33. Eric
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
ERIC
This was supposed to make me feel better.
Or at least more prepared. Instead, I’m stuck away from Amanda in this particular newfound hell called group therapy.
Soft instrumental music drifts through the large facility as if there’s some study proving it’ll sand everyone’s edges.
Outside the large floor-to-ceiling windows the late afternoon sunlight flows in between the pine trees.
I don’t belong here.
Everyone around me carries something heavier. A kindergarten teacher who still flinches when doors slam because her ex sent her to the hospital. A pediatric nurse who stopped sleeping after a baby died in her arms. A former army medic with burn scars on his cheeks.
A man whose father left. A man who cheated on the only woman he’s ever wanted and still somehow expects to become a role model. I sit through group therapy feeling like a fraud.
Then there is me. Every breakthrough everyone else seems to have leaves me more aware of how far behind I am.
I should be getting better by now. Instead, I lie awake every night listening to the walls and think about Amanda sleeping without me while her body changes and the kid gets bigger, forgetting the sound of my voice.
And I’m doing what? Matching feelings with words like that’ll make me ready.
I clear my throat. “I shouldn’t even be here.”
Dania, the pediatric nurse, frowns. “Eric—”
“No, seriously.” Heat crawls up my spine, settling on my neck and cheeks. “You all have real trauma. And I’m here because I can’t handle… meanness.”
Samir, the vet, leans forward. “Pain doesn’t need a ranking system.”
I flick my gaze toward my split skin. “Well, mine is self-inflicted.”
The silence that follows isn’t meditative. It’s dead air. I’ve stalled the session again.
The group leader checks the clock. “We’ll pause here. Movement session at 2:30. Belay partners will be assigned. Everyone”—his eyes focus on me—“be on time.”
Climbing is my thing. It settles me. Here, it pisses me off with how it’s monitored. Every partner complains that I lower too fast or climb too aggressively, and I have to slow down. It grates on me because I don’t have time to slow down.
By the time I log into my virtual session with Val, my shoulders ache from tension, and my skin feels too tight for my body. And Val’s going to clock it right away.
“Rough day?” Her glasses slide low on her nose. New hairstyle, too—half-up, half-down.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here.” I snap. “Amanda is alone while I waste time journaling. I’m not even allowed to call her.”
Val arches her brow. “You’re saying you’ve learned nothing?”
“That I hate climbing with strangers. That I miss Amanda.” I scrub a hand over my face. “That everyone here has worse problems than me.”
She doesn’t flinch. “Tell me about Amanda.”
I clench my jaw. “You get to see her every day. You tell me.”
“She’s good.” Val nods. “She had lunch with Diego. Idiot didn’t realize she slipped him a twenty.”
I bark out a laugh, but it catches in my chest and lodges painfully between my ribs.
My lungs strain against it, air refusing to move properly around the sound trapped in my throat.
Then it finally breaks free, cracking into a loud, humiliating sob.
And it doesn’t stop there. My whole torso convulses hard enough that I have to brace my elbows against the desk.
Tears drip onto the surface while more slide down my face, my gaze fixed on the calluses split across my palms.
“Tell me about Amanda, Eric.”
I swallow. “It’s Wednesday. She’s twenty-six weeks and one day.
” My voice cracks. “The baby is the size of a lettuce. In the planner she gave me before I left, this week, she’s making a checklist from the nursery and reading some thriller romance, tallying up the red flags.
” Thinking of me, if I’m lucky. I wipe at my face harshly.
“And she’s doing all of it without me. Because I couldn’t keep myself together.
” A pathetic, high-pitched whimper leaves my throat. “She deserves better.”
“Do you hear yourself speaking of her? She deserves you, Eric.” The crackling of the audio feed on the computer fills the room. “You keep track of her pregnancy.”
I nod and shrug. “It’s stupid.”
Val shakes her head. “I disagree. She loved the notes you’re sending.”
“She likes them?” The weight on my chest lightens.
“Very much.”
I look away before I cry harder. “I don’t want to miss the next appointment.”
“We evaluate week by week,” Val says. “Now answer the question. What are you doing there?”
I drag both hands over my face. “I’m becoming the best version of me.”
She tilts her head slightly. “Do you think Amanda deserves someone who hates himself?”
I exhale shakily. “I told her I’d come back ready. But I don’t know what it means.”
“You do,” Val says. “Amanda doesn’t need perfection. She just wants you.”
My throat tightens. “She does, doesn’t she?”
She nods once. “And a few weeks ago, you wouldn’t accept that as her truth. That matters more than you think.”
For the first time all day, my chest feels a little less heavy.
It’s another group session. We’re all slouched in chairs, nursing coffee or picking at lint.
I lean forward, really listening in. Kayla shares that she stared at the scar on her cheek today.
For the first time, she didn’t rush to look away in disgust, but held her eyes on it.
Dania gives her a soft, “Hell yes.” Samir gives a single loud clap. It’s my turn next.
“I’ve talked about Amanda before,” I say. “Used to think she’d be better off with someone else. Then she found someone and…” I exhale. “It couldn’t fucking stand it.” I drag my hands down my face. “I grew up thinking I wasn’t worth the effort. You can’t give what you never got, right?”
A couple of heads nod. No one jumps in.
I shift in my seat. “I don’t want to keep blaming my dad or my history. I don’t want my kid believing love is conditional.”
Samir leans forward a little. “So what do you want?”
I exhale through my nose. “I want to show up. Always. No matter how hard.”
It’s not life-changing. It doesn’t earn applause. But Dania gives me a look that says, there you go. And Kayla offers a little half-smile. For the first time, I don’t believe I’m faking recovery, but working on it. And for being here feels doable, and the outside feels unpredictable.
It’s my third Saturday here, and Diego’s turn to visit.
We hike through damp pine trails slick with mud from Thursday’s drizzle.
Fallen branches crowd the path until the trees finally open to the natural wall tucked deeper in the woods.
It’s steeper than the ones we’re kept on during movement therapy, rough stone split with narrow cracks and jutting shelves.
Diego and I have been climbing together since we were kids.
We know each other’s rhythm instinctively by now—when to push, when to pause, when the other is about to slip before it even happens.
Years of ropes, harnesses, and near falls turned us into something almost mechanical together, two bodies moving through the same language.
My muscles remember before my mind does.
I hit the first break in the wall just before Diego reaches it below me.
“You look…” Diego squints up at me from the ledge, one hand hooked into the rock. “Not miserable. Contemplative. Walden Pond-style.”
“Not my thing. But I’m getting better at belaying. Giving people the right amount of rope, and letting them help me.”
“Progress.”
I close my eyes and focus on the chirping birds above us. “She okay?” I ask finally.
Diego lifts himself up and stands next to me. “I read some baby book about an owl so she’d sit down. I cried, man. That was some deep shit.” He squeezes right above my collarbone. “She’s good. I promise.”
I want more. I need to know everything she’s eating and if she’s sleeping in my bed.
“She’s seen a lawyer,” Diego adds. “Wants Daray to sign some kind of declaration.”
I let go of the rope as my chest tightens. “He hasn’t?”
“He hasn’t, last we talked about it.”
I palm the center of my chest, thumb digging into my left pec to loosen the pressure building inside me—under the regrets and hopes inked on my skin.
“And the cabin trip?”
“She’s going.” He tips his chin. “I offered to stay back with her.”
“Keith and my father—”
Diego nods. “Keith and fucking Robert can suck my dick.”
“I’ll… Still be here.”
“You’re doing the right thing, man.” He clips my shoulder. “Anytime Robert or Keith are in the picture, there’ll be a Camacho stuck to her side.”
“It should be me.” I trace the A tattooed over my heart. “It fucking sucks.”
Cicadas shrieked nearby, their sharp call ricocheting through the trees. “I was ready to move her out of your place.”
I arch a brow. That would have never happened.
Diego shrugs. “We both thought you’d be fucking someone in that bar. Repeating history.” He waits out my reaction, chest puffed out. “Instead… you’re doing this.” He waves around us. “Breaking the habit.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. Diego hasn’t apologized for hitting me that night, and I realize he isn’t going to, but this is better.
“She misses you,” he says.
I give him my back so he doesn’t see my eyes misting up.
“I helped her move this ugly-ass dresser into your bedroom. She stares at it with such yearning, like you’re hiding in there.
” Diego grabs my shoulders and shakes me lightly, forcing me to look at him.
“The way that woman wants you, man.” He smiles.
“That or you really know what to do with your—” He freezes, then grimaces.
“Nope. Can’t do it. Too much like a sister to me. ”
He chuckles, a lopsided smile on his face. It dims when I don’t laugh.
I avoid his gaze. “It’s not like that at all. We haven’t—”
“Haven’t what?” Diego asks.