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where we’re going or how much travel time we’ll need.”
    Joshua froze. He’d been thinking more in terms of Victoria introducing herself to the women, giving them a card, and urging them to call the clinic. “Visit?”
    “Yeah.” She turned a puzzled glance on him. “These women have some sort of problem, or they would have come back in. I’ve got to talk to them and find out what the problem is. Evaluate their cases.”
    The last thing Joshua wanted to do was to traipse in and out of the homes of pregnant women whose emotions were closer to the surface and screwed up by hormones. “Why don’t we drive by, you knock on the door, and ask them to come into the clinic?”
    Thinking she understood, Victoria laughed. “It’s not an exam, Joshua. I want only to talk to the women. Face-to-face. It’s harder to evade the issues that way or make promises they won’t keep. We’ll be talking about boring stuff like nutrition and prenatal vitamins. So you don’t have to worry.”
    Not bothering to explain that his real reluctance was contact with
people
, Joshua told her candidly, “You do know that the most likely reason the women haven’t come back in is that they don’t have transportation or gas money. How are you going to fix that?”
    “Home care maybe.” She shrugged her shoulders. “The county health department warned me about the transportation problem. It’s what made me decide to go after Dr. Grenwald’s no-shows. The hospital won’tback me if I do home deliveries, but I can do prenatal care in the home with no problem.”
    “No problem as long as they can pay you, or you can afford to work for free. If they don’t have money for gas, they don’t have money to pay you, Victoria, and mountain pride won’t let them accept anything for free.”
    “Believe me, I’m cheaper than an ob-gyn. Besides, if money is keeping them from getting prenatal care, we can figure something out. A staggered payment schedule for the insurance deductible or something. They probably qualify for Medicare/Medicaid if they don’t have insurance and have been unemployed for a while.”
    Surprised, Joshua stared at her. “Medicare pays?”
    “Yep, for CNM’s.” At his blank expression, she elaborated. “Certified nurse midwives. If transportation’s a problem, then we’ll work out home visits. If insurance is a problem, we’ll find out if they qualify for federal aid. And if they don’t have transportation or health insurance, it’s a sure bet that my phone call wouldn’t have made any difference. Seeing is believing. I want an expectant mother to believe me when I tell her that she doesn’t have to be ashamed of being poor and that she’s not the only mother who’s had to go on Medicare or Medicaid because she was having hard times.”
    Joshua looked dubious and glanced down at the list. “If I were you, I wouldn’t look down your cultured Connecticut nose and tell these women that they’re poor.”
    Victoria was appalled. “Give me a little credit. I wasn’t going to say it like that!”
    “Not intentionally, but it’s the way you look, Victoria—like someone with all the answers. Like someone who doesn’t have problems.”
    “But I’m barely making ends meet myself!”
    “They don’t know that. You don’t present yourself that way. You’ve got emerald earrings, a Range Rover, and a killer red dress.”
    Victoria glanced down, stunned. “There isn’t anything ‘killer’ about this dress. It would have been two years and ten pounds ago, but not now. A woman will know that, trust me.” Meeting his gaze, she said, “The emerald earrings I got from my father for my sweet sixteen, and they’re the only pair I own. The truck—such as it is—I got in the divorce. I live in the real world nowadays, just as they do. Don’t worry, Joshua. I’ll get my point across without insulting anyone.”
    “I hope so. You’ve got to meet these women on the level and part on the square,” he