Page 2 of Wrong Way

"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?"