I watch Deborah’s face as she quashes her instinct to instruct Cora to let me answer. I’m happy the doctor understands that our sole concern here is Cora.
“Does that resonate with you, Adrian?” Deborah asks.
Trust is psychobabble bullshit, but I’m not going to quash Cora, either. “I rely on people to generally behave in a way that’s aligned with their past actions. Or how they’re motivated to behave.”
I expect Deborah to quibble. Instead, she turns to Cora. “Is that how you see trust, Cora?”
Cora softly snorts. “You can’t predict how people will act, and you don’t really know what motivates them.”
“You and your husband hold very disparate beliefs about trust. I would say, respectfully, both are almost cynical views, but in different ways. That must pose challenges.” Deborah lets the statement hang in the air like a question.
I’m about to redirect the conversation somehow back to Cora when she says, “We have that in common, I guess. We’ve both got a screwed-up way of looking at people.”
I know it’s bad, to feel hopeful at that, but a small flame flickers to life in my chest. Cora is still holding my hand, and she’s not leaving me hanging out to dry.
I feel raw and exposed, like I should say something to move the moment along, but also, I want her to say more. Tell the stranger what else we have in common. Throw me another lifeline.
By some miracle, she does keep going. “I used to think that we were together because he was, like, my Prince Charming. And then I thought our relationship was all a terrible mistake.”
I can’t argue because my lungs have seized.
“But now?” Deborah prompts.
“Honestly?” Cora hesitates, gnawing her bottom lip. She looks at Deborah when she answers. “I think eleven-year-old him and the messed-up kid inside me recognized each other. I think we made pretend people for each other, so we could be happy in the way we thought we should be.”
“Did it work?”
“For a while, but it couldn’t last.”
Dread extinguishes the flicker behind my ribs. She needs to stop talking. The truth in the words is gutting me.
I open my mouth, but before I can argue or plead or beg, she finishes her sentence. “What we have now is better.”
My heart cracks open, flooding my veins with an impossible high, and suddenly, for the first time in months, Ifeellike I’m sitting straight, like gravity isn’t working against me to drag me down.What we have now is better. I want her to say it again. I want her to scream it while I’m inside her. I’m going to tattoo it on my chest.
“Can you tell me more?” Deborah asks. “About what you have now?”
Cora glances down shyly. I think she said more than sheintended. “We know each other now. A little. We know each other’s Achilles’ heels.”
“You have intimacy.” Deborah is obviously using reflective listening, but from Cora’s expression, to her, it’s a novel idea, and she’s more than a little ambivalent about it.
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Is that a good thing?” Deborah smiles.
“I couldn’t even begin to tell you.” Cora actually smiles back.
My lungs finally start working properly again. Maybe we actually have a chance. I torched my marriage to save myself from the pain of caring about someone more than she cared about me, and maybe, even though I’m a piece of shit and don’t deserve it, maybe I get a redo because Ididpick the perfect woman—messed up and tough with more layers than an onion. Beautiful. And real.
Cora falls silent again, and I suppose Deborah knows to quit when she’s ahead, because we spend the rest of the session answering innocuous questions about our life and the girls.
Cora doesn’t object when I set up our next appointment for the day after Christmas, and she lets me hold her hand on the way out. I tell Johnson to drive past Rockefeller Center on our way home. Cora loves the tree, and I want more time, just her and me.
My nerves are oddly jangled, like I’ve had too much caffeine. We’re quiet for most of the drive. She agreed to another appointment, and I don’t want to press my luck by rehashing what just happened. There is one thing I can’t let go, though.
I wait until after we’ve left the city to ask. “You said we know each other’s Achilles’ heels. What’s mine?”
She’s sitting beside me, and she glances over to answer, her eyes shyly downcast, her lips curving ever so slightly atthe corners. “You love me,” she says softly. “And you don’t know it.”
