That's fine. He doesn't have to.
***
Jake is in the corridor outside his room when I pass it an hour later.
He's sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and his knees up and his head tipped back — such a specific echo of RJ at the fence that it stops me mid-stride.
He doesn't look up. "Don't."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"Good."
I sit down on the floor across from him. He lets me.
"What happened on the mountain?"
He pauses for a long moment.
"He was like this on the mountain," Jake says finally. To the wall above my head. "Building and building. We could all feel it." He stops. "But when you are in wolf form, this doesn’t matter. You fight, blow off steam and it’s done. Completely."
He looks at me then.
"When Lumi rescued us, some of us came back to ourselves quickly," he says. "Some of us didn't. RJ was improving and then he wasn’t. He couldn't." He looks at the wall. “I don’t know why.”
I hold that.
I think about what Lumi told me. A medical center, smaller and quieter than this one, where RJ was starting to come back — slowly, in the way he does everything, but coming back. Learning to speak again. Making progress in centimeters. And then a little girl, Lumi's niece, playing outside with her fathers, and she screamed the way children scream when they're happy, and RJ's wolf heardthreatand didn't hear anything else.
He hadn't been trying to hurt anyone. He'd been trying to protect her.
The girl wasn't harmed. But RJ came back to himself in the aftermath of what he'd done to the men, and whatever had been building toward speech and presence and the possibility of a future collapsed completely. He lost it all. Stopped speaking. Got reclassified. Got sent here.
He was trying to protect a child and it cost him everything.
Jim appears at the end of the corridor.
He takes in Jake on the floor, me across from him. He doesn't intrude — just walks down and sits beside Jake, close, and that's all. His shoulder against Jake's. Jake looks at him for a second and then looks away and his shoulder drops about half an inch.
Chapter fifteen
Sven comes to my door.
Not unusual — he's been escorting residents under lockdown, covering the movement protocol himself because they're short-staffed without him and apparently a concussion isn't enough to keep him off the floor. I heard him in the corridor an hour ago, the even pace of a man who walks the same way whether he's fine or not.
He opens the door. Looks at the arm I'm still holding against my side.
"Medical," he says. "You should have gone yesterday."
"I was busy."
"You were avoiding it."
Both things are true. I get my jacket.
***
Sven doesn't fill the silence and I don't either. I watch him move.
