The nightmares had started a couple of months ago. They’d wrecked the bliss of our engagement, exhausted us and made us tiptoe around each other. And then came that first night when Heath didn’t return home from work. It hurt, of course. But more than that, it scared me. What did he need that I couldn’t give him? What was he doing that he couldn’t share? As it turned out, it was the first night of many. A new normal for us.
I could hear Lenny now, drawling in her posh, old-money Buckhead accent. This is why you give a man at least five years before you let him put a ring on it. She was my best friend, my partner in our corporate design business, and she was always looking out for my interests, but when it came to Heath, I took her advice with a whole saltshaker. She didn’t have the full story. She assumed I’d fallen fast and hard for Heath because he looked like he’d taken a wrong turn out of a Greek myth. She had no clue, but it wasn’t her fault. It was because I’d never told her. I’d never uttered the two words that would’ve explained everything: soul mate.
I couldn’t have said those words and expected her to keep a straight face. Nobody said old-fashioned stuff like that anymore. It made people gag and roll their eyes and pity your na?veté. The idea of a soul mate was a cliché. An invitation for mockery—even if it happened to be true. Even if it was the only term that came close to describing the connection you felt.
Somehow Heath and I had short-circuited the customary “Show me yours, I’ll show you mine” dating process and arrived at a perfect understanding of each other. “I have a story,” he’d said on our second date at a cramped Italian restaurant in an out-of-the-way corner of the Westside. “A long, sad story that I don’t particularly enjoy talking about.”
I nodded. You and me both.
He sighed. Took my hand. “It stars a single mom, some of her particularly unfriendly boyfriends. She passes away. There are a lot of nights sleeping on friends’ couches.” He looked down at our interwoven fingers. “The thing is, I don’t believe therapy is the answer. I don’t believe you find strength in talking about your past. I think you find it in a person. The right person.”
I was mesmerized by the elusive logic of it all. Crazy how, in one instant, everything you could never express can suddenly make perfect sense. I wondered if I was the right person, if he was mine. And then he jutted his chin at the speaker above us, which had been playing a steady stream of Sinatra all evening. Now “Why Can’t You Behave?” slithered through the patio.
“This guy,” he said. “He’s always made my skin crawl.”
I laughed. I hated Sinatra too.
With that, loving another person became the most effortless, beautiful thing I’d ever experienced. Our silences were more precious to me than all the conversations I’d ever had with other men. Even after nine months together and getting engaged, Heath knew very little about me. But he knew the things that mattered. He knew I loved him. That I would never leave him. Not even with the nightmares, or the distance, or this ghosting routine he was putting me through. Not ever. Maybe it sounded desperate, but I had been searching my whole life for something I didn’t know existed. Now that I had it, now that I had him, there was no way in hell I was going to let it go.
Dread, like warm bile, pushed up my throat as I threaded through the crushing tide of people in Divine. I slid onto the vinyl stool the dreadlocked woman had deserted, and Heath straightened, a look of surprise on his face.
“Daphne.” He’d been playing with a white business card, rotating it between his fingers, but now he held it still, poised like a flag.
I fought the urge to put my hand against his cheek. “Hi.”
On the other side of Heath, a knot of girls in tight club dresses and impossible shoes not-so-subtly checked him out. I wondered how long they’d been standing there. Posing. Baiting him.
One, in particular, was really locked in. She had long honey-colored, flat-ironed hair, beige lipstick, and bright-blue eyelash extensions. College student, probably. A baby. I almost wished I could pull her aside:
Stay one night with him, I dare you. See how it feels to wake up to him screaming and ripping the sheets off the bed. Trying to climb through the window. Breaking the wedding dishes you picked out together at Crate and Barrel. See how sexy that shit is.
I hung my purse on the hook by my knees, caught her eye, then pushed up my glasses with my middle finger. Not super classy, but you know what they say—you can take the girl out of the Division of Family and Child Services . . .
Blue Eyelashes tossed her stick-straight tresses and turned back to her posse. She said something that made them all titter, then they aimed a collective sneer at me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the bartender chuckling to himself.
“I’m sorry I made you come looking for me,” Heath said.
I met his eyes. “Please don’t apologize. Not if you don’t mean it. Not if you’re just going to keep doing this every night.”
He started to say something but stopped, and in the sudden flash of light from the TV screens above the bar, I realized his eyes were red and damp.
“Not here,” I said quickly. “We can talk at home.”
“No. I can’t go home, not yet. I’m just . . .” He shook his head. “I need to tell you what’s going on. You’ve been really patient, and you deserve an explanation.”
I exhaled evenly. This was going to get tricky, I could feel it. Yes, I wanted Heath home, and yes, I wanted the nightmares to stop, and yes, maybe even an explanation from him would be just the thing to get us over this rough patch. But talking led to other, unwelcome things. Talking led to openness. To heartfelt statements, honesty, and confessions. Dangerous and unknown places. Places that terrified me.
Talking, for me, wasn’t an option.
Heath rubbed his eyes, and in the seconds he wasn’t looking, I picked four cashews out of a nearby bowl. I clenched them in my hand under the bar, feeling their reassuring kidney shape against my skin. Immediately the electrical storm in my head cleared, and I felt calmer.
I drew in a breath and let it out slowly. The counting was residue from my ranch years. A weird habit—or tic, whatever—that so far I’d been able to keep from Heath. Back then, it was always about food—how much was available and would I have access to it when I needed it. Now the counting alone seemed to settle my nerves. It always had to be an even number, preferably four. Four cashews, four stones, four pens. I knew it wasn’t normal—and sometimes I could curtail it with a quick snap of the elastic hair band I kept around my wrist, hidden among a stack of bracelets—but it did make me feel better. Particularly in moments of high stress. Like this one.
“Do you remember what you told me when we first met?” he asked. “About closure?”
I swallowed. Of course I remembered. It was the same thing I had said to every new friend I made, every guy who’d ever pressed me to talk about my past.
“You said closure was an illusion,” he went on. “You said we can’t go back. We can’t fix things. And trying only brings more pain.”
I waited. There was a but coming.
“I so admired you for believing that. For living it out every day. I wanted to be like you. I tried and tried, Daphne, but I’m not as strong as you. I want closure. I need it . . . and I need help finding it.”
He pushed the business card he’d been holding at me. I stared at it numbly.
Dr. Matthew Cerny, PhD, the elegant font read. Baskens Institute. Dunfree, Georgia.
“He’s a therapist. A psychologist,” Heath said.
A therapist. Someone whose sole job it was to make you tell your secrets. To poke and prod at you until you voluntarily gave up information that ruined your life—or someone else’s. I had opened up to a psychologist once, and it had torn a good man’s world apart. Torn mine apart too. The dread I’d been swallowing since I set foot in this place snaked up into my chest and lodged there.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“You said you didn’t believe in therapy.” My voice was faint.