neither of his brothers understood how Joe’s crash-and-burn return from Iraq had crippled him. He prayed they never did. To lie at the mercy of his doctors, to wake crying in pain, to rely on pills to function and his family for the most basic human needs had been a devastating comedown.
He was the oldest, the leader, the one who did well in school. The foreign correspondent, the world adventurer.
Now he was back to eating his mother’s leftovers and fretting over writing a feature on a hole-in-the-wall clinic.
Will’s chair scraped back. He grabbed the whistling kettle and poured boiling water into two mugs.
“Want some?” he asked Joe, lifting the kettle.
He wanted a drink. He wanted his life back.
He cleared his throat. “Sure. Thanks.”
Will snagged another mug from the cupboard and added instant crystals.
“Don’t worry about Mom,” he said, stirring the coffee. “I told her you weren’t getting out because you were finally settling down.”
Joe pushed his half-eaten stew away. “And she believed that?”
“She didn’t,” Mike said, helping himself to one of the mugs and bringing another over to Joe. “But then I told her you were seeing somebody.”
Joe didn’t “see” women. He had sex with them, to fill the time and dull the pain.
“Yeah?” he asked, almost amused. “Who did you tell her I was—”
Oh, no.
Mike wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
He had. He was trying not to wriggle like a puppy who’d missed the paper, but it was clear he knew he’d made a mess.
“Nell Dolan,” Joe said flatly, answering his own question.
“She was the only one I could think of,” Mike said.
“A blond nurse with an Irish surname,” Will put in, a gleam in his eyes. “She’s perfect. Mom was thrilled.”
Nell was perfect, Joe acknowledged. That was her problem. Or rather, it was his.
She would fit too well into his family and into his parents’ expectations for their disabled son. She had the idealism and commitment they admired and he had lost. On top of that, she was Irish. Catholic. A caretaker.
She could take care of him.
The thought was as bitter as his brother’s coffee and much harder to swallow.
Joe forced himself to take a sip and turned the conversation. “What were you doing there today, anyway? At the clinic.”
“Your girlfriend called us in,” Mike said. “Somebody’s lifting narcotics from the clinic pharmacy.”
Joe felt the tickle of interest like a spider on the back of his neck. “Is it serious?”
“Not yet.” Mike waggled his eyebrows. “It wouldn’t hurt you to keep an eye on things, though.”
It could, Joe thought. He didn’t want to get involved with Nell or with her clinic. He was going to turn in his fifteen-hundred words and be done with them both.
But as he sat waiting for his brothers to finish their coffee and leave, he couldn’t stop thinking this could be the hook, the angle his story needed.
The hell with it.
Frustration bubbled and seethed inside him. Despite the time he’d lost with his brothers’ visit, despite his aching ankle and looming deadline, he needed to get out of the house tonight.
He needed a meeting.
The banging woke her.
Nell’s head jerked up. She blinked, disoriented, at the scattered pages of the grant proposal spotlit by her desk lamp. She had to finish it tonight. She had to—
Bang. Bang. Bang. Like a garbage can bouncing down a fire escape.
—open the door.
Nell hauled herself to her feet. Her eyes were gritty. Her mouth was fuzzy. Her brain wasn’t working at all. If she had any kind of sense, she’d be home at this time of night. If she had any kind of life…
Someone was at the clinic door, pounding hard enough to threaten the glass. Her heart tripped. Trying to get her attention? Or trying to get in?
The panic button was up front, under the registration desk. It hadn’t been used in… Nell couldn’t remember the last time it had been used.
She hurried down the hall, switching on lights along the way. The Ark Street Free Clinic wasn’t the county E.R. Her practice specialized in preventive medicine and family care. Not belligerent drunks or whacked-out junkies or gangbangers who had to be strapped to their gurneys to stop them from finishing in the hospital what they’d started on the streets.
Bang. Bang.
Pulse racing, Nell flipped the entrance lights. A pale face leaped at her from the darkness beyond the glass. Her heart rocketed to her throat.
Joe Reilly?
Dazed, Nell stood with her hand still on the switch plate and her feet rooted to the linoleum. What was he doing here?
He rattled the door in its frame.
Shaken from her surprise, Nell jumped forward to slide back the bolts.
“What is it?” she asked. “What do you want?”
And it better be good, her tone announced. She was tired. And she still hadn’t forgiven him for his “play doctor” crack.
“Not me,” he said immediately. “Her.”
He turned and reached down to the bundle of rags huddled in the shadow of the building. The bundle gasped and struck his arms away.
Not rags. A woman. A girl, really, her dark eyes huge in her thin face, her hair covered by a plain scarf, her body draped in shawls.
Nell took a step forward. “Help me get her inside.”
“I can’t,” Joe said tersely.
She spared him a brief, assessing glance. “Your ankle?”
“No. She’s Muslim. Unless her life is in danger, it’s not permitted for me to touch her.”
His sensitivity surprised Nell. But she was already bending down, offering her arm to the young woman. “How did you get her here?” she asked over her shoulder.
Joe looked grim. “I convinced her her life was in danger.” The girl cried out. And Nell saw what the shadows and the shawls had hidden until now.
“She’s pregnant,”
