Chapter 23 #2
But I sat across from Casey Robin for months and told myself I was helping him.
Wrote positive indicators in my notebooks while he hoarded clothes in a pillowcase and learned my route.
Smiled at him the same way I smile at everyone, because warmth is all I know how to give, and my broken brain never once suggested that warmth might be dangerous.
I'm the monitor who can't tell when she's in danger.
Except I did. I caught it late, but I caught it. I put it in writing and I filed it and the facility buried it.
The thought hits hard enough to stop my breathing. I've spent seven years telling myself that the fear response I lost in that car accident was an asset. The woman you send into Ward C because she'll sit across from serial killers without breaking a sweat.
But fear exists for a reason. It's the signal that tells you when something's wrong, and mine has been gone since I was twenty-one. I've been walking through the world without it, trusting my brain to keep me safe, and my brain can't do the job it was designed for.
The absence of alarm is not the absence of danger.
I say it out loud, testing the words. They feel true. They feel like something I should have understood years ago.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand and pull up a fresh page in my notebook. Not the facility notebook—the personal one. The one I started keeping after the incident, when I realized I needed a system my broken brain couldn't provide.
At the top of the page, I write: CHECKLIST.
Underneath, in careful letters:
1. The absence of alarm is not the absence of danger. Check anyway.
2. Trust patterns over feelings. If something looks wrong on paper, it's wrong.
3. Ask someone else. Borrow their alarm system when yours doesn't work.
4. Document everything. Your memory of feeling safe is not evidence of safety.
5. When in doubt, assume danger. You can apologize for caution. You can't undo being right too late.
I stare at the list for a long time. It's not elegant. It's just a woman on her kitchen floor at 2 AM, building herself a manual for a system that should come standard.
But it's a start.
The tears have stopped. My hands have stopped shaking. I gather the notebooks into a pile and stack them neatly on the counter, and when I finally stand up my legs are stiff from sitting on the cold floor for too long.
Day ten ends with me climbing into bed as the sky starts to lighten outside my window. I don't sleep, but I close my eyes anyway.
Tomorrow I'll try again.
I do try again. Each morning the same phone call, the same voicemail, the same silence where a response should be. By day sixteen, Gage finds me in the parking lot.
I've been sitting in the Greenridge parking lot for an hour, forehead pressed against the steering wheel, when the knock on my window makes me jump.
Gage is standing outside, still in uniform. He gestures for me to roll down the window, and when I do the cold air hits my face and I flinch.
"You've been here every day," he says.
"Yep."
"They're not going to let you in."
"I know."
He's quiet for a moment. His eyes move over my face. Then he walks around to the passenger side and gets in.
The car feels smaller with him in it. He doesn't say anything. Just sits there, looking straight ahead through the windshield.
"He's not doing very well in there," he says.
My stomach drops. "How bad?"
"Pretty bad." Gage goes still. "The sedation's heavy. They've got him on a six-hour chemical stack, and even when it thins out he's not... he's not present. Not the way he was before."
"They're punishing him."
"Yeah."
"For protecting me."
Gage turns his head. Looks at me for the first time since he got in the car. "For protecting you," he agrees. "And for proving he could get through their security when he wanted to. They're scared of him now. More than before."
"He stopped because you told him to stop." My voice comes out fierce. "He could have killed him. He didn't."
"I know."
"But they're treating him like he did."
"I know, Hope."
The silence stretches. Outside, the parking lot is emptying as the day shift ends and the night shift arrives.
"Kent's building a case," I say. "The privileges restriction request was on Hudson's desk before the incident. They had warning about Casey and they did nothing. That's negligence. That's—"
"I know what it is."
"Then help me." I turn in my seat to face him. "Help me get him out."
Gage doesn't blink. "You're asking me to testify against the facility I work for."
"I'm asking you to tell the truth about what happened.
You were there. You saw Casey's hands on me.
You saw Jude stop when you told him to stop.
" I lean forward. "You're the only witness who can confirm that he had control.
That he wasn't just violent—he was targeted, and he stopped the moment it needed to stop. "
"And if I testify, I'll lose my job."
"Maybe."
"Definitely." His voice is flat. "Hudson's been looking for a reason to push me out since I started asking questions about the treatment of the patients and sedation logs. This would give him everything he needs."
"So you won't do it."
The question hangs between us. Gage is quiet for a long time—long enough that I start to think he's not going to answer at all.
"Six years," he says. "Six years I've worked in places like this. Prisons, psych facilities, halfway houses. Every one of them had problems. Every one of them had men like Hudson running things and men like Jude locked up inside. And for six years, I didn't let any of it touch me."
"What changed?"
He looks at me the way he did in the corridor after Casey.
"You walked in," he says. "And you smiled at everyone like you actually gave a damn. And you kept going back into that room every single day when every other monitor they've sent quit inside a week."
His hand comes up, hesitates, then rests against my cheek.
His palm is warm and rough and I lean into it without thinking.
"You're the first person in six years who made me want to give a damn about anything.
And then I watched you almost get taken, I watched him tear through walls to reach you, and I stood there and let him do what I wanted to do myself. "
"Gage—"
"I'm not done." His thumb traces my cheekbone. "I'll testify. I'll tell them exactly what happened—every second of it. Casey's hands on you, Jude stopping when I told him to stop, all of it."
"You'd do that?"
"For you, yes." His voice drops.
The space between us closes. His forehead touches mine, and we stay there for a second, breathing the same air.
"This is different than the diner," I say.
"Yeah." His voice is rough. "It is."
Because it is. When he kisses me this time, it isn't soft. His hand grips the back of my neck and I pull him closer by his shirt and it's raw and graceless and exactly right. I kiss him back hard, and the guilt I keep waiting for still doesn't come.
Jude knows. Jude watched. Jude held on without holding me back.
Gage pulls back first. His breathing is ragged, his eyes are dark and his hand is still on my face.
"That's not making any of this easier," he says.
"It's not supposed to be easy."
His hand drops from my face but he doesn't move away.
"Casey," I say. "What happened to him?"
Gage's expression hardens. "Transferred to Ridgemont—long-term residential, heavy supervision."
"He's alive."
"Yeah."
"Is he—" I stop. Start again. "Does he still think—"
"He still thinks you're in love with him." Gage's voice is flat. "The delusion doesn't break just because reality contradicts it. If anything, this probably made it stronger. You're the woman he almost had. The one who got away."
Casey is out there somewhere, still building his story. And Jude is locked in a box because he tried to protect me from a man the system should have contained.
"Sixteen days," I say. "They've had him in solitary for sixteen days."
"I know."
"How much longer?"
"I don't know." Gage's hand finds mine in the dark between our seats. "But Kent's good at what he does. And you're the most stubborn person I've ever met. If anyone can get him out, it's the two of you."
"The three of us," I correct.
He squeezes my hand. The tears come back without warning—not the ugly kind this time, just the slow, exhausted kind that happen when you've been running on fury for two weeks and someone finally sits still next to you long enough for the rest of it to catch up.
"Hey." Gage pulls me across the center console so that I'm straddling his lap, and his arms go around me, and I press my face into his chest and let it out.
He doesn't shush me. Doesn't tell me it's going to be okay.
Just holds me with one hand on the back of my head and the other flat against my back.
"I'm not going anywhere," he says against my hair. "You hear me? I'm not going anywhere."
I nod into his shirt. His heartbeat is steady under my ear, and I let it hold me together until the shaking stops.
The parking lot lights flicker overhead. Somewhere inside the building, Jude is in a cell, sedated and alone, because he broke through a door to get to me.
I'm going to get him out.
I don't know how yet. I don't know what it will cost or how long it will take or what I'll have to sacrifice to make it happen. But I'm going to do it.