“Sure.”
She nods for me to continue and I take a deep breath before nodding to myself. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want out of my life, you know… all the things I had planned before everything fell apart.”
“Mmhmm,” she hums, writing down some more notes as I take another deep breath. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been seeing Dr. Brewer for seven years, I still find it difficult to open up and talk about my feelings, especially from that time in my life.
“So Eden was encouraging me to go after the things I want…”
Dr. Brewer holds her hand up to interrupt me. “What exactly are we talking about here? Love?”
“No,” I whisper, shaking my head. “Love is… complicated and not my focus. I do still want the family, though and she’s been encouraging me to look into ways I could make that happen without a man in my life.”
“I see,” she answers with a nod, writing some more notes.
“Anyway, that day she came over with information and I realized how expensive it all was and I just felt so defeated. It wasn’t something I was ready to talk about in front of the whole group, though.”
Dr. Brewer finishes her notes and leans back in her chair, narrowing her eyes as she studies me. “You seem less defeated today, though. Has something changed?”
“Um,” I whisper, my mind slamming me back into a memory of seeing Wyatt yesterday as I shake my head. “I’m not sure.”
“Care to elaborate?”
Sucking in a breath, I nod. “I saw Wyatt yesterday.”
“Oh,” she breathes, dropping her gaze to her notepad as her pen scratches furiously across the paper. “Did you just run into him?”
I shake my head. “No. Eden found him on a dating site and she started talking to him. When she realized who he was, she set up a date but sent me instead.”
“And were you in on this deception?”
“No,” I scoff. “I didn’t know who I was meeting until I showed up and he was sitting at the table.”
She peeks up from her notes. “That must have been…”
“Yeah,” I answer, interrupting her. Whatever word she was going to use, seeing Wyatt again with no warning was exactly that. “It was a lot to deal with and I almost stood him up.”
“But you didn’t?”
I shake my head.
“Why not?” she asks and I shrug. Truthfully, maybe it would have been the smart thing to do but I just couldn’t force myself to get back in my car and drive away from him. Not again.
“I don’t know. I just… couldn’t.”
She hums to herself as she scribbles some more notes onto her notepad. “So you spoke to him for the first time in ten years?”
I nod.
“How did that go?”
“It was tense,” I admit, remembering the blanket of pain and anger that draped over us as we sat across from each other in that restaurant. I knew he would be hurt. I knew he would be angry but I still wasn’t prepared for it to smack me in the face as soon as I sat down. Closing my eyes, an image of him pops into my head and my chest aches.
“What are you thinking right now?” Dr. Brewer asks and my eyes open as I wipe away a sneaky tear and shake my head.
“Nothing.”
She holds up her finger in warning. “Remember, you’re not allowed to do that. If you don’t feel like talking about it, that’s fine but quit calling your emotions in this moment nothing.”
“Okay,” I whisper as I nod. One of Dr. Brewer’s biggest rules is not invalidating my feelings in any way and something I always struggle with but after a lifetime of telling everyone around me I was fine when I had chaos raging through me every day, it’s almost second nature. It’s one of the biggest things that got me in trouble in the past and something I always have to be careful about. “I just… I miss him so much and every day that I have to continue without him, feels impossible. I hate the mistakes I made and I wish, more than anything, that I could take them back. I want him back in my life.”
By the time I’m done, tears are streaming down my face and Dr. Brewer nods as she passes me a box of Kleenex with a sympathetic expression on her face.
“Did you tell him that?”
I shake my head. “No. He wouldn’t want to hear that. Not after what I did.”
“You mean what he thinks you did,” she points out, jotting down some more notes and I nod as I wipe my nose with the tissue.
“I don’t know that it matters that I never cheated on him now. He’s lived with that for ten years and it’s almost like it’s become a part of him.”
She glances up, tilting her head to the side. “Why do you say that?”
“It was obvious as soon as we started talking. He’s angrier now, rougher in a way he never used to be, and maybe it’s just because he was talking to me but I don’t think so. It feels like I ruined his life.”
“And you don’t think that is your own guilt talking?” She jots more notes down, glancing up at me as she writes as I think through my response. I know all too well the way your emotions can influence the way you see the world but something about the look on Wyatt’s face revealed to me the damage I’d done when I walked away from him. I could practically see the walls being erected around his heart as we talked…
I shake my head. “Yes and no. Maybe my guilt amplified it but he’s definitely closed himself off from the world and that blame lies with me.”
“So,” she muses as she finishes up some more notes and looks up at me. “If you didn’t talk about any of that, what did you talk about with him?”
“Oh, that…” My eyes widen as I drop them to my hands and fiddle with my thumbs as my mind drifts back to what I blurted out at the restaurant yesterday. I didn’t mean to ask him to help me have a baby but when he insisted I tell him what I wanted and the only thing screaming through my head was the word, “You”, I panicked. Sucking in a breath, I look up. “I asked him to help me have a baby.”
She jerks in her seat and her gaze snaps to mine. “What?”
“I asked him to help me have a baby,” I repeat, refusing to meet her eyes. I don’t have to see her look of disapproval to know it’s there. She’s quiet for a few seconds and my heart pounds as I glance up. With her mouth slack in shock, she stares back at me before shaking her head.
“Piper, it’s been a hell of a long time since someone shocked me but I honestly don’t know what to say…”
I nod. “I know… I don’t even know why I did it except that when he asked me what I wanted, I panicked and blurted it out.”
“I see…” she muses, jotting down a few more notes before looking at me again. “But it’s not entirely a lie, is it?”
“Oh, God,” I groan, burying my face in my hands before shaking my head and leaning back into the couch. “I don’t know. It was just something Eden said when we were talking about the options for me to have a baby and then when he asked me what I wanted…”
“You had to tell him anything other than the truth?” she supplies and I nod. Sighing, she folds her hands over her notepad and pins me with a look.