Chapter 16
?
— Bea —
Then I was awake. The room was dark. The sheets were cold on his side. And I remembered.
I lay there in the dark with the residue of it, which was somehow worse than waking angry — the grief with nowhere to go because there’d been nothing frightening in the dream to push against.
Sally called this “intrusive grief imagery.” I called it annoying.
“You’re doing better than you’re giving yourself credit for,” she said at our session that week.
“I’m not sure what metric we’re using.”
“You’re feeling it. You’re not intellectualizing it or controlling it or redirecting it. You’re just feeling it.” She tilted her head slightly. “How many of your clients can you say the same about after six weeks?”
I thought about Sarah, still in the acute phase after three months. The young man I was seeing for complicated grief who’d been deflecting for half his life.
“Some of them are doing better than me,” I said cautiously.
“Some of them are. And some of them would benefit from watching you model what it looks like to feel something without needing to manage it into a more acceptable shape.”
I knew she was right. At the same time, I hated that she was right because sometimes I just wanted to wallow in my grief.
Lilac called from the parking lot of the twins’ school that afternoon.
She’d come from a scan — she mentioned it in passing, the way she’d taken to doing, like a status update.
Eighteen weeks. Both boys were measuring right on track.
She’d started feeling movement, little flutters she described as “like someone flicking the inside of a balloon.”
“The brothers still can’t agree on names,” she said, and I could hear her smiling. “Handful suggested Maverick and Goose last week. Before that it was Bonnie and Clyde, which Colt vetoed on principle. Oh, and my personal favorite — Thunder and Lightning.”
“He’s not serious.”
“He made a PowerPoint, Bea. There were slides.”
I laughed — a real one, the kind that surprised me lately. “And Colt?”
“Colt and I have drawn up a shortlist that Handful described to Indira as ‘aggressively sensible.’ But we’re not sharing it with anyone.”
We were quiet for a moment. I could hear the ambient hum of her car, the muffled sounds of the school parking lot through closed windows. Then she paused, and I heard her take a deep breath — the kind of breath that rearranges a conversation.
My mind went immediately to the twins. The pregnancy. “Are Luca and Knox okay?”
“They’re fine.”
“Baby A and Baby B?” We’d taken to calling them that to avoid the ridiculous names the brothers kept cycling through.
“Bea.” Lilac’s voice was louder suddenly, almost sharp. “Everything is fine with me. The boys. The babies. All fine.” She exhaled. “Stop being a therapist. Stop thinking about everyone else. Just listen.”
I closed my mouth. I heard her take another breath, and I knew she was probably telling herself off for talking to me that way. When she spoke again her voice was quieter, more careful. “I have to tell you something, and I want to tell you before you hear it from someone else.”
My pen stopped moving. I was aware, suddenly, of the weight of the phone against my ear, the way the room had gotten quieter without actually changing. “Okay.”
“He’s not good. Holden.” She paused. “He’s been drinking since it happened. Not—I don’t think it’s crisis-level yet, but Colt’s worried. The brothers are keeping an eye on him.”
I let that settle. “Thank you for telling me,” I said.
“I’m not telling you so you’ll go to him,” Lilac said quickly. “I’m not—that’s not what this is. I just thought you should know.”
“I know.” I turned my pen over in my hand, and reached — almost without meaning to — for the safe question. The one I could ask without having to answer anything myself. “How does that feel, honestly? Knowing he’s struggling?”
I could hear her catch it — the swerve, the therapist’s sidestep — and decide to let me have it. “Complicated,” she said finally.
“Yeah.” I set the pen down. “Complicated.”
After I hung up, I sat with the phone still in my hand.
The office was quiet. I set it down after a moment and just stayed there — not trying to analyze what she’d told me, not constructing a response, just sitting with the way it made my chest tighten in about four different directions at once.
Worried for him. Angry that he’d put himself in this position.
Aware that the drinking wasn’t about me, that it was about Danny, that the two things had just gotten tangled up in one terrible night.
Aware also that he’d had a person who would have helped him through it and had sent her away before she could. That was the one I kept coming back to. Not the infidelity. That.
?
My session with Sarah that week was harder than usual.
She’d called me four months ago, her voice so flat I’d almost mistaken it for calm.
She’d found out her husband was having an affair.
He’d denied it — denied it convincingly, for weeks — until she’d found the second phone in his gym bag.
Fifteen years of marriage undone by a prepaid SIM card.
She’d sat in her car in a grocery store parking lot for an hour before she could make herself drive home, and then she’d called me instead of going inside.
In those early sessions she’d been sharp, controlled, furious in a way that was almost clinical.
She’d laid out the facts like evidence — the dates, the lies, the way he’d looked her in the eye over dinner the same night he’d been with someone else.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t waver. She filed for divorce within six weeks and moved into an apartment near her sister.
By most clinical measures, she was doing well.
But grief doesn’t move in a straight line, and the anger had always been holding something else in place.
This week she came in looking like someone who’d been crying for days. “I miss him,” she said, before she was even fully in the chair. “I know that’s terrible. I know what he did and I miss him.”
“That’s not terrible. That’s human.”
“I hate it.” She pressed her hands against her thighs.
“There was this night — maybe a year ago. I was working late, some deadline that doesn’t even matter now, and he texted me to ask if I was coming home for dinner.
I said no. I didn’t even think about it.
” She looked at the ceiling. “I keep going back to that night. Like if I’d just put the laptop down and gone home—”
“Sarah.” I kept my voice even. “You’ve done this work. You know the answer.”
“I know the answer and I can’t make myself believe it on the days when it hurts.”
I nodded slowly and looked down at my hands, folded in my lap.
I understood that gap more personally than I could say.
The obsessive replaying, the way you circle one specific moment and convince yourself that’s where it all went wrong — as if the whole thing balanced on a single night, a single choice, and not on the person who decided to lie.
We worked through it together — the difference between knowing the answer and being able to live inside it on any given Tuesday. By the end of the session she was calmer, more grounded. She thanked me and left.
I sat in my chair for a while after.
The thing I’d said to her: that’s not terrible. That’s human. I meant it. And I meant it for myself too, even on the days when it was hard to hold both things—the anger at what he’d done, and the simple fact that I missed him.
Sally had said something once that I kept coming back to. The missing doesn’t cancel the anger. The anger doesn’t cancel the missing. You’re going to feel both for a long time, and that’s not a problem to solve. I was working on believing it.