Chapter Thirty-Seven
“What do we tell her?” Mattie asked as Chloe walked the boys to a small office located just behind the local mall.
“You tell her whatever you want, whatever you feel.” Though she’d yet to start therapy herself, she insisted her boys sit down and speak to someone. Their father had died, and though they didn’t have a long history with him or all the gory details of his death, grief counseling seemed a necessary step in the search for normal. Her appointment was tomorrow, but she wasn’t thinking about that.
Dayton held the door to the office and Chloe signed them in. The pen hovered over the clipboard, her mind picturing tomorrow when she’d be signing her own name. She placed the pen on the counter with an unsteady hand and sat beside Dayton.
A few minutes later he was invited back. She sat with Mattie while his brother had his session and when that was over she sat with Dayton while Mattie had his.
On the way home, Mattie asked, “Do we have to go back?”
“Didn’t you like talking to Dr. Shields’?” Her eyes watched through the rearview mirror as he shrugged.
“I dunno.”
Her gaze shifted to Dayton. “How about you?”
Her eldest shrugged as well. “Dad was a jerk.”
Unanswered questions rushed through her head, but she worried she might not be able to handle the truth. “It’s okay to be sad.”
“I don’t care,” Dayton said, his attention focused on the window as they drove. “He can’t yell at you anymore and that’s what I care about.”
Had he been able to hear them fighting? Hear her screaming? “I think we should visit Dr. Shields a few more times before you decide whether or not to go anymore.” Because she would never be able to properly counsel them about Marcus. Too many demons of her own clouding her judgment.
The next day when she returned to Dr. Shields’s office, she stared down at the clipboard, gripping the pen, her hand hovering and shaking violently. She silently placed it on the counter and left the office. She couldn’t do this.
She was a hypocrite, knowing if she were the therapist in this situation she’d do everything she could to help a client in her shoes. But in all her experience, no one else ever came to her with the same situation. And as much as she would want to help, she couldn’t see how an outsider might do so. It was a paralyzing and lonesome realization that stole any hope. She was on her own and until she figured out her own thinking, she didn’t have the energy to voice her thoughts to someone else.
She missed walking without crutches and couldn’t get far without getting winded. But she made it to the mall and sat on a bench, watching people stroll by. There were mostly women, hardly looking up from their shopping missions and finding some sort of satisfaction in the act Chloe could no longer conjure.
When couples passed her brow tightened, her eyes studying the way the men positioned themselves protectively at the women’s sides, or perhaps flirtatiously. The women seemed to hold all the power. They were the lure and the men were the hungry fish. Didn’t some of them feel slightly hunted?
The smiles and laughter she sometimes saw made her chest ache. Sitting in the mall, surrounded by dozens of people, filled her with a sense of loneliness almost too painful to bear. When would someone hold her hand like that again? The thought made her shoulders hunch inward. How many therapy session would she skip before she accepted that she might never heal?
She’d lost her faith in herself and the profession she’d built her life around. What a hypocrite. For all the coaxing she’d done, trying to get clients to open up and bare their deepest scars, she couldn’t even face her own. Festering wounds too ugly to show, too shameful to name, too many to count.
Of course, therapy would probably help with some of these concerns, but she couldn’t speak of the things that happened. Most days she could hardly make sense of it in her head. If she couldn’t understand, how could anyone else?
She refused to force herself into another vulnerable spot, too raw to risk the scrape of criticism or some outsider pointing out a way things could have gone differently. She had her own cruel conscience for that.
They’d rush her back to normal when she still needed time to heal, deciphering her longing for companionship and making suggestions that she follow those yearnings. She couldn’t. It would feel forced and she’d been forced into enough.
The things companionship entailed... The closeness, the touching, the exposure… No. Her mind shuddered at the thought of anyone trespassing into those private territories, yet her heart continued to yearn for that nearly forgotten bond she’d lost with Trenton.
Her inadequacies frustrated her to no end. This wasn’t a throw yourself back on the horse after a fall situation. This was anger. Eventually, there might be acceptance, but right now she was too pissed off about the husk of a woman Marcus had left in his wake to predict when those other stages might show, when she might—if ever—find normal again.
Using her crutches, she slowly walked back to her car. Another day, the same redundant epiphany. No matter how much she envied couples and the closeness they shared, she’d likely be alone for the rest of her life.
Trenton was gone, off on some job, and she was here, not healing, not coping. Just … existing. Whenever he returned, he’d find the same broken woman he left behind. And no matter how much she wished things could be different, how she wished she could be the woman he used to know, she knew she’d never be that person again.
His attention and affection would wane the more he realized that truth. And eventually, he’d wise up and move on for good. She was better off letting him go first. She’d be better off doing a lot of things, but that didn’t mean she could force herself to do them.
At the end of every day, he was one of her last thoughts. She was losing him because, after everything she’d been through, she’d lost herself. She didn’t much care for the woman she’d become. Chances were Trenton wouldn’t like her either. Being in love had never hurt so badly.