In keeping with the trend, he didn't get much sleep last night. The NOS kicked in at the wrong time, and he ended up staying up an extra two hours after he got off work looking through all the Park profiles he and Trinh had sorted through.

What little sleep he did get kind of sucked anyway, though, so it wasn't a big loss. He had some real shitty dreams – the 'wake-up-sweaty-and-breathing-hard-and-not-in-a-good-way' kind of dream – and he might've missed his alarm clock, and now he's coming into work about half an hour late running on a protein bar and a cup of coffee, getting ready to tell Trinh what he thinks about the profiles they put toge—

What the fuck? He does a double take at the interrogation room, and yeah, that's definitely Mia sitting there. Across from Stasiak. What the fuck?

The first instinct he has is to walk straight into the interrogation room, grab Stasiak by his ugly-ass tie, and beat the ever-loving shit of that lying little bastard. They had a deal. He's supposed to lay of Mia.

He realizes, though, that that might not end well for anybody, so he manages to reign it in and walks immediately over to the phone on Trinh's desk. He dials a quick number, and he's cool again. Ice cold. His fingers aren't shaking or anything, and his voice is dead even as he says, "Hi. This is Forsythe in evidence." Forsythe's one of Stasiak's familiars, and he's pretty sure that'll be enough to get Stasiak running. "I need Stasiak down here right away to sign some greenies. Thanks."

Then he hangs up the phone, and it's more for the sake of appearances than general interest that he turns to Trinh. "Hi. Hey." He waits until Trinh looks up at him and hands her the files. "Okay, I narrowed it down to fifty or so David Parks. What I'd like you to do is run the make and model on each of them. Okay?"

"Alright."

"Thank you." He hears the buzz of the door, and waits until he sees Stasiak heading for evidence before heading for the interrogation room. He buzzes in and opens the door, and walks in like he's supposed to be there, because that's the trick: acting like you're supposed to be there. "Hey, Tyler, we got a transfer," he says, and he forces himself to stay smooth and casual as he walks up to Mia. Like this is just another red tape jump rope. Like he's done it a hundred times before.

Like this isn't the first time he's seeing the woman he lied to, dated, and tore apart the family of.

She doesn't actually say anything, but her eyes are just as hard as they were all those years ago when she first found out he was a cop, and he's just praying that she's not gonna make this hard.

You don't have to like me, he tries to convey in a look, you just have to play along.

And to his relief, she does. She gathers up her purse, and lets him guide her out of the building and across the street to the parking lot. She even lets him open the door for her into his car, and then again into the diner.

He's not fool enough to think that means she's coming around, though. He doesn't blame her, and the first thing she says to him doesn't come until after they've finished their coffees. He actually thought about getting some real breakfast, but he's too busy trying not to bounce in his damn seat – the coffee's probably not helping – to eat, and she's not eating, so he doesn't think that'd be right.

"I'm almost done," she says after an almost unbearable silence, and she's looking down at her near-empty coffee cup before sitting it down with a sharp clink and looking up at him at last. "Why don't you tell me why you brought me here, Brian?"

Brian knows the Torettos well enough to know when a request isn't actually a request, and this? This is one of those times.

Problem being, he's not really sure how to explain that. He's spent the whole silence running through his head what he was gonna say to her. Shit, he's spent the last few years trying to figure that out, and he's drawing a blank. He can't tell her the most immediate reason. He can't tell her that he's got a deal with Stasiak, and he can't let Stasiak renege on that, because as soon as he does, who knows where the fuck that'll go.

He can't tell her the long game, either, though, because apologizing for ruining someone's family and telling them that, in the end, you really just want to protect them isn't something you do over shitty diner coffee and the world's most awkward silence.

So, he sighs, leans back, and settles for something somewhere in between. "You know they're gonna capture Dom, Maybe worse. I don't want you getting tangled up in this so stay away from him." It's a scare tactic, he knows. Another fucking bluff, and he hates himself for doing it to Mia, because this is another line he doesn't want to cross. But he can't…he can't let her get involved. He's worked so hard to keep her out of the line of fire, and he can't have her running right back into it.

It sounds so selfish. Shit, it probably is. But even though he doesn't want all this shit these last few months to be for nothing, that's not really why he says it. He says it because he doesn't want her to get hurt, and he's thinking that the only way to do that is to keep her out of this. As far out of it as possible.

Unfortunately, she doesn't see it that way.

"That's what you have to say to me after five years?" she says. "All of the sudden, you care what happens to me?"

No, he wants to say. I've always cared. He's doing all this shit for them, for her and Dom, and he can't even tell her. Because if she hates him now, if she's looking at him like that now, he doesn't think he could stand to see how she would look at him then.

"What I did to you was wrong," he tries instead, except it comes out sounding so…inadequate. "I'm sorry. It was—it was the hardest thing I ever had to do."

He knows as soon as the words leave his mouth that they're the wrong ones.

"I'm sorry, too, Brian," Mia tells him, and fuck, her eyes are burning into his, and it feels like he's got lungs full of exhaust. "I'm so sorry you had to come into my home and pretend to love me. I'm so sorry that you ripped my family apart. I'm very sorry that that was hard for you."

He wants to say something, anything. Wants to make her understand. But there aren't words for what he wants to express; there's no way to explain to her how sorry he is, and the only way he can show her, she can never ever know about.

"I lied to you." He can at least admit to what he's done. Confess. Own up. D) all of the above. "I lied to Dom. I lied to everybody. It's what I do best; it's why the Fed recruited me." He's not going to try to justify it; it is what it is. He just wants Mia to know that he understands what he did. That he's not under any illusions of how badly he fucked this up.

She just kind of nods, and that's probably the worst thing she could've done, because it means she agrees. Lying's what he does best. Nothing else. Even though he met her undercover, even though he lied, she still knows him better than most people do that know him as O'Conner, and the fact that she agrees is like a fucking knife in his chest.

And what she says next is even worse. "Maybe you're lying to yourself."

Brian takes a deep breath, mostly just to make sure he still remembers how. He hates it, because she's saying what he's been thinking. She's saying what he doesn't want to think.

"Maybe you're not the good guy pretending to be the bad guy. Maybe you're the bad guy pretending to be the good guy. You ever think about that?"

He's amazed he can still find his voice. "Every day," he tells her. She has no idea.

And he hopes she never will.

Part of him is relieved when she gets up from the booth and walks away, but then she stops, and turns around, and he steels himself for another knife. For another blow that he knows he deserves, and knows is still gonna hurt just the same.

"I always wondered," she says, "why'd you let my brother go that day?" But there's a look in her eyes, and he can't help thinking it's like she already has an answer in her head. Like she already knows, or at least suspects.

He wishes he had as much insight, but truth be told, there's so many damn reasons it could be…. "I don't know," he says, and truer words have never been spoken. Maybe it's like he told Rome back in Miami, and he was making up for old mistakes. Maybe he felt like he owed him. Maybe he felt like Dom didn't deserve to go back to jail. Maybe he couldn't bear the thought of Dom making good on that promise of his to die before he went back there, because losing him like this is bad enough; losing him like that would be fucking unbearable. And he thinks…he thinks that maybe he knows why that is, but what the hell's he supposed to do with it?

As he watches Mia walk away again, he lets out a sigh from the deepest part of his chest, somewhere behind all the knives and exhaust.

"Shit."