And the way Natasha watches the detective…

Is she debating whether this woman can provide that protection and more?

Kit looks to McGowan too.

Wonders what she knows, what she doesn’t. Wonders what she’s seen, what she hasn’t.

Wonders what’s imperfect inside this woman too.

Because, after all, game recognizes game.

And Kit’s hands move involuntarily in her lap as if she, too, is writing in her journal, attempting to stave off the inevitable, even as McGowan scribbles in hers.

Interviewing high schoolers is no different from asking kids what they learned at elementary school on any given day. They always respond with a variation of nuthin’. It’s partly the reason Carla McGowan hasn’t had kids. Another reason is that love hasn’t been very good to her. And maybe that can be explained by how often she’s moved around the state, city to city, working her way up the ladder in a nonlinear way, never having held the same position in any two. She was a beat cop in Detroit; community support officer in East Kent; scenes of crime investigator in farmland Chowder; fingerprint officer (briefly, one week) in Goblin; civilian investigation officer in Chaps; and now, detective in Samhattan. Not much time for roots, living a life like this, though even she recognizes some degree of making excuses, as she’s been in Samhattan close to two years now.

Still: even if she had found love, she sure as hell didn’t want any kids. There’s a long period of their lives in which they either don’t listen to you or subconsciously rebel against you, and it’s not until they’re about thirty that they realize how good you really were to them. That’s the arc Carla took with her own parents, and that’s the arc she sees all day every day, interviewing the people of Samhattan. Teens don’t know what’s important yet and so they worry more about how they look while answering than they do the actual answers. It’s all right. Carla gets it. The world doesn’t have to be perfect, all her questions don’t have to be answered in a linear way. And often people reveal things without meaning to. But if there’s one thing that revs her up, one thing that brings her close to her own breaking point, it’s wasting time. And while this current case isn’t one of a missing person (boy, is it ever not; Carla has the death photos on the phone in her blue jacket pocket; all of Samhattan knows exactly where the girl is now), she still feels an urgency some might call anxiety.

It’s one of the reasons she’s been moved around the state as much as she has: Carla McGowan has a tendency to cross legal lines when she panics.

Often, with crimes like these, McGowan, daughter of a deeply unsettled Cuban woman and an unknowingly neurotic Irish man, wishes she could pull the cruiser over and freak the fuck out. It seems there used to be time for doing things like this. It used to be you could go out drinking and vent about school, your job, the world, your place in it. Yes, back in high school and college: You felt shitty? You found a corner of the world to cry in. You felt like crying? You cried. You felt like dying? You put on some emotional music and you curled into a ball and you waited to see if it happened and it never did, so you got back up and faced the world again.