April recounts her story choppily, with pauses in between her sentences, as if she is choosing each word with great care.
“He is an abhorrent person,” April is told. “It doesn’t matter who initiated things. He took advantage of you and violated your trust. What he did bordered on criminal.”
April shakes her head. No,” she whispers. “I also messed up.”
She can barely choke out her words. “Please don’t be mad at me. I never admitted this to you. I was too ashamed. But . . . he’s actually married.”
A sharp intake of breath accompanies the terrible revelation: She’s a liar.
The very first thing April did, before we even met in person, was promise to be honest. She signed an agreement to that effect when she became Subject 5.
“You should have revealed this to me much earlier, April.”
The counseling April received was predicated on the assumption that the man who spurned her after she brought him home to her bed was single. So many hours, wasted. Had she been forthcoming about the origin of their relationship, and his marital status, the situation would have been handled very differently.
April isn’t the victim, as was believed only moments ago. She shares culpability.
“I didn’t exactly lie to you, I just left that part out,” she protests. Incredibly, April sounds defensive now. She is shunning responsibility for her actions.
There are crumbs beneath April’s stool; she must have been aware that when she bit into a cracker, she scattered them. But she just left them, another one of her messes, for someone else to clean up.
My finger is placed beneath April’s chin and gentle pressure is applied so that her head is lifted and eye contact established. “That was a serious omission,” she is told. “I am deeply disappointed.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” April blurts. She begins crying again and wipes her nose on her sleeve. “I’ve wanted to tell you for so long . . . I didn’t know how much I’d like you.”
A frisson ot alarm sends a jolt through my body.
Her words are not logical.
Her anticipated feelings for me should not have dictated what she revealed about the man she slept with. There should have been no connection at all.
The nickname Thomas gave me years ago, the falcon, is significant now.
You can pick up on a seemingly throwaway comment by a client and trace it all the way back to the source of why they came in for therapy, even if they don’t realize it themselves, he said once, admiration ringing through his voice. It’s like you have X-ray vision. You see through people.
A falcon homes in on the slightest undulation in a field of grass; that is the signal it is time to swoop in.
April’s discordant words are the slight ripple in a verdant landscape.
She is considered more closely. What is she hiding?
If she is frightened, she will shut down. She must be coaxed into the illusion of safety.
My tone is gentle now; my utterance deliberately echoes hers: “I didn’t know how much I’d like you, either.”
Her wineglass is topped off again. “I’m sorry if I sounded harsh. This information just came as a surprise. Now, tell me more about him,” she is encouraged.
“He was really kind and handsome,” she begins. Her shoulders rise as she takes in a breath. “He had, um, red hair . . .”
The first clue emerges: She is lying about his appearance.
A common misconception, perpetuated in movies and television shows, is that individuals engaged in a falsehood reliably exhibit certain tics: They look up and to the left as they try to conjure a story. When they speak, they either avoid eye contact, or engage in it excessively. They bite their nails, or literally cover their mouths as a subconscious symptom of their unease. But these tells are not universal.
April’s giveaways are more subtle. They begin with a change in her respiration. Her shoulders visibly rise, signaling that she is taking deeper inhalations, and her voice grows slightly shallow. This is because her heart rate and blood flow change; she is literally out of breath due to these physiological alterations. She has exhibited these signs before: once, when she tried to pretend her father’s frequent travel and general absence from her life wasn’t painful, and again when she claimed that it no longer bothered her that she had been shunned by the popular girls in high school, even though she was so traumatized by her ostracization that she swallowed pills in a suicide attempt during her junior year.
But in those cases, she was lying to herself.
Lying to me is very different.
That is what she is doing now.
Why would April fabricate details about the man’s appearance after admitting so many other difficult truths?
April continues describing the man, reporting that he is of average height, and slender. She is encouraged with a gentle nod and a touch on her wrist, which has the dual purpose of confirming her pulse rate is elevated—another sign of deceit.
“I asked him to stay the night, but he couldn’t, he needed to get home to his wife,” April continues. She sniffs and wipes her tears with a napkin.
A terrible suspicion begins to form. The man was a therapist. He was married. April appears to need to confess this because it has been weighing on her.
But she is trying to hide his identity from me by camouflaging his appearance.
Who is he?
Then April gives a little flip of her hand, as if what she is about to say next is nothing but a simple, throwaway line: “Right before he left, he hugged me and said that I shouldn’t fall for him. He told me I deserved better, and that someday I’d find the person who would be my true light.”
Five seconds can change a life.
Wedding vows can be sealed with a kiss. A lottery ticket can be scratched to reveal a winning number. A Jeep can slam head-on into a tree.
A wife can discover her husband’s infidelity with a disturbed young woman.
You are my true light.
That is the inscription on my wedding band, and on Thomas’s. We chose it together.
Five seconds ago, those words belonged only to us. Knowing they were always pressed against my ring finger provided me with such contentment. Now they feel as if they are searing my skin, as if they could melt the white gold of my ring.
April and Thomas slept together; he is the mysterious married therapist.
It seems as if such a shattering revelation should create a sound. But the town house is silent.
April takes another sip of wine. She appears calmer since she has released a partial confession, an attempt to alleviate her guilt as well as serve as a secret apology for sleeping with my husband.
But she didn’t just sleep with him. She grew obsessed with Thomas.
Is this why she entered my study? To learn more about Thomas’s wife?
The state of deep shock can cause a person to feel numb. That is what is occuring now.
April continues chattering, seemingly unaware that everything has changed.
April knew from the moment we met that she’d slept with my husband.
Now we both do.
April and Thomas betrayed me deeply. But only one of them can be dealt with right now.
Perhaps April thinks she can just stroll out of the town house tonight and carry on with her life, leaving me with another mess—this one impossible to simply sweep up.
My husband’s lips were on hers. His hands roamed over her body.