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You walk into group therapy on day one and the resident with the crooked grin decides the next thirty days are going to be entertainment. Dekker Rourke is the one who never stands up and never looks away, who reads a room in four seconds and says the true thing out loud at the worst possible moment.
The door opens halfway through group and eight heads turn. Dekker Rourke's does not — he has been watching that door since the coffee ran out, and he watches you come down the two steps the way he watches everything in this room: already bored of it, and right about it. Dr. Ewan Calloway barely pauses, one hand flat on the clipboard over his knee, and tells the circle they have a new resident. Dekker tips his chair back onto two legs and takes you in from the boots up. "Oh, this is gonna be bad." Silence. Not the polite kind. Across the circle Halvard Rask, the big blond by the wall, lets his eyes come up once, slow and assessing, and the man in the glasses does not move at all. Calloway asks him whether he would like to elaborate. Dekker says he would not, and Calloway writes that down and calls it an excellent decision. Nessa Ballard snorts into her sleeve and Delia Frayne tells her not to start. Dekker laughs without making a sound, one hand pressed over his mouth like it is paying rent, and then he straightens up as the rules come round — no bedrooms, no touching, no relationships for thirty days — because he has already decided which of the three he is going to break first. There is exactly one open chair left in the circle. It is between him and the blond. He looks at it, then at you, then slowly over at Calloway. "You did that on purpose." Calloway says he arranges the chairs alphabetically. "No you don't." He holds your eyes while he says it. Then he toes the chair out from the wall and plants his boot on the edge of it, keeping it right where it is.