Chapter 29 Silva
Silva
“What I’m hearing is that one of your biggest challenges as a couple,” the therapist began slowly, her chin on her knuckles, “is this constant push-pull that you’ve been engaged in since the start. An unwilling dance, if you will.”
Tate had been disappointed to learn there was no minotaur in the practice.
There was a werewolf, but neither of them was entirely comfortable with a human-adjacent therapist. “An obnoxious human for twenty-nine days out of the month,” he’d put it a bit more unkindly.
He had wrinkled his nose further at the photo of the goblin she’d scrolled to next, shaking his head.
“I’ve got nothing against goblins, Silva.
But I would never stop staring at that piercing.
I don’t want to hear life advice from anyone who’d do that to their eyelid.
I’ve enough eye-related trauma as it is. ”
She exhaled in a whoosh, rolling her eyes.
He was ridiculous. He was in favor of the ogre on the page, but she didn’t want to go to a male of any species.
They had settled, at last, on a long-faced troll named Zola, with kind eyes and oversized glasses perched on the tip of her nose, deciding she was as neutral as they would find.
It was their third appointment.
The first week had been mostly introductory, with each of them telling the therapist about themselves and what had brought them to therapy together.
She’d told Zola about the enclave, about the heavy weight of expectations she’d been born under, and the sharp edges of the community at large.
A privileged life, of course. One of ease; without question.
But still a life that had never felt entirely her own, mapped out from the day she was born.
Silva breathed out a sigh of relief once she was done.
She’d started with her own therapist just a few weeks earlier and had done the same exercise, so in this, at least, she was a bit ahead of the curve.
“And why is it that you were hoping your own therapist would have been able to take you on as a couple?” Zola asked, seizing on a comment Silva had made offhand. “Were you hoping to go into this having someone already on your side?”
She blinked. “Of course not.” Of course, she had. She squirmed in her seat, avoiding Tate’s eye. She had already told her own therapist all about their relationship issues, starting from the very first night they met. “I just thought it would be easier, but-but this is fine. Obviously.”
When it was his turn, Silva was surprised by how willing Tate seemed to be to share, giving a highly-edited version of events to keep them from having the authorities called, but largely telling the truth.
She’d winced at his description of his mother when he’d been a child.
She tried to imagine him as a tiny boy, a male counterpoint to Aelin, tiptoeing around to avoid setting off a volatile, mentally unstable parent.
Silva loved her daughter more than anything in the world, couldn’t imagine a scenario when she’d not be Aelin’s soft place to land, and the thought alone made her feel a bit sick.
“I’m glad to hear she’s met our daughter. But you’ve had phone calls, Silva. Not real life. I want Aelin to know her, but with guardrails.”
His grandmother’s kitchen and his grandfather’s workshop had been his safe havens, and losing them in adolescence when he did had not only been the severing of the familial unit, but it had been the end of his emotional safety as well.
And that’s not even getting into whatever happened to him in the Otherworld.
You’re going to be in therapy together forever.
During the second appointment, Zola handed Tate a tablet and asked him to go into the adjoining room alone to fill out a survey and be as honest as he could.
Silva filled Zola in on their relationship and why they were seeking therapy while he was gone, assuming it would be her turn next .
. . but the moment never came. The tablet was placed in a desk drawer, and they had continued for the rest of the hour as normal.
“I don’t understand why he gets to go off and play on the tablet while I have to bare my soul,” she’d huffed to Dynah the following evening.
She hated that a tiny, insidious part of her brain was viewing their couples therapy as a race to see who was most at fault.
Silva knew that wasn’t fair. The whole point of this was to fix what was broken, not to get a gold star for being the one who’d caused the least damage.
At the very least, if they were never going to be fixed as a couple, they needed to learn to co-parent, because so far Tate had been showing up for Aelin with the same consistency and work ethic he’d shown in his businesses. Which is part of the problem.
The other part of the problem, another one she knew was unfair, was how irritated she was over how good he was at this.
Silva teared up, forced her way through thick emotion to talk about the way she felt and her insecurities.
Tate was calm, well-spoken, more honest and insightful than she’d been expecting, and she couldn’t shake the ridiculous notion that he was winning therapy.
It was nice having Dynah next door. Dynah joined her and Aelin for dinner at least once a week, took walks with them in the evening, didn’t mind Aelin running into her little backyard to check on the chipmunk, and came over with her own basket and folded laundry with Silva on Thursday nights as they watched a sweeping historical drama, featuring a brooding naga lord and the working-class selkie he loved.
“Maybe she was giving him a personality test,” Dynah offered with a shrug.
Now it was their third appointment, and evidently, they were engaged in a dance to which neither of them knew the steps.
“If we want to put a label on this, it’s a differing attachment style,” Zola went on. “You have an anxious-avoidant dynamic. It’s very common. It’s almost a kinetic pull from one to the other. You described your early relationship as magnetic, and that’s not surprising to hear.”
Tate dropped his face into his hands. “Oh, I hate this already.”
The troll chuckled as Silva glared from the other side of the loveseat, wanting to kick him. She didn’t like how discomfited she was feeling in their newly rekindled relationship, and she didn’t know how to admit that quite yet, not being able to fully explain it to herself.
Everything was going well.
She had no reason to complain. And that, more than anything, she had decided, was a sign that everything was all wrong.
“I don’t know how it is that you don’t remember how to get back to somewhere you claim you were just five days ago,” she’d told him several weeks earlier, picking him up from the Plundered Pixie.
It had been the first week of the new month, the week Aelin was starting school, the first week Tate would be officially stepping back into Silva’s life as more than her missing lover, as more than the love of her life, as more than the long-absent piece of her heart.
He was coming back as Aelin’s father, and Silva still didn’t know how she felt about that.
She knew it was ridiculous. This is what you wanted.
This is what you dreamed about. This is what you almost got yourself killed for.
All of that was true, but in those intervening three years since Aelin’s birth, she’d learned a self-sufficiency she’d previously never needed to develop.
All she had wanted was for Tate to come home.
She’d never taken the time to think through what that would be like, though.
They had been fine without him . . . and now she needed to make room for him within the independence she’d carved out.
He would pick Aelin up from school and keep her until Silva got home. The rest of the week’s schedule was still a work in progress, but for those three days, they had a plan.
Tate gave her a scowl from the passenger’s seat.
“Well, it hasn’t been five days now, has it, dove?
” He held up a hand, counting off on his long fingers.
“Five days getting me fuckin’ head kicked in, and then I was dead for a week.
I spent a second week in that miserable hospital.
Then I was home, completely feeble. And now it’s been a fourth week, so I think a month and then some is adequate enough not to remember whatever nonsense directions you gave me to Clagglehorn Crookery. ”
Silva smiled grimly, shaking her head. He was still counting his time away from her in weeks. Weeks. She felt as though she’d aged a hundred years without him, five endless, aching years, half a decade, and he had the audacity to be counting in weeks.
Counting in weeks, and looking like a fresh-faced twenty-something as he did so.
She hadn’t realized it until his bruises were less fresh, then understanding he was serious about sleeping up on the Pixie’s roof, like a ridiculous gargoyle.
Hadn’t realized until his injuries were less noticeably severe, when the impact of those five days beneath that oversized moon became clear, but he looked years younger, as if the unnatural moonlight in her Majesty’s forest had buffed his skin to a smooth sheen, giving him a supernatural lustre.
She’d been even crankier afterward, staring at her own five-years-older reflection in the mirror.
She’d picked him up that morning, after he insisted he didn’t even know which direction to head in for the morning’s objective — to show him the way to Aelin’s school, how to get to her condo, where to find the community center, the grocery store, and any other Cambric Creek landmarks Silva thought it was important for him to know.
“The hospital, I didn’t even think of that. It’s in the other direction, back by the university.”