“For you? Yes. Now, you want to tell me what happened?”
Hanna inhaled, letting the breath fill and expand all the places she hid her scary thoughts, forcing them to float to the top. The last time she’d seen Olivia was at the peak of her week in Milo’s home—god, she’d been so recklessly stupid.
Hanna talked a mile a minute, including all the sordid details that made her sob. She told Olivia about the bar, about the panic attacks, about the dinner she’d cooked for him. She told her about Vegas and Logan. She told her about how she’d cried in front of Milo.
When Hanna finally got to the final conversation they’d had on the plane, Olivia stopped her.
“Do you think he was right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, do you think you’d burn him on your healing journey?” She gave Hanna one of those looks, “Hey, you dumb bitch, you better have a big breakthrough here or you’re wasting two hundred bucks!” and Hanna stared at the coffee table in front of her, filled with self-help books that she probably needed to read.
“No.”
“All the therapy in the world can’t make a man unafraid of love, Hanna.”
Hanna rolled her eyes, but really only at herself.
“I should have pushed.”
“Well, you had a good point too. You have unfinished business with a lot of pieces of your life. You won’t have room for something new until you handle them.”
“Damn, Olivia.” Hanna recoiled a little. Didn’t she pay her to make her feel better?
“I know, the truth can be a little painful sometimes. But in all the time we’ve been talking, you’ve had a pattern of immediately backing away from anything that pushes too hard on your emotions. I think that’s what happened here.”
“I mean, yes. That’s true. But like, what else am I supposed to do? Just keep letting people hurt me? It’s been a hell of a year for that. Shouldn’t I be avoiding things that are only going to make it harder to keep my head above water?”
“I know it feels like that,” Olivia said softly. She said everything softly, even when she was landing a lethal dose of observation. “But we don’t get to choose what happens to us. We only get to choose what we do about it.”
“God, that sucks.”
Olivia smiled, and for the first time in a few weeks, Hanna did too.
“What do you think your mom would have done?”
Hanna flinched. She hated that question. Mostly because, while the answer always came to her quickly, she was never sure if it was truly what her mom would have done, or if it was projection. There was a grief between those layers all their own.
“She would have never been in this mess to begin with,” Hanna laughed. Lisa hadn’t had patience for men in general.
Olivia tilted her head. “You said he was close with his mom. Do you think that was a blocker for you?”
"With him, it never felt like a big deal in relation to my mom because I know he gets it. It would have been the same if I had introduced him to my dad, you know? I don't know. Maybe there's a part of me that saw how close he is with his family and I was afraid to fall in love with, and potentially lose, even more people."
“Mmm,” she said, which was Olivia for say more about that.
Hanna frowned. “Maybe I’m afraid it feels like cheating on my mom. A little.”
“And if you were to find a maternal relationship like that, what’s the worst that might happen?”
The tears stung. She couldn’t say it.
“Everyone leaves,” she whispered.
“You've endured a lot of trauma and a lot of abandonment over the last year, Hanna. What I often see with clients like you is that the story becomes about how you deserve these things to happen, almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Does that make sense?”
Hanna sat with that for a moment.
