Chapter Twenty-Three
The Work
Archer
Ollie picks the bar—not Callahan’s, but somewhere new in Williamsburg, with low lighting and booths big enough for three NHL players to sit without their knees touching the table. Zayden is already there when we walk in, halfway through a beer and scrolling his phone.
“There he is,” Ollie says, sliding in across from him. “The married man.”
“Not married yet,” Zayden says.
“Practically married. You have a joint checking account. That’s basically married.” Ollie flags down the waiter and orders a round. “Arch, tell Zayden about the blocker save from Tuesday. He missed it.”
“It was on SportsCenter.”
“I want him to hear your version. You always undersell it.”
We talk hockey for a while. Zayden breaks down a defensive play from last week’s film that he thinks we’re running wrong. Ollie disagrees. I eat pretzels and referee, which is my usual role when these two start arguing, because they’re both right about different things and neither will admit it.
The second round arrives, and the conversation loosens up, as it always does after the hockey talk runs its course.
Zayden puts his phone down. “So, how’s Sydney?”
“She’s fine.”
“And how are you and Sydney?”
“We’re, uh—” I pick at the label on my beer.
“I don’t know what we are. She gave me a whole speech about why we shouldn’t be together, and then I kissed her.
Then Luke had a nightmare, and now we’re in this weird holding pattern where we’ve kissed but haven’t talked about it.
She’s being careful around me, and I’m being careful around her, and the whole house feels like it’s made of glass. ”
Ollie and Zayden exchange a look.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” Zayden says. “Just, uh—you used more words in that sentence than you’ve used in the entire time I’ve known you.”
“She makes me talk. It’s annoying.”
“It’s healthy,” Zayden says. “Trust me.”
“Her speech wasn’t wrong, though.” I lean back in the booth. “The divorce has only been final for four months. I haven’t dealt with any of it. I just, uh—moved on. Bree left, and I put my head down and took care of the kids, played hockey, and didn’t think about what happened or why.”
“Did you think about Sydney?” Ollie asks.
“I thought about Sydney before the divorce was even final. I thought about her before the divorce was even a conversation. I’ve been thinking about her longer than I’m comfortable admitting.”
The beers arrive. We all drink. The bar fills up around us—it’s Friday night, the usual crowd—and I sit in a booth with two of the only people I trust, ready to say the thing I’ve been avoiding.
“Maybe she’s right. Maybe I need to deal with my own issues before I drag her into them. Bree and I were roommates for two years before she left, and I never once tried to fix things. I just let it die. I don’t want to do that with Syd.”
“Then don’t,” Zayden says.
“It’s not that simple.”
“It kind of is.” He sets his beer down. “After Sienna and I split, I was a mess. I thought I was fine because I was skating and scoring and showing up every day, but I was also angry all the time—at her, at myself, at the situation. Tori saw it before I did.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to therapy.” He says it as casually as if he’s telling me he went to the grocery store. “Tori didn’t ask me to. She didn’t give me an ultimatum. I just realized I didn’t want to bring all my Sienna baggage into something new, and that wasn’t fair to Tori. So I went.”
“And it helped?”
“It’s not magic, man. Nobody waves a wand and fixes you. But yeah, it helped. Mostly because it made me see patterns I didn’t know I was running.” He looks at me. “You’ve got patterns, Arch. We all do. Yours is that you default to steady and let everything else rot underneath.”
Ollie nods. “The stoic suffering thing. Very noble. Very dumb.”
I drink my beer and don’t argue because he’s not wrong.
“I can give you my therapist’s number,” Zayden says. “She’s, uh—she’s good. She’s direct. She won’t let you bullshit your way through it.”
“I don’t know man, some stranger picking through my brain…”
“Or you can keep doing what you’ve been doing, which is clearly working out great.” He grins smugly and raises his beer. Ollie raises his. I stare at both of them.
“Fine,” I say. “Give me the number.”
Her name is Dr. Melendez, and her office is in Midtown on the fourteenth floor. The chairs are the kind of comfortable that’s designed to make you feel safe enough to say things you otherwise wouldn’t.
I sit down on a Tuesday at noon during a break in the schedule. I’ve never been to therapy before, and I don’t know what I expected, but Dr. Melendez is a small woman in her fifties with glasses and a calm demeanor. She doesn’t waste time.
“So, Archer. What brings you in?”
“My teammate said I should come.”
“Why did he say that?”
“Because I’m, um—” I rub the back of my neck. “I’m recently divorced, and I want to begin a new relationship with someone who matters a lot to me. And I want to make sure I’m not repeating mistakes.”
“What mistakes?”
“I don’t know. That’s kind of the problem.”
She writes something down. “Tell me about your marriage.”
I tell her not the whole thing, not every year, but the shape of it—how Bree and I looked good on paper, how the first few years were fine, how the distance grew slowly and neither of us addressed it, how we spent two years sleeping in separate rooms before she finally said she was leaving.
“Did you try to stop her?” she asks.
“Not really, no.”
“Why not?”
I think about this. I’ve never been asked that specific question before, and the answer I’ve been telling myself—that I respected her decision, that I knew she was right—doesn’t feel complete anymore.
“Because I was relieved,” I say, and the word surprises me as it comes out. “She left, and I was sad, but underneath the sadness, I felt relieved, and I’ve been carrying a lot of guilt about that.”
“Why do you think you felt relieved?”
“Because it was over. The pretending was over. I didn’t have to keep showing up for something that wasn’t working and act like it was fine.”
“You used the phrase ‘showing up.’ Is that how you experienced your marriage? As something you showed up for?”
“Um—” I stare at the gray, nondescript carpet. “Yeah, I think I did. Like it was a job I was committed to, not a relationship that brought me joy. Does that make sense?”
“It makes a lot of sense. Let me ask you something else. You said you don’t want to repeat mistakes with this new person. What do you think the mistake was with Bree?”
“I married the wrong person.”
“I hear that. But I’m asking about the pattern. What did you do—or not do—in your marriage that you’re afraid of repeating?”
The room is quiet. The clock on her desk ticks. I lean forward to consider this.
“I chose her because she was safe. Bree was kind and good, and she loved me, and I loved her back—I did—but I chose her because being with her didn’t scare me.
Being with Sydney scared me. Sydney, uh—” I stop.
“Sydney is my best friend from way back, and she made me feel things I didn’t know how to handle.
Big things. Overwhelming things. And instead of sitting with that, I went the other direction.
I found someone calm and steady and told myself that calm and steady was what I wanted. ”
“Was it?”
“It was what I could manage. That’s not the same thing.”
Dr. Melendez looks at me for a long time, her pen resting on her notepad. “Archer, I want you to sit with something for a second. You said being with Sydney scared you. Can you tell me what specifically felt scary about it?”
“Losing her. If we tried and it didn’t work, I’d lose the most important person in my life.”
“And what happened instead? When you chose not to try?”
The question hits me like a puck to the chest. I sit with it, turning it over, and the answer is so obvious that I can’t believe I missed it for this long.
“I lost her anyway,” I say. “Not entirely, but I lost the version of us that could have existed. I watched her date other men while I married someone else. We stayed friends, but there was always this—this distance beneath it. It was as if we both knew we were holding something back.”
“So you chose not to risk losing her, and in doing so, you lost the thing you were trying to protect.”
“Yeah.” My throat tightens. “Yeah, that’s exactly what happened.”
“And now she’s here. You have a second chance. So what’s actually stopping you?”
I think about Bree’s face in the hallway at the birthday party. I picture the drawing on the fridge, and the guest room door clicking shut.
“I don’t trust myself,” I say, my voice rough.
“I had something real with Bree—not the same as with Sydney, but real—and I couldn’t keep it alive.
I let it die through neglect. I showed up every day, did the minimum, and told myself that was enough, but it wasn’t. How do I know I won’t do that again?”
“You don’t,” Dr. Melendez replies. “Nobody gets that guarantee. But I want to point out something you just said. You described your marriage as showing up and doing the minimum. Does that sound like how you are with Sydney?”
“No.” The answer comes immediately. “With Sydney, I’m—I’m different. I want to be better. I think about what she needs, and I actually care about getting it right. When I mess up, it keeps me awake.”
“You’re describing two completely different relationships, Archer. In one, you showed up out of obligation. In this one, you’re showing up because you can’t imagine not being there. That’s not a pattern repeating; that’s a pattern ending.”
I sit in Dr. Melendez’s comfortable chair on the fourteenth floor of an office building in Midtown, and something shifts. Not dramatically—there’s no lightning bolt, no movie moment. Just a quiet click.
I don’t need to fix myself first, prove I’m ready, or make up for the years I wasted being afraid. I just need to show up differently than I did for Bree, and I’m already doing that. I’ve always done that. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for Syd.
“I think you’re going to be just fine, Archer. But I’m always here if you need me,” Dr. Melendez says as she closes her notebook.
“Yeah,” I reply. “Thanks. I think I am too.”
I drive home through Midtown traffic, the city loud and bright around me, and I feel lighter than I have in months. Not fixed—Zayden was right about that; nobody waves a wand—but clearer. It’s as if someone wiped a windshield I didn’t know was dirty.
I park in the garage and come inside to find Sydney at the kitchen island with her laptop, working on a class schedule for the senior center. She looks up when I walk in.
“Hey. How was your, uh—” She gestures vaguely, knowing where I went. I told her this morning, and her expression was half-surprised and half-something I couldn’t read. She said, “I think that’s really great, Arch,” and meant it.
“Good,” I reply. “It was good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I set my keys on the counter, lean across the island, and kiss her. She makes a soft sound of surprise against my mouth, and her hand comes up to my jaw.
I pull back and look at her. “I want to take you on a date this weekend.”
She’s smiling—not the careful smile she’s been wearing since the speech, but the real one. The one I’ve been in love with since I was too young to understand what that meant.
“Okay,” she says.
I grin, and she rolls her eyes as I walk upstairs to change. The house sounds right. It sounds the way it’s supposed to—her at the island, the twins’ voices from the playroom, the hum of a life that isn’t just mine anymore.
It’s ours.
I’m done being afraid of that.