She’d never realised how lonely she was until she found herself looking forward to her weekly therapy sessions as though she were catching up with an old friend. Like him, her therapist never judged her, and whether it stemmed from a clinical perspective or genuine empathy, she felt safe in that room in a way she’d only ever experienced with him.
It was the final session before Christmas when she finally gathered the courage to discuss him. Things at home had not been great. Callan had become increasingly agitated by his situation, and his mother had placed her on a visiting schedule, as it had become too confusing to have them around without one.
Without their shared evenings together, the silence of the home—the one he ought to have been sharing with her—had become deafening, and in that silence, he’d begun creeping back into her thoughts. She needed to know, she had to know, why, after all this time, he lingered in her mind like an unwanted guest.
“Do you think, because of my history, I could mistake love for kindness?” she asked, picking at a loose thread on her jeans.
Her therapist regarded her carefully. “Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?”
“There was this man, Logan, a neuroscientist I interviewed for work, who became a sort of friend.”
She raised a brow. “A sort of friend?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Nothing is unexplainable,” she said. “Trust me.”
So, she told her everything. She explained their random encounters, how he’d taken her to the hospital when she’d gone into labour, and how, despite not having seen him for months, she believed she was in love with him.
“What makes you think it’s love?”
She swallowed. “Because I think about him all the time. I haven’t seen him for months, not since that day, and he is still here,” she said, gesturing first to her head and then to her heart. “And I cannot, for the life of me, rid myself of him.”
Her therapist considered this, jotting something down on her notepad. “When an individual has experienced instability in their life, they may develop attachments to people they perceive as safe.”
She nodded, a surge of warmth rushing to her cheeks.
The woman offered a small, knowing smile. “Daisy, I am not saying you didn’t love Callan when you married him, or that you did it simply because. What I am suggesting though, is that when a person has a history of trauma and rejection, they can idealisethose who show them genuine care. I’ve been doing this a long time, and it’s something I see often.”
Daisy watched her, the faintest hint of a smile playing on the woman’s lips as she made a show of taking off an invisible hat.
“I’m going to take off my therapist hat for a moment,” she continued, her voice softening. “I can’t tell you if it’s love with this other person you’re speaking of; that’s something only you can answer for yourself. But I can tell you that there’s a man in your life now, trying to make sense of the world around him, and you’re a crucial part of that.” She hesitated for a moment before continuing, her tone contemplative. “I had a client, a woman, years ago, who went through something similar. Her boyfriend had fallen off a motorbike without a helmet. They’d only been together a couple of months, but she was twelve weeks pregnant and didn’t want to give up on her child. She came from a devoutly Catholic family, so it wasn’t all that unusual.”
She leant back in her chair, her eyes drifting to the window. “You know,” she went on, “I saw that woman for years, Daisy. She had a hard life. She stayed with him and married him eventually. But I’ll be honest with you—she spent her entire life grieving the loss of her youth. Her husband couldn’t remember her before the accident, and to him, she wasn’t his wife; she was his carer. She filled that role for him, day in and day out, sacrificing everything for him. I don’t judge anyone for choosing their own path; you only get one life. But my question to you is this—if that becomes your life, fifty, sixty years from now, how would you feel, looking back, if your story turned out the same?”
Just then, as if on cue, the door swung open, and her receptionist walked in, a tray of coffees held close to her chest.
“Let’s resume this next week.”
XXIX
DAISY
She couldn’t stop thinking about what her therapist had said. Since the dawn of time, people had been warned not to live with regret. “Live like today is your last,” some would say. “Nothing is promised,” others would chime in. But it was never that simple. Daisy had come to know that better than most.
When faced with a choice that could completely alter the course of one’s life, it was naïve to believe that a part of oneself wouldn’t splinter off, trapped forever in the grey space of what might have been. If she left Callan, she wasn’t sure she would ever forgive herself. They hadn’t been together long, and his mother still questioned the authenticity of their relationship, but Daisy loved him. Then came the harder question: if shestayed, would some future version of herself come to resent the decision, knowing what dreams she had sacrificed, buried, and burnt as a result?
When Christmas Day arrived, Ida had been battling a cold for the better part of a week, and Callan’s mood swings had worsened; they’d become violent outbursts, during which he would throw things in frustration whenever he failed to communicate what he wanted.
Daisy spent more time awake than asleep at night, worrying about whether his mother was truly safe in that house. She never admitted to struggling—she was too proud for that—but it was obvious, even to an outsider, that the cracks were beginning to show.
As Daisy walked through the front door, she found Callan’s mother sweeping shattered glass off the kitchen floor, mascara smudged beneath her eyes, and a tea towel wrapped tightly around her finger. She set Ida down and hesitated, debating whether to ask what had happened. But then she glanced up, shaking her head.
“Please,” she said, her voice unusually quiet. “Don’t ask. Not today.”
Daisy nodded and shifted her focus to the unbaked ham resting on the bench. “Does this need to go in?”
“I haven’t glazed it yet.”
