CHAPTER ONE
Dr. Mitchell's office was always slightly warm and welcoming but with the rain pouring outside, something about it felt desolate today.
Through the third-floor window, a flat gray sky pressied down on the city as rain ran in sheets against the glass.
Miles had been watching it for the better part of five minutes while Dr. Mitchell waited him out.
She was good at waiting. It was one of the things he respected about her and, from time to time, used to his advantage.
"You went quiet," she said.
"I'm thinking."
"You've been thinking for a while."
Miles shifted in the chair and brought his attention back to her. Dr. Mitchell was a compact woman in her early fifties with silver-framed glasses and a way of sitting completely still that he had never fully gotten used to. She had a tablet in her lap but rarely looked at it during their sessions.
"I don't know what you want me to say about it," he said. "I gave you the version that's accurate. Hartley had a syringe. He tried to put it in my neck. We struggled and he got hurt."
"His arm was broken in two places."
"Yes."
"After he'd dropped the syringe."
Miles held her gaze. "He was still fighting."
"According to Agent Stone’s account," Dr. Mitchell said, without any particular emphasis, "you continued applying pressure after the syringe hit the floor."
"Vic was fifteen feet away and moving fast. Her read on the sequence of events isn't going to be frame perfect.
" He heard how that sounded and made himself slow down.
"Look, I'm not saying she's wrong. I'm saying that in the middle of a physical struggle with a man who just tried to drug me with whatever was in that needle, the exact timeline is not something either of us could reconstruct with total precision. "
"That's a very careful answer," she responded without missing a beat.
"It's an honest one."
Dr. Mitchell made a small note. Outside, the rain intensified briefly, drumming against the windows. Miles watched a rivulet work its way down the glass and split into two separate streams.
"How have you been sleeping?" she asked.
"Fine. Better than before."
"Better than before Manhattan, or better than before the session two weeks ago?"
"Both." He wasn’t quite sure why but the speed and cadence of her questions was starting to piss him off.
She looked at him over her glasses, studying. "Miles."
"I've had a few rough nights," he said bitterly. "But nothing like what I was dealing with after Los Angeles. I'm not waking up at three in the morning every night. It's been manageable."
"I'm glad to hear that." She set the tablet aside and added, "I want to come back to something you said when you first came in today. You said that after Manhattan, you're feeling more settled. More in control."
"That's right."
"And yet in Manhattan, you broke a suspect's arm well past the point of subduing him, wept in a public gallery, and had to be physically removed from the scene by your partner."
Miles was quiet for a moment as the truth of it settled around him. The rain moved against the window in waves, nearly hypnotic.
"I had a breakdown," he said. "I know that.
I'm not pretending it didn't happen. But the pressure that had been building up leading into that moment was extraordinary.
Kane escaping, and just the entire case itself.
I'd been running on almost nothing for weeks.
I cracked. And then I went back to my hotel, slept eight hours, and got back to work the next morning.
That's not deterioration, if you ask me.
That's a human response to an inhuman amount of stress. "
"And how did you feel afterward?”
He looked at her for a moment. "Fine. Maybe a little…lighter."
"Not troubled?"
"Should I have been?"
"Miles." She folded her hands in her lap. "I've been working with you for nearly six months now. You're an intelligent man. You know what I'm getting at."
"You think I'm losing control."
"I think," she said, measured and careful, "that there's a pattern worth examining.
The confrontations are escalating. The physical responses are intensifying.
And when I ask you about each individual incident, you have a perfectly reasonable explanation for why it was necessary.
But it keeps happening. And the explanations keep coming. "
Miles leaned forward and set his elbows on his knees.
"What would you have me do? These are people who are in the act of committing murder.
Or who just tried to kill me. I'm not roughing up witnesses.
I'm not losing it in the parking lot when I can't find my keys. The violence, every single instance of it, has occurred while I was actively trying to prevent someone from dying. I’m a federal agent, not a fucking mailman. "
"And it has never occurred to you," she said, ignoring the outburst, "that you might be bringing extra force to those moments? That the anger you're carrying around the rest of the time is finding an outlet there, because there it's sanctioned?"
The question sat between them for a long moment. Miles looked back toward the window.
"You've been working with Kane's disciples for over a year now," Dr. Mitchell continued.
"You've watched person after person commit horrific acts because a man they never met convinced them it was righteous.
Elena is gone. Kane escaped the one sentence that was supposed to contain him.
You haven't been able to fully grieve any of it because the work never stops long enough to let you.
That's an enormous amount of anger to be carrying around. "
"I know I'm angry," Miles said.
"How often?"
He didn't answer immediately but he also felt that maybe admitting it would do some good. He shrugged and said, "Nearly all the time.” The admission came out flat. He had not quite said it out loud before, not in those words, and hearing it in his own voice felt different from thinking it.
Dr. Mitchell didn't react with alarm or satisfaction. She remained absolutely professional and carried on. "Thank you for saying that."
"It doesn't mean I'm not in control of it," he said.
"You broke a man's arm after he was disarmed."
"He'd just tried to kill me."
"I know," she said. "I know he had. And I know that context matters.
But I need you to hear me on this: the fact that you had a legitimate reason doesn't mean the response was proportionate.
Both of those things can coexist, and until you're willing to sit with that, I don't think we're going to make much progress. "
Miles stood and started to pace by the window. The rain had eased slightly, dropping from sheets to a steady gray curtain. He could see the parking structure across the street, the wet gleam of the cars inside.
"Gabriel Kane is out there,” he said. “The task force is still operational, which means there are more disciples we haven't identified.
I go back to work tomorrow, and it starts again.
What you're describing, the kind of deep interior excavation where I sit with my complicated feelings about a potential excessive use of force…
I don't know when I'm supposed to do that. "
"You're doing it now."
He turned from the window and glared at her but the irritation he wanted to feel simply wasn’t there. "You know what I mean."
"I do," she said. "And I'm not asking you to stop working, or to take yourself off the cases.
I'm asking you to stay honest with me about what's happening inside you while you do it.
The anger that's there nearly all the time, that's what concerns me.
Not any one incident, but what's underneath all of them. "
"What do you want from this conversation?" he asked, sitting back down.
"I want you to stop framing it as a question of whether you're coping fine or not coping fine.
That's not the right question. The right question is what you're doing with what you're feeling, and whether it's sustainable.
" She leaned forward slightly. "Are you talking to Agent Stone, or to your director?”
"No. Hayes has enough to deal with. And Vic and I are good, but we're not exactly processing together."
"How are you eating?”
He felt that she was scraping the bottom of the barrel now, but he answered anyway. "Decent?"
"Are you still drinking every night?"
He paused a half-second too long. "A drink or two. Nothing excessive. And not quite every night."
She wrote something down. He had the strong suspicion she noted the pause. He made a note of this himself. Maybe he did need to cut down on the drinking.
When the session ended twenty minutes later, Miles took the elevator down alone and walked to his car through the rain, not hurrying. He got in, sat with the door shut, and looked at the water moving across the windshield without turning the key.
He knew she wasn't wrong, and that was the most frustrating part of it, more frustrating than the questions, more frustrating than the careful language she used to make sure he couldn't dismiss what she was saying.
He could counter each specific thing she raised because each specific thing had a specific explanation.
But sitting here now, in the gray quiet of the parking structure with the rain outside, he couldn't quite counter the sum of it.
He was angry nearly all of the time. He had said it out loud, and it was true, and he had no particular idea what to do about that. Perhaps the worst thing was that he had hoped the admission would help, but if anything, it had done the opposite.
It had made him even angrier.