Bad Girls [Rio]

Walls Tumbling Down [Part II]

Two days later and I was at the fire station, chatting with Hen and Buck. I had talked to Bobby about possibly opening the doors to civilians for a charity event. He was hesitant at first, but my arguments never failed to convinced anyone, and Bobby wasn't the exception.

I initially wanted to raise money for Sarah. Ruby's daughter. Nevertheless I was informed that Annie and Beth were donating their cut from the deal they had previously done with Rio, without me, to their cause. That eased my mind as I was going nuts trying to find a way to fund the upcoming medical interventions. However, when I was coming to the conclusion that I had to forget all about the event, I got some news.

Athena came in the station the day before and talked to me about the girl that was trapped in the basement of Melora, the girl that had kidnapped me on valentine's day. Her name is Ashleigh and she was Eddie's sister. Not my Eddie. Rio's Eddie. Half dead, shirtless on my niece's bed Eddie.

She was out of the hospital after she suffered a mental breakdown, and was now ready to go on rehab again. Just like I had promised her brother. However, there was still a problem. She had been to almost all of the rehab centers in town, and no one would welcome her into their facility again unless she decided to put in the work this time. Needless to say all of those programs were of public access. It's not like they really cared about the person behind the addiction, so I took action.

I wrote to a private clinic in Detroit, using my degree on medicine to hopefully get her in the program. They got back to me almost immediately, saying that they'd be glad to take her in, but someone was to pay for the treatment and housing. They said they could guarantee a noticeable progress on Ashleigh within the first 6 months, but that it'd cost around 50 dollars a day.

That'd be around 9 thousand dollars by the 6 month mark. Money I didn't have. So I thought we could have the charity event at the station and raise as much money as we could for her. The team were on board and so the day before, we went shopping, got some business to donate some stuff and tried our best to decorate the place.

I saw Beth and Annie walk into the station and went to greet them. "Hey, what's this about?" Beth said, as Annie shoved her hands inside the pockets of her jeans and examined the room, more specifically my co-workers.

"Charity event."

"You want us to wash money here?" Annie suddenly said in a whisper.

I returned the confused look she wore and shook my head slowly. "No, Annie. I don't want you to laundry the money I wanna donate to a good cause. I just wanted you to be part of something that's important to me. I've been trying so hard to be there for you guys, help you, be part of your lives, that I realized, you don't know the first thing about my life."

"I know you work at a fire station." Annie stated.

"Doesn't count. The building gave it away."

"Actually, it was the uniform." Annie joked. "We didn't bring any money though." She said, looking up at Beth, who nodded in agreement.

"It's not about donating... Well, not only donating. It's about the community coming together to help someone else. So, Annie, if you're up to it, you can go help Hen with the balloons, we're expecting a lot of parents to bring their kids in, and Beth, Buck is in charge of the sweets." I signaled Annie to go with Bobby while I guided Beth to the table with buckets and bowls full of last year's Halloween candy. "Teal bucket is for kids with food allergies. Everything in there is nut-free, dairy-free, egg-free, soy-free, and gluten-free. Think you can handle that?" I chuckled, knowing full well she hated it when I brought up the topic.

"What are those?" Beth pointed her index finger at the smoke alarms.

"That's all bobby..." I sighed.