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As for the ones that were ours for the morning, two were playing checkers at the table by the window and had been playing the same game for four days because neither of them would take a piece.

One was asleep sitting up. One was walking the length of the room and back, over and over again and would keep doing it until his lunch. The walking wasn’t from agitation but was a side effect of his medication.

Sandy was in his usual chair with his knees up, picking at the arm of it, which was an improvement on the window frame he usually picked the paint off to chew on. And Teddy was rocking gently forward and back in the corner by the bookcase with his hands over his ears. The way he did every morning until about ten, when whatever was shouting at him got tired and went quiet for a while.

Nobody was screaming.

Nobody had thrown anything.

So, by the measure of a regular day, it was a good morning. At least that was what I told myself as I tried to ignore the newcomer who made everyone else in the room seem like harmless kittens compared to the tiger in the far corner. And everybody gave him space. I watched three separate men change their route across that floor to avoid coming within six feet of him, and not one of them appeared to notice they were doing it.

Whatever else had gone wrong in those heads, they had all kept the oldest instinct there was. The one that knows when there is a predator in the room.

A predator with his back to the wall and one shoulder against it and both hands loose at his sides not doing anything. He simply stood there with a view of the whole room and let everybody else move around him.

And what he was watching… was me. He had been watching me since I came through the doors, and he hadn’t stopped watching me once in the following forty minutes. As for me, I refused to look at him properly, only getting a few glances in here and there that he never missed. But soon there would be an excuse for him to get close, as it was time to hand out the medication. Something that was done from the clinical room, through a hatch in the wall.

It had a shutter that came down and locked, with a shelf on our side and a lip on theirs. The whole point of it was so that the drugs and the person handing them out are on the safe side of a wall. Half of them knew the time without ever looking at a clock. You could watch it happen from behind that hatch, the room starting to lean toward you a good ten minutes before anybody said a word. Men got up out of chairs for no reason they could have told you, drifting a little closer, finding something to look at as if trying not to seem too eager about it.

Then Roz leaned into the doorway and called, “Meds” into the room, and the rest of them came. Seconds later and a line formed. There was always a line, and there was always somebody in it who wanted to talk to you about the wait.

Roz and I usually do it together. I check the chart, she draws it up, one of us hands it through and the other watches the mouth. The hatch takes about an hour. Then there are the ten who won’t come to it, and they get theirs taken to them one at a time, which is where the rest of the morning goes.

“You’re quiet,” Roz said, without looking up from the cart.

“Am I? Restless night’s sleep, I guess,” I commented, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Nice dreams I hope.” She said it with a smirk and because she had no idea just how close to the mark she was, my response came out as far less cool than I would have liked.

“What? No, no… it was fine.” It came out about an octave higher than my actual voice and Roz stopped what she was doing and turned all the way around to look at me.

“Okaaay,” she said with a chuckle.

“I’m fine,” I tried again.

“Mm.” She went back to the cart, and I thought that was the end of it. But no such luck, and I should have known better, as there was never an end to it with Roz. About four patients later she nodded her chin toward the far end of the day room without turning her head, which was a skill that took about a year to develop in a place like that.

“So how did it actually go? With your new one.” And there it was, the burning question I knew had been on her mind since I walked in and one she hadn’t had a chance to ask me yesterday… thank God.

“Fine,” I replied and damn my stupid brain for using that same word twice. Because she wasn’t stupid and any woman who tells you they’re fine twice in a row is a red flag.

“Erin.” She said the only name she knew for me and I almost winced.

“It was an admission check. It went fine.”

Damn it!

Fucking fine again.

“Oh, come on.” She flicked a curl out of her eye with the back of her wrist, both hands full. “You have got to give me more than that. You were in there an hour.” I didn’t even want to know how she knew this.

“There was a lot to do,” I said in an offhanded way that secretly screamed, please drop it.

“I’ll bet there was,” she snickered before nudging me with her hip and going on to point out the most obvious statement I think I had ever heard,

“You have to admit he’s hot, though.”

Again, my response to this was not cool as I popped a pill clean out of the blister card and onto the floor. Which meant signing for a wasted dose and starting that one again.