8. The Wrong Fix
Eight
The Wrong Fix
Damian
I thought I understood what needed to happen.
I called Camille on a Tuesday and told her, plainly, that I needed us to change how we operated.
No more late-night calls unless it was a genuine emergency.
No more assuming I’d drop everything the moment my phone lit up with her name.
I told her I loved our friendship and that I needed it to look different going forward — smaller, more contained, built around actual boundaries instead of twenty years of habit that had calcified into something neither of us had ever questioned.
She was quiet for a moment on the other end of the line. “Is this Elena’s idea?”
“It’s mine,” I said, and it was, mostly, even if Elena’s absence had been the thing that finally made me see it clearly enough to act on.
“I should have done this a long time ago. It’s not fair to either of us, honestly — you shouldn’t have to be the person I call every time I don’t want to sit with something hard alone, and I shouldn’t be treating you like a backup plan for whatever my marriage isn’t giving me in the moment. ”
“Okay,” Camille said, and I heard something careful in her voice, something that told me she understood this conversation mattered more than I was making it sound. “I hear you. I don’t love it, but I hear you.”
I hung up feeling, for the first time in weeks, like I’d actually accomplished something.
Like I’d identified the problem and fixed it, the way I fixed everything in my professional life — decisively, efficiently, moving straight to the solution without lingering in the discomfort of the problem itself.
I drove to Elena’s apartment that same evening, energized, certain I was about to close the distance between us with one clean conversation.
“I talked to Camille,” I said, the moment she opened the door, before she’d even fully stepped back to let me in. “I told her we need boundaries. Real ones. No more calls unless it’s genuinely urgent. I think this fixes the actual issue, Elena. I think this is the thing you needed to see.”
Elena looked at me for a long moment, and I watched something in her expression close, slowly, like a door I hadn’t realized was still open a crack, now settling shut.
“You still think Camille is the problem,” she said, quiet, not raising her voice at all, which somehow made it land harder.
“I’m setting a boundary with her. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“No, Damian. I wanted you to understand why the boundary needed to exist in the first place. There’s a difference.
” She crossed her arms, not defensively, more like she was steadying herself for something she’d rehearsed saying.
“If she disappeared tomorrow — if Camille moved across the country and we never spoke again — we’d still be married to the man who needed his wife to explain, repeatedly, over years, why she shouldn’t come second.
That’s not a Camille problem. That’s a you problem. ”
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s completely fair,” she said, quiet, not cruel, just certain.
“You didn’t come here because you understood something.
You came here because you found a task you could complete.
Set a boundary, check the box, expect the marriage to reset like a switch had been flipped.
That’s not the same as actually changing who you are underneath all of it. ”
I wanted to argue. I opened my mouth to argue, and then I heard, underneath her words, an echo of the exact thing I’d told myself in the empty house three weeks ago — that I’d been treating loyalty like a resource with no cost, right up until I’d needed to actually pay for it, and even now I was still looking for the cheapest possible way to settle the debt.
“I don’t know how to fix this the way you need me to,” I admitted, and it cost me something to say it, some old instinct that hated admitting a problem I couldn’t immediately solve with a phone call and a plan.
“I know,” Elena said. “That’s probably the first honest thing you’ve said tonight.”
She didn’t invite me in. I didn’t ask to stay, understanding, somewhere underneath the sting of it, that I hadn’t earned the right to ask.
I drove home that night understanding, with a clarity that felt almost physical, that I had a great deal more work ahead of me than a single phone call to Camille — and that Elena was not going to hand me a shortcut through it, no matter how badly I wanted one, no matter how efficiently I tried to package my apology.
I didn’t blame her for that anymore.
I was starting, slowly, to understand that I’d never earned the shortcut in the first place, and that wanting one now was just another version of the same old habit — looking for the version of change that cost me the least.