“Hi, Liam.” The voice is female, warm, a little shaky. “I’m—oh God, I can’t believe I’m actually calling. I’m sixty-two years old, and my husband forgot our fortieth wedding anniversary.”
“Forgot it completely?”
“Completely. Went to work, came home, ate dinner, watched the news, went to bed. I sat across from him at the table waiting for him to say something. He talked about the weather.”
“The weather?”
“The weather.”
I open my mouth and nothing comes out. Not nerves, exactly. More the sudden awareness that this woman called a stranger for help and the stranger is me, sitting in a converted studio room in Beaumont with no degree, no training, and no clue what the right thing to say is. Scared shitless, if I’m being honest. I look at Bex through the glass. She gives me a small nod.
“I, uh—have you told him it bothered you?”
“Of course I have. He said he’d make it up to me. That was three weeks ago.”
“Three weeks?”
“Three weeks.”
And then I stop trying to say the right thing and say the true thing instead.
“I forgot my wife’s birthday once,” I say into the mic. “I was on tour. I was in a different time zone. I had every excuse you can think of, and none of them mattered. What mattered was that she spent the whole day waiting for me to remember, and I didn’t.”
“What did you do?”
“I came home three days later with flowers and an apology and a reservation at her favorite restaurant. She forgave me before I finished the sentence. But she remembered. She still remembers. And every year since, I make sure I’m the first voice she hears that morning.”
The woman on the phone is quiet for a moment. “So what do I do? Just wait for him to realize?”
“No. Don’t wait. Don’t sit on the other side of the table hoping he’ll catch up. Tell him. Say, ‘You missed it, and it hurt.’ Give him the chance to make it right. The gesture matters more than the date. But he can’t make a gesture if he doesn’t know he needs to.”
“Forty years,” she says softly.
“Forty years is worth a conversation. Go make one.”
She thanks me. The line clicks off. Oddly, I feel relieved. Not only that the first call is out of the way, but because I think I actually helped. I relax in my chair and look at Bex. She’s writing something on a notepad. She does not look up or give me the satisfaction of knowing I did well. Bex expects it.
I take the next call.
“Yeah, hey.” The voice is male, young, with background noise behind it. A TV, maybe a roommate. “My girlfriend wants me to delete all the women off my social media. Like, all of them. Friends from college, coworkers, everyone. She says if I love her, I shouldn’t need other women in my life, even online.”
“How long have you been together?”
“Eight months.”
“And were these women in your life before she was?”
“Most of them, yeah.”
“Here’s the thing. Trust isn’t built by deletion. You can wipe your entire phone clean, and she’ll still feel the same way tomorrow because the problem isn’t your contact list. The problem is she doesn’t trust you. That’s the real conversation. Ask her what she’s afraid of. Not what she wants you to remove. What she’s afraid of.”
“She’ll just say she’s not afraid of anything.”
“Then ask again. Because nobody makes that kind of demand from a place of confidence.”
He goes quiet. I hear the TV in the background, canned laughter from a sitcom.
“Thanks, man,” he says.
