“I went to therapy.” He says it as casually as if he’s telling me he went to the grocery store. “Tori didn’t ask me to. She didn’t give me an ultimatum. I just realized I didn’t want to bring all my Sienna baggage into something new, and that wasn’t fair to Tori. So I went.”
“And it helped?”
“It’s not magic, man. Nobody waves a wand and fixes you. But yeah, it helped. Mostly because it made me see patterns I didn’t know I was running.” He looks at me. “You’ve got patterns, Arch. We all do. Yours is that you default to steady and let everything else rot underneath.”
Ollie nods. “The stoic suffering thing. Very noble. Very dumb.”
I drink my beer and don’t argue because he’s not wrong.
“I can give you my therapist’s number,” Zayden says. “She’s, uh—she’s good. She’s direct. She won’t let you bullshit your way through it.”
“I don’t know man, some stranger picking through my brain…”
“Or you can keep doing what you’ve been doing, which is clearly working out great.” He grins smugly and raises his beer. Ollie raises his. I stare at both of them.
“Fine,” I say. “Give me the number.”
Her name is Dr. Melendez, and her office is in Midtown on the fourteenth floor. The chairs are the kind of comfortable that’s designed to make you feel safe enough to say things you otherwise wouldn’t.
I sit down on a Tuesday at noon during a break in the schedule. I’ve never been to therapy before, and I don’t know what I expected, but Dr. Melendez is a small woman in her fifties with glasses and a calm demeanor. She doesn’t waste time.
“So, Archer. What brings you in?”
“My teammate said I should come.”
“Why did he say that?”
“Because I’m, um—” I rub the back of my neck. “I’m recently divorced, and I want to begin a new relationship with someone who matters a lot to me. And I want to make sure I’m not repeating mistakes.”
“What mistakes?”
“I don’t know. That’s kind of the problem.”
She writes something down. “Tell me about your marriage.”
I tell her not the whole thing, not every year, but the shape of it—how Bree and I looked good on paper, how the first few years were fine, how the distance grew slowly and neither of us addressed it, how we spent two years sleeping in separate rooms before she finally said she was leaving.
“Did you try to stop her?” she asks.
“Not really, no.”
“Why not?”
I think about this. I’ve never been asked that specific question before, and the answer I’ve been telling myself—that I respected her decision, that I knew she was right—doesn’t feel complete anymore.
“Because I was relieved,” I say, and the word surprises me as it comes out. “She left, and I was sad, but underneath the sadness, I felt relieved, and I’ve been carrying a lot of guilt about that.”
“Why do you think you felt relieved?”
“Because it was over. The pretending was over. I didn’t have to keep showing up for something that wasn’t working and act like it was fine.”
“You used the phrase ‘showing up.’ Is that how you experienced your marriage? As something you showed up for?”
“Um—” I stare at the gray, nondescript carpet. “Yeah, I think I did. Like it was a job I was committed to, not a relationship that brought me joy. Does that make sense?”
“It makes a lot of sense. Let me ask you something else. You said you don’t want to repeat mistakes with this new person. What do you think the mistake was with Bree?”
“I married the wrong person.”
