Lilac wrapped her hands around her mug. “What do you think he thought?”
“That he was protecting me.” I looked at my tea. “That if he got there first, I wouldn’t have to make a harder choice later.” I set the mug down. “And I can see the inside of the logic. That’s the part I can’t get past — I can see exactly how he got there. And I still didn’t get a word in.”
Lilac was quiet for a moment, turning her mug. “When Colt thought I was gone, he just—decided things,” she said carefully. “For years. Didn’t ask anyone. Didn’t let anyone in. He thought that was what it looked like to love someone.” She paused. “I don’t know if it’s the club, or just the kind of person who ends up in it. But I think some of them genuinely don’t know there’s another way.”
I recognized what she was describing. It wasn’t an excuse. Just — context.
“That doesn’t fix it,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t.”
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I had my first therapy appointment two weeks after he ended us.
Dr. Sally Batten had been on my professional radar for years—we’d referred clients back and forth, attended the same conferences. Sitting in the patient’s chair across from her felt strange since I knew the mechanics all too well and had to remind myself that knowing how something works didn’t exempt me from needing it.
She asked me why I was there. What I wanted to get out of this. What had happened that had led me to her door.
I gave her the shape of it, not the specifics. A close friend of his had died suddenly. The night it happened my boyfriend had come apart in a way I hadn’t seen from him before, andI’d stayed with him until he was asleep, then left to be with the friend’s mother. When I came home, he was waiting in my doorway to tell me he’d slept with someone else that night and that we were done. I left out the club, the circumstances of the death, the names.
Sally let a moment of silence settle. “You said he ended it before you could speak,” she said.
“Yes.”
“How did that land?”
I thought about it. “Like I’d been handed a piece of news and a verdict at the same time, with no gap in between for my opinion.”
“And what would you have said, if he’d given you the gap?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. My hands had gone still in my lap without my noticing — both of them, flat on my thighs. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I think I would have been furious. I think I would have needed time. I think I might have—” I stopped again. “I might have tried to understand it. What was happening to him. What drove him to that.”
“And that bothers you?”
“That I might have stayed? No.” I looked at my hands. “He didn’t give me the chance to even decide. That’s what bothers me.”
Sally nodded slowly. “You’re a therapist. Your first instinct in crisis is to move toward the wound and understand it.”
“Yes.”
“And he preempted that.”
“He took the choice away before I could decide whether to forgive him.” I sat forward without meaning to, the anger rising in my throat, clean and clear. “Which I might not have done. I might have decided it was unforgivable. But I want that to be my decision.”
“I think,” Sally said, “that’s the thing we’re going to work on.”
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I kept seeing clients. Kept supervising Jessica, my graduate student, through the practicum hours she owed toward her license. Kept showing up.
Some days were fine. Some days I sat between sessions and thought about him—not about the infidelity, but about the way he’d looked standing in my doorway. The deliberateness of it. The grief on his face that had nothing performative about it.
I didn’t call him. He didn’t call me. But I thought about him more than I wanted to, in the quiet moments.
Chapter 14
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