Elias realized it was getting worse when he caught himself writing Clara's name in the margin of someone else's file.
He sat alone in his office, fluorescent lights buzzing faintly overhead, a stack of evaluations open on the desk. The case in front of him had nothing to do with her—a young man picked up for an armed robbery, no history of domestic violence, a completely different kind of damage.
He'd been halfway through a sentence—*"Subject describes his actions as inevitable given his circumstances"*—when his hand had drifted, almost unconsciously, and written a small, precise word in the margin.
*Clara.*
He stared at it.
Then he drew a line through the name, more forcefully than necessary, and closed the file.
Contamination.
That was the word his old supervisor had used when talking about countertransference—the way one patient's story could bleed into another's, distorting perception if a clinician wasn't careful.[2] It was supposed to be monitored, managed, brought into awareness.
Awareness, he had.
Control, he was no longer certain about.
He checked the time.
He had fifteen minutes before a scheduled supervision meeting with Reyes. It wasn't formal, not in the way training had been years ago, but they made a point of checking in with each other about difficult cases. It was one of the recommended safeguards against exactly what he was feeling now.[2]
He considered canceling.
He went anyway.
Reyes's office was three doors down from his, smaller, cluttered, with a plant in the corner that looked like it had survived more neglect than most people. A mug on her desk read: *I HEAR VOICES (AND THEY PAY MY BILLS).*
She looked up when he knocked.
"You're on time," she said. "Should I be worried?"
"Possibly," he said.
She gestured to the chair across from her.
"Sit," she said. "Which ghost are we talking about today?"
"Shaw," he said.
"Of course," she replied. "You're not the only one the headline got stuck to."
He sat, hands folded, and for a moment just listened to the low hum of the building: distant carts, muffled voices, the soft whir of the air conditioning.
"I had a meeting with counsel," he said finally.
"I figured," she said. "They like to poke the experts before they put them on stage. How bad was it?"
"Standard," he said. "On paper. Prosecution pushing for 'knew exactly what she was doing.' Defense leaning on 'cornered, long-term abuse.' Both warning me, in different ways, not to sympathize too much."
"And did you?" she asked.
"Sympathize?" he said.
"Too much," she clarified.
He exhaled slowly.
"What's 'too much'?" he asked.
Reyes leaned back, studying him.
"In our world," she said, "too much is when you start confusing your feelings with facts. When you adjust the data to fit how you want to see someone. When your report becomes a confession you're writing to yourself."
He thought of his private notebook, the sentences he'd written there that could never appear in a file.
"I'm not adjusting the data," he said.
"Good," she said. "Then what's the problem?"
"She's… getting into other cases," he admitted. "I caught myself today linking a kid holding up a liquor store to her word 'inevitable.'"
Reyes nodded slowly.
"Ah," she said. "Schema bleed."
"Excuse me?" he asked.
"Once you start really seeing a pattern, you start seeing it everywhere," she said. "Especially if it resonates with your own history. Abuse to homicide is a clearer line than most people want to admit. Once your brain traces it, it will try to lay that template over everything."
"I don't want it over everything," he said.
"That's at least half the battle," she replied.
Silence settled for a moment.
"What is it about her that's sticking?" she asked.
He considered deflecting.
Instead, he answered.
"She refuses to simplify herself," he said. "She won't perform helplessness just because it's safer. She admits to relief, anger, even satisfaction. And she's right about how people prefer their victims: trembling, grateful, apologetic."
"And you like that she won't play along," Reyes said.
"Yes," he said. "And no. It makes my job harder. It makes the court's job harder. It makes me… uncomfortable."
"Because?" she prompted.
"Because it resonates," he said, before he could talk himself out of it.
"With you," she said.
"Yes," he replied.
She didn't look surprised.
"She poke the Lila wound yet?" Reyes asked quietly.
He stiffened.
"How—" he began.
"You mentioned a missing sister once after too little sleep and too much coffee," Reyes said. "I took a wild guess that someone like Clara would find the seam."
He looked away.
"She asked if I'd ever wanted to hurt someone and didn't," he said. "She assumed the answer was yes. She wasn't wrong."
"Everyone in our line of work has those moments," Reyes said gently. "Thoughts of pushing someone, punching someone, putting a bottle through someone's face. The line is between thought and action."
"She argues the line is thinner than we pretend," he said.
"She's not wrong," Reyes said. "But that doesn't mean there isn't a line."
He rubbed his forehead.
"She told me not to call her dangerous just because I'm afraid of the part of her I recognize in myself," he said.
Reyes let out a low whistle.
"That's a sharp one," she said. "She's good."
"She's not wrong," he repeated.
"No," Reyes agreed. "But she's not the only one allowed to have sharpness in the room."
He looked at her.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I mean you're allowed to have a reaction," she said. "You're allowed to feel seen, even attacked. You're then *required* to put that reaction through the grinder of supervision, ethics, and research before you let it near a conclusion.[1][2] Which is what you're doing right now."
"It doesn't feel like enough," he said.
"It never does with the ones who get inside your head," she said. "So let's be concrete. Do you find yourself minimizing her actions because you feel for her?"
"No," he said. "If anything, I'm hyperaware of how they'll be perceived. I hear her words and, at the same time, imagine the prosecutor repeating them in court."
"Do you feel a pull to protect her?" she asked.
He thought about Clara saying, *"What was the point of staying alive after that night if everyone decides I'm a monster anyway?"*
"Yes," he said eventually. "From being flattened into something she's not."
Reyes nodded.
"Not from consequences," she said. "From misrepresentation."
"Yes," he said again.
"That's not pathology," she replied. "That's integrity. As long as you're not twisting data to do it."
"I'm not," he said. "But I am… invested."
"In your work," she said. "In accuracy. That's your job description."
"In her," he said quietly.
Reyes was silent for a moment.
"Romantically?" she asked, blunt.
"No," he said quickly. The speed of it made her raise an eyebrow. He amended, "Not consciously. Not in any way I'd act on."
"Good," she said. "Because that would be career suicide and ethically indefensible."[1][3] "What, then?"
"She occupies more mental space than she should," he said. "I find myself thinking about her framing when I'm off duty. Wondering what she'd say about other cases. About myself."
"That's countertransference," Reyes said. "Textbook. Not unusual. Not automatically catastrophic."
"It feels like a crack," he said.
"Maybe it is," she said. "Cracks let light in. They also let things leak out. Your job is to decide which is happening."
He huffed out something that wasn't quite a laugh.
"You make it sound simple," he said.
"It isn't," she said. "But the guidelines on our side are clear: you disclose internally, you monitor yourself, you don't isolate.[1][2] You also don't punish yourself for being human in a job that feeds on humanity."
He nodded slowly.
"Do you think you can still testify neutrally?" she asked.
"Yes," he said. "If anything, I think I'm overcorrecting. Too careful. Too aware of how my words will be used."
"Then your next task is to avoid letting fear of misuse make you vague," she said. "Jurors need clarity. They need to know you're not hiding the ball."
He thought of Clara saying, *"Make sure it's all of it. Not just the parts that make you look neutral."*
"I told her I would tell the truth," he said.
Reyes smiled, faintly.
"She'll hold you to that," she said. "Whether she's in the room or not."
He left the supervision session feeling marginally steadier, but the steadiness came with a new weight: the awareness that he was walking a tightrope, and that both falling and clinging too hard to balance could cause damage.
Back in his office, he opened Clara's official file.
The summary section stared up at him, half-filled.
He read what he'd written so far:
*"Ms. Shaw presents with no evidence of psychosis, cognitive impairment, or major mood disorder. She demonstrates high insight and verbal ability. Her narrative of long-term abuse is consistent with known patterns of coercive control, though some elements remain uncorroborated. She does not deny responsibility for the homicide; rather, she frames it as an inevitable endpoint of chronic entrapment."*[4][5]
He added:
*"Emotional response to the homicide is complex, including reported relief and perceived restoration of autonomy, alongside fear of consequences and awareness of moral transgression. Such mixed reactions are documented in survivors of prolonged abuse who engage in retaliatory or defensive violence."*[4][6]
He stopped, pen hovering.
Then, deliberately, he wrote:
*"Evaluator acknowledges personal reactions to the case, including empathy and discomfort, and has sought consultation and supervision to monitor potential bias. These reactions have not altered the factual content of this report but are noted here for transparency."*[1][2]
He read the sentence twice.
It was unusual to include something like that in a forensic report. Most experts preferred the fiction of pure objectivity.[1][3] But the newer guidelines encouraged awareness of bias, not denial.[7][8]
If he was going to walk this line, he would do it in the open.
He imagined Harrington's face when he read that paragraph.
He imagined Singh's.
He imagined Clara's, if she ever got access to the report.
She would probably smile that small, knowing smile and say, *"See? I told you you're not above the mess."*
He set the pen down and leaned back.
For the first time since this began, he felt something that might have been a fragile form of peace. Not because the conflict was resolved—it wasn't—but because he had stopped pretending it didn't exist.
Neutrality, he realized, was not the absence of fault lines.
It was standing on them without letting either side swallow you whole.