20. Will
— ? —
Will
Dr. Reyes had a way of looking at me that made me feel like a specimen under glass.
“You mentioned your father’s affair several times,” she said, pen poised over her notepad, her eyes steady behind wire-rimmed glasses. “But you haven’t talked about how it made you feel.”
“I’ve told you. It made me determined not to become him.”
“And yet you accused your wife of exactly what he did.”
The words lodged somewhere under my ribs, sharp and uncomfortable.
I shifted in my chair, the leather creaking beneath me.
Dr. Reyes’s office was deliberately neutral, all soft colors and indirect lighting, designed to make patients feel comfortable opening up.
I didn’t feel comfortable. I felt like someone had peeled back my skin and started poking at the raw tissue underneath.
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Isn’t it?” She tilted her head, that particular gesture she used when she wanted me to think harder. “Your father suspected your mother of infidelity. He accused her. He was wrong. You suspected Blair of infidelity. You accused her. You were wrong. The parallels seem fairly clear.”
“My father was projecting his own guilt onto my mother. I wasn’t doing that.”
“Weren’t you?”
I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it again. This was what I paid her for. To ask the questions I didn’t want to answer. To shine a light into the corners I’d spent thirty-four years avoiding.
“I’ve never been unfaithful to Blair.”
“I didn’t suggest you’d been.” Dr. Reyes made a note. “But guilt isn’t always about what we’ve done. Sometimes it’s about what we’ve wanted. Or what we’ve feared we were capable of.”
“What does that mean?”
“You tell me.”
I stared at the painting on the wall behind her desk.
Some abstract thing, all blues and greens, probably chosen specifically because it was impossible to interpret.
The quiet held, and I knew she wouldn’t break it.
She never did. That was part of her technique.
Let the patient sit with the discomfort until they either spoke or spontaneously combusted.
“I was afraid,” I said finally. “That’s what it comes down to. I was afraid that Blair was too good for me. That she’d eventually realize it. That one day she’d wake up and see that she could have done better, could have had someone who wasn’t carrying around all this. This damage.”
“And Trip represented that fear.”
“Trip was everything I wasn’t. Charming without trying. Funny. He had this history with her that I could never compete with. Twenty years of friendship. Inside jokes I’d never understand. I felt like I was always on the outside of their relationship, looking in.”
“So when evidence appeared that seemed to confirm your fears.”
“I jumped on it.” The admission tasted bitter. “I used it as proof of what I’d always suspected. That I wasn’t enough. That she wanted something else.”
“And in doing so, you pushed her away. Created the very outcome you were trying to prevent.”
“Yes.”
Dr. Reyes wrote another line in her notepad.
“That’s a significant insight, Will. I want you to sit with it this week.
Think about the relationship between fear and self-sabotage.
Think about how your determination not to become your father actually led you to repeat his patterns, just with different details. ”
“You’re saying I’m exactly like him.”
“I’m saying you learned from him. Children learn from their parents, whether those lessons are helpful or harmful. The good news is that patterns can be unlearned. New behaviors can be established.” She glanced at the clock. “We’re out of time for today. Same time next week?”
“Same time.”
I walked out of her office feeling raw and exposed, the way I always did after our sessions. The afternoon sun was too bright, the street too loud, everything too much. I got in my car and sat there for a long moment, gripping the steering wheel, trying to process everything she’d said.
Fear and self-sabotage. Repeating patterns. Becoming the thing I was most afraid of.
I drove home to an empty house.
Henry came to stay that weekend. Our first real overnight at Seacliff since Blair left, and I prepared for it like it was the most important thing I’d ever do. His cereal. The dinosaur sheets from his room at home. An actual list, bullet points, of things we could do if the silence got too big.
Blair brought him at ten on Saturday. We did the handoff on the front steps like the strangers we were teaching ourselves not to be, passing a backpack and a stuffed whale between us.
“He didn’t sleep well this week,” she said, low, out of his hearing. “Bad dreams. Just so you know.”
“I’ve got him.”
“I know you do.” She crouched to kiss his hair. “Be good for Daddy. See you tomorrow.”
He was fine all day. We built a fort. We wrecked French toast on purpose.
He beat me at a card game he almost certainly cheated at and I let him gloat.
It was the best day I’d had in months, and I kept catching myself grinning at nothing, and I kept remembering that at the end of it his mother was across town in a narrow bed that wasn’t ours.
It was at bedtime that he took me apart.
I’d tucked him in, whale under one arm, and I was halfway to the door when he said it, in that flat casual way children deliver the things that end you.
“Daddy? Is it my fault?”
I stopped. “Is what your fault, buddy?”
“That you and Mommy don’t live together.” He said it to the ceiling, not to me, the way he did when a question was too big to say to somebody’s face. “Because I told Mommy about our talk. The one you said was secret. Maybe if I didn’t tell, you wouldn’t have gotten so sad.”
I came back and sat on the edge of his bed. My chest had gone tight in a way that had nothing to do with breathing.
“Henry. Look at me.” I waited until he did. “None of this is your fault. Not one piece of it. You did exactly the right thing, telling the truth. The grown-up thing that’s broken, I broke it. Me. Not you. Understand?”
“Then why can’t you fix it?”
“I’m trying. Every single day.”
He chewed his lip, the way his mother did.
“I drew a picture at school,” he said finally.
“Of our family. Miss Abbott put them all on the wall. Mine had you and Mommy and me and the baby, in front of our house.” His voice went small.
“But then I remembered we don’t all live there anymore.
So I asked if I could take mine down. She let me, but everybody saw, and Tommy asked why, and I didn’t know what to say. ”
He said it without crying. That was the part that gutted me. He’d already made his peace with it, this seven-year-old, folded the wreckage of his family into a shape small enough to carry to school and hide in a desk.
I stayed until he fell asleep. Then I went downstairs and sat in the dark in the house four generations of Beaumont men had lived in, and I put my face in my hands, and I understood all the way down what my fear had actually cost. It hadn’t only cost Blair, or me.
A little boy was taking his own family down off a classroom wall so no one would ask him about it.
I did that. My suspicion did that.
That night, I wrote another letter to the baby.
I’d started doing this a few weeks ago, after the vineyard weekend.
A habit Dr. Reyes had suggested, actually.
She’d said that sometimes it was easier to be honest with someone who couldn’t respond, who couldn’t judge, who would just receive the words without comment.
The baby couldn’t read yet, wouldn’t be able to for years, but somehow that made it easier.
We’d found out, at the last appointment, that it was a girl.
Blair had let me come. We sat in the dark little room and watched the screen and the technician said the word, and I had to stare at the ceiling to keep from coming apart in front of everyone.
A daughter. I’d started calling her Lili in my head that same afternoon, though I hadn’t said it to Blair yet, and I didn’t know if I ever would.
I sat at my desk with a glass of scotch I wasn’t drinking and a pen I couldn’t seem to put to paper. The house was quiet around me, too quiet, the kind of silence that pressed in on you until you couldn’t breathe.
Finally, I started writing.
Dear Lili,
That’s not your name yet, not officially.
Your mother wants Lysandra. But I like to imagine you as a Lili, all delicate petals and hidden strength.
Your mother has that quality too. She looks soft, gentle, like someone who needs protecting.
But she’s the strongest person I’ve ever known.
Strong enough to leave me when I hurt her.
Strong enough to start over. Strong enough to build a life of her own while carrying you inside her.
I need to tell you what happened. Not the details, necessarily. Those don’t matter. What matters is that I failed her. I failed both of you.
Your mother is the bravest person I’ve ever met.
She kept a secret that cost her everything, because it was the right thing to do.
She walked out of our home with her head high while I stood there like a coward, too proud to admit I was wrong.
She chose to protect someone else when I couldn’t even see past my own fear.
I asked her a question I can never take back. A question that came from somewhere dark and broken inside me. I let fear make me cruel. I let the ghost of my father’s mistakes haunt my own marriage until I became exactly what I was running from.
I’m trying to be different now. I’m in therapy, which would have been unthinkable to me a year ago.
Beaumont men don’t need help, my father always said.
Beaumont men handle their own problems. But I’m starting to realize that Beaumont men have been handling things badly for generations, and someone needs to break the cycle.