She laughs, soft and tired, and I feel it vibrate through me.
I close my eyes, feeling both of them warm against me, and let sleep take me again.
57
Chris
Someone from admin has strung garlands along the whiteboard and set out a bowl of candy canes on the table. The building’s PA system is playing a jazzy instrumental version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” at a volume just low enough to be ignorable. Two weeks until the holiday and the Los Angeles field office is leaning hard into festive.
Wyatt unwraps a candy cane and crunches into it like a man who’s never heard of savoring anything. I watch him decimate the thing in three bites while the feed from Nina’s office loads on the wall-mounted screen.
“You’re a monster,” I tell him.
“They’re meant to be eaten.”
“They’re meant to be sucked. Slowly. Over time.”
“That sounds tedious.” He reaches for another one. “Also, phrasing.”
The screen flickers to life before I can respond. Four camera angles tile across the display: two from corner fixtures, one from a smoke detector, one from what I’m pretty sure is a decorative plant. Nina’s office from every angle.
Vicente and Arturo are already seated when Nina enters the frame. Vicente moves more carefully than he did before the shooting. There’s a stiffness in his left side that he’s working to hide, a slight hesitation when he lowers himself into the chair. Two weeks out from a bullet that nicked his pulmonary artery and he’s sitting in a therapy session like nothing happened. The man’s capacity for denial is almost admirable.
Arturo sits closer to him than usual. Their shoulders nearly touch. I’ve watched enough of these sessions to recognize the shift. The shooting changed something between them, stripped away whatever remaining pretense of distance they’d been maintaining.
Nina settles into her chair across from them and doesn’t reach for her notepad. That’s new.
“Before we begin,” she says, “I need to address something directly.”
I can’t quite see Vicente’s face, but he moves his hand fractionally toward Arturo’s knee. Arturo’s shoulders square.
“I’m in a relationship,” Nina continues. “With two federal agents. One CIA, one DEA. Both of whom are actively working your case.”
She lets that sit. Neither man reacts visibly, but the temperature in the room shifts. Even through the camera feed, I can feel it.
“One of those agents,” Nina says, “has personal history with you, Vicente. History that I now understand in detail. History that, frankly, makes me question whether I can maintain any pretense of professional objectivity where you’re concerned.”
Beside me, Wyatt stops crunching. His hand finds my arm, steadying.
“Your son uncovered an assassination plot and came halfway around the world to warn you,” Nina continues. “When the assassins found us at the safe house, he helped take them down. I was there while you were bleeding out on the floor. I held pressure on your wound while we waited for the helicopter. I’ve crossed so many ethical lines at this point that I should probably refer you to someone else and recuse myself entirely.”
Vicente opens his mouth to speak, but Nina holds up a hand.
“I’m not finished.” Her voice is calm, but there’s steel underneath it. “I’m not going to refer you out. We both know the parameters of your arrangement with the federal government, and we both know I’m the only therapist read into this situation who’s willing to take you on. So we’re going to continue. But I’m done pretending I don’t have opinions about what I’ve learned.”
She leans forward slightly, and even through the grainy camera feed I can see the shift in her posture, the therapist mask slipping, the woman underneath emerging.
“What you did to Chris Longo was abuse,” she says. “I don’t care what you told yourself at the time. I don’t care what justifications you’ve constructed over the years. You took a young man who started as your captive, who had no power and no choice, and you exploited that. You used sex as a tool of control. You conditioned him to associate violence with intimacy. You broke him, Vicente, in ways he’s still trying to put back together.”
My chest constricts. Hearing it laid out like that—clinical, precise, spoken not as my lover but as a therapist who’s seen the damage up close?—
I don’t know what I expected to feel. Vindication, maybe. Satisfaction at watching Vicente get called out.
Instead there’s just this strange unraveling. Like a knot I’ve been carrying so long I forgot it was there, is finally starting to loosen.
Wyatt’s hand slides down my arm to my wrist. His thumb presses against my pulse point.
On screen, Vicente’s expression has gone carefully blank. Arturo is watching him, not Nina.
