"I'm serious. You eating actual food or just that sad instant coffee?"
I look at the pasta rotating in the microwave. "I had a sandwich."
He shakes his head. "Mom would have a fit."
"Mom's not here."
"Which is why I'm asking." He asks if I'm coming to Aunt Kathy's on the weekend. I tell him yes.
"Dave's building a new section on the deck. Neil's supervising." He uses air quotes. "By supervising I mean he's sitting in acamping chair drinking beer and telling Dave he's doing it wrong."
Aunt Kathy's boyfriends. Both of them. They've been the three of them since before I was born.
"Sounds about right."
"Sunday lunch. Don't bring wine. Neil bought a case of something and he'll be offended if you don't drink it."
We talk for another ten minutes. He tells me about a kitchen renovation he's quoting.
I shower. Pull on an old university jumper. Make a coffee.
Jude's file sits on my kitchen table where I left it this morning. I open it. The incident reports. The dosing logs. Dr. Kennedy's notes. My documentation beside them, yellow highlights.
The facility's version of this man is a pattern of violence. Sedate, isolate, document. Each response justifies the next.
Mine is different. The man I spent forty minutes with this morning doesn't belong on the dose he's on.
Chapter 6
Jude
The pill is white, round, and sits in a paper cup on Devina's medication tray beside a plastic tumbler of water.
New addition. They used to inject me every morning whether I'd touched anyone or not—twenty milligrams of diazepam, no clinical justification beyond 'he's Jude Chadwick.' Kent filed a motion to stop it. Won. Now I get a white pill instead. Kennedy's compromise—an oral antipsychotic added to my chart four days ago. I've been compliant. Kennedy thinks a pill will keep me that way.
Devina holds the tray at arm's length. Her elbow locks straight. She used to brace the tray against her hip to hide the shake in her hands. She doesn't bother anymore. Her pulse sits visible at the base of her throat while she stands in my doorway and waits.
Three years I made this woman's job hell. Not by being violent toward her—I never touched her—but the stare. Holding her gaze while she pushed a needle into my arm during an incident response. Her fear was the most honest thing in my day. Everyone else covers it. Devina couldn't.
I take the cup and tip the pill onto my tongue. Swallow. Hold the water for a moment—it's cold—and drink it. Open my mouth. Lift my tongue. Turn my head.
"Thank you," I say.
She flinches. Pulls the tray back and marks the chart without writing anything legible. She'll fill it in at the nursing station where her hands can shake without me watching. The orderly in the doorway, a kid named Ashley who started last month, presses his back harder against the frame.
Devina leaves. Her shoes click fast down the corridor, the half-running pace she uses every time she passes my cell. Even now. Even when the man inside it just said thank you and opened his mouth for an inspection and didn't look at her the wrong way.
That's the part that scares her. Not the silence, not the old stare, not the years of forced compliance that everyone knew was a leash and not a cure. A thank-you. Volunteered. With eye contact. A man who has decided to be polite, and she doesn't know what the politeness means.
She's right not to know. I don't know either.
The pill doesn't do much. A slight flattening an hour after I take it—not a punitive stack, nothing close. More of a dullness at the edge of my focus, a half-second delay between a thought and the sharpness that usually follows it. Kennedy says it targets aggression pathways. I don't tell Kennedy that my aggression doesn't live in a pathway his textbook can find.
The morning stretches. I do push-ups because my body needs the work and because the routine keeps my muscles from atrophying under three years of confinement. Two hundred, broken into sets of fifty, and in the gaps I stand at the window and watch the corridor through the glass.
Lane passes my door at 0847. Arms folded, face flat. He looks at me through the panel and keeps walking. I said good morning to him three days ago. He stopped walking and looked at me like I'd grown a second head.
Lane has the best instincts in this building. Everyone else looks at the new Jude and sees what they want to see—Kennedy sees progress, the night guard sees a reason to check twice, the nurse who handles my tray has started knocking before she slides it through. She never used to knock. She started the day I caught the door when it stuck and held it for her, and her hand shook so hard the mug rattled on the tray.
