My voice breaks.
“But I did.”
The tears come harder now, impossible to stop.
“I felt like the worst person on this planet.”
Claudia doesn’t rush to fill the silence. She lets me cry, hands folded calmly around her coffee cup.
Finally, she speaks.
“Guilt can be a powerful teacher,” she says gently. “But it can also be a prison.”
I sniff and wipe at my face. “Feels more like hell.”
“That’s because you’ve been living in it without moving through it,” she replies. “By suppressing what you did for a year, you managed to add to it.”
I nod. That seems about right.
“I feel worse now than when it happened,” I admit.
“You made a mistake,” she continues. “A serious one. And you’re allowed to feel remorse for that. But your guilt is not just about you anymore.”
She pauses, letting that sink in.
“There’s another element, your husband. His feelings. His pain. His need for space to process what happened.”
I stare down at the table. “I know.”
“And right now,” she says carefully, “Logan isn’t asking you to fix everything. He’s asking for time to decide what he can live with.”
“I hate that I hurt him,” I whisper.
“Caring doesn’t erase consequences,” she adds gently.
“So what am I supposed to do?” I ask.
“For now?” She offers a small, reassuring smile. “Respect the boundary he set. Work on understanding yourself. And learn to sit with uncertainty instead of bulldozing into it.”
I swallow. “I’m not very good at that.”
“You’re going to have to be,” she says gently.
We spend the rest of the hour talking about exactly that, me giving Logan the space he so desperately needs, and what it actually looks like in practice.
Claudia suggests I focus on myself in the meantime. “Find something that belongs just to you,” she says. “A passion. A new hobby. Something to pour your energy into instead of your anxiety.”
I think about it for a moment, then nod.
“I actually have just the thing in mind,” I tell her.
Logan
Wednesdays seem to be therapy days around here.
I have a Zoom session at ten with Dr. Brett, and when I mentioned it to Jess, she promptly scheduled one with Claudia.
Calling your therapist by her first name is not something I understand, but it’s her therapist, so I bite my tongue.
