When Jill walked in the door that evening, she immediately started apologizing. Wally had suggested that the two of them surprise me with the tapes. The whole thing was meant to be a joke. She was planning on telling me before it went too far, but then she got to like the guy.

“I don’t want you to talk to Mr. Rogers ever again,” I said.

“I can’t do that,” she replied. “I care.”

“Then you’re not sorry.”

“I’m sorry for hiding it from you. I’m not sorry for calling him.”

“Don’t you get it, Jill? He’s using you. This isn’t a real relationship. You don’t know him. How can you trust what he says?”

“I trust him,” she said. Jill came over and sat next to me. She slid an arm around my shoulders. “Have you ever thought that maybe he’s just lonely?”

I tried to kiss her with all the feeling she said she was missing. I wanted affection that felt true and unrehearsed, an urgent kind of love. “Whoa, slow down,” Jill said. “Can Mr. Rogers do this to you?” I asked, rubbing my erection against her thigh. “Nope,” she said. “He can’t.” She stood up from the couch. “I don’t want you when you’re desperate.”

Walter Perkins was fired after Mr. Sullivan committed suicide. His wife was still alive, still in hospice at his daughter’s house, so we figured his depression wasn’t out of the ordinary. He had written a note before sneaking out his first-story window—completely in the nude—to die of exposure in the snow. “Tell Anne I’m going on a new adventure!” it read. Somehow, he had rigged the alarm around his ankle not to sound upon his escape. An investigation was conducted into why the staff had failed to prevent the death. After Chloe learned that Wally had continued to make tapes, it didn’t matter that he hadn’t been on duty when it happened; he was told to collect his things. Right before walking out, he bequeathed to me his recorder.

“I don’t need it anymore,” he said.

“I can’t exactly say I feel sorry for you, Wally,” I replied.

“Anyway, I’ve got to get out of here. I’m going to apply to work in construction. A job where I can get ripped. I want to be the guy girls think about when they touch themselves before they go to sleep.”

“Best of luck with that.”

A week later, Angie and I shared the graveyard shift. She and I weren’t chitchatters, but that night she came and sat next to me with her coffee.

“Chloe called me out on avoiding Mr. Harris,” she said.

“Oh, who cares?” I said.

“I’ve felt guilty about it ever since Mr. Sullivan died, yet I can’t make myself go in that room.”

“It’s just a fantasy,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Even if that’s true, I wouldn’t know the first thing to say to him anymore.”

“So tell Chloe he was sexually harassing you, and she’ll assign me or one of the other nurses to him from now on. She won’t give you crap about it. Problem solved.”