Chapter 27
?
— Holden —
D r. Peter Larkin’s office was nothing like Bea’s.
Where Bea favored warm neutrals and soft lighting, Pete had gone for dark wood and leather, the aesthetic of a man who’d spent thirty years working with first responders and veterans.
His walls were lined with certifications and photographs—groups of firefighters, police officers, military units he’d counseled over the decades.
I sat across from him in a leather chair that creaked when I settled into it.
The room smelled like old books and something faintly chemical — wood polish, maybe.
Nothing soft about it. Nothing that said safe .
Just solid and functional, the way a workspace looks when the person using it has stopped worrying about comfort.
“Start from the beginning,” he said. “Whatever made you pick up the phone. Take it from there.” He paused. “Pete, by the way. Nobody who sits in that chair calls me Dr. Larkin for long.”
I told him. All of it. I kept Bea’s name out of it — she was in the same line of work, and I didn’t know whether Pete knew her, and it wasn’t my call to drop her into the room without her knowing. So she was just the woman the whole way through.
Pete listened without interrupting. He didn’t write anything down. Just watched me, hands folded, and let me talk until there was nothing left. By the end my hands were braced on my knees, shoulders low, the leather chair creaking under the shift of my weight.
When I finished he was quiet for a long moment.
“That’s a lot to carry,” he finally said.
“I was drowning. I’m trying to swim now.”
“Good.” He nodded. “That’s the first step — deciding you want to live instead of just survive.”
I glanced at the clock on the wall behind him. The hour was up. I started to push myself out of the chair.
“Sit down.”
I looked at him. He hadn’t moved.
“I block two hours for first sessions. The first hour is for talking, or for sitting in that chair saying nothing — about half the men who come through here use it for the second one.” He nodded toward the chair. “The next hour is for figuring out what you actually need.”
I sat back down.
“What do you want out of this?”
I thought about it. “I don’t want to be the man I’ve been since Danny,” I said.
“I don’t want to be the one who reached for a bottle.
The one who closed a door on the only person who could have helped me.
” I stopped. “The woman — I’m not ready to talk about her.
Not today. I need to deal with everything else first. Then maybe I come back to her. ”
Pete nodded once, slow. He didn’t write that down either.
“That’s the right call. Most men come in here wanting to fix everything at once.
They end up fixing nothing. One thing at a time.
We’ll come back to her when you’re ready.
” He sat forward. “Then let’s talk about what that takes.
What I do in this office matters, but it’s not enough on its own.
You need other people doing different jobs in the work.
One man can’t carry you out of this. Not me, not your president, not your VP, not anybody.
It has to come from a few directions at once or it doesn’t hold. ”
He held up a hand and ticked the points off on his fingers.
“One. This office. Twice a week to start — Tuesdays and Thursdays at two. We’ll re-evaluate in a month. The first six weeks are the worst. That’s when most men quit. I want eyes on you twice a week through that window.”
I nodded.
“Two. There’s a grief support group that meets at the community center on Maple Street, Tuesday evenings. A woman named Gillian runs it. She’s good. I want you in that room.”
“I can talk about Danny in here.”
“You can. You’re going to. I want you also saying his name in a room of people who didn’t know him.
Strangers grieving their own dead. People with no investment in what it means for you.
You need to hear what your grief sounds like out loud somewhere you can’t impress anyone and can’t disappoint anyone. ”
My throat went tight. I nodded again.
“Three.” He set his hand down. “Tell me about the drinking.”
I’d been waiting for it the whole hour. “Almost every day since Danny died. Half a bottle of whiskey on a slow night. A whole bottle in the first few days.”
He didn’t react. Just absorbed it. “What do you want to do about it?”
I looked at the leather of the chair under my hands. Cracked along the seam, soft from years of men sitting in this exact spot doing this exact thing. I’d been turning the question over since the morning I’d walked to Bea’s door.
“I’m done,” I said. “Starting today. No more.” I’d thought it would feel like giving something up. It didn’t. It felt like shutting the door on someone I didn’t want to be anymore.
Pete didn’t congratulate me. Didn’t tell me it was the right call. Just watched me say it and let the words be what they were. “Okay. What’s your plan when you crave it at two in the morning.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Then we’re going to make one before you leave this room. Who can you call at two AM who’ll pick up and not make it weird.”
I thought. “Colt. My VP. He’d pick up.”
“Does he know what the call is.”
“He’s been somewhere like this. Different shape, same room.”
“Good. Use him. Every time. Don’t try to ride it out alone.” He paused. “How long have you been trying to carry things by yourself, Holden?”
I didn’t answer. He knew the answer — I’d walked him all the way back to sixteen in the first hour.
He sat back. “One more thing. Get yourself a notebook between now and Thursday. Write in it. Doesn’t matter what — what you’re thinking, what you’re avoiding, what you reached for instead of dealing with something. Just put it on the page. Bring it with you Thursday.”
“A notebook?”
“A notebook. The kind a kid takes to school. Don’t overthink it.” He stood. The session was over.
I made the next two appointments with his receptionist on the way out — both at two, Tuesday and Thursday going forward — and stepped out into the afternoon.
I’d come in expecting to be talked at. Lectured.
Told what to set down first. Some sentence I could carry out of the room and turn over in my hands.
What I had instead was a list. An appointment with Pete twice a week.
A grief group on Maple Street. A notebook to buy. And a conversation to have with Colt.
Instructions. Something I could follow. I could do that. A road captain followed a map. Planned a route from A to B. Built contingencies for the parts that went sideways. I’d been doing that job for the club for years. I could do it for this.
I stood on the sidewalk for a moment with my face tilted up. The sun was low and pale. I took a breath that went all the way down.
The clubhouse was quiet when I got back. A handful of brothers in the main room. Pool game in the corner. Country station on the radio behind the bar.
Colt was at the table near the office door, paperwork spread in front of him. He looked up when I came in. Watched me cross the room.
I stopped in front of him. He set the pen down.
“Larkin?”
“Larkin.”
He looked at me for a long moment. He’d been waiting for me to land somewhere. Hadn’t pushed. Hadn’t asked. Just held space and let me get here in my own time.
“I’m done drinking. As of today.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. I don’t think I’ll have a problem. But if I do—”
I let the sentence go. He picked it up where I left it.
“I’m here, brother. Whatever you need.”
He stood up. The chair scraped back. He came around the table and put a hand on my shoulder. Left it there longer than he needed to.
“Anything else?”
“No. That was it.”
“Okay.” He took the hand back. Sat down to his paperwork.
?
I started journaling.
It felt stupid at first — a grown man writing in a notebook like a teenager with a diary. But Pete had told me to, and I was willing to try anything.
The first few entries were garbage. Rambling, incoherent, more self-pity than self-reflection. But slowly, over days and weeks, patterns started to emerge. Connections I’d been too drunk to see.
Pete asked what I was afraid of. I said losing people. He asked if controlling everything had ever actually kept anyone safe.
I didn’t have an answer.
First Tuesday at the community center. Sat in the parking lot for fifteen minutes before I could make myself walk in. Said my name. Said Danny’s. Said it to a room of strangers, walked back out, went home, didn’t drink.
Pete keeps making me say the same sentence.
Danny chose. He stepped in front of that bullet himself.
I trained him but I didn’t put him in that path — he put himself there.
We’ve been over it every session for weeks.
Today I wrote it down without flinching.
Maybe that’s progress. Maybe it’s nothing.
I looked up from my journal to find Colt standing in the doorway of my room. He was leaning against the frame, arms crossed. Looked like he’d been there a minute already, watching without announcing himself. Not the VP face he wore in church. The other one.
“Something’s different,” he said. He pushed off the doorframe and walked in, settling into the chair by my desk.
“Pete’s helping. The journaling. The Tuesday group. Talking through it instead of drowning in it.”
“And the guilt?”
I closed the journal and set it aside. “Still there. Probably always will be. But I’m learning to carry it instead of letting it carry me.”
Colt nodded slowly. “That’s how it works. You don’t get over the hard things. You just learn to live with them.”
“I have to. Not just for Bea. For Danny. For myself.”
“The waiting’s over, at least.”
“The waiting?”
“The part where you thought the revelation would fix it.” He shrugged, not unkind. “We could all see it. You were holding on—waiting for the truth to come out, like once Bea knew you hadn’t cheated, that would be the thing that opened the door.”
I wanted to argue. But he was right. For weeks I’d been going through the motions while part of me held the revelation like a key — like once I turned it everything would unlock.
It hadn’t. Because it was the wrong key to the wrong door.
“I’m not doing it for her anymore,” I said. “I mean, I hope—” I stopped, shook my head. “It doesn’t matter what I hope. What matters is that I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. Because I need to be a better man, whether we get back together or not.”
Colt studied me for a long moment. Then he nodded once, decisively.
“Good. That’s the only way it works.” He stood. “Keep doing the work. She’s watching, even if she’s not saying so.”
His hand came down on my shoulder and stayed a moment longer than it needed to. He’d been in this exact place. Knew what it felt like to stand in it. I didn’t look up and he didn’t need me to.
He left, and I sat alone with my journal and my thoughts. I opened the journal to a fresh page. Before I had a chance to write anything, there was a knock.
Glitch.
“She’s doing okay, brother. Nothing to flag.”
I nodded.
“She doesn’t know,” Glitch said. Not reassurance — just confirmation. He walked off.
I wasn’t doing this to get her back. I knew that now, clearly. I was doing it because I’d stood in her hallway and told her to check before she opened the door — and because I knew she didn’t always do it, and because somebody needed to be close enough to help her if she needed it. That was all.
I looked back at the journal. The page was still blank.