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“What! That’s not true… why the hell would he do that?” Debbie asked and once more it was like she had stolen the very question from my lips. Although there was a traitorous part of me that already knew why and it also had something to do with why both our files were missing.

“Vern was on the fence, Debs, he watched him do it.”

“Why would anybody…” She was quickly cut off.

“That’s what I’m telling you. There isn’t a why, only a new prisoner in this place who is that fucking crazy and that’s why they’re all shitting themselves out there.” The paper towel dispenser again.

“You can’t scare a man like that. You can’t hurt him, because he’ll do it to himself for shits and giggles and then smile at you. And then he told them all that the prison was now his, before he just calmly lay down on the ground and let the guards cuff him. Lay down Debs, like he was doing them a favor. As if he had planned the whole damn thing… it’s nuts.”

A long silence in that bathroom.

“When was this, yesterday?”

“Yeah, about eight thirty the call was made for…” I didn’t hear the rest, as my mind was too busy spinning. Because if I was honest, I had gone back over that morning so many times. But now I viewed the whole exchange differently.

I also couldn’t tell you a single word either of them said after that, only that they left, and that the door swung on its hinges before it settled. Then I sat in a locked stall in a prison bathroom with my hands shaking in my lap.

Eight thirty.

Yesterday.

An hour after that fight ended, a man had been brought to me with a laceration to his right forearm. I cleaned it, closed it and dressed it. And the whole time he watched me do it with one fist white on the bed rail and the other wound tight into his own chain, because I had asked him to behave. But here was the thing that I couldn’t get past. Here was the thing that was still sitting there when everything else had drained out of me.

I knew.

Not consciously. Not in any way I could have said out loud. But some part of me had looked at that arm and known it had been intentional. A thought I had cast aside because the alternative was insane.

As crazy as the story I just heard.

Because a wound tells you how it happened. It is the first thing they teach you and the last thing you forget. A gash you get in a fight is a mess. It’s ragged and it changes depth and it goes wherever the other man’s arm decides to take it. It has an accident’s handwriting written all over it.

But this one…it had been far too clean. One line, one direction, one pressure, running half the length of his forearm as evenly as a seam.

I remember thinking, for about half a second with a swab in my hand, that is a very tidy cut for a brawl.

And then he had breathed me in, and a little while after that his fingers had brushed my leg and I had dropped an entire tray on the floor, and I had never thought about it again.

He did that to himself.

He stood in a yard, in front of sixty hardened criminals, and opened his own arm with the same shank. Then as the man he had just destroyed was on the floor broken and bleeding, he told an entire prison it now belonged to him.

And then he came to me.

But why… was it to prove a point, to make them fear him, or was it something different entirely?

Was it that he…

He needed a reason to be sent to me.

Could that really be it? After all, Dr. Halloran doesn’t send a man to medical because he asks nicely. He sends him when something is broken and there is paperwork attached. So, the man with no name had gotten himself some paperwork, and he had paid for it in his own blood. He had walked down three corridors with it wrapped in a shirt to sit in front of me for one hour and ask me whether I lived local.

And I had put nine stitches into that arm and thanked God he was behaving for me.

It was at that point that I got up off that toilet lid, my legs shaky from sitting too long. My monitor was buzzing at my hip and I ignored it, which was a thing I never did, and I went to the sink. I then put my hands under the cold faucet and looked at Anna Vale in the mirror and found that she looked like a woman who had just done the math.

Because there is a version of this where a violent man takes a shine to a nurse, and that was utterly terrifying. And I had spent the whole morning hunting for an ordinary explanation, because an ordinary explanation was the only thing that would let me finish the week. But the problem was…

There wasn’t one.