY WAS GRAY AND DAMP. By afternoon a soft fall rain had settled outside, making the clinic look tired and dirty. Sagging chairs leaned against murky beige walls. A garbage can overflowed with empty paper cups. Wet jackets were hung on the coatrack, dripping onto the grimy linoleum. Reception was a crush of damp bodies that smelled of urine and feet and unwashed hair.

Some of my patients were from the eastern side of Skamania, where the yards were cut into neat squares of green, the bushes professionally trimmed. But most were poverty-stricken, immigrants, homeless, addicts, or all of the above. They had little or no access to health insurance, suffering agonizing pain instead of seeing a doctor because they couldn’t afford it. These were the people I’d gone to medical school to help.

The more cynical accused us at the clinic of having a savior complex, but I knew we were making a difference in these people’s lives. We were helping.

I yawned as I walked toward the shared medical-staff office. It had been a busy day with patients, doing wellness exams, checking X-rays and lab results. And all on very little sleep. Josh had come into our bedroom too many times to count last night. When we’d first woken this morning, his fever had been too high to send him to school, so I’d called Nate’s mother and she’d agreed to stay with him. Fortunately, I was good on very little sleep. It was sort of a prerequisite to being a doctor.

I dug my cell phone out of the closet where I stashed my purse. Nate had texted me an X. I smiled and shot an X back to him, loving that he thought about me during his day. I then dialed Moira before my next appointment.

“Hello, Emma.” Moira’s voice was brisk, the tone she always used with me. I could hear the pursed-mouth exhale of the cigarette she thought nobody knew about. I imagined her draped in her cashmere and pearls, slate-gray hair smoothed perfectly into place, a cigarette dangling out the window in secret. I gritted my teeth but kept quiet. It wasn’t like we had a lot of choice of babysitters.

“Hi, Moira. How’s Josh?”

“He’s sleeping now. I gave him some ibuprofen.”

“If he wakes up—”