3:00 am at the Lincoln Memorial

The city gave me peace. The job took it away.

Mar 12, 2026

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I’ve sat on the eastern steps of the Lincoln Memorial at 3:00 am more times than I should admit.

The air is different then: cooler, damp around the edges, like the Potomac is breathing. The marble holds the day’s heat. The city hushes down to the soft stuff: a distant siren that never quite arrives, the occasional radio somewhere doing its lonely crackle.

Lincoln sits behind me. My future is out in front of me. And uncertainty, quiet, patient uncertainty, works on me from the inside.

After a surveillance down in Indian Head, one that went places I didn’t expect, I ended up there again. Same steps. Different weight.

People are capable of incredible good. We build. We serve. We sacrifice.

People are also capable of things that make you want to wash your hands when you get home.

You watch them throw away marriages like receipts. Use their kids as leverage. Hurt each other, emotionally and otherwise, just to get what they want. Sometimes it’s selfishness. Sometimes it’s cruelty. Sometimes it’s both wearing the same jacket.

Some nights it weighed heavier than others.

The city gave me peace.

Indian Head, Maryland

Indian Head had gone bad.

It was supposed to be simple surveillance. Follow her from work to home, then from home to wherever she went when she was supposed to be there with her husband and kids.

“Girls night” every Thursday. Leaving at 9:00 pm like clockwork.

And she was right on time.

First a bar for a while. Then I followed her following another car, a man she’d embraced a little too familiarly coming out of the bar. Then to a house about 8–10 miles away. A rendezvous.

Well, that’s why they hire us.

About an hour later: police lights in my rearview.

Great. Another explanation to give. I’d been burned.

But the badge didn’t stop for me. It drove right by, fast, and pulled up to the curb of the house I’m watching.

Then another right behind it.

And that’s when my subject came running out, half dressed, hair a mess, moving like panic makes you move. One shoe slapped the pavement like she’d lost the other one somewhere between the door and the truth. Her face looked… wrong. Not just “caught.” Not just “embarrassed.”

Bruised?

You can make your own determinations.

But this is what I do. I document the destruction of families. Then go sit alone with it.

And all I could think was: who explains this to the kids?

How?

There will be a lifetime of split Christmases to follow. Awkward school events. New “rules” at two houses. A lot of tears nobody gets to see. A lot of damage that doesn’t show up in a police report.

At 3:00 am, the memorials glow. Lincoln. Jefferson. Washington. Granite and marble from every corner of the Republic: Massachusetts to Tennessee, Vermont to Georgia. The Capitol. The White House.

Big, clean symbols of what we tell ourselves we believe in.

The pursuit of happiness. Security. Individual rights.

I wanted to believe it.

I was raised on service. Cub Scouts. First Baptist Church. Taught that happiness meant serving others, not yourself.

This work made me question all of that. Or it made my search for God, meaning, and purpose more urgent.

Depends on the day.

When you watch bad behavior and bad decisions, hear lie after lie, day after day, you begin to understand why good people who swore an oath to uphold the law and serve their neighbors get jaded. Hurt. Untrusting.

I get it now in a way I didn’t before.

I’ve sat in a car, hungry, watching someone make the exact decision that will ruin their life, thinking: Dude. Don’t do that. If you don’t do that you won’t get caught.

And then the darker part of my brain whispers: Here. Let me prove it.

But the city… the memorials… the traffic and the protests and the energy… the whole place buzzing with people who still believe they can build something better. A free nation calling out to anyone who burns for the chance to do something meaningful, whether they came from across the world or across town.

It’s a privilege to live here. To be born here.

This tug of war between service and self-care grew case after case.

In the beginning, it was exciting. I was instinctually good at reading people, understanding what they were saying that wasn’t being said. I learned fast that people crave connection, and that connection could lead to information that would move my case forward.

But con men do the same thing.

By the end of my short career watching human behavior on the darker side, I was questioning what I wanted to represent.

What I wanted to do with my interactions with others.

How I walked away from this work—and why I had to—is a story for another time.

But I’ll tell you this:

Those steps at 3:00 am taught me something I couldn’t learn anywhere else.

The city gave me peace.

The work took it away.

I had to choose.

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