“I’m sleeping,” Maggie replied. “Actual sleep. Not just lying awake catastrophizing.”
“That’s progress.” Kim pulled out her tablet. “Tell me what’s changed.”
“Evie,” Maggie said simply. “We’re... together. Actually together. Not just stolen moments or secret meetings. But we’re making a go of it. I’m trying my hardest to anyway.”
Kim nodded slowly. “And how does that feel?”
“Fucking scary,” Maggie admitted. “Wonderful. Occasionally suffocating. Like I’m standing at the edge of a cliff and I can either jump or spend the rest of my life wondering what it would’ve felt like to fly.”
“That’s very poetic.”
“I’ve been reading Sarah’s journals,” Maggie said. “She was the poetic one. I’m just... learning.”
Kim leaned back in her chair. “Walk me through a typical day. How are you managing the suspension?”
Maggie described her routine—the ethics training, the long runs, the hours spent reading or cooking or doing anything to avoid the gnawing anxiety that came with forced stillness. She talked about Evie coming home exhausted, about making dinner together, about the way they’d fallen into patterns that felt both fragile and permanent.
“It sounds domestic,” Kim observed.
“It is,” Maggie said. “And that scares me.”
“Why?”
“Because domestic means permanent. Means building a life together. Means risking—” She stopped, jaw tightening.
“Risking what?” Kim prompted gently.
“Everything,” Maggie said. “My career. My reputation. My carefully constructed life. Everything I’ve spent fifteen years building.”
“For what?”
“For love,” Maggie said quietly. “For something real. For her. I never choose love. I choose practicality and logistics.”
Kim was quiet for a moment, making notes. Then she looked up.
“Tell me about control,” she said.
Maggie blinked at the shift. “What about it?”
“You’ve spent our entire therapeutic relationship talking about control. How you need it. How you lost it when Sarah got sick. How you rebuilt your life around maintaining it. But now you’re in a relationship that requires letting go. So I’m curious—how are you managing that?”
Maggie considered the question carefully.
“I’m not,” she finally said. “Managing it, I mean. I’m just... doing it. Badly, most of the time. I still want to fix things. To plan three steps ahead. To manage outcomes. But Evie calls me on it.”
“Give me an example.”
“Last week, she came home upset about gossip at the hospital,” Maggie said. “Morrison being an ass, other residents talking. My immediate instinct was to suggest we take a break until things died down. Create distance to protect her.”
“And?”
“And I caught myself,” Maggie said. “I recognized it as my fear, not wisdom. So instead of deciding for both of us, I asked her what she needed.”
“What did she say?”
“That she needed me to trust her. To stop trying to protect her from consequences she’s willing to accept.”
Kim nodded slowly. “That’s significant growth, Maggie.”
