The A.D.A.'s Ninth-Step amend: the one scene inside Pat's head

pivotal · ~20 Nov YDAU

• When: ?/20 Nov YDAU — the novel's single Pat-focalized scene
• What: The remorseless Assistant District Attorney who has hunted Gately for years comes to Pat's office — not professionally but in explicit AA confidence, trying to work up the nerve to make a direct Ninth-Step amend to the man he resents. Pat receives him as the consummate professional and old-timer: she protects her resident with an exaggerated innocent trying-to-place-the-name-type face, grants and honors the confidence, counsels almost entirely in reflective-listening idiom — I hear you; It sounds very, very hard; Willing, maybe — and meets his spiritual agony with a dry I-have-a-nodding-acquaintance-with-Nine-myself. The scene states her governing split in the narration's own voice: cool steel when protecting the residents and House, a shattered husk of a wreck back home. And the one detail that reaches past the steel is human and tiny — the man's mismatched wool socks speak to Pat's heart more than anything else. She closes the institutional loop of Gately's crisis without his ever knowing.