"Medication compliance at ninety-four percent. No incidents since the unfortunate situation with Officer Dutton." He doesn't say Rick's name. Doesn't acknowledge that the unfortunate situation involved a guard threatening to follow Hope to her car. "The board will be pleased."
I watch his hands. The pen moves between his fingers in a pattern he thinks is casual—index to middle, middle to ring, back again. A nervous habit he's never managed tobreak, despite the dozens of articles he's published on patient observation techniques.
He's written a book about me. Two hundred and thirty-seven pages on criminal psychopathy and institutional rehabilitation, my case study threaded through every chapter. I've read it twice. Kent brought me a copy after publication, curious what I'd think.
What I think is that Kennedy's been sitting across from me for three years and still hasn't asked the right question.
"I'd like to explore something today," he says. "Your early post-military period. The year between your discharge and your first... incident."
"The year I decompressed."
"Yes." He makes a note. "You've described it that way before. Can you tell me more about what decompression looked like for you?"
The game begins.
This is what Kennedy doesn't understand—what he's never understood, despite the diplomas and the book and the forty-seven therapy sessions we've shared. He thinks he's mining for breakthroughs. He thinks the questions he asks and the silences he leaves are sophisticated clinical techniques designed to unlock my psyche.
He's wrong.
Every crumb I've fed him has been deliberate and measured, designed to give him enough to write his papers and build his reputation while revealing nothing that matters. He wanted childhood trauma, so I gave him Frederick's coldness in careful doses—enough to support a theory, not enough to expose thetruth. He wanted military history, so I described deployments in language sterile enough for academic citation.
He's built his career on the version of me I've allowed him to see.
The real version would end it.
"Decompression," I say, settling back in the chair. "Adjustment. Reintegration into civilian life. All the words the VA uses when they don't want to say what's happening."
"And what was happening?"
"I was learning to wait."
Kennedy nods like this means something. His pen scratches across the notepad—I can read his handwriting upside down.Stillness as coping mechanism. Possible dissociation?
He's so far from the truth it's almost funny.
The year after my discharge wasn't a decompression. It was reconnaissance. I spent twelve months learning to move through the civilian world without the structure of the military, without the sanction of orders, without the convenient framework that had made killing easy and justified.
I was learning to hunt alone.
"The transition must have been difficult," Kennedy prompts. "Losing the structure, the purpose—"
"The military gives you a target and permission. Remove both and you have to find your own way."
He looks up from his notes. Interest crosses his face, or the first tremor of unease. But he's too invested in his theories to hear what I'm saying.
"Your own targets," he repeats. "Meaning goals? Professional aspirations?"
"Meaning whatever keeps you moving forward."
I let the silence stretch. Kennedy fills it the way he always does—more questions, more probing, more attempts to fit me into the diagnostic framework he's already constructed. He needs me to be what his book says I am. Anything else would require revision, and Kennedy doesn't revise. He doubles down.
"I've been reviewing some of the case files associated with your post-discharge timeline," Kennedy says. "Harold Devins, for instance. CEO of Meridian Capital."
He's watching for a reaction.
"What about him?"
"He was found dead in his home six years ago. Four months after your discharge. The investigation never produced a suspect."
