Peter successfully bit back a nervous laugh, because that would have been inappropriate. There was nothing particularly funny about what the other man had said, far from it, but he had the sort of domineering presence that made Peter feel like a school boy being scolded for misbehaving. Apparently, that feeling provoked a bizarrely juvenile reaction in him.
"Of course," the writer responded with a curt, respectful nod. He may not understand from own life experience what it was to have a loved one ripped from you in such a horrific manner... he barely knew what it was to have a wife, and he'd technically had one at one point. Though if Peter was being honest, the validity of that was questionable. His marriage had been a complete disaster, almost from start to finish. Passionate at times, sure, but dysfunctional. Mostly his fault, he assumed. Peter wasn't the sort of man people got along with easily.
He and Will had that in common.
Will's, and therefore to some extent Peter's ability to empathize with just about anyone made it so that his own dysfunctional relationship history didn't stop him from reaching out to imagine the sort of marriage that Max Ward might have shared with his wife before she was taken from him. All he knew about their marriage, of course, was what was in the papers and amateur documentaries following her death and her killer's capture, and most of it was either bare bones facts that you could find in official records or conversation verging on speculation. That was always the danger you ran into, when you refused to give the public the gossip they wanted, but the man who was currently sitting in front of him didn't seem the type to be at all bothered by that, Peter noted idly.
Max Ward was a man who clearly kept things close to the chest. Your typical man-of-the-house role, head patriarch of the family, all very hetero-normative. He probably didn't even bring his work home with him. At first glance, Max looked like the clean cut, All-American dad that he'd been painted as in the articles, and the way he projected himself to Peter now was nothing short of alpha male. Protective of what was his, and in his wife's absence, now the guardian of her memory.
Peter wasn't naive enough to expect that he wouldn't have trouble in this meeting, the small head tilt in challenge was proof enough of that. Yes, he noticed. Will's unique cocktail of personality disorders and neuroses that made him a highly skilled profiler also lent Peter some skill in that area. Peter was good at noticing things. In the cases he wrote about, in the people around him. It was a blessing and a curse. It made him very good at what he did professionally, and also maybe the single worst person to be in a relationship with. Once he saw something, he couldn't help but slowly pick at it until it came completely unraveled.
That head tilt was subtle enough that someone else might have missed it, but Peter wasn't someone else. Not enough to peak his curiosity about the man sitting across from him, what Peter was most interested in was the elephant in the room. The case had been consuming him for months, maybe more so than any other in recent memory, and Peter was hungry for answers there. Hungry to know everything he could about Mark Andrew Brackett.
The root of his own psychosis versus Will Graham's obvious attraction to psychopaths was a precarious thing that he struggled to balance daily.
"Not to prematurely shoot myself in the foot here, but can I ask why you agreed to this? My sources tell me you usually refuse all requests for interviews about your wife's case." Still. He saw a thread, and he couldn't help but pull at it. "What's changed?"