Chapter 9
Hope
Jude moves his bishop three squares and George takes it with a pawn. He doesn't smile and Jude doesn't react, but his shoulders settle and his hand steadies when he reaches for the captured piece.
The supervised activity area sits between Ward B and Ward C—four tables, eight chairs, two guards at the door, and a strip of windows that let in enough gray light to remind everyone what outside looks like.
Dr. Kennedy runs it as a therapeutic socialization program, which in practice means six men sit in heavy silence while guards line the walls. Jude and George play chess.
George brought the board a few weeks ago, a battered thing with felt peeling off the bottom and a missing black rook replaced by a medicine-cup lid.
They've played five games and George has won four.
I've seen Jude correct a dosing number the nursing staff got wrong, so he didn't miss that bishop.
He let George take it. George doesn't know, and I'm not going to be the one who tells him.
Gage stands at the far door with his arms folded and his weight even. He looks at me a moment too long before he turns back to the corridor. He does this every session now.
I don't mind it.
"You're losing on purpose," I say to Jude when George gets up for the bathroom.
Jude looks at me. "Am I?"
"The rook sacrifice in game two. The bishop just now. You're feeding him the win."
"Maybe I'm not as smart as you think I am."
"You are, though." I lean back in my chair. "That's the problem."
His mouth pulls and he holds my gaze a beat longer than he needs to. He heard me. He always hears me—even the parts I don't say out loud—and that should concern me more than it does.
"What are you reading?" I nod at the paperback tucked under his chair. Kent has fought for him to have books, and I've been keeping track of the titles. It tells you more about a person than their file does.
"The Lighthouse Keeper's Lunch." He picks it up and turns it over in his hands. "George recommended it."
"He recommended you a children's book?"
"He said it was about a man who eats the same lunch every day and seagulls keep stealing it." He sets the book down. "He said it reminded him of me."
I laugh before I can stop myself. The sound carries across the room and the guard by the window shifts. Gage's head turns.
"George has a sense of humor," I say.
"He has a death wish." But Jude's smiling when he says it. It makes him look like someone you'd sit across from at dinner, not a serial killer.
The game winds down and George wins again.
They pack the pieces into the cigar box George uses as a case.
I watch their hands work—George slow and careful, Jude efficient, dropping each piece into its slot without looking.
The orderly against the far wall stands there with his mouth half-open because he's never seen Jude do anything with his hands that didn't end with someone on the floor.
The corridor back to admin is long and quiet. My shoes squeak on the linoleum the way they always do, and I take the long way past the staff offices and the medication dispensary.
Casey's by the water fountain near the Ward A junction. He stops when he sees me and his whole face changes—opens up, softens—the way people look when someone they've been waiting for finally walks in.
"Hope." Not Ms. Turner. Hope. He says it like we talk every day, like this is something we do. "I was thinking about what you said last week. About routine being underrated."
I said that to him in passing during a ward check. Ten words, maybe less, while I was writing up someone else's chart.
"It really helped," he says, and his hand finds my arm. Light. Brief. Gone before I can respond to it. "You're the only person in this building who actually talks to me like I'm a real person."
I note the shift. First-name usage without invitation. Unsolicited contact. A passing comment inflated into something personal. It's a pattern change, and I'll flag it in my next review.
"Have a good afternoon, Mr. Robin," I say, and keep walking. When I turn the corner he's still standing by the water fountain, watching me go.
The case review meeting starts at two. I find out at one fifty-five, because Nolan catches me outside the staff toilets with a printed agenda and tells me Dr. Hudson wants me in Conference Room B.
The room has a long table, twelve chairs, and a whiteboard nobody's touched since I started here. Dr. Hudson sits at the head with Dr. Kennedy to his left, two clinicians I've seen in the halls but never spoken to, and Nolan at the far end with his laptop open.
Kent sits against the wall, not at the table, chair pulled back with a legal pad on his knee and a pen in hand.
I take the empty seat at the corner, closest to the door and farthest from Hudson.
Hudson runs through the agenda without looking at me—medication reviews, staffing updates, a facilities maintenance note about the Ward B showers. Twenty minutes pass before he gets to Ward C.
"Item six. Patient Chadwick." He opens a folder. "Dr. Kennedy, your assessment."
Kennedy straightens in his chair. "The patient has shown consistent behavioral improvement over the past four weeks.
Compliance with oral medication. Participation in supervised group activity.
His session engagement is the best it's been in three years.
" He pauses. "My recommendation is to maintain the current pharmacological protocol and reassess at ninety days. "
"Comments?" Hudson glances around the room. The two clinicians look at their folders.
I put my pen down.
"Dr. Kennedy just described a patient whose behavior has improved. If the treatment plan doesn't adjust in response to improved behavior, what is the treatment plan based on?"
Kennedy turns in his chair. "Ms. Turner, the pharmacological protocol is a clinical decision."
"I understand that. I'm asking what clinical rationale supports maintaining a dose you escalated in response to behaviors that are no longer presenting."
Hudson folds his hands. "The patient's behavioral improvement doesn't necessarily indicate a change in underlying risk."
"Then his behavior has no bearing on his treatment."
"That's not what I—"
"If his behavior has no bearing on his treatment, I'd like that in writing. Because right now my reports show weeks of documented improvement and a dosing chart that hasn't moved in any direction but up for three years."
Hudson stares at me. I stare back.
"Your role here is observational, Ms. Turner. Not clinical."
"My role here is to report what I observe. And I observe a treatment plan that doesn't respond to the patient's actual behavior." I pick my pen back up. "That's what my next report will say unless someone at this table can explain why it shouldn't."
Nobody speaks. I write down the date, the time, and what Hudson just said, word for word.
Kent hasn't moved or spoken. I glance at him and his pen touches his legal pad—one word, written without looking up, a single line drawn beneath it—and then he flips the page.
Hudson closes the folder. "Let's move to item seven."
The meeting ends fifteen minutes later. I collect my things and walk out, and in the corridor my hands aren't shaking. My reports have been saying this for weeks, and today I said it out loud.
The drive to Aunt Kathy's takes forty minutes because the highway is two lanes and everyone in Colorado apparently decided to leave at the same time. I roll the window down halfway even though the November air bites at my fingers. The heater in my car runs too hot and there's no in-between.
I can smell the smoke before I cut the engine. Hickory and something sweet—Steve's barbecue sauce. He makes it every time. Vinegar base, brown sugar, a full head of garlic. He guards the recipe like state secrets.
Steve is at the kitchen counter when I come through the side door, basting brush in one hand, beer in the other, his nose peeling from last weekend's trip to the lake. "There she is. You look like shit."
"Thanks, Steve."
"I'm serious. When did you last eat an actual meal that didn't come out of a jar labeled Nescafé?"
"Instant coffee is a meal. It's a warm beverage with cultural significance, and I will die on this hill."
He flicks sauce at me. A drop lands on my wrist and I lick it off.
"It's good. It's always so damn good."
"That's because it's my recipe." He catches my eye. "You want the family legacy, learn to cook something that requires more than a kettle."
Dave is out on the deck in the camp chair, feet up on the railing, beer balanced on the armrest. Through the sliding door I can see the back of his head tipped against the chair, the sky going purple behind the tree line.
He built this deck. He builds most things around here—the shelves in the hallway, the half-finished pergola, the kitchen island he fitted over a long weekend while Neil sat on a stool and told him the measurements were off.
Aunt Kathy comes in from the garage carrying a bag of charcoal and a pair of tongs she's had since before I was born.
The rubber grip is melted on one side from the time Dave left them on the grill.
She's fifty-three, short and solid, Greek on her father's side like mine, and when she laughs the whole street can hear it.
"Hope, baby." She drops the charcoal by the sliding door and pulls me into a hug that smells like her perfume. "Come help me with these ribs."
I follow her out to the grill—a big Weber on the concrete pad beside the deck stairs.
The concrete has a crack Dave keeps saying he'll fix and Neil keeps saying adds character.
Aunt Kathy arranges the charcoal while I hold the tray of ribs Steve's been marinating since yesterday.
The cold air hits my arms and I can feel the last warmth of the day pulling out of the ground.
"Your brother tells me you've been skipping meals again," she says, not looking up.
"Steve needs a hobby that isn't policing what I eat."
"He worries. We all worry." She lights the charcoal and straightens, wiping her hands on her jeans. Takes the tray from me and starts laying ribs on the grate.
"I said something at a meeting today." I watch her lay the ribs one by one. "Something I probably should have kept for a report."
"What kind of something?"
"The kind where I told the facility director that his treatment plan doesn't hold up and I'd like his position in writing."
She stops with a rib halfway to the grate and turns to look at me. Her eyebrows go up. "Hope Margaret Turner."
"I know."
"No, I'm not scolding you. I'm impressed." She places the rib and reaches for the next one. "Did you mean it?"
"Of course."
"Then that's all there is to it. Your dad would have done the same thing." She adjusts the grate. The smoke starts climbing, filling the air with charcoal and garlic and the sweet edge of Steve's sauce from inside.
From the kitchen, Steve yells that the sauce needs to rest and if anyone touches it before it's ready he's going home.
Neil yells back from the living room that the sauce is fine and Steve is the one who needs to rest. Dave just lifts his beer from the camp chair and takes a sip and watches the sky go dark.
Aunt Kathy shakes her head at both of them through the sliding door.
We stand at the grill while the ribs cook.
The deck light clicks on behind us and the neighborhood settles into that early-dark quiet that November brings—porch lights coming on up and down the cul-de-sac, the sound of someone's dog barking two houses over.
Aunt Kathy turns the ribs while I hold the plate.
We don't talk for a few minutes, and it's fine.
Quiet is easy with her. The way it's easy with Gage. Some people just don't need you to fill the space.
"Aunt Kath."
"Mm."
"How did you know? With Dave and Neil." I keep my eyes on the ribs. "How did you know it would work?"
She turns a rib and takes her time with it.
"I didn't. Nobody gets a sign, Hope. I just stopped pretending I had to choose.
" She taps the tongs against the grate and looks at me.
"That's all it ever was. I loved Dave and then I loved Neil.
I kept waiting for someone to tell me that I couldn't, but in the end no one did.
" She shrugs. "I don't think I would have listened anyway. "
I don't say anything.
Inside, I wash my hands at the kitchen sink. Three mugs on the drying rack—a blue one, a green one, and a white one. I've been looking at those mugs since I was five years old.
We eat on the deck with blankets over our knees because Steve insists on outdoor dining even when the temperature drops below forty and everyone else is too stubborn to argue.
Dave talks about the pergola while Neil argues about the wasps the grape vines will bring, and Aunt Kathy tells them both to shut up and eat.
Steve piles my plate with a second rack of ribs before I've finished the first.
When I leave, Aunt Kathy walks me to my car. She holds my face with both hands and kisses my forehead the way she's done since I was small.
"Stop overthinking," she says. "You never used to overthink."
"I never used to have anything to overthink about."
She laughs and pats my cheek and watches me back out of the driveway. I can see her in the mirrors, standing under the porch light with her arms folded, until I turn the corner.
The drive home is thirty minutes of dark highway and the smell of smoke in my hair. I shower, make a coffee, and sit on the couch with my notebook. I write up the meeting and the chess game, close it, and pull the blanket over my knees.
Aunt Kathy's voice is still in my head.
I just stopped pretending I had to choose.