Page 19 of In Every Lifetime
“I know Shawn. I saw Shawn last week.” She let go of my hand and crossed her arms over her chest. “Why in the world didn’t he tell me you were meeting with him? I mean, you’re my husband and he’s my colleague.”
“Ex-husband,” I corrected with a wink.
She rolled her eyes and gave my arm a light punch. "Semantics."
“There’s this wild set of laws called HIPAA. He’s not allowed to tell you about me, honey.” The term of endearment just slipped out. I hadn’t even noticed I said it, the term rolling off the tip of my tongue. “It’s the same set of laws that has kept you from talking about your work our entire marriage.”
"Logically, I know you're right, but I just had a lot of information dumped on me and I'm processing it in strange ways, which apparently means taking my anger out on Dr. Morris." She said it with a pout, her eyes narrowing at the mere thought of him. "Once I've properly processed all of this, I'll apologize to him. Internally. He doesn't need to know about it."
“Well… in that case,” I cleared my throat and shouted, “Fuck you, Dr. Morris!”
Sarah dissolved into laughter at the absurdity of it. "Knowing the two of you, you've probably been wanting to say something like that since your first appointment."
“That I have,” I confessed. “He makes me want to pull my hair out, but damn is he good at his job. It’s almost annoying.”
She laughed again, her whole face lighting up, the joy returning to her eyes. “I think most of my patients feel the same way about me. Not that I mind, it usually means I'm doing something right."
I smiled and let the music fill the quiet between us. It felt easy between us in a way it hadn't in years. Before the divorce, our conversations had always carried the weight of what we were both trying not to say—the relapses, the enabling, the slow unraveling of everything we had built. This felt free of all that, and while it was unexpected, it wasn't unwelcome.
“Why didn’t we talk about any of this before?” Sarah asked. “Before the divorce, the separation, all of it?”
I sighed, thinking back to all the times I relapsed and we would just push it under the rug once I sobered up, moving on entirely. “I think we didn’t want to face the reality that everythingbetween us wasn’t as perfect as it seemed. It was easier to pretend.”
"You and I both work in fields built on communication. I spend my days working through people's deepest issues, you spend yours uncovering the truth in other people's stories. You'd think we would have been better at it ourselves, wouldn't you?" Sarah said, a quiet smile on her face at the irony of it.
“Maybe we used up all those communication skills at work and had nothing left in the tank at home,” I tried to joke, but her face had gone serious. “What?”
She tried to wave it off, but I held my ground. "Tell me."
She sighed but gave in. “I don’t think it was from exhaustion, or nothing left in the tank. What if we had stopped communicating to put off the hard conversation we had been avoiding?”
I raised a brow in question.
She swallowed and took a steadying breath. “That we didn’t work. Not anymore.”
And there it was. The truth we had both been circling for years, never quite willing to land on it. Because somewhere in our desperation not to lose each other, we had each quietly lost ourselves.
“Maybe.”
