Isla gave her the version.The efficient, curated version she'd been assembling in her head since Kate had first mentioned psychological evaluation, the way she assembled case files—organized, coherent, with the relevant facts presented in the right order and the irrelevant ones excluded.
She'd been working a case.The Lake Superior Killer—Robert Brune, sixty-five, serial murderer operating for decades under the guise of accidental drownings.She'd identified him after years of pattern analysis.He'd attacked her partner, Agent Sullivan, at a scrapyard and put him in the hospital.She'd continued working the case after being told to stand down, which was the insubordination that triggered the leave.Sullivan was recovering.She was frustrated by the pace of the investigation.She understood why Kate had made the call she'd made, even if she disagreed with it.
Clean.Professional.The testimony of a competent agent who had perspective on her own situation.
Dr.Linden listened without interrupting, her gaze steady and attentive in a way that wasn't invasive—she looked at Isla the way a good listener did, with enough focus to convey engagement but not so much that it became scrutiny.When Isla finished, Linden nodded slowly.
"That's a lot," she said."A partner in the hospital, a suspect at large, mandatory leave.Any one of those would be significant.All three at once—that's a lot of weight."
"I can handle it."
"I believe you.Handling things seems to be something you're very good at."There was no irony in it, no hidden edge.Just an observation, offered simply."Can I ask how you've been spending your time since the leave started?"
"Running.Visiting Sullivan at the hospital.Reading."All true.All incomplete."Trying to stay busy."
"And the nights?"
Isla's pulse didn't change.Her hands didn't move.She held Dr.Linden's gaze with the same composed neutrality she'd walked in with, and the lie came out as smoothly as breathing.
"I go home.I eat.I watch the lake from my apartment window and think about the case more than I should."A small, self-deprecating half-smile—the kind that invited the therapist to see a woman with enough self-awareness to recognize her own patterns."I'm not sleeping great, if that's what you're asking.But I wasn't sleeping great before the leave either.The job does that."
"The job does that," Dr.Linden agreed."What about the dock patrols?"
The question landed like a stone in still water.Isla felt the ripple pass through her and held everything still.Kate had told her.Of course Kate had told her.Whatever was in that file on the table between them included the phone call from the night of the attack, the confession Isla had made from a squad car bumper with blood on her collar and chain bruises darkening around her throat.
"I've stopped," Isla said.She met Linden's eyes and didn't blink."Kate made her position clear.So did Sullivan, once he was conscious enough to have an opinion.I'm not going back to the docks."
It was the most important lie she told that morning, and she delivered it with the conviction of someone who had spent a career reading other people's deceptions and understood, intimately, the mechanics of a convincing one.Steady eye contact.Relaxed shoulders.The right amount of reluctance in the admission, as if stopping had been hard but she'd done it anyway, because she was a reasonable person who listened to the people she trusted.
She had not stopped.She had gone back two nights ago.And last night.
The chain bruises had faded to a yellow-green that she covered with a scarf and, when indoors, with a turtleneck that she'd bought specifically for this purpose.The cut above her eye had healed to a thin pink line she'd explained away as a stumble during a morning run.She was more careful now—she stayed farther from the container yard, kept to the perimeter, and carried a can of bear spray in her jacket pocket that was technically legal and better than nothing.She didn't go as late.She varied her route.She was smarter about it.
She was still doing it.
The compulsion had a texture she could almost describe if she tried, though she wouldn't, certainly not here.It wasn't recklessness, despite what Kate and James and anyone else would call it.It was the impossibility of stillness when the thing that needed doing wasn't being done.She'd felt it in Miami, too—the nights after Alicia Mendez's death, when she'd driven past the crime scene over and over, as if proximity to the place where she'd failed could retroactively change the outcome.She knew it was irrational.She knew what a therapist would make of it.That was precisely why she wasn't going to share it.
Dr.Linden watched her for a moment.The silence stretched, comfortable from the therapist's side, calibrated from Isla's.
"Good," Linden said."I'm glad you've stepped back from that."She said it without the weight of someone testing a statement for truthfulness, which either meant she believed Isla or was choosing not to challenge it in the first session.Either way, the ground held.
They spent the remaining thirty minutes on safer terrain.Dr.Linden asked about Isla's background—the Coast Guard childhood, the coastal cities, the parents.Isla gave her the outline, the version she'd given a dozen intake forms over the years, stripped of the details that mattered most and padded with the ones that mattered least.She mentioned Claire.She didn't mention how the phone calls with her sister had become a thin wire she clung to on the worst mornings.She mentioned Miami.She didn't mention Alicia Mendez's face at the moment of death, which she still saw with high-definition clarity on the backs of her eyelids at three in the morning.
Dr.Linden didn't push.She asked, listened, noted, moved on.If she sensed the careful architecture of Isla's responses—the way every answer was a wall built to look like a window—she gave no sign of it.She was patient the way water was patient, present and unhurried, willing to find the cracks on its own schedule.
At 10:50, Linden glanced at the clock on the wall—not her watch, not her phone, the clock, visible to both of them, so the time was shared rather than imposed.
"We're coming up on our time.Before we wrap up, I want to ask you something, and you can think about it this week rather than answering now."She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward slightly, the first shift in her posture since they'd sat down."You described everything that's happened—the case, the leave, your partner's injuries—in terms of the investigation.The facts of it.What I didn't hear much about is how any of it has made you feel."She held up a hand, pre-empting the response Isla was already composing."I'm not asking you to perform emotion.I'm genuinely curious.You're carrying an extraordinary amount of stress, and you've described it to me the way you'd describe it to a supervisor.I'm wondering what it looks like when you're not presenting it for evaluation."
The question sat in the room between them like something with weight.Isla looked at it, and through it, and at the woman who'd asked it.
"I'll think about it," she said.
"That's all I'm asking."Dr.Linden stood and extended her hand.Her grip was warm and firm and precisely calibrated—not challenging, not limp."Same time next Thursday?"
"Same time."
Isla collected her jacket and walked through the waiting room, past the white noise machine and the tissues and the painting of the lake, down the creaking stairs and out onto East Fourth Street, where the March air hit her face and the sky was the color of old pewter.She stood on the sidewalk and breathed.The session had been manageable.Linden was good—better than Isla had hoped for, which meant more dangerous than she'd prepared for.
