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“Your wife,” he replied.
I blinked, then accepted the phone from him. “Hello?” I said into the receiver.
“Hey, handsome,” she said with warm sincerity. “Having a rough go of it?”
The sweet kindness in her voice washed over me like a cool shower on a hot day. “Hey,” I said, giving a long, draining exhale. “Yeah.”
The doctor quietly left the room, giving me some privacy.
“I’m sorry they called you. I didn’t ask them to,” I said.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “I’m your wife. This is what I’m here for.”
I smiled to myself, loving how much she loved to call herself my wife. Loving how good it felt to call myself her husband. “I should have just brought you with me,” I said. “Now I’m ruining mother-son time.”
“No, not at all,” she said. “We’re at McDoggies, and he’s playing in the ball pit instead of eating the chicken nuggets he so desperately claimed to need.”
“Sounds like our son,” I said. That felt good to say, too. “How is it going? Finding what you were looking for?” I asked.
“Yes, and then some,” she said with a sweet little laugh. “I apologize in advance for your credit card statement, but Noah had some of the best ideas ever for the kids wing.”
“I’m sure he did,” I said, smiling. “I can’t wait to see it when we get home.”
“I can’t wait to show you,” she said. “So, what’s going on, honey? You want to talk about it?”
“Just kind of had a bomb dropped on me,” I said before switching the phone to my other ear. “Apparently, Gramps can’t shift anymore. I knew some of our pack members also couldn’t, but I didn’t know that he couldn’t and...and...” I choked on my words at that point, stopping short.
“And you feel like it’s your fault? That it wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for you getting caught?” she asked.
“More like I failed to protect my pack members. I should have been better and more prepared.”
“But remember,” she said. “Remember, Cole, that’s a cognitive distortion. Remember those cognitive behavioral exercises the therapist told you to start doing?”
“Yeah,” I answered, taking in a deep breath and letting it out. “Yeah, I remember.”
We’d been going through them a lot in therapy lately. Thought errors that led to the crippling shame and guilt I was dealing with in the wake of what had happened to us. I still wasn’t entirely convinced that I should be taking it easy on myself, either...then my therapist told me that was the perfectionism talking.
“So, what kind of distortion is that?” Marley asked me.
“Mmm...‘should statements’, right?'”
“Mm-hmm, but with maybe a little something extra added in,” she said. “What do you think?”
I paused. “Maybe personalization? The one where you take too much responsibility for something?”
“Yeah, I think so,” she said. “So what else did the doctor say? Did he say there was no way to fix it?”
“He didn’t get that far before I started spiraling,” I admitted.
“That’s alright. That was scary information to get,” she said. “I would have freaked out, too.”
Sometimes, I thought Marley’s training as a teacher made her even more capable of supporting people than she already was. She had a way with simple empathy that made me not feel so isolated and afraid.
I took in another deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yeah,” I said finally.
“Do you think you can stay calm to finish the conversation now?” she asked me. “Or do you need me to come help out?”
“I think I can handle it now,” I said. “I just needed an interruption.”
