Brother from another mother

Disbarment

"About your disbarment?" She stands in front of him now, her hands at her sides, finished with their charade, the make-believe that a hug will make things all better, that a gentle touch can change anything. "Of course I have. But Harvey, you can't just run away and hope things will work out on their own."

He shakes his head. Isn't it amazing how a person can know everything and nothing at the same time?

"Run away from what," he says. "Run away from my clients? What clients? You think anyone will want me to represent them, you think anyone will want to be within twenty feet of me once this gets out?"

"You still have the firm," she says, laying her hand over her heart. "You still have all of us. We're your family, Harvey, we care about you and we don't want to see you like this. I don't want to see you like this."

Like a failure? Like a man whose stupid choices, whose selfishness and greed have trapped him into abandoning the most important people in his life? Like a man who let down the only person he swore he never would, the only person he never thought he could? Like someone who's lost everything he's ever known?

He smiles again, thin and cold.

"So stop looking."

"You don't mean that."

Don't I?

Ah, well. You may be right. It doesn't matter much anymore, I don't think.

How about you?

---

Mike, poor Mike, lies on the floor of his tiny cell, staring up at the ceiling and doing everything he can not to think of Harvey, thinking only of Harvey, every memory they ever shared, every promise they ever made. "I'm not letting you go," he said. He did, those were the words he used. "I hate you," Mike shouted back with tears spilling down his cheeks, throwing punches, falling to the floor, and still, Harvey was there. Harvey was always there. Harvey is always there, Harvey will always be there.

Harvey is gone, and he's not coming back.

Mike closes his fists and presses them to his eyes. Everything is wrong, everything is so terribly, horribly wrong. All he wanted to do was to make it right, all he ever wanted to do was to save the man who saved him, and now what? Now what's he done? Demolished both their lives, broken the whole world down with no way to build it up again.

He should have known better than to trust that anyone else really wanted to help them. To help him. He should have known better than to trust Anita Gibbs. "I won't go after your friends," she said. She swore it, she put it in writing. But she's only one person, isn't she? Only one assistant district attorney in a whole office full of them. "I won't let anyone else go after your friends," she never promised that. "I'll protect Harvey." She didn't. She wouldn't. She knows better. And then he confessed in open court, on the record, and she's gotten everything she wanted, stabbed them all in the back, and he let it happen. He let her take Harvey, he let her ruin them all.

He should have seen it coming.

Mike presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until his head aches.

Everything you're feeling, keep it deep down inside. Locked away where no one will ever find it, where no one even knows to look.

Don't show them that you're broken.

---

He doesn't know what he was expecting.

"I'm here to see my client," he used to say, and they sent him to a little room with a door he could close. With chairs to sit in, or to throw at the cameras, if it came to that. Simulated privacy, in every sense of the word. So they've taken away that veneer, laid everything out bare for anyone to see, but how different can it really be when all that's really changed is that they've stopped pretending?