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It was working perfectly well at Corwin too, right up until a vending machine.

It happened in my second week. In the corridor outside the staff room, with my handset buzzing against my hip and my hands shaking badly enough that I had already dropped my dollars once.

I had food in my bag. I always have food in my bag. But my bag was in a locker on the other side of two sets of doors and a keypad, and my legs decided they didn’t like the rest of me anymore.

So of course, the machine ate my money.

It took it, thought about it, and gave me nothing. The little coil holding the candy bar turned and stopped, with my precious candy bar mocking me as it hung there on the edge of the shelf.

“Wonderful… just wonderful,” I muttered as if life hated me just a little bit more that day as I stood in that corridor and looked at it like the enemy. As if it was the cause of all of my problems, which I knew was ridiculous but because I hadn’t let myself cry since leaving Ashlock, it was in that moment that I was seconds away from doing so in a corridor over a few dollars.

“Oh, that machine is a thieving little douchebag. It has been robbing this hospital blind since before I got here and nobody has ever done one thing about it.” She came around the corner already talking, which I have since learned is how she arrives everywhere.

She was small and loud in the best, bubbly way, with dark curls escaping a clip that had clearly given up on her hours ago. She was even wearing scrubs with cartoon avocados all over them that nobody had ever quite gotten around to telling her not to wear.

She didn’t ask if I was all right. In fact, she didn’t ask me anything at all. She just walked straight up to the machine and hit the side of it with the flat of her hand in one precise spot about halfway up. And just like that the coil turned, and the bar dropped before she crouched down and fished it out to put it in my hand.

“You have to hit it like you mean it. Tapping it does diddly squat.”

I got it open and got it into me as she talked the whole way through me eating it. In all my years, I don’t think I had ever met anyone who talked like she did. It was a mile a minute, without once needing me to answer. Telling me everything the machine had stolen from her over the year and a bit she had worked there, right up to the day she hit it so hard it gave her two candy bars and she took both.

All I had to do was nod.

Then eventually she blurted out,

“Roz, my name… my mom was a fan of Frasier.” I smiled at that and offered,

“Erin, and I have no clue why.” I told her, lying easily because that was something being on the run taught you early on. But it wasn’t long before I found out that Roz was twenty-nine, single but had her eyes on a pizza delivery guy, telling me it was costing her a fortune in takeouts. She also added that she had a leaning tower of pizza boxes in her garage that she still needed to get rid of. Then she asked me if I liked pizza.

I swear it was like getting whiplash as I could barely keep up with her. But she had an endearing quality to her that I liked, and I found myself smiling at her as she continued on chatting.

I left that conversation to continue on with my shift asking myself how a place like Corwin hadn’t yet tainted that cheery demeanor. Because I had only been there a few days when I noticed it in others. There were staff in here with eyes like the bottom of a well, who came in soft and got scraped hollow over the years. It wasn’t a criticism of any of them; it was just the nature of the beast. Being exposed to what the country would deem the worst of the worst was the price you paid for taking care of them.

But for Roz, it hadn’t touched her and that was rare. Strangely it made me feel more protective over her. Because I remembered being her. Being a version of myself I was forced to bury that day when I finally realized I was done being a victim and the only option left was to run far away from who I once was.

As for Roz, the day after meeting over a chocolate hostage situation, she found out what my shifts were and switched her own so we would be working together. And four weeks later we were still laughing our way through the days.

Days that had all started to merge into one. First, it was the med pass that took about two hours and was without a doubt the most important part of the day. Especially when most of the patients relied on it to keep them calm throughout the day and enough to be manageable for staff. Roz and I did that together and it made the job go quicker. Plus, she knew everyone and therefore became a godsend of knowledge, making the job easier from that point on.

Because you don’t simply hand out pills in a place like that. You count them, you sign for them, then you watch them go down, before you ask the patient to open their mouth and lift their tongue. An order that’s masked as a request if you do it kindly enough. Roz does the whole of it while asking a man how his sister’s dog is getting on and that same man killed three random people and woke up in their blood with no memory of it.

Antipsychotics, mostly. Mood stabilizers. Some of these men have been unwell for twenty years and some of them arrived the day before yesterday and have not yet worked out where they are.

I have four on clozapine, which means blood work regularly and without fail, because it is the drug that works when nothing else on earth does. But it’s also the drug that can quietly destroy your white cells while you feel perfectly fine. So, I draw them, then I chase the results, and I ring the lab when the results are late.

Depot injections every fourteen days, which is a long-acting antipsychotic that goes into the muscle, and that is the whole difference between a man who is stable and a man who quietly stops taking his tablets in the spring and comes back to us in the summer.

Then there was their physical health, which was another battle as a lot of time these drugs put weight on people and wreck their blood sugar. So, I do the blood pressures and the glucose checks and the EKGs, and I spend half my life chasing men who have not had a blood test in seven months because nobody thought it mattered.

Which was funny, in its way. I spend all day watching other people’s blood sugar with a monitor taped to my own arm under my sleeve. Roz knows because despite her dizzy personality, she wasn’t stupid. So, she was used to seeing me stuffing down candy bars or glucose tabs and to the point that she started keeping a fun-size candy bar in her top pocket.

She was a total sweetheart like that.

As for the rest of the job, it is as simple as watching.

That was genuinely the most of it. Which meant that you noticed when the man in bed four has started sitting with his back to the door when he never used to. You noticed that the one who has been polite for three weeks has gone from polite to charming, and that was not an improvement, that was a plan. You noticed who wasn’t eating, who was up at night and whose hands have changed.

Then there was the alarm on my belt.