Chapter 9: The Work
Grant texted Diane the next morning.
He did it at the kitchen table, phone flat so I could see the screen if I wanted to.
I didn't read it over his shoulder.
But I saw him type, saw him send, saw him set the phone down and leave it there.
She replied twenty minutes later.
He read it.
His face didn't change much.
He set the phone face-up on the table and slid it toward me.
*I understand.
I'm sorry for my part in this.
Take care of yourself.*
I slid it back.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay," he said.
We didn't talk much that morning.
He did the dishes.
He moved his gym clothes from the floor to the hamper without being asked.
Small things.
But I noticed.
I called a marriage counselor on Monday.
Her name was Dr.
Voss.
She had an opening on Thursday evening.
I told Grant at dinner.
"Thursday works," he said.
"You don't have anything?"
"I moved it."
I looked at him.
"I had a team dinner," he said.
"I moved it."
I nodded and went back to eating.
That was the first time in a long time that I felt like he had chosen me over the default.
Dr.
Voss's office was on the third floor of a building downtown, small and warm, with two chairs angled toward each other and a couch against the wall.
She was in her fifties, calm, with the kind of stillness that made you feel like she had heard everything before and wasn't going to flinch.
She asked us each to say, in one sentence, what we hoped to get from the sessions.
Grant said, "I want to stop making my wife feel like an afterthought."
I said, "I want us to actually talk to each other instead of around each other."
Dr.
Voss wrote something down.
"Good," she said.
"Those are compatible goals.
That's not always the case."
It was hard.
The sessions were hard.
There were evenings we drove home in silence and evenings we argued in the car and one evening I cried in the parking garage before I could get myself together enough to drive.
Grant sat with me in the parking garage that night.
He didn't try to fix it.
He didn't tell me it was going to be okay.
He just stayed.
That was new.
"I didn't know you could do that," I said eventually.
"Do what?"
"Just sit with something without trying to solve it."
"Dr.
Voss told me to practice."
"She told you to practice sitting in a parking garage while your wife cries?"
"She told me to practice not running from discomfort."
I laughed.
A small, tired, real laugh.
He reached over and took my hand.
We sat there for another few minutes before I started the car.
The house looked the same when we got home.
Same hallway, same kitchen, same laundry basket in the corner of the bedroom.
But something in the air had shifted.
Not fixed.
Not finished.
Just different.
May you like
His shoes were by the door when we came in.
He picked them up without me saying a word.
