“She’s right and good for her.” He leaned forward, and the grin went. “Julian, we have all been tiptoeing around you for years. We learned not to push and just accept that you handle things your own way. She met you and decided that wasn’t good enough and found a way around it.” He tipped his head. “You know who taught her that move?”
I shook my head, annoyed.
“You did. How many times have you arranged things so the rest of us would take help we’d never have asked for? Dressed up care so it wouldn’t land like charity?” He raised an eyebrow at me. “I recall cosigning a lie about WadeHouse paying for her condo. Open your eyes, Jules. She learned from the master. She did to you exactly what you’ve done to all of us for years, and you can’t stand it, because it’s flipped and you were the one on the receiving end.”
“That’s different.”
“Because you do it out of duty and she did it out of love?”
“Because I don’t need?—”
“Stop.” His voice flattened. “Just stop with theI don’t need. You need to deal with finding Mama. You need to deal with what happened with Pops. You need togrieve, Julian, instead of managing everybody else’s grief and calling it the same thing.”
“I’m fine.”
“You look like hell, you’ve missed Sunday dinners, hardly going to the office, and you're about to lose the best thing that’s happened to you — a woman who’d walk barefoot over glass for you — because she got too close to the thing you’ve spent your adult life making sure nobody could touch.”
“She lied to me,” I said again. “I’m supposed to ignore that?”
“She risked you being furious with her to get you something you needed. That’s love. That’s somebody caring enough to fight for you when you won’t fight for yourself.”
I had nothing for that.
He stood and went to the door, and stopped with his hand on it. “You want to know my one regret? Eighteen years, and you’ve never once let me carry a single thing for you. Not one. You’re my hero, Jules. You have been since the day Mama died, the way you stepped up and held all of us together? And the whole time, you’ve been alone inside it, deciding that was the price. You never let any of us pay a cent of it with you, and we all respected and appreciated you too much to push. I regret not pushing.”
He opened the door. “Go to therapy. Not for her. For the kid who never got to fall apart because three other kids needed him to stay standing. And when you’re done being too proud to see it… thank her. She’s the first person in your life brave enough to tell you that you matter too and not let up about it.”
He let himself out.
I sat there a long time holding coffee gone cold.She learned from the master. That’s love.She’d risked us to help me. And I knew, standing there, that I’d have done the same for her. That I already had.
Later, I took the folded list of names out of the drawer where I’d shoved it, and I looked at it for a long time, and then I made a call.
I satin the parking lot for twenty minutes with my engine running. The clock moved from 1:48 to 1:53 to 2:01, and I worked through every reason I should not be there. A four o’clock meeting. A deal closing Thursday. The fact that in all my years I had never once walked into a room and told a stranger about myself.
At 2:04 I killed the engine, sat one more minute, then I got out of the car.
The building was generic, no big neon sign flashingpsychology. The directory downstairs listed a discreetT. Matthews, PhD, which was a discretion I approved of.
There was a sign-in sheet, and I felt ridiculous writing my name, like somebody was going to pop out and point at me:“Look, Wade’s here because he can’t handle his shit.”
I signed in, and after a few minutes, the receptionist nodded for me to go back.
The far door opened and the man who came through was Black, mid-fifties, a clean fade, sleeves rolled twice. He looked at me like he’ddone this countless times before and was deciding what kind of patient I’d be.
“Julian. Thank you for coming.”
“Sorry I’m late.”
“You’re not late.”
I was twelve minutes late.
“You’re here,” he said. “That’s the only time this room counts.”
His office had two leather chairs facing each other, a low table, a bookshelf, a framed photograph of what looked like Kilimanjaro on the back wall, no people in it. He took one chair. I took the one near the door. He didn’t pull out a notebook, or start a recording. He crossed one leg over the other knee and looked at me with no particular expression. Then waited.
I had been expecting rapid-fire questions. A clipboard, an intake form,what brings you in today, Mr. Wade, the kind of clinical opening that would have let me answer in the corporate register I had loaded and ready. He gave me none of it. He just sat there and let the quiet be my problem, and the quiet was, in a small and specific way, harder than what I’d prepared for.
