Chapter Thirty-Eight #2
I shook my head. “He wasn’t. Not really. He’d sit in his chair and read the paper and wait for dinner. Sometimes he’d yell. Mostly he just wanted me quiet. The TV was always on, as loud as possible.”
“And your mother?”
I let out a bitter laugh. “She was a ghost. Did everything she was supposed to, but only because she was afraid of the consequences if she didn’t. If I was out of sight, I was out of mind. I don’t remember ever being hugged by her. Not once.”
Dr. Stiles nodded. “That must have been lonely.”
I braced for her to say more, to fill the silence with a platitude. But she let the words hang, just heavy enough to crush me if I let them.
“I was an only child,” I said, as if that explained it all. “I didn’t have friends. We moved every year or two, sometimes less. There wasn’t a point in starting over.”
She made a note—mental, not written. “What did you want from them?”
I chewed on that. It wasn’t something I’d ever let myself articulate, even to myself. “I guess… I wanted them to care. To be present. To make me feel like I mattered.”
“And did you?”
I shook my head. “No.”
She let a moment pass, then said, “You’ve told me before how important it was for you to have a family of your own. Can you tell me why?”
I felt my hands knotting into fists. “Because I didn’t want to end up like them.”
“Like your parents?” she prompted.
“Yes.” The word came out sharp. “I wanted to build something real. Something that wouldn’t fall apart because people were too busy or too scared or too selfish to hold onto it.”
She nodded again, but this time it was softer, almost mournful. “Did it work?”
I tried to laugh, but my throat closed up. “No. It made everything worse. I wanted it so bad I… I ruined it. I made it impossible for her to stay.”
Dr. Stiles let the silence settle again, a blanket of accusation I was supposed to pull off myself.
“I thought if I could just…” I trailed off, unable to finish.
She waited.
“If I could just keep her happy, make her feel like we were enough, it would work. That’s what I told myself. But I was never enough. Not for anyone.”
She let the words breathe. Then she leaned in, elbows on her knees.
Her gaze sharpened, voice even softer than before.
“You told me once that after the diagnosis, something changed in you. That it felt like a switch flipped.” She tilted her head, searching my face.
“Was it the absence of hope? Or was there something about losing the possibility of children that made you—” she paused, “—need more from your marriage?”
I looked away, unwilling to give her the satisfaction, but it was pointless.
I wasn’t fooling anyone. “I didn’t know how to fill the void.
There was just this… emptiness. Like the world shrank down to one thing I could never have.
I thought, maybe if I could bring in something exciting, new—sex, variety, whatever—it would drown out what we’d lost.”
She nodded, not judgmental, just noting the words as they hung in the air. “So you tried to patch over the loss with distraction. You created rules and structure, hoping it would feel like control.”
“Didn’t work,” I admitted, letting out a laugh that sounded brittle. “All it did was make everything worse. For both of us.”
“It couldn’t have worked,” she said gently. “Because what you were missing wasn’t sex. It wasn’t excitement or newness. It was intimacy—a sense of belonging. A family. And when you substituted thrills, you only drifted further away from what you really wanted.”
A hollow spot opened in my chest. “I see that now. I just… at the time, it felt like the only option left. Like if we couldn’t be parents, then maybe we could at least avoid being miserable. But nothing stuck. Not for long.”
Dr. Stiles’ eyes met mine, steady and calm.
“Cameron, people often try to compensate for deep emotional pain with temporary relief—sex, alcohol, gambling, whatever their drug of choice is. But it always comes back to the pain underneath. The wound just gets bigger the more you pretend it isn’t there. ”
I swallowed hard, throat tight. “I could see Livi slipping away from me. Every night, a little further. I thought I was losing her to the grief, but it turned out I was the one burning the bridge between us.”
She leaned back, hands folded, her manner almost kind. “What would you go back and tell yourself? The man you were, the moment he decided to open the marriage?”
I let the question sink in. “Don’t do it. Just—talk to her. Admit you’re scared. Let her in instead of pushing her out.” The words stung, maybe more than I expected. “If I’d just been honest about how desperate I felt, maybe I wouldn’t have blown up everything good we had.”
Her mouth curved into a sympathetic half-smile. “Honesty is harder than excitement, isn’t it?”
A cold knot coiled in my stomach. “It’s easier to risk everything than to admit you’re already broken.” I picked at the seam of my pants, unable to look up. “I guess that’s what I am. Broken.”
She shook her head gently. “You aren’t broken. You’re hurt. And you’ve learned some painful lessons about how from running the core of your issues—the truth of them—only makes them hit harder when they finally catch up to you.”
She leaned back and sighed before continuing, “you’ve spent your life trying to outpace your loneliness.
That’s what drove you—work, marriage, your obsession with having children.
You thought that if you built the perfect life, you could fill the emptiness inside you.
But you never learned to sit with yourself, to be enough on your own.
So you chased, and when you got close, you sabotaged it because you didn’t think you deserved it. ”
I closed my eyes. “That’s… exactly it.”
She sat back, satisfied. “Now, what do you think comes next?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“You have to grieve what you lost. Not just Livi, but the life you thought you were owed. The childhood you didn’t get. The family you built up in your head. Grief is ugly, and lonely, and it feels endless, but it’s the only thing that lets you move on.”
My chest tightened. “How do I do that?”
She smiled, just a little. “You let yourself feel it. All of it. Not just the anger, but the sadness, the regret, the emptiness. You don’t run from it. You don’t try to fill it up with noise or work or sex or anything else. You let it break you down, because only then can you start to rebuild.”
I wanted to argue, to push back against the cliché. But I was tired. So fucking tired.
She looked at the clock—never at her watch, always the clock on the bookshelf behind me.
“We’re almost done for today,” she said.
“Before you go, I want you to try something this week. Every day, when you wake up, I want you to write down three things you’re feeling.
Not thinking—feeling. No qualifiers, no justifications.
Just what’s there. At the end of the week, bring the list, and we’ll talk about it. ”
I rolled my eyes. “More journaling.”
“Self-awareness,” she corrected, with the faintest curl of her lip. “You can do it or not. But I think it might help.”
I nodded, not because I agreed but because I needed to end the session on something that felt like progress.
As I stood to leave, she said, “You don’t have to punish yourself forever, Cameron. You just have to learn to live with yourself. That’s hard enough.”
I thanked her, a reflex, and walked out into the cold, gray light.
The air bit at my face, sharp and bracing.
I stood there on the curb, hands in my pockets, watching the traffic blur by.
I thought about the assignment, about how stupid it seemed, and about how maybe, for once, I could just do what I was told.
I went home. I opened a new spiral-bound notebook—one that Livi had bought for me, still pristine. I wrote down the first three feelings I could name.
Empty.
Guilty.
Tired.
I closed the notebook and set it on the nightstand, beside the ugly blue bowl and the silent phone. I wasn’t sure if I’d keep going, or if it would matter. But for the first time in months, I felt the faintest outline of hope, like the shape of something slowly filling in from the inside out.
That night, I slept.
I dreamed nothing at all.