Chapter 58 Chris #2
No leather couches. No Rorschach prints.
No degrees arranged in a self-important grid on the wall.
Instead, there’s a small room with two comfortable chairs angled toward each other, a window overlooking a courtyard garden, and a side table with a box of tissues and a carafe of water.
The walls are painted a warm gray that somehow manages not to feel institutional.
Photos on a bookshelf: a group shot of teenagers in graduation robes, a wedding photo with two women in white, a candid of what looks like a Thanksgiving dinner with at least a dozen people crammed around a table.
No CIA insignia anywhere. No indication that the woman sitting across from me has security clearance high enough to know about operations I’m not even read into. Wyatt said she’s contracted through them, but you’d never know it from looking around.
Dr. Reiner herself is not what I pictured.
Late fifties, maybe early sixties. Black, with a cascade of natural curls falling past her shoulders—dark at the roots, honey-brown at the tips.
She’s wearing a blazer over a simple blouse, small gold hoops in her ears, and an expression that reminds me uncomfortably of Nina when she’s decided to stop letting me deflect.
She looks like someone who’s raised a houseful of kids. Not just her own, but every stray who needed a place to land. The kind of woman who’d make you feel welcome and seen and then calmly refuse to let you bullshit her about anything that mattered.
That quality makes me profoundly uncomfortable.
I settle into the chair she’s indicated, cataloging the exits out of habit. One door, one window. Standard office building layout. No surveillance equipment I can detect, though that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
“Water?” she offers, gesturing to the carafe.
“No. Thank you.”
She nods, settling into her own chair with the unhurried ease of someone who’s done this thousands of times.
Doesn’t reach for a notepad. Doesn’t check her phone.
Just sits, hands folded in her lap, watching me with that same steady attention I’ve seen from Nina when she knows I’m about to try something.
“I understand Nina Palmer referred you.”
“She recommended you. Said you were the best.”
“She’s generous.” A small smile. “She also mentioned you might be resistant to the process.”
“She’s not wrong.”
Dr. Reiner nods again, unsurprised. “Most of my clients are. Comes with the territory. The Agency doesn’t exactly recruit people who enjoy discussing their feelings.”
The acknowledgment of what I am, what we both know she knows, lets me exhale. At least we’re not pretending.
“So,” she says. “Why don’t you tell me what brought you here today?”
I’ve rehearsed this. On the drive over, after Tatiana’s text about going dark, I practiced what I’d say. Something professional, controlled. A sanitized version that hits the right therapeutic notes without actually cracking me open.
The words I practiced don’t come.
Instead, I hear myself say: “I made a promise.”
“To whom?”
“To them.” It sounds inadequate. “The people I’m with. I told them I’d try.”
“Try what?”
“This.” I gesture vaguely at the room, at her, at whatever this is supposed to be. “Talking. Processing. Whatever you want to call it.”
“What would you call it?”
I don’t have an answer for that. My training runs the opposite direction: compartmentalize, deflect, maintain cover. Feeling things is a liability. Admitting you feel them is worse.
But I promised Wyatt, in that hospital bathroom while Vicente’s blood was still drying on my clothes. I promised Nina, curled between us in the dark, that I’d try.
And I’m so goddamn tired of running.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I finally say. “I don’t know how to sit in a room with someone and just... talk. About the real stuff. The shit that actually matters.”
“What’s the real stuff?”
The question hangs there. I could deflect. Give her something true but manageable, ease into this slowly over months of careful sessions.
Or I could stop being a coward for once in my fucking life.
“Five years,” I say. The words come out rough. “I spent five years undercover with a man who—” I stop. Start again. “He was my target. The head of an operation I was supposed to be infiltrating. Then it became something else.”
Dr. Reiner’s expression doesn’t change. Her attention is steady, patient, and devoid of judgment.
“He conditioned me. Used sex, violence, intimacy—all of it tangled together until I couldn’t tell the difference anymore. Until I didn’t want to.” My jaw tightens. “Until I craved it. The control. The pain. All of it.”
I wait for her to flinch. To show something that tells me I’ve crossed a line, revealed too much, become unfixable in her eyes.
She doesn’t.
“That must have been terrifying,” she says quietly. “Losing yourself like that.”
The words hit something I didn’t know was exposed. My eyes burn, and I blink hard, trying to force it back.
“I got out,” I manage. “Six months ago. I’m still trying to figure out how to be a person again. But I found people who—” My voice cracks. “People I love. Who love me back. And I thought that might be enough.”
“But?”
“But he’s back.” The admission feels like bleeding out. “Not in my life, exactly. But close. Too close. And I’m finding out that I’m not as okay as I thought. That whatever he did to me is still in there, still running in the background, and I don’t know how to make it stop.”
Silence. The kind that invites more, that doesn’t rush or push or demand.
“I hurt someone,” I say. “A few weeks ago. During—” I can’t say it. “I dissociated. Became someone else. Someone he made. And I didn’t even realize what I was doing until it was over.”
“You hurt one of the people you love?”
I nod, not trusting my voice.
“And that’s what brought you here.”
Another nod.
Dr. Reiner leans forward slightly. “Chris. Can I call you Chris?”
“Yes.”
“What you’ve described—the conditioning, the dissociation, the loss of control—these are symptoms. Treatable symptoms. They don’t define you. They’re not who you are.”
“They feel like who I am.”
“I know.” Her voice is gentle but certain. “That’s what trauma does. It convinces you that the worst version of yourself is the truest one. That the person you became to survive is all you’ll ever be.”
My throat closes. The pressure builds behind my eyes, in my sinuses, spreading until my whole skull throbs with it. I know this feeling—the one I’ve spent thirty-eight years outrunning. Boys don’t cry. Longos don’t cry. Operatives sure as hell don’t sit in therapists’ offices and fall apart.
But I’ve seen Wyatt cry. At the safe house, when we finally talked about what happened between us. He’d looked right at me while he did it, tears on his face, voice steady. Like it was just another thing a body does. Like it didn’t diminish him at all.
If he can do that—if tears don’t make him less—
The first one spills over before I can stop it. Then another. I stop trying.
“It’s not true,” she continues. “The fact that you’re here, that you made that promise, that you’re trying to protect the people you love by getting help—that’s who you are. The person who sat in that chair and told me the hardest truth you know. That’s you.”
I don’t know if I believe her. But I don’t leave, either.
She hands me the box of tissues and waits for me to collect myself. Then she asks her next question.