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CHAPTER ONE
Amaranta
Dropping down at my desk, I cradled my head in my hands and tried my hardest not to cry.
It was something I had to do more and more lately.
Try not to cry.
While everything fucking fell apart around me.
There was a leak in an exam room we couldn’t afford to lose. We were completely out of casting material. There were no more free samples of the common drugs I needed to be able to give to the uninsured patients who simply couldn’t afford to get an actual prescription. And my shoes were making my feet hurt.
Sure, that was kind of low on the emergent scale, but I’d spent way too much money that I couldn’t afford to lose on them, and they made every step feel excruciating. I couldn’t even go back to my old shoes because they had actual holes in them. The kind that duct tape couldn’t make workable anymore. I know. I tried.
Everyone thought doctors were just… rolling in cash. Maybe that was true. If you went into a speciality. If you were in medicine for the money, and therefore made your career decisions based on that drive.
But for those of us who went into medicine because we genuinely cared, because we wanted so badly to make a difference for people, yeah, we were all pretty much struggling.
Student loan debt was just debilitating when you went to school for something like becoming a doctor. It was made worse when you busted your ass and did a fast-track medical degree to get through college faster. Not many schools offered it. And those who did, yeah, they weren’t cheap.
But I’d been determined.
I needed to get through school and get back to my neighborhood to run the clinic that had been failing so many people in my community for so long.
So, yeah, I cut coupons and tried to duct tape my shoes. And hadn’t had a nice dinner at a restaurant in, well, ever.
Any money I had left over, I tended to put back into the clinic.
It was me who paid for the new chairs in the waiting room. And the fridge in the break room when the old one died.
God, I even bought the damn hand sanitizer.
Even so, with all those sacrifices, with all that hard work, we were just barely managing to keep the place running.
And byweI meant me and the nurses, since the rich doctors who actually owned the place didn’t give a single fuck about it. They just liked how it looked on their websites and social media to say they ran a clinic in a low-income area.
“Fucking bastards,” I hissed, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands.
“I don’t know who we are talking about, but abso-fucking-lutely,” my nurse said, walking into my office with a metal clipboard box hugged to his chest.
Michael was my rock.
He talked me off of a ledge almost daily.
He was also hideously underpaid for all the work he did.
If I ever, ever, saved enough money to buy the clinic myself, I was going to give my nurses the biggest salary increase anyone had ever seen.
Because, the fact of the matter was, I knew they could be making a killing if they wanted to. They could take up traveling contracts and easily make four or five times what they were getting paid to work in this falling-down clinic.
But they stayed.
Because they cared too.
“I’m talking about the doctors who own this place, driving around in their two-hundred-thousand-dollar cars while I wonder exactly how unethical it would be to use craft sticks as tongue depressors since we can’t afford to buy them this month.”
“Well, maybe this will help,” Michael said, moving forward toward the other side of my overflowing desk, cluttered with old paper coffee cups and bills that needed paying.
