“So it’s like your heart has a friend now,” she said one night, tracing the small scar below my collarbone with one finger.
“Exactly like that,” I told her, and something about hearing it phrased that way, in her voice, made the whole ordeal feel less like a wound and more like something that had, in its own strange way, protected me.
Daniel’s counseling sessions started slowly. I did not attend them, obviously, but Susan Bell kept me informed of his general progress as part of her ongoing role. The first update was almost comically minimal — he had attended, he had been “resistant to full engagement.” The second was slightly better. By the third, something had genuinely started to shift.
I saw it myself during a pickup in week six. He arrived early, which was new, and instead of the clipped, defensive tone he’d used with me since the divorce filing, he said, “Can I ask you something? Not for the case. Just — for me.”
