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WHEN LIES FALL

ANNA

Three days without laying eyes on him.

I thought a great deal about those three days, because at the time I believed they were a mercy. They turned out to be nothing more than a calculating move on his part.

Because he didn’t once come to medical, nor did he manufacture an injury to give him the excuse to be there. He didn’t have to. He reached me anyway, through a warden and a locker and a folded shirt, and still I checked that locker every single morning with my heart in my throat, and every single evening with something I refuse to call disappointment.

Three days, and the man never once showed me his face.

I should have been grateful. I should have counted my blessings that he was keeping his distance. What I shouldn’t have done was secretly obsess over the reasons why I wasn’t on his radar anymore.

And it undid me more thoroughly than it should have done. Because you can’t brace against nothing. I had spent three years learning to read a room, to clock the exits and to feel the change in the air pressure when a man has walked up behind you. And all of it counted for nothing against a man who did the one thing I had no defense for… which was to stay away.

So, I jumped at every set of boots in the corridor. I looked up every time the wing radio crackled. And I did my job the whole time. A diabetic on D wing whose feet I dressed twice a week. A boy of nineteen coming down off something and shaking hard enough to bite his own tongue. Split knuckles, a burst eardrum, three men with the same chest infection, a broken thumb somebody swore he had shut in a door.

And every single time that door opened, every time an officer put his head in to say they were bringing someone down, I stopped breathing until I saw who it was.

Then I got to the end of a shift with my shoulders tense and my blood sugar in my boots, because I had been running on adrenaline for nine hours over a thing that hadn’t happened. It was like he was doing this on purpose.

Like this was all part of his game.

However, that all changed on the fourth day. I hadn’t even made it all the way through the second gate before I was told someone had fallen in the shower. I still had my bag on my shoulder, my coat on and my ID swinging on its clip, when an officer I half knew came down the corridor as they were still running the wand over me.

“Vale. Good, you’re in.” He was already turning to go back the way he had come. “We’ve got a man down in the showers on C. Fell on the wet tile, cracked his head on a bench. There’s a shit load of blood.”

“How much blood?” I asked, already snapping into nurse mode.

“Enough that I’m coming to get you instead of delivering him straight to the infirmary, like we usually do.”

“Is Halloran in?” I asked, despite knowing the answer, seeing as they were rushing to get me and not him.

“Running late.” He didn’t slow down. “So, you’re it, I’m afraid.”

Wonderful, I thought with a grit of my teeth.

“I need my kit,” I stated. Head lacerations bleed like something from a horror movie and mean almost nothing. Or the worst case is they bleed like that and mean everything. The difference is a nurse getting eyes on it inside of five minutes. Wet tile and a wing full of men and no shoes. It happens often enough, whether intentional or not. It’s the single most boring emergency in a prison and the easiest to clean up.

“Then go grab it,” he replied, already leading me to where it was.

So, I did just that, grabbing the medic bag that lives on a hook by the infirmary door. One that was packed and sealed and that I had over my other shoulder inside forty seconds. Which meant my own bag was still with me, the way it always was, and my coat still on, because there had been no time for the locker room.

I got my coat off on the move, one arm and then the other without breaking stride, and folded it over my forearm. You can’t work in a coat. So it comes off before you get there, because the last thing a man bleeding on a floor needs is a nurse fighting with her own sleeves.

He hurried me down two flights and along a corridor, and the whole way he complained about the state of the drains, as if this had been the cause of the fall. Which I thought was odd, considering it happened in the shower where the floor naturally gets wet and becomes a hazard for millions faced with the same problem.

As a nurse I was no stranger to the ‘I slipped in the shower’. It was one of the most common causes of accidents, that and I fell off my ladder, which, no surprises, increases substantially at Christmas time.

There were two officers on the door, which struck me as a lot for a man who had fallen over. But then I stopped thinking about it, because there was a head wound on the other side of it with my name on it. However, I did briefly wonder why neither of them would look at me.

“He’s in there,” said the one who had walked me down. He put his hand flat on the door and pushed it in, causing the steam to come rolling.

“Straight through the first bank. He’s on the floor around back.”

“Is anybody with him?” I asked with a frown and he nodded, telling me that there was.

“Go ahead.”