Chapter 15: Jo's POV: The Wrist

Jo's POV

All shift I kept doing the same sum.

The note said the twelfth of September.

On the twelfth Shane had been in a line at an Ohio funeral home, shaking hands, hours from Megan's desk.

She had not even tried to hide it, because she had never thought anyone would check a date.

I ate Devin's sandwich at two in the morning in the supply closet, standing up, and it was better than anything the cafeteria had made all year.

I hated that.

I was still angry at him, and I was also eating his sandwich, and my body had decided the second thing mattered more.

"Hesketh," said the charge nurse from the door. "Bay six. Wrist, college kid, came in alone."

"Alone at two in the morning?"

"Her words were 'I tripped.' I wasn't impressed."

I wiped my hands and went.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed in a program T-shirt with the words Lisbon Spring across the front.

I knew the shirt.

Megan had been handing them out at the orientation Devin sat through, and he had described them to me with his jaw tight.

The girl was maybe twenty-one.

She had a swollen left wrist held against her stomach and her hair in a plastic clip, and she did not want to look at me.

"I'm Jo," I said. "I'm your nurse. What happened?"

"I tripped on a curb."

"Okay."

I took her arm and turned it over under the light.

The bruises on the inside of her wrist were four long ovals in a row and one on the other side.

They were the width of fingertips.

I had seen a thousand of them on arms, and none of them were ever from curbs.

I did not say so.

I asked her to make a fist, and she did, and she winced.

"It's probably not broken," I said. "We'll get a picture to be sure."

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