25. Daniel
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Daniel
Ifound the counselor's name the same week I talked to Rebecca, a woman named Dr. Patterson who worked out of a small office above a coffee shop in Cool Springs. I told no one I was going. I needed one thing in my life that I was doing because it needed doing, with no audience attached.
The first session felt like being handed a shovel and told to start digging without being shown where.
"Tell me about your father," Dr. Patterson said, maybe fifteen minutes in, after I'd spent most of the session giving her the efficient, factual version of events, the gala, the erasure, the separation, delivered with the same clean confidence I'd have used to walk a client through a project timeline.
"My father ran a hardware store for thirty years. Good man. Worked constantly."
"How was your parents' marriage?"
"Fine. Good, actually. They're still together."
"How did your mother experience your father's work?"
I sat with that question longer than I expected to, turning over memories I hadn't examined in years, my mother eating dinner alone with me and my brothers more nights than not, my father missing birthdays and school plays with the specific, unquestioned assumption that the store simply required it, my mother's occasional flat, tired comments about it that I'd absorbed as background noise rather than actual information.
"I don't think she loved it," I admitted. "I never really thought about it as a pattern before. Just as how things were."
"What did you learn from watching that?" Dr. Patterson asked.
I hated the question because I knew the answer before I said it. "That work gets to be urgent. Family is supposed to understand." Saying it out loud made it sound uglier than it had ever felt growing up.
A few weeks later, I told her, "I keep coming back to the fact that I thought I was doing fine. I never touched another woman. I came home. I paid the bills. I thought that was the test."
"And now?"
"Now I think I was grading myself on the easiest part." The answer sat badly in my chest. "I need to get better at being there before something becomes a crisis."
The sessions stayed practical after that.
We talked about the moments when I treated urgency as permission, the panic underneath my need to be the person everyone called, and what I could do before those habits made the decision for me.
None of it felt profound while I was doing it.
Mostly it felt repetitive and uncomfortable.
I kept going after Natalie and I reconciled. By then it felt less like emergency repair and more like maintenance, the same reason you checked drainage before a storm instead of after the yard flooded.
I told Natalie about counseling months into our reconciliation. By then, keeping something meaningful in a private compartment had begun to resemble the old habit I was trying to leave behind, even though I had started therapy for myself and never as evidence I expected her to reward.
"I've been seeing a counselor," I told her one evening, "since right after you left. Never told anyone. Wanted to make sure it was real before I made it about anything other than actually fixing myself."
She was quiet for a moment, something moving across her face that looked like surprise chased quickly by something warmer. "How long?"
"Since June. Every other week, mostly. Sometimes weekly when things get hard."
"Thank you for telling me," she said. "I'm glad you did it for yourself first."
"Me too." I reached for her hand across the table, and she let me take it.