This was far from the only difficult meeting Peter had ever taken in the middle of his research. Hazard of the job, when the main focus of your job was dealing with the worst things that could ever happen to people. And if it wasn't law enforcement giving you a hard time, it was family, which was also understandable. Max Ward happened to be both law and family, which made him a particularly formidable barrier between Peter and the information he wanted from the man sitting across from them.
Another writer in Peter's line of work might have chosen to be horribly offended by the agent's remark, but it rolled off Peter like water. Litany of leeches was at least more creative than 'true crime hack' but the truth was, no one could ever find something more disparaging to say about him than Peter had at one point thought about himself.
"If I were you, I'd think the same thing." There was no point in tip toeing around it. Peter wasn't a very good liar, and Max Ward hunted liars for a living. That made any attempt of his to play coy somewhat fruitless, and coy wasn't something Peter did. Detached, maybe.
He knew how it must look, especially to someone in Max's position. Not just as a member of the bureau, but husband and a father, as much a protector of the badge as he was his family's memory. The unsettling fact was that there were far more writers in the business looking to make the quick buck and sell a hot story than there were those who genuinely wanted to help. Little more than vultures. Some days, Peter wasn't sure where he fell on that. Most days, he knew that he felt a deeper calling that had lured him to this line of work, like ships to jagged rocks. He just wasn't always sure what exactly that deeper calling would lead to.
The fact that he was familiar with Peter's work at all was the bigger surprise. True Crime writers, despite involving themselves in many of the same grey areas, were considered pariahs in the more respectable fields of law enforcement. Many police officers and FBI agents wouldn't even lower themselves to sitting across from him like Agent Ward was now.
They couldn't be more different, Peter allowed himself to hypothesize. Despite their shared professional interests, Max was everything that Peter wasn't. All of the articles he'd read leading up to the trial painted him as a supportive father, a man who brought respect to the badge. A loving husband. Well, that was one other thing they had in common, actually. In one way or another, they'd both lost a wife.
But comparing his loss to the agent's was nothing short of grotesque. It wasn't the same, by a long shot. And no amount of exercising his Will Graham levels of empathy to assume Max Ward's point of view would change that, no matter how good they both were at it. He could imagine all he wanted, he didn't actually know what it was like to lose someone you loved so horribly. His ex-wife was alive and presumably happy, now that she was free of him. And his father? Well. That had always been more complicated.
He and Agent Ward didn't just see the world in different ways, Peter guessed. They lived in entirely different worlds too.
"And at the risk of proving you wrong, should we treat this as a simple conversation then? Doesn't have to be an interview unless you decide you're comfortable." A pause, then, because Peter wasn't prepared to give up completely while Agent Ward was still deciding whether or not to kick him out of his polished, Jack-Crawford-identical office. "We could just talk about Mark Andrew Brackett. We don't have to talk about your wife."