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.
Lane sees what's happening but he can't prove it. What's he going to tell Hudson—the patient's too polite? He just knows, and I respect him for it.
Kennedy gets his breakthrough at ten. I sit in his overheated office with the WORLD'S BEST THERAPIST mug steaming on his desk and give him a story about the groundskeeper's dog.
A spaniel. Brown, old, running in circles on the lawn.
I watched it for weeks because I couldn't work out why it was doing it.
"I think I was twelve before I understood the difference between playing and hunting," I say. I let the pause stretch. "The dog knew. I didn't."
Kennedy's breathing changes. His pen moves faster. He underlines something and writes patient demonstrates capacity for reflective self-awareness re: affective deficits, and I know this because I can read upside down and because Kennedy's handwriting is large and unguarded.
"That's real progress, Jude."
I've known it for twenty years. But the note fills his session log, and a full log keeps Kennedy invested, and his sign-off is what got Hope's sessions reinstated after the incident.
The clock on the wall reads 10:47 when Kennedy releases me. Three hours and thirteen minutes until she arrives. I've stopped pretending I don't count.
Back in my cell, I read. A battered copy of Dostoevsky that Kent brought in two months ago, the pages soft from handling. I don't retain the words. My ears are tuned to the corridor, sorting footsteps by weight and rhythm. Guard boots. Orderly sneakers. Devina's half-run. None of them are right.
At 1:53, I hear it.
Light. Steady. A pace that doesn't speed up at my door.
Hope.
She appears in the doorway at two exactly, hair pulled up, notebook under her arm, pen tucked behind her ear. She smells like burnt coffee and coconut lotion—my new favorite smell—and I close the book.
"Afternoon." She pulls the chair to its usual spot and crosses her ankles. "How's the week been?"
"Quiet."
"Good quiet or bad quiet?"
"I don't know the difference anymore."
She smiles and opens her notebook.
"Dr Kennedy says you're making real progress."
"He's being generous."
Her pen stops. She looks up. "That's your version of kind, isn't it."
She caught it. Nobody else would.
The session runs longer today. She asks about the new medication and whether I've noticed side effects, about the corridor transfers and whether the guards are professional. I answer all of it, honestly. She writes without rushing, her pen clicking twice every time she turns to a new page.
I've sat across from psychiatrists and parole boards and military tribunals. I've been evaluated by men with decades of training and security clearances that could put me in the ground. None of them made me want to keep talking.
Hope makes me want to keep talking.
I wait until she's settled into the rhythm of note-taking. Then I nod at the cup she brought in. Paper, no lid, steam curling off a surface that smells like something burnt.
"What is that?"
"Coffee."
"That isn't coffee."
"It's instant coffee." She picks it up with both hands and takes a sip. "It's good coffee."
I raise an eyebrow. She sets the cup down.
"Don't. Don't give me that look. Instant coffee gets a bad rap because people make it wrong. Too much water, wrong temperature. You have to commit to it."
"Commit."
"Yes. Commit. Give it a chance." She's leaning forward now, elbows on her knees. "Everyone writes it off because it doesn't come from a machine with a steam wand and a line out the door. But if you make it right—proper hot water, the right ratio, a few minutes of patience—it's good. It's honest."
"Honest coffee."
"Stop repeating my words back to me."
"I'm not."
"You're mocking me."
"I am not mocking you. I am taking your coffee theology very seriously."
She laughs. A real one—open, loud, her eyes closing, her shoulders shaking.
The sound fills the room and bounces off the walls and the guard at the door shifts his weight.
I've heard her laugh before. The polite half-versions she gives the orderlies when they crack a joke at the checkpoint.
This is different. This is the sound she makes when she's forgotten where she is.
I want to hear it again. I want to be the only person who ever hears it.
When it fades, she looks at me a moment longer than she needs to. Then she picks up her pen.
"My aunt Kathy makes proper coffee. French press, whole beans. I was at her place last weekend—she and her partners, Dave and Neil, built this deck out back. Well, Dave built it. Neil supervised from a lawn chair and Kathy brought them both drinks every forty minutes."
"How long have they been together?"
"Since before I was born. Dave first, then Neil about five years later."
She shrugs and goes back to her notes. Keeps talking while she writes. "They're building a pergola next. Dave wants grape vines. Neil says they'll get wasps. Kathy just likes watching them argue about it."
She knows what I've done. Eighteen counts of murder, the trial transcripts, the psychiatric evaluations that use words like predatory and remorseless.
She knows all of it, and she just told me her aunt's name and her uncles' names and what they're building in their backyard.
Freely. Without stopping to wonder whether that was smart.
It wasn't. I want her to keep doing it.
"Why do you do this work?"
Her pen slows. She finishes the word and sets the pen flat on her notebook.
"You could be anywhere," I say. "Private practice. University. A desk in Denver with a window and a view. Yet here you are in this building with a man behind the glass in Ward C."
"You're not the reason I do this."
"I didn't say I was."
She holds my gaze for a long moment. Then she sets her pen down.
"My best friend, Mishel. She grew up in the system. Foster care." She pauses. "I watched the whole thing from the outside. My family was normal—loving, regular. I went home to parents who made dinner and helped with homework. Mishel went wherever the system put her."
I don't move.
"There was a placement when she was twelve.
The family locked the fridge." Her voice doesn't change.
"A padlock on the refrigerator so the foster kids couldn't eat unless they gave them food.
The caseworker was supposed to do a home visit.
She forgot the paperwork. My best friend was in that house for four months before anyone noticed. "
"Four months."
"I was eleven. I told my mom. My mom called people. Eventually they moved her." She picks the pen up and turns it over between her fingers. "But the system didn't catch it. Nobody caught it. I was eleven and I decided I'd grow up to be the person who would."
Her eyes shift left and her thumb presses harder against the pen barrel. There's more she isn't telling me. Her shoulders tighten and she starts picking her words too clean. Worse than a padlocked fridge.
I want what she's holding back more than anything she's given me today.
"Mishel's good now," she says, and stops there.
Her stomach growls. Quiet, but the room is small and I'm two feet away.
She checks her watch. "Shit. I forgot lunch." She shakes her head and picks her pen back up.
"When did you last eat?"
She looks up. "What?"
"Breakfast. Did you eat breakfast?"
"I had coffee." She tips her head. "I'm fine, Jude."
"After this, eat. Not coffee. Actual food, understood?"
She holds my gaze for a beat. "Umm, okay, yes. Where were we?"
The session continues for another fifteen minutes. She finishes her questions and I answer each one and she writes, and I watch her hand for the tremor from hunger. It's still there. Faint, but I can see it.
Near the end, she leans forward to check the medication chart clipped to the board at the head of my bed.
Her arm stretches across the mattress edge, her body tilts toward me, and a strand of hair comes loose from her ponytail.
Black, long. It falls across her face and catches at the corner of her mouth.
She tucks it back with her free hand. It falls again.
I reach up. Slow. My fingers find the strand against her cheek and draw it behind her ear. My thumb brushes the curve of her cheekbone. I hold her gaze while I do it.
She doesn't pull back. Her breath catches—I'm close enough to hear it. Her eyes stay on mine.
"Thank you," she says. Her voice is softer than before.
She turns to the chart and keeps writing, but there's color in her cheeks that wasn't there a moment ago.
The guard at the door has stopped breathing. He saw my hand near her face and he's working out whether what he saw is something he's supposed to report. Whether it was a threat. Whether the man in Ward C just touched the court-appointed monitor and what the hell that means.
She finishes her notes. Caps the pen and stands.
"Until next time, Jude."
"I'll be here."
Her mouth pulls left. "Yeah. I suppose you will."
The lock clicks behind her. The cell smells like burnt instant coffee and coconut and it'll linger for an hour after she's gone. Maybe longer. I don't want it to fade.
Her hair against the pad of my thumb was softer than I'd expected.
The skin of her cheek was warm. The catch in her breath when I touched her—that small sound—I'm going to think about that sound for the rest of the day.
The rest of the week. I'm going to think about what her voice sounds like underneath me.
I stand at the window and watch the corridor long after she's gone. The burnt-coffee smell fades but the coconut lingers.
I should be thinking about Kent's next filing, about the board review, about the strategy that's going to get me out of this building and back into the world. Instead, I'm thinking about her hands. The tremor in her left one because she forgot to eat.
Tomorrow I'll find a way to get her something. Protein bar, sandwich—Gage will do it. I've seen the way he watches her. He'll do it if he thinks it's his idea, but she'll know it came from me.
She asked about my week and I almost told her the truth.
That's the terrifying part. Not that I want her—want is manageable, containable, something I've controlled my entire life.
It's that I'd tell her.
For the first time in thirty-seven years, I want someone to know me. And I have no idea what to do with that.