My Husband Got Our Marriage Counselor Pregnant (Wives Who Bite Back #26)

1. Claire

CLAIRE

The tissue box is six inches closer to me than it was last week. I notice because I have become very good at noticing the things Dr. Helena Arkwright moves before she tells me I am imagining patterns.

Soft gold lamp on. Sound machine outside the door. Derek angled toward her instead of me. My notebook sits open to the page labeled ACCOUNTABILITY, written in my own careful block letters because Helena likes us to title the exercises.

“Where were you Thursday night?” I ask.

Derek exhales through his nose. Helena does not look at him. Her attention shifts to me.

“Claire,” she says gently, “before Derek answers, I want you to notice what just happened in your body.”

I still my hands on the notebook.

“What happened in my body is not the question.”

Derek shifts beside me. His knee points away from mine. Helena’s expression does not change. She has a television face, all soft concern and patient attention. It is one of the reasons people pay obscene amounts to sit in this room.

“Your insistence on an exact answer is the pattern we’re trying to interrupt.”

I turn to Derek.

“Your phone showed you across town. You said you slept at the office.”

He presses his lips together.

“I told you I was exhausted.”

“That isn’t a location.”

“See?” Derek turns to Helena. “This is what I mean.”

I should know better than to hate those five words. They have started too many sessions. Helena leans back in her chair.

“What do you mean, Derek?”

He gives a short, dry laugh.

“That there is no answer that satisfies her. If I say I worked late, she checks my location. If I say I needed space, she wants to know where. If I tell her I can’t keep living under an interrogation lamp, that becomes more evidence that I’m hiding something.”

The office has no interrogation lamp. It has a brass floor lamp with a cream silk shade that probably costs more than the monthly rent on my first apartment.

I say, “You answered how my question made you feel. You still haven’t answered where you were.”

Helena folds her hands.

“Your insistence on an exact answer is the pattern we’re trying to interrupt.”

The same sentence. For one hot second, I want to ask whether Helena has noticed she is repeating herself or whether repetition is the point.

The anger gets as far as the back of my teeth. Then shame comes down over it, quick and practiced. My fingers curl against the paper before I uncurl them again.

Before Helena, I would have kept asking. I would have said Derek’s discomfort did not move the GPS pin on his phone. I can still hear that version of myself, brisk and unimpressed, and I miss her with an intensity that makes my eyes sting.

Now I look at Helena first. I wait to learn whether the question I asked is permitted to remain a question.

“Claire,” she says, “what would it mean to trust without proof?”

A laugh catches painfully behind my breastbone. Derek’s hand closes around mine before it can escape. His thumb rubs the inside of my wedding ring.

He used to do that before I walked into a difficult client pitch. Back then the touch meant, I’m here. You have this.

My body remembers the comfort before my mind can stop it, and for half a second I lean toward him.

Then his thumb presses again, a tiny correction. I pull myself upright.

“It would mean accepting that I don’t get to know everything.”

Helena smiles. “Good.”

The praise loosens something in my chest. I hate her for making me need it. I hate myself more for feeling relieved.

A month ago, Helena asked me to tally every moment Derek volunteered affection. I made the list because assignments are easier than arguments.

Flowers after he missed dinner.

Derek rubbing my feet on the couch while he answered email.

A weekend booked, then canceled for a client emergency.

Helena called the list evidence that love remained when I stopped demanding its exact form. I remember the flowers on the kitchen counter, already browning at the edges when I came downstairs the next morning. I remember thinking they came after he lied.

I looked at Helena. I looked at Derek. Then I crossed that thought out before either of them could see it.

Helena gestures toward the notebook. “What did you write for your accountability exercise this week?”

I flip back one page. The list is in my handwriting.

I canceled dinner with Phoebe because Derek said my work relationships made him feel secondary.

I gave Derek the password to my old agency archive because Helena said transparency should not be unilateral.

I stopped asking why he carries his phone into the bathroom when he showers.

I bought the blue dress he likes because last month’s intimacy exercise became a discussion of how often I reject his preferences before he voices them.

I read the list aloud. By the third item, my voice sounds like someone else’s. Helena nods thoughtfully.

“What do you notice?”

That I sound insane. That the woman who ran crisis rooms full of lawyers, reporters, executives, and panicked board members is sitting here reporting whether she has been pleasant enough to deserve an answer from her own husband.

I say, “I’ve been trying.”

Derek’s eyes close briefly. Helena catches it.

“Derek?”

He looks at the ceiling.

“I’m tired.”

The words are quiet. Perfectly pitched.

I used to write statements like that for clients. Not the sentence itself. The effect. Low detail. High emotional credibility. Give the audience enough to feel without enough to check. Helena turns toward me again.

“What happens when you hear that?”

“I feel bad.”

“Anything else?”

“Frustrated.”

Derek flinches. Helena focuses on me.

“Can you stay with the first feeling before protecting yourself with the second?”

His frustration becomes injury. I close the notebook.

“Derek, I’m sorry I checked your location.”

His shoulders loosen. Helena says nothing. She waits.

There is always another layer. I know what she wants because we have practiced it.

“I’m sorry I made you feel unsafe in your own marriage.”

Derek turns to me fully now.

“Thank you.”

He still has not told me where he was.

Helena reaches for her tablet.

“That was real progress.”

My shoulders lock and my hands stop moving. She begins talking about the Arkwright Method Marriage Summit, which starts in three weeks at Northmere House.

I have heard about it in every session for two months. Eight hundred attendees.

A paid livestream. Sponsors. Guest clinicians.

A keynote called Radical Honesty: The Courage to Be Known. Derek’s foundation is underwriting part of it. I wrote the sponsorship language.

Helena turns her tablet so I can see the summit schedule. My name is on Sunday morning.

Claire Hollis and Derek Hollis: From Surveillance to Surrender. The title sits under my name like a diagnosis.

“I thought we were doing a short testimonial.”

“We are.” Helena smiles. “Twelve minutes.”

“This says twenty.”

“That includes Derek’s response.”

Derek pats my hand.

“It’ll be good for us.”

I turn toward him.

“When did you agree to this?”

He frowns as if I have asked something needlessly sharp.

“We talked about it.”

“No. We talked about a testimonial.”

Helena cuts in before his irritation can become useful.

“Claire, what does your mind do when a detail shifts unexpectedly?”

I almost answer. I almost tell her that details do not shift. Agreements do. Instead I reread the schedule.

Helena’s face appears beside the keynote description. She is smiling in a white suit, one hand open toward the camera.

Below it, the copy reads:

THE MARRIAGE EXPERT WHO SAVED HER OWN.

I know she and Harlan Arkwright have had problems. Everyone does. They have built half her recent publicity around it.

A difficult season. Time apart. Repair.

The Arkwright Method works even when the marriage belongs to its creator. Helena taps my notebook.

“I’d like you to bring this.”

I pull my hand over it.

“Why?”

“Because the audience needs to see the work.”

“My private exercises?”

“Only what you choose to share.”

Derek says, “It could help people.”

His certainty catches me. The answer is so fast that he must have thought about it before today.

Helena continues. “Resistant couples need examples. They need to see what surrender looks like.”

There is that word again. Surrender. At the start of therapy, Helena called it trust.

Three months ago, openness. Now surrender. I write nothing down.

Derek rubs my ring again. Helena smiles at us as if something has been repaired.