Dr. Mercer locked the infirmary door behind us and pocketed her keys. “You know, you remind me of myself when I first started here.”
I blinked at the subject change. “How so?”
“All that”—she gestured vaguely at me—“black-and-white thinking. Bad guys, good guys. No gray areas.”
My spine stiffened. “There’s nothing wrong with having standards.”
“Didn’t say there was.” She started walking toward the exit, and I fell into step beside her. “But I learned pretty quickly that this place doesn’t operate in black and white. And honestly? Adjusting my perspective made me a better doctor.”
“How?”
“Because when you see someone as a monster, you stop seeing them as a person.” She glanced at me sideways. “Not consciously maybe. You’d never deny someone treatment because you thought they were scum. But there’s a difference between going through the motions and actually caring. And to give the best care, you have to care.”
I thought of Knox’s knuckles under my hands. The steadiness of my work. The way I’d cleaned every wound with precision, detachment, efficiency.
Had I cared? Or had I just been doing my job?
“But some of these men are dangerous,” I said. “Violent. Bad men who don’t deserve empathy.”
It wasn’t cruelty. It was math. Cause and effect. You hurt people, you pay the price. End of story.
“Some of them, absolutely. Doyle?” She made a face. “There’s darkness in that man. Real darkness. You can see it in his eyes. Nothing there but hunger and entitlement. The kind of person who takes what he wants and feels justified doing it.”
I shuddered.
“But most of them?” She shrugged. “I don’t presume to know why they did what they did. I take precautions—I’d be an idiot not to—but I’ve learned something in my years here. Two things can be true at once. A man can be guilty of a terrible crime and still have good in him. A man can have done something unforgivable and still be a decent human being.”
My hand drifted to the base of my throat without my permission.
Dr. Mercer stopped at the security checkpoint, turning to face me fully. “Here’s the thing about compassion in a place like this: It’s not about excusing what these men did. It’s not about forgetting or forgiving. It’s about remembering they’re still human.”
“Being human doesn’t excuse?—”
“No. It doesn’t. But denying their humanity?” She held my gaze, and there was weight in her eyes. Warning. “That’s how you end up as cold as the worst of them. I’ve seen it happen. Nurses who start seeing monsters instead of men, and eventually…” She paused. “They become what they claim to hate: coldhearted.”
The security guard buzzed us through, and Dr. Mercer gave him a wave.
“Take Knox, for example,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “He’s never given my medical staff a single problem. Not once in all the years I’ve been here. Never violent toward us. Never verbally abusive. He follows directions. Complies with treatment. He just … doesn’t talk.”
“He’s a convicted killer,” I argued.
“I know.” She pushed open the exterior door, and the evening air hit my face like a slap. “But I don’t know why. And neither do you. Point is, don’t judge a book by its cover.”
“What if the cover is a warning label?”
She smiled at that, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Then I guess you’ll have to decide if you’re brave enough to read it anyway.”
She headed toward the parking lot, leaving me standing at the entrance with her words ringing in my ears.
“Two things can be true at once.”
I thought about Knox Blackwood. The most dangerous inmate at Coldwater, evidently. A convicted murderer. The man other prisoners feared so much, they’d probably throw a party if he made parole.
And then I thought about the man in my infirmary. The one who’d lowered his voice so he wouldn’t startle me. Who’d held perfectly still while I cleaned his wounds, like he was afraid any sudden movement might scare me off. Who’d looked at my scar and asked, with something that sounded almost like fury, “Who gave you that?”
If two things could be true at once … then which was the real Knox? Or I guess I should say, the more dominant one?
The apex predator? The convicted killer? The man the entire prison evidently whispered about like he was the monster under the bed?
