Tomboy (The Hartigans #3)(12)

That was the way it worked a lot of the times for the folks who came into the free clinic. Young single moms existing right at the poverty line made sure the family resources went to the kids first. That meant when something came around—like strep throat—their immune systems weren’t up to the task of fighting the infection off.

“You know we’re starting a services center in the warehouse next door. Employment help and skills training. A food pantry. A closet for interview clothes. Eventually, even a preschool.” Fallon busied herself with straightening the wellness and parenting pamphlets in the hanging rack, knowing that the key to getting a lot of her clients to accept help was to make sure they didn’t view it as charity. For some reason, a lack of direct eye contact seemed to help with that. “It’s only open as a pilot program right now, but I’d love to have you take a look when you’re feeling better so you can try everything out. We’d really appreciate some feedback on how we have it set up and what improvements we can make.”

“Feedback, huh?” Sylvia asked, sounding as if she knew that wasn’t exactly the whole truth.

“It would be a huge help,” she said as she walked over to the kids and checked out their drawings.

“I’ll think about it,” the other woman said.

Okay, she could totally take that as a win. “Thanks, I really appreciate it.”

After Sylvia and the kids left the clinic, there didn’t seem to be a single break in the action until almost 7 p.m. Fallon was dragging by the time she walked into the break room for the monthly staff meeting.

She sat down at one of the round tables next to Harley, a fellow nurse at St. Vincent’s who also moonlighted as a bartender at Marino’s Bar and Grill, and closed her eyes. What Fallon needed was a do-over of her weekend.

Harley cleared her throat, making Fallon crack her eyes open. Turning her head, she got the full force of Harley’s always-cheery expression. It was a lot to take on a limited amount of sleep.

“Dreaming about your weekend with Harbor City’s most fuckable hockey player?” Harley asked, her voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry beyond the two of them.

Fallon bit back a groan. Yeah, it seemed like everyone and their dog had spotted that stupid photo of her and Zach that had run on the metro area’s most popular hockey site and then been picked up by all the major news outlets. Her mom included. Questions? Oh, she’d only had about a billion hurled at her by her family. Some days she wanted to kill whoever invented group texting.

Fallon rolled her eyes. “I’m fantasizing about how good it would feel to get a full eight hours of sleep three days in a row.”

“Aren’t we all.” Harley leaned in closer. “So does that mean you aren’t going to see him again?”

“Only on TV.” And in that weird dream she kept having that involved him in only basketball shorts and then nothing at all. She really needed to stop eating Spicy Cheetos before bed.

Harley let out a sigh and shot her a sympathetic look as if Fallon ever wanted to see that man again. “Too bad.”

“Not really.” The last thing she needed in her life was one more pain in the ass.

“So he was a disappointment in bed?” Harley wrinkled her nose in sympathy. “Damn. I had hopes for that one.”

Fallon ground her teeth together and counted to ten. “I didn’t sleep with him,” she said for what felt like the thousandth time since Friday morning.

“I’m not judging.”

“It’s the truth.” Not that anyone believed her.

Haley gave her a conspiratorial wink. “I’m with you whatever you want to say.”

Fallon didn’t get a chance to try to set Harley straight because Cameron West, the clinic’s director, started the staff meeting. As usual, it was a lot of bad news wrapped in success stories about the people they’d helped. The short of it? The clinic was helping people who desperately needed it, but their budget couldn’t cover all the work that needed to be done.

“Hey Fallon, can I talk to you for a minute?” Cameron asked after he adjourned the staff meeting.

Her stomach sank. Good news rarely followed that question. “Sure.” She walked over to where he stood by the coffeemaker. “What’s up?”

“There’s no good way to put this. Our grant application for the money to fund a full-time salary for you wasn’t accepted. I’m so sorry.” He patted her on the shoulder. “If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t just you. The grant process has gotten so competitive with federal funding dropping that we got waitlisted for the proposal for our pilot services program, too.” He rubbed his palm against the back of his neck as he grimaced, the strain of the clinic’s budget obviously doing a number on his stress level. “It looks like the food pantry and job training pilot programs will end when the money runs out at the end of the year.”

The news for her was bad, but thanks to her job at St. Vincent’s she wasn’t going to have to worry about how to pay her bills. The services the outreach programs could offer, though, would make a real difference for people like Sylvia and her family.

They couldn’t give up. Too much was at stake. “There’s got to be something we can do.”

“Hope for a miracle,” Cameron said. “Our donors have given generously, but we just don’t have enough support to cover the clinic’s financial needs and the additional outreach programs. Something has to give.”