The Inmate (48)

Oh no. No, no, no…

“I bet Nelson would be really interested to hear about that,” he muses. “I’d sort of like to see the look on his face, you know?”

“Please don’t tell him,” I gasp. “Please.”

Hunt flashes me a smile that makes me want to punch him in the nose. “Don’t worry, Brooke,” he says. “Your secrets are safe with me. But you better be a little nicer to me. For starters, from now on, you can bring coffee to me every morning.”

“Fine,” I snap.

He gives me a long look, and I brace myself for more demands. But they don’t come. He just shakes his head at me.

“What a waste, Brooke,” he mutters. “All for that scumbag.”

With those words, he jerks open the door to the examining room and storms out.





Chapter 33


My daily goal is to get Correctional Officer Steve Benton to smile.

Officer Benton is my first stop every day when I enter the penitentiary. I can’t say that I still don’t get a little jolt of fear when I walk past the prison yard with the guard towers lining the fence. I’ve never seen any of the guards up there with their rifles, but I know they are up there. Ready to shoot if they need to.

But once I’m inside, it’s the same old routine. I pass the waiting area, and Jan at the front desk knows my face by now, so she immediately hits the buzzer to open the metal bars and waves me inside—I barely even jump anymore at the sound. And my next stop is the security check-in with Officer Benton.

“Good morning!” I chirp as I lay my purse down on the table in front of him to go through the metal detector. “How are you?”

Benton grunts. “Fine. You?”

“Oh, the usual.” I step through the metal detector, holding my breath like I always do. It doesn’t make sense, but I do it automatically. “I had a visit with Mr. Barrett yesterday—you know, the guy who was an English teacher on the outside? He’s such a flirt.”

He looks up with mild interest. “Oh yeah?”

I nod. “He told me he wanted to marry me when he gets out of here.”

“Did he?”

“Yes, but unfortunately, you can’t end a sentence with a proposition.”

It’s such a cheesy joke. It’s true on some level—Mr. Barrett was an English teacher, and he does flirt with me shamelessly. But the corny dad joke was entirely for Barrett’s benefit—and it pays off when his lips twitch just a bit. An almost smile. I’ll count it as a win, and I have a little extra skip in my step as I walk down the hallway to the examining room/office.

Until I find Dorothy waiting for me outside the room, her beefy arms folded across her chest.

Great. What now?

“Brooke,” she says sharply. “I need to talk to you.”

“What about?” I glance at my watch. “I’ve got patients to see shortly.”

“I’d rather not talk out here. Let’s go to my office.”

She cocks her finger at me, and I follow her wordlessly to her office. We could have talked in the examining room, where I would’ve had some leverage. Instead, Dorothy gets to sit at her desk while I sit at the small chair in front of her desk, feeling very much like a child being disciplined by the principal. I rack my brain to think of what I might have done to upset her. Really, it could be anything. It doesn’t take much to set Dorothy off—I’ve been doing my best to stay out of her way.

Dorothy settles into her ergonomic leather chair, her eyes boring into me. “We got a delivery this morning. A pressure relief mattress.”

Despite everything, I feel a jolt of happiness. It’s been weeks since I filled out the forms Officer Hunt gave me and after a few frustrating phone calls, I had started to lose hope. “Mr. Carpenter’s mattress came?”

“Brooke.” Her lips set into a straight line. “I already told you we don’t have the resources to provide every patient with a special customized soft mattress. You’re going to bankrupt the prison.”

“Mr. Carpenter isn’t every patient. He’s a paraplegic, and he has a non-healing pressure wound on his sacrum. This is a medical treatment.”

“A comfy mattress is not a medical treatment.”

When I first started at the prison, I had thought Dorothy looked familiar to me. It suddenly hits me who she reminds me of—my mother. As I stare across Dorothy’s desk at her square face with her tan chin tilted slightly up in the air, I can’t help but remember how my mother used to boss me around. She always believed she knew better than me, and she couldn’t stand it if I ever disagreed with her—it was her way or the highway.

You can’t possibly be thinking of keeping that monster’s baby, Brooke. I won’t allow it.

But I kept my baby. I didn’t let her push me around that time. And I won’t let Dorothy push me around anymore. I’m sick of being a victim.

“It’s a pressure release mattress.” I stare at her, unblinking. “Without this mattress, he is for sure going to end up in the hospital and maybe need surgery to get this repaired.

Dorothy snorts. “Please don’t be so dramatic. How long has it been since you graduated from school? Five minutes? When you’ve been a nurse as long as I have, you know what patients need and what they just want.”