“It will heal fine,” I reassure him. “I promise. We just need to immobilize it.”
“Okay, Brooke,” he says. “If you say so.”
I’m glad he goes along with this plan. It’s not exactly easy for a prisoner to get a second opinion, especially since I don’t seem to have a doctor backing me up. The inmates have rights, and if he lawyered up, we would be in trouble. But most of the men either don’t know they can do this or don’t care enough. In any case, I try to give them the best medical treatment I can.
I grab some paper tape from a drawer so I can buddy tape his fourth and fifth digits together. Fanning watches me, a look of growing concern on his face. “That’s all you’re going to do?”
I wrap the tape around his fingers. “This is the standard treatment. It was a simple fracture—we just need to immobilize it.”
“And it will heal?”
“Absolutely.”
Fanning grimaces with pain as I stretch out his fingers to wrap the tape evenly. “Goddamn Nelson.”
I jerk my head up. “What?”
“Nothing,” Fanning says, his eyes suddenly wide with panic. “Never mind.”
“Mr. Fanning.” I wrap one more layer of tape over his fingers. “Can you please tell me how this happened?”
“I already told you.” He averts his gaze. “A door closed on my hand. I swear.”
Of course, he could be telling the truth. Maybe a door did close on his hand, and that’s how he broke his finger. But then the question would be, was somebody holding his hand in the door when it closed? If they were, that person meant business. They meant to smash two of the fingers of his dominant hand to smithereens.
And why did he say the name Nelson?
Then again, it’s not like Nelson isn’t a common name. No, I don’t remember there being any other files with the last name Nelson on them when I was looking in the file cabinet. But it could be somebody’s first name. Couldn’t it?
I ensure that the tape has secured his fingers so he can’t bend them, and then Mr. Fanning is good to go. He holds up his hand, still looking skeptical that a roll of tape can heal his fracture, but he accepts it.
“Come back in a week,” I tell him. “We’ll see how it’s healing.”
He nods. “Thanks, Brooke. I appreciate it.”
“Just don’t slam your hand in any other doors, got it?”
He winces. “Yeah. I’ll try—believe me.”
Fanning slides down off the table, and I let Hunt back into the room to escort him to his cell. I watch the two of them disappear down the hallway, and I still can’t help but wonder how he got that fracture.
Goddamn Nelson.
He couldn’t have been talking about Shane. Maybe Shane was dangerous on the outside, but not here. If anything, Shane has been a target here in prison. He certainly isn’t going around breaking other people’s fingers.
But the truth is, I don’t entirely know what he is capable of.
Chapter 30
Tim has come by this weekend to build a birdhouse with Josh.
At least that is what Josh has told me about a thousand times over the last hour. Seriously, I thought kids get less annoying as they get older. But it’s sweet that he’s so excited. I thought Josh might cool to Tim after finding out that he wasn’t secretly his father, but that hasn’t been the case at all. If anything, they’ve gotten closer in the last couple of weeks.
So have Tim and I.
At about eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, Tim rings the doorbell. We did exchange keys for safety reasons since he’s my neighbor, but he usually rings the bell. I appreciate that. We have to keep some boundaries here. I mean, we know each other so well, it would be easy enough for him to just move right in. But we are intentionally taking it slow.