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My last client of the day is a woman I’ve been seeing for almost two years.

Her name is Diane. She came to me after her divorce, convinced the whole thing was proof she was fundamentally unlovable, and we’ve spent twenty-two months slowly, carefully taking that belief apart and looking at where it actually came from, which was not her marriage and never was.

She’s better now. Not fixed. There’s no fixed. But she laughs in session sometimes, and she’s started dating in a way that isn’t punishing herself, and today she’s telling me about a man who took her to a botanical garden and didn’t try to make it more than it was. I’m listening, and I’m happy for her in the specific way you’re happy for someone you’ve watched climb out of a hole one handhold at a time.

We wind down the way we always do. I ask what she wants to hold onto from today. She tells me. I write my note.

And then, gathering her coat, she stops.

“Can I say something? And you can tell me it’s none of my business.”

“You can say anything.”

She studies me for a second, and there’s something careful in it, the look of a person deciding whether to hand over a fragile thing.

“You seem different. The last few months. I’ve been trying to put my finger on it and couldn’t, and then I figured it out in the parking lot last week, driving home.” She pauses. “You seem happy. It’s all over you.”

I open my mouth to do the professional thing, the deflect and redirect, this is your hour not mine, and she keeps going before I can.

“And this is going to sound crazy, and you can absolutely tell me to mind my business, but.” She takes a breath. “Did you find Jesus?”

The question lands somewhere I’m not braced for. In two years, in a thousand hours of me asking the questions, she has never once turned one on me. Nobody does. That’s the architecture of the room. The chair I sit in doesn’t get asked things.

I don’t have a professional answer ready, because there isn’t one, and for a second I just look at her.

Her face falls. “Oh gosh. I’m sorry. That was too personal. That was so far over the line, this isn’t about me, it’s about you, forget I⁠—“

“Diane.” I reach over and put my hand over hers on the arm of the chair, which is a thing I have never once done, because there are boundaries and I keep them. “No. You’re right. I did.”

She goes still.

“I found Him. Or He found me. I’m not sure which way that sentence goes. But yes. That’s what you’re seeing.”

And Diane, who came to me two years ago certain she was unlovable, breaks into a smile so wide it changes her whole face.

“I knew it,” she says. “I knew it was something like that.”

“How could you tell?” I ask, and I mean it, I actually want to know, because I have not told a single client, I have kept my whole faith folded up in my own chest where it’s mine, and somehow it’s been leaking out anyway. “I never said anything.”

“You didn’t have to.” She pulls her jacket on. “Your words are different. The way you talk to me. It used to feel like you were the smartest person in the room, which you were, but now it feels like you actually believe I’m going to be okay. Not because the research says so. Because you know something you didn’t used to know.” She shrugs, a little shy about it now. “And you’ve just got this glow. I don’t know how else to say it. You walk in and the room’s warmer. My grandmother had it. Now you’ve got it too.”

After Diane leaves, I sit in my office in the last light of the afternoon and I think about a sermon from three months ago.

Pastor Jack, on words. The tongue, a small thing that sets a whole forest on fire.

And then the turn I didn’t see coming, the one that’s been silently rewiring me ever since. That the person you talk to most in your life is yourself.

I sat in that service and realized I’d been preaching a mean sermon over myself for ten years. That was the part that got me first. But there was a second part, smaller, work-shaped, that I filed away and have been slowly acting on ever since without fully deciding to.

I’ve spent my whole career handing people tools I never used on myself. And I’ve spent it, if I’m honest, from a particular distance. Kind, but clinical. Warm, but from behind glass. I could tell a grieving man exactly why he felt the way he felt, name it, chart it, hand it back in a shape he could carry. What I couldn’t do, what I didn’t know how to do, was sit in the dark with him and believe, all the way down, that there was a way out. Because I wasn’t sure there was. I’d built a whole life on the assumption that there mostly wasn’t. You manage the pain.

Something’s different now, and Diane’s right, it’s in the words.

I still give people the tools. The reframes, the exercises, the careful science. But somewhere in the last few months I started telling people the truth I couldn’t tell them before, which is that I know they’re going to be okay. Not because a study says most people are. Because I have watched, in my own life, a thing I was certain could never change, change. Because I handed my whole locked-up self to a God I’d written off and a room full of people I didn’t trust, and instead of the disaster I’d spent a decade bracing for, I got a life so full it barely fits.

I can’t put that in a treatment note. But it comes out anyway. In the words. In whatever Diane calls the glow.

She’s not the first to say it. That’s the thing I keep turning over.