I know what they found. I know what it means. My mind has decided, nonetheless, to know something different.
I take long breaths and when I open my eyes, Dr. Mellissa is sitting down in her chair.
"You said you have nightmares. When did they start?" She asks, resuming her professional demeanor.
"They started on the second night after Daniel died." I say remembering how they started. "I was still in the hospital. Now as I remember, that room was also white." I look around. "But the window was not frosted. I could actually see the world outside." My world that had turned grey. Dr. Mellissa listens silently.
"I think it was three something o'clock in the morning, I saw him standing at the foot of my bed." He was standing there wet and dark against the white of that room. It's getting harder for me to breathe.
"He was…." I gasp for air again.
"If its hard to say we can do this another time." Dr. Mellissa is concerned now.
"He was soaking wet, just like in the basement, just like he was dragged from beneath all that rubble…and," another gasp "..and.."
"Dr. Crow! I need you to breathe. That’s it. We will continue this tomorrow."
After I got a little stable, Dr. Mellissa leaves and I don’t know if I feel relieved that I didn't have to say the things haunting me out loud or sad that I couldn't took them outside of me.
It's night again. He is standing there, at the foot of my bed, water running off him and onto the floor and pooling there without spreading and that's not what water does. He is saying something, always, his jaw is moving, and his chest working but there is no sound or maybe there is but it lies at the outer edges of what a human ear can register.
I want to be honest about something, here in this white room where there is nothing to do but be honest with myself because all the other options have been removed along with my field credentials and my access to the bureau's database and my phone and my own clothes, which have been replaced with the kind of soft institutional garments designed specifically so they cannot be used as a ligature, which tells you something about what people are afraid I might do, which I find both insulting and, if I'm being completely honest, not entirely without basis.
I do not believe in ghosts.
I want to say that clearly. I have spent eleven years investigating things that occupy the penumbra of the explicable, and in that time I have documented twelve cases where phenomena initially assessed as paranormal were subsequently attributed to infrasound, electromagnetic field interference, mould-induced hallucination, group psychogenic illness, deliberate staging by actors with motive, or some combination of the above. I believe in psychology. I believe in the extraordinary capacity of the human mind to construct reality from insufficient data, to fill absence with presence, to insist on meaning in chaos because the alternative, that Daniel died because a building got down, is a narrative so thin and stupid and structurally unsound that my mind has simply refused to live in it.
I believe Daniel's ghost visits me every night because my mind is broken.
And this is the part I have been less willing to commit to, the part I keep circling back to in the sleepless hours of three and four and five in the morning, I also believe that he is trying to tell me something.
Both of these things can be true simultaneously. I am a clinical psychologist. I understand the architecture of delusion. I understand that the certainty of the deluded person is not evidence of external reality. I understand that I am not an objective observer of my own psychological state.
None of this stops the feeling, at three in the morning, that he is there. That his mouth is moving. That the sound is almost within my grasp.
On day one, they took my gun, which I had expected. They took my personal laptop and my field kit and the small encrypted drive I keep on my person at all times, which I expected. They took the photograph I keep in the inside pocket of my jacket. Daniel and me in front of a field office in Albuquerque, 2019, both of us squinting in the desert light, him with his hand up shading his eyes and me apparently saying something with my whole face the way I apparently always do, according to everyone who has ever known me. That one I did not expect, and that one I protested.
They gave it back. There are limits, even here. Even in the bureau's internal containment facility, which is what this white room is, dressed up in the language of mandatory recovery leave and psychological stabilisation protocol and your wellbeing is our priority, Mae.
My wellbeing. Right.
They put me in a containment facility because seven weeks ago, I told my colleague Agent Rouke that I had identified the people responsible for the death of Daniel in that compromised Tillamook property and that I am not going to sit back until I haven't sent them to hell.
Agent Rourke, to his considerable credit, did not panic. He listened carefully. He asked three very good questions. Then he walked me very calmly to Director Harlow's office and he knocked on the door and he said, " Mae has some things she needs to tell you, " in the tone of voice that means this needs to happen in a room with a closed door and then he left us alone.
What happened next is something I have gone over many times in nineteen days, in a white room, with a great deal of time and nothing to use it on.
Director Harlow sat behind her desk with her reading glasses pushed up to the top of her head and her hands flat on the desk surface and she listened to all of what I had to say.
She listened. And then she said, with the careful precision of someone choosing every word like a piece on a board: " Mae. I need you to hear me when I tell you that the investigation into Daniel's death was thorough and complete and the conclusion was structural failure. I need you to hear me when I tell you that Petrov Laszlo has been under surveillance for four years and there is no operational evidence connecting him to the Tillamook property. I need you to hear me when I tell you that you have not slept a full night in months and you have been conducting unauthorised investigation and accessing financial records without a warrant and I am telling you this as someone who has known you for eleven years and who is choosing very carefully between the things I could do right now."
I told her what she could do with her careful choices.
I am, perhaps, not at my most diplomatically adept at seven in the morning after no sleep and months of dreams.
She did not send me here as punishment. I want to be fair to her, even now, even in this white room. She sent me here because I was, by every measurable metric, unwell, because I had dropped eleven pounds in five months and was running on stimulants and private obsession and the kind of grief that has curdled into something that looks, from the outside, dangerously like a mission. She sent me here because the alternative was letting me continue, and I had made it clear I was going to continue, and she was not willing to find out what considerably more than file a report meant when delivered by someone with my training.
I think she was afraid of what I would do.
I think she was right to be.