He doesn’t look up from his laptop. I see his eyes moving and I realize he’s reading, and that only pisses me off more. “I mean it, Tomasetti. This isn’t just about you anymore. The things you do affect me, too. It’s incredibly selfish of you not to consider that.”

He closes the laptop and looks at me. “Joey Ferguson is a piece of shit. He’s a murderer and a rapist and he’s going to continue fucking up people’s lives until someone stops him.”

“It doesn’t have to be you.”

“Who else is there, Kate? The Cleveland PD? BCI? A jury of his peers? Here’s a newsflash for you: They didn’t get the job done. The law failed me. It failed my family. My children.” Up until this point, he hasn’t raised his voice, but that final word is fraught with emotion, and I know that’s the heart of the matter here. That he lost his children. That they’d suffered before they died, and he hadn’t been there to protect them.…

“Your kids loved you,” I tell him. “They wouldn’t want you to sacrifice yourself in the name of revenge.”

“You don’t know anything about them.”

“For God’s sake, Tomasetti, you know better than anyone that sometimes terrible things happen to good people. The people we love get hurt. Sometimes we lose them.”

“Not like that!” His shout is so abrupt, so loud and filled with emotion that I jump. “They didn’t deserve what he did to them. He didn’t just murder them, Kate. He tortured them. He raped and terrorized them. And then he burned them alive. I couldn’t even bury them, because there was nothing left.”

“I know what they did!” I shout back. “And yes, it was the most horrible thing imaginable. But you survived—”

“Did I, Kate? Did I really?”

“Yes! Damn it, you’re just getting your life back on track. Tomasetti, you’ve got a lot to lose. We’ve got a lot to lose if you do something stupid.”

“Should I just let it go, Kate? Let that son of a bitch go on with his perfectly happy life while those caskets full of bone and ash rot in the ground?”

“Don’t go there. Don’t do this to yourself.”

He rises and approaches me. His nostrils are flared, teeth clenched. When he speaks, his voice is deadly and soft. “Do you know what he was doing earlier this evening?”

“It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t—”