the knock — harvey specter x reader
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summary harvey specter knew exactly what this was. he'd watched it destroy his family. he did it anyway. and that was the part he couldn't live with.
prompt – opposing corporate counsel, affair, harvey's mother parallels, moral dilemma, both povs, open ending warnings – affair, heavy angst, references to childhood trauma, moral complexity, no resolution word count – ~4k note – thank you for this request anon, sorry for the long wait 🫶
requests are open :)
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harvey
He knew what he was doing.
That was the part that separated this from something he could excuse or contextualise or file away under complicated circumstances. He wasn't confused. Wasn't swept up in something he hadn't seen coming. He was Harvey Specter — he saw things coming, that was the whole point of him — and he'd seen this coming from the second drink in the bar after the Morrison trial and he'd walked toward it anyway.
He knew what he was doing because he'd watched someone do it to his father.
He'd been sixteen the first time he caught his mother. Had stood in a hallway with the specific, terrible clarity of a teenager who had understood something in a single second that he'd spend years trying to unknow. She'd looked at him with her eyes wide and said Harvey, please and he'd made a promise he never should have made and spent two years carrying a secret that had no right to be his.
He'd watched his father. That was the thing that had never left him — watching Gordon Specter be kind and steady and entirely unaware while Harvey sat at the dinner table knowing. Watching his father trust a woman who had decided his trust wasn't worth keeping.
He'd told his father eventually. Because he couldn't carry it anymore. Because two years of being his mother's secret-keeper had done something to him that therapy had only partially undone. His parents had divorced. His mother had said things that couldn't be unsaid. Harvey had built walls that were still standing twenty years later and would probably never fully come down.
He'd told himself, with the absolute certainty of someone who had learned something at tremendous personal cost, that he would never be the person in that story who knocked.
He was outside her building on a Thursday night.
He was the person who knocked.
her
She loved her husband.
She needed that to be the first thing, the grounding thing, the true thing she returned to when everything else got complicated — because it was true, completely and without qualification, and she refused to let what she was doing erase it.
Daniel was a good man. A corporate attorney at a smaller firm, steady and kind, the person who had been exactly what she'd needed at exactly the right time and had never stopped being that. He remembered things. He asked questions and meant them. He had never once made her feel like being sharp and driven and relentless was something she needed to apologise for.
She had not been looking for anything.
And then a case had landed on her desk — corporate litigation, significant, the kind that required her full attention — and on the other side of the table had been Harvey Specter, and something had shifted that first day in the conference room that she hadn't been able to explain to herself since.
It wasn't that Daniel wasn't enough. She needed anyone who might ever know to understand that. It wasn't the narrative she'd always quietly judged — the bored spouse, the unmet need, the predictable reason. She was happy. She had been happy.
Harvey was something else. Something she didn't have a framework for. Something that had happened to her like weather.
She hated that she didn't have a better explanation.
harvey
He'd googled the statistics once.
Not proudly. Late at night, in his apartment, with the particular self-loathing of a man who was looking for something to make him stop. He'd read about patterns, about people who repeated what they'd witnessed, about the specific psychology of it. He'd closed the laptop and sat in the dark for a long time.
He wasn't his mother. That was what he'd told himself. He wasn't doing what she'd done — the years of it, the sustained lie, the son turned into a secret-keeper.
But he was knocking on a door that he had no right to knock on. And the husband on the other side of that equation was, as far as he knew, exactly where his father had been — trusting, unaware, not given the choice that had been taken from him.
Harvey Specter, who had built a career on knowing what things cost, had decided the cost of this was acceptable.
He didn't know what that said about him. He suspected he did know and wasn't ready to say it out loud.
The first time he'd stood outside her building he'd turned around. Gone home. Told himself it was over before it had properly started, which was the only acceptable outcome. He'd poured a drink and sat with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had done the right thing.
Then he'd thought about her in the deposition that morning — the specific, precise way she'd dismantled the opposing argument while he watched from across the table — and the quiet satisfaction had lasted approximately forty minutes.
He knew what he was. He just couldn't seem to stop being it.
her
The first time she'd opened the door she'd told herself it was once.
A single lapse in an otherwise intact life, the kind of thing that people buried and carried and never repeated. She'd told herself that with complete sincerity standing in her kitchen afterward, and she'd meant it.
Harvey had come back the following Thursday.
She'd stood on her side of the door for four minutes. She'd thought about Daniel — his face, his voice, the particular way he looked at her when she came home from a hard day like she was the thing that made the hard day worth it. She'd thought about the life she'd built with him, the specific architecture of it, the years that had gone into it.
Then she'd thought about Harvey across the conference table that week — the way he'd argued a position she'd disagreed with, the way he'd pushed back when she'd said so, the way the whole interaction had felt like the most alive she'd been in a room in months — and the four minutes had ended and she'd opened the door.
She'd hated herself afterward. Properly. She'd sat with it and let it be as bad as it was, hadn't managed it or contextualised it away.
She'd opened the door the Thursday after that too.
She didn't understand herself. She was a corporate attorney — she dealt in facts, in precision, in the careful construction of arguments that could withstand scrutiny. She applied that same rigour to everything else in her life. She was not a person who did things she couldn't explain.
She couldn't explain this.
harvey
She'd asked him once why he kept coming back.
They'd been in her kitchen — the second or third time, he couldn't remember exactly, the Thursdays had started to blur at the edges — and she'd looked at him with the directness she brought to everything and asked it plainly. Not accusingly. Just honestly. Just wanting to understand.
He'd almost told her about his mother.
He'd stopped himself. Because telling her would have been an intimacy too far, would have made this into something with a shape and a history and a logic, and he wasn't ready for it to be that. Or he was too ready. He wasn't sure which.
He'd said, "I don't have a good answer for that."
She'd looked at him for a long moment. "Neither do I," she'd said. "For why I keep opening it."
That had been worse somehow than any answer either of them could have given.
He thought about his father sometimes. Gordon Specter, who had gone to work every day and come home every day and trusted completely. Harvey had spent years being angry at his mother for what she'd done to that trust — the specific, personal fury of someone who had been made complicit in it.
He was doing the same thing to a man he'd never met.
He couldn't make those two facts sit together comfortably. He'd tried. The closest he'd gotten was a kind of compartmentalisation that he recognised as the same thing his mother had probably done — the separation of the thing from its consequences, the person from the harm — and recognising it made it worse, not better.
He knocked on her door anyway.
her
She'd almost told Daniel.
Three weeks ago, on a Sunday morning, sitting across from him at the kitchen table with coffee going cold between them. He'd been reading something on his phone, entirely at ease, entirely himself, and she'd looked at him and felt the weight of it so acutely that the words had been right there — I need to tell you something, I've done something, I don't know how to explain it but I need you to know—
She'd said, "How's the coffee?"
He'd said, "Good, bit strong."
She'd looked at her hands and said nothing.
She thought about that moment a lot. The version of herself that had almost spoken. What would have happened if she had — the specific, irreversible cascade of it, the thing that couldn't be untold once it was told. She'd watched cases like that. The moment a secret became public, the way it changed the shape of everything after.
She'd chosen silence. And then she'd hated herself for the relief.
Harvey, to his credit — or to whatever the correct word was for this — never pretended it was simple. He didn't construct a narrative in which they were the protagonists of something romantic and the husband was a footnote. He sat with the weight of it the same way she did, she could see it on him, the specific unhappiness of a man doing something he knew was wrong and couldn't stop doing.
She'd asked him once if he felt guilty.
He'd said, "Every time."
She'd said, "Me too."
Neither of them had said so let's stop.
harvey
Thursday. Eight forty-seven.
He was outside her building again.
He'd had a session with Dr. Agard that afternoon — she didn't know about this specifically, the specifics were a line he hadn't crossed, but she knew something was wrong and had been asking the right adjacent questions for weeks. Today she'd asked him about his mother.
He'd talked about it for the first time in a long time. The hallway, the promise, the two years, the dinner table. The way he'd felt like he'd been turned into something he didn't agree to be. The way his father's face had looked when Harvey had finally told him the truth.
Dr. Agard had said, carefully, "Do you think that experience affects how you see yourself now? In terms of your own capacity for honesty?"
He'd said he didn't know.
He'd known.
He stood outside her building and thought about his father. About sixteen-year-old Harvey making a promise that wasn't his to make and then carrying it until it broke him. About the specific horror of being the person who knew the thing the other person deserved to know.
He was the person who knew now. He was on the other side of it this time — not the kid in the hallway but the person in the doorway. The person his mother had been.
He took out his phone. Stood there with it in his hand.
He thought about walking away. He'd done it before. He knew what it felt like — the cold air, the particular texture of the right decision, the version of himself he could live with more easily.
He put his phone away.
He walked to the door.
her
Eight fifty-two. The knock.
Daniel was in Chicago. Back Monday. She'd kissed him goodbye that morning with everything she was carrying sitting in her chest and had spent the day trying to build a wall around a decision she'd already made and kept unmaking.
She was in the kitchen. She heard the knock and stood very still.
She thought about Daniel in Chicago, probably in a hotel room, probably thinking about her in the comfortable uncomplicated way of someone who had no reason not to. She thought about his face that morning. The hug at the door.
She thought about Harvey in court last week — the way he'd looked at her across the room after a ruling had gone her way, not with the professional annoyance she'd have expected but with something that looked like genuine respect, which from Harvey Specter meant something specific and significant.
She thought about who she was. The person she'd built. The attorney, the wife, the woman who prided herself on precision and integrity and knowing exactly where she stood.
The knock came again. Patient. Certain.
She set her glass down.
She walked to the hallway.
She stood on her side of the door.
She thought clearly and deliberately about her father-in-law — a man she'd met twice, who had shaken her hand at the wedding and said he's lucky and meant it — and she thought about what it would mean to him if he knew. What it would mean to Daniel. What it would mean to the version of herself she'd been before the Morrison trial and the three-hour drink and the first Thursday.
She put her hand on the handle.
Harvey's voice, through the door, quiet: "I know."
She went still.
"I know what I am," he said. Not loud. Just certain, the particular honesty of someone who had stopped pretending. "I know what this is. I know what it costs." A pause. "I know all of it and I'm still here and I don't have a good explanation for that."
She stood on her side of the door and didn't say anything.
"I had a session today," he said. "She asked me about my mother."
She knew the shape of that story. Not the details — Harvey kept his walls — but enough. She'd seen it in him the first time she'd asked why he kept coming back and he'd gone somewhere briefly that was sixteen and a hallway and a promise.
"I know what I'm doing to someone I've never met," he said quietly. "I know exactly what that is. I've known it from the beginning."
Silence.
"I came anyway," he said.
She closed her eyes.
She opened the door.
Harvey stood there — coat on, city behind him, the expression that was never triumphant, never uncomplicated, always the specific weight of a man who had lost an argument with himself and was standing in what was left of it.
They looked at each other.
Neither of them spoke for a long moment.
"I don't know how to stop," she said finally. The most honest thing she'd ever said to him.
"Neither do I," he said.
She looked at him. At the city behind him. At the door still in her hand.
She stepped back.
He walked in.
The door closed behind him and the flat was quiet and outside Chicago was three hours away and Monday was three days away and neither of them said anything about what came after, because there was no answer to what came after, just the weight of the thing they'd chosen again, carried forward into another Thursday with no resolution in sight and no end they could see from here.
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