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“And with women?” I asked.

“Perfectly nice.” She said it like a punchline, because to her it was one. “Polite. Makes eye contact. Yes and no and thank you, or he did with Maggie anyway, and that is the only thing anybody has got out of him in two days.”

Which was when she handed it to me… the real reason she was telling me this before I had even made it to my locker.

“So, he’s yours, sorry. You get the admission, the health check, all of it, and I would have taken him off you, but I’ve got a review board report due and Karen would actually murder me.”

That meant he was mine. Not for an hour, not for the admission and then somebody else’s problem, but mine for as long as he stayed in that building. His care plan, his risk assessment, his physical health, his notes. Every review meeting about him would either have me sitting in it or be reading something I had written.

I would do his observations and walk beside him when he got his exercise. I would also be the one standing in front of him twice a day with his medication and watch him swallow it and ask him to lift his tongue. I would take his blood every month and his weight every week and put my hands on him to do both.

Then, if he was willing, I would sit with him and talk to him, because that was written into the care plan in black and white. It was called therapeutic engagement, and it wasn’t optional.

He wasn’t my only one. I had six others, and every one of them needed the same from me, which until now hadn’t been much of a problem, other than my paint eater.

As for Roz she squeezed my arm on the way past.

“Honestly though, don’t stress about it. He is an easy one, plus he seems to like women, so you will do fine.” I gave her a nod as she disappeared to get on with her day and so far, my own started well enough when I didn’t see Briggs hanging around.

Then twenty minutes after dropping my stuff off in my locker and filling out forms, I had the admission pack on my clipboard ready to meet my new patient.

Every new patient gets a full physical health assessment, and it isn’t a formality. Because these men come to us out of prisons and off the street and from other hospitals. And half of them haven’t seen a doctor in years. Blood pressure, pulse, temperature. Height and weight. An EKG, because of what the drugs do to the heart. Blood work. Allergies. Whatever medication they are on, along with a full history. Old injuries, previous surgeries, current pain, anything infectious. A skin check… the whole lot.

They had already brought him down to the treatment room by the time I got there, which is where all of it happens, because that is where the machines live. Two of the support staff had walked him over and were waiting outside the door for me to be finished with him.

Two techs on the door and both of them women. So, they know they are waiting for you and what is going to happen. Despite this, I knocked anyway. You always knock, even here and even in a room you have the key to.

So, I knocked and went in looking down at my clipboard. I reeled off my usual spiel with a friendly, bright expression on my face.

“Good afternoon. My name is Erin, I’m one of the nurses on the unit, and I’m here to do your admission check. It won’t take long, and I’ll talk you through every part of it before I…” It was at this point that I looked up and took in the sight of my patient for the first time.

And who I found sitting there made all the air in my lungs leave me all at once. Because there he was, sitting in a chair against the far wall with his forearms braced on his knees, taking up the entire room with his presence.

And he was looking straight at me.

As if he had been looking at every door waiting for me to walk through it for the last two days.

Then he spoke.

Two months of that voice had haunted my sleep, and now… Now it was in the room with me.

And the first thing he said was exactly what I expected him to say…

“There’s my little nurse.”

27

I OWN YOU

ANNA

Iwas too shocked to move at first.

I just stood there in the doorway of that treatment room with my clipboard against my hip, staring at a man who should have been over four hundred miles away. Which was why it took my mind far too long to catch up with what I was seeing.

Then it did, all at once, and I dropped the clipboard at the same time I took a step backward toward that door.

And that was what moved him.