The Silent Wife. Karin Slaughter
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relieved she’d held it back during their divorce. She had kept it hidden when they’d started dating again, falling in love again. She had kept the secret for so long that by the time she’d finally told Jeffrey, Sara had felt ashamed, as if it was all somehow her fault.
The song on the radio pulled her back into the present. Amanda’s ring clicked against the steering wheel as she tapped along to Sinatra’s ode to Chicago—
One town that won’t let you down.
Sara looked for a tissue. Her sleeve—Will’s sleeve—was empty. Charlie had taken her duffle bag. She’d left her purse in the van. She should call Charlie and ask him to lock it in her office, but the thought of taking her phone out of her pocket, dialing the number, was too much.
She wanted Will. To spoon with him on the couch. To sit in his lap and feel his arms around her. He was probably halfway to Macon right now. They were literally going in opposite directions.
Sara could remember exactly when she had told Will about the rape. She’d only known him for a few months. He was still married. She was still unsure. They were standing in her parents’ front yard. It was freezing cold. Her greyhounds were shivering. Sara was longing for Will to kiss her, but of course he wasn’t going to actually kiss her until she kissed him. The confession had come naturally. Or as naturally as it ever could. She had told Will that she had put off telling her husband about the rape because she didn’t want Jeffrey to think that she was weak.
Will had told Sara that he’d never once thought of her as anything but strong.
He was kind that way. He was physically impressive. He was razor-sharp. But Will was not the type of man who commanded attention. He was the man at the party who stood in the corner petting the neighbor’s dog. His humor was mostly self-deprecating. He worried about how people felt. He was silent, but always watchful. Sara assumed this came from his horrific childhood. Will had grown up in the foster care system. He seldom talked about that time, but she knew that he had suffered a shocking level of abuse. His skin told her the story—cigarette burns, electrical burns, jagged ridges where bone had fractured through skin. He was shy about the scars, unreasonably embarrassed that he’d been the sort of child that someone would hate.
That wasn’t the Will that the rest of the world knew. His protracted silences made most people uncomfortable. He had a feralness to him. An undercurrent of violence. An internal spring that threatened to flick open like the blade of a knife. In another life, he might have been one of the thugs locked up at Phillips. Will had barely graduated high school. He’d been homeless at eighteen. There were criminal charges in his background that Amanda had somehow managed to expunge. This clean slate had given Will the opportunity to change his life. Most men would not have taken it. Will was not most men. He’d gone to college. He’d become a special agent. He was a damn good cop. He cared about people. He wanted to get it right.
Sara was loath to compare the two great loves of her life, but there was one very stark difference between them: With Jeffrey, Sara had known that there were dozens, possibly hundreds of other women who could love him just as intensely as she did.
With Will, Sara was keenly aware that she was the only woman on earth who could love him the way that he deserved to be loved.
Amanda said, “We’ve got another half hour. Is there something you’d rather listen to?”
Sara dialed the tuner to Pop2K and cranked up the volume. She rolled down the window the rest of the way. The sharp breeze cut into her skin. She closed her eyes to keep them from burning.
Amanda endured ten seconds of the Red Hot Chili Peppers before she broke.
The radio snapped off. Sara’s window snicked up.
Amanda said, “Will told you about Nesbitt.”
Sara smiled, because it had taken her long enough. “I thought you were a detective.”
“I thought so, too.” Amanda’s tone showed a begrudging respect. “How much do you know?”
“Everything Will knows.”
The words clearly stung. Amanda wasn’t used to Will choosing a different side. Still, she told Sara, “Nesbitt’s jacket is in my briefcase behind the seat.”
Sara stretched around to retrieve the file. She opened it on her lap. The jacket was at least two inches thick. She skipped over the expected—that the raging asshole had managed to buy himself twenty more years—and found the medical section. They didn’t need a warrant to read the details. As an inmate, Nesbitt didn’t have a right to privacy. Sara skimmed the voluminous notes on his past hospitalizations and multiple visits to the prison infirmary.
Nesbitt was a below-the-knee amputee, abbreviated as BKA. During his eight-year incarceration, he’d seen dozens, possibly hundreds, of different doctors. There was no continuity of care in prison. You were more likely to see a unicorn than a wound-care specialist. Inmates got what they were given, and if they were very lucky, the doctor wasn’t fleeing malpractice suits or employed by a private contractor whose bottom line depended on providing the absolute bare minimum of care.
Sara flipped ahead to the pages and pages of invoices. Prisoners were charged a $5 a visit co-pay no matter if they were seeing the doctor for congestive heart failure or getting their toenails clipped. Nesbitt owed the state of Georgia $2,655. His commissary account and three-cents-an-hour janitorial wage were being garnished until the debt was resolved. If he ever got out of prison, that money would continue to be garnished from whatever paycheck he managed to earn. In the last eight years alone, Nesbitt had required 531 medical visits and 28 hospitalizations. That was more than one visit per week.
Sara told Amanda, “Nesbitt’s foot was amputated after a car accident. He’s lost four inches of leg since he became incarcerated. He was poorly fitted for a prosthetic. A bad prosthetic is like a shoe that doesn’t fit. The rubbing and friction occludes normal capillary pressure. The tissue becomes ischemic. If this goes on long enough, which it’s bound to in prison, the tissue becomes necrotic.”
“And then?”
“Then—” Sara paged through the chart, which was a case study in Third World medicine. “Diagnostically, you stage the damage based on what you can see. Stage I is superficial, just a red patch. Stage II involves the top two layers of skin. It looks like a blister, basically. Stage III is an ulcer with full thickness. That’s an open sore. You can see the fat, but the bone and muscle aren’t visible. There’s a white or yellow slough that has to be wiped away.”
“Pus?”
“More like a slimy film. It smells awful. You have to keep it clean or you’ll develop an anaerobic bacterial undergrowth.” Sara noted in the chart that bacteria had repeatedly set up in Nesbitt’s leg. Inmates were not allowed to keep medications inside their cells, and sterile cloths were hard to come by, especially at $5 each visit.
Sara continued, “Stage IV is a full-thickness ulcer. You can actually see inside the leg to bone, muscle and tendon. Past that, it’s technically unstageable because you can’t see anything. The skin develops a black, hard scar tissue that’s as thick as the sole of a shoe. You have to saw through it. The smell is putrid. Think of rotting meat, because that’s basically what’s happening. The muscle is destroyed. The bone becomes infected. Nesbitt has reached this point four times over the last eight years, and each time, they cut off a little bit more of his leg.”
“Is that the best way to treat it?”
Sara would’ve laughed if the situation wasn’t so appalling. “If you’re on a Civil War battlefield, absolutely. But this is the twenty-first century. The gold standard is to use a vacuum-assisted closure and ideally, hyperbolic oxygen treatments to bring blood flow back to the area. In the best of circumstances, it would take months of intensive wound care to heal.”
“The state would never pay for that.”
Sara allowed the laugh to come out. The state barely paid for clean sheets. “Nesbitt currently has a stage III, full-thickness ulcer. You’d be