Author’s note: Just a quick heads-up before the chapter: thank you for your patience. Life got loud, and I needed a moment to quiet it before I returned to Bryn and Bruno’s story. I’m back now, and this chapter marks the beginning of where things truly change.
The clock on the wall is louder than it has any right to be.
Not ticking, it’s one of those quiet, respectable ones, but I can see the second hand gliding and I keep thinking, that’s another second where I don’t lie. That’s the rule in this room. No lying, no performing. Carla said it on day one, like it was a simple thing to ask of someone who has spent his entire adult life building rooms inside rooms so nobody could find the real one.
She’s my therapist. Soft cardigan, dark curls, sensible shoes. Not the type I would’ve chosen. I would’ve chosen someone glamorous and sharp so I could flirt my way around the hard parts. But when I moved out of my home, I kept the appointment I’d made in quiet desperation.
“Yes,” I tell her now, shifting on the couch that’s a little too low. “I’m still at the apartment.”
“The one you used to work from?” she asks.
I nod. “It was always mine. So it didn’t feel like leaving Marianne to go somewhere new. It felt like… returning.”
You, yes you, probably remember the place. The tall windows. The painting watching everything. The kitchen that’s too nice for one man. I still don’t cook. The fridge looks like a student lives there. But it’s quiet. It’s mine. Marianne never liked it, so there’s no shadow of her in the walls. That helps.
“And how has it been, being there alone?” Carla asks.
I laugh too quickly. “Loud.”
She waits. Therapists wait like silence is a net and you’re the fish.
“Not the neighbours,” I add. “Me. My head. Months of echoes.” I circle my hand lazily, like I can toss the word away. “You know when you slam one door and the rest of them rattle? That’s what leaving felt like. Everything I ever tried to keep shut started shaking.”
This is the part where I’m supposed to say I left for my growth. And it’s true. But you didn’t come here for the brochure version. You want the mess. I thought I did too.
The reality is that I left because I’d run out of versions of myself to sell.
Because he saw me.
Because he walked into a coffee shop with paint on his fingers and looked at me like I was an answer, and I didn’t realise that answers don’t like competition.
Carla pushes her glasses up. “You said on the phone something broke open. What happened?”
I look past her to the little clay sculpture on the shelf. Two faceless figures leaning into each other. Safe. Anonymous.
“He saw me with someone else,” I say. “Bruno did.”
There. Name on the table.
She doesn’t flinch. Professionals are irritatingly steady like that.
“It wasn’t love,” I tell her. “It was habit. It was the old version of me. The charming one. The available one who always has more attention to give. I was at the coffee shop with a younger man I’d been having sex with and it looked worse than it was.” I pause. “It also looked exactly like it was. Like I was cheating on the man that I was cheating with.”
“And Bruno walked away,” she says.
“And Bruno walked away,” I echo, softer.
What I don’t say to her yet, but I’ll say to you, is that I felt it break in my ribs. The look on his face wasn’t shock or anger. It was recognition.
Ah. Right. You’re that man.
And the worst part is he was right.
“And after he left?” she asks.
“I drove to his house that night,” I say quietly. “Not to fix anything. Not to lie or talk my way out of it. Just to see him. Just to be near him.” I inhale slowly. “But the lights were off. Curtains shut. Like he’d already started erasing me.”
Carla says nothing. The silence does the work.
“I sat in my car for nearly an hour,” I continue. “Watching his house. Waiting for a light or a shadow or something that would give me permission to knock. Nothing happened. Eventually I called him, but his phone went straight to voicemail.”
I swallow. “It felt like he disappeared.”
I shift. “I went home to Marianne after that. And I told her the truth. All of it. No performance. No half versions.” I meet Carla’s eyes. “I told her about the paint she saw on my ear. I answered the questions I used to dodge. I didn’t hide anything from her.”
“And you reached a limit,” Carla says.
“Hers. His. Mine,” I reply.
“I moved to the apartment,” I continue. “Took clothes, books, personal things. Mostly I took Chloe’s overnight stuff. Marianne let me. She didn’t make it ugly.” My voice tightens without warning. “Which somehow made it worse.”
“How so?” Carla asks.
“Because if she’d screamed, I could’ve made her the villain. But she didn’t. She just looked tired. She said she hoped we were past this. And I thought we were too. But I wasn’t. I’m not.”
I look past her. Out the window.
“I tried to love two people,” I admit. “I thought being honest with myself would make it less sneaky. But it didn’t. I wanted Marianne. I wanted him. I love my child. And I didn’t know how to be enough for all of it. I made it ugly.”
Carla waits.
“The first month, I didn’t reach out to Bruno. I stayed away from the gym. Stayed in the apartment. Saw Chloe. Tried to make the place feel like home for her. I kept it clean for her. I let it fall apart for me.”
“The second month, I started seeing you,” I say. “Because thinking about him felt too heavy to carry alone.”
“And this month?” she asks.
I smile, slow. “This month, I’m telling the truth. That it wasn’t just sex. That I loved him. That I still do. That I left my marriage but I’m still not free. That I don’t know if he could ever want me again after he saw the real me. I hope that he does.”
Carla flips to a clean page. “You said you wanted to explain the gap. To whom?”
“To him,” I say. Then softer, “To whoever is listening.”
I look past her again. Past the room.
“I’m trying not to be the man you saw that day, Bruno. I’m trying to become the man you thought I could be. And you don’t build that in a week. You sit inside every broken version of yourself and choose what stays.”
“And what stays?” Carla asks.
I look at my hands. “The father. The man who shows up. The man who asked for help.”
I breathe deeper.
“And the man who loved you,” I say to Bruno. “If you’ll still have him.”
Carla scribbles something. I pretend not to care.
You’re probably wondering where we’ve been.
Months passed without a word, after all that noise. I feel like I can now speak for myself. Unfortunately I can’t speak for Bruno, I don’t know where he is. I haven’t spoken to him. I hope that one day, I can.
I could lie and say I needed space or that I began healing the second I moved out. But I stopped speaking because everything I said echoed against Bruno’s absence. Eventually I ran out of things to throw at the quiet.
The first week, I got rid of everything that reminded me of Marianne. I boxed the things that reminded me of Bruno. I left Chloe’s monitor on, falling asleep to static because it sounded like her breath.
The second week, I drank too much. I wrote him text messages and deleted them before the word hey.
By week three, silence started to feel like safety.
“Bryn,” Carla says, bringing me back. “When we met, you said you keep moving so you don’t have to look back. Do you think you’ve slowed down?”
“I’ve slowed,” I admit. “I don’t know how to stop though.”
“Slowing is the beginning,” she says gently. “Stopping comes later.”
I don’t ask when later stops hurting.
I left Marianne. I told her I loved someone else. She didn’t shout. She said, I hope he treats you better than you treat yourself.
We haven’t had a real conversation since. Only messages about Chloe. Logistics disguised as grace.
“You said that it’s loud in your head. What do you do with it?” Carla asks.
I look down at my hands. “Mostly, I listen. It’s surprising how much noise lives inside your own head when you stop filling it with other people’s voices.”
She tilts her head. “And what have you heard?”
I almost laugh. “A lot of apologies. None of them out loud.”
She waits. Always waiting.
“For who?” she asks eventually.
It takes me a second to catch up. “What?”
“You said there are a lot of apologies,” Carla says. “If they were out loud, who would they be for?”
It is such a simple question that I almost laugh. Instead, I look at my hands, at the little white crescent of a half-moon scar on my thumb. I got it on a broken wineglass years ago. Kane had been pouring.
“There’s a list,” I say. “Marianne. My parents. Chloe, even though she is too young to know what she would be forgiving. Bruno.” I pause. “And someone who is not here anymore.”
Carla does not rush to fill in the name. She has been in the room with ghosts before.
“That last apology,” she asks, “would it be for him, or for you?”
I think about that. No one has ever framed it like that.
“Both,” I say. “Or maybe neither. Maybe it is for whatever was left of me after him.”
Carla leans back slightly, enough to ease the intensity without losing it. “You said earlier that Bruno ‘saw’ you. That something broke open when he walked away. Is he the first person who has seen you that way?”
I shake my head. “No. He is the first one I wanted to see me. That is different.”
She nods once. “So who saw you first?”
I knew this was coming. She is too good for it not to.
I stall anyway.
“You ever tell a story so many times you start believing your own edits?” I ask.
“I think everyone does,” she says.
“I told Bruno about him,” I say, more to the bookshelf than to her. “On the phone, the morning after he stayed over. I gave him the version that makes sense. The one with clean lines. There was love. There was chaos. There was addiction. There was a motel room and a note. It is all true. It just isn’t all of it.”
Carla’s voice softens. “What did you leave out?”
The room feels smaller now. The air thicker. I can hear the faint hum of the building’s air conditioner, the distant muffled sounds of someone at reception answering a phone. Ordinary life, still happening. It feels wrong and comforting at the same time.
“You know that feeling when someone dies and everybody tells the story like a moral lesson?” I ask. “Like, if you line the facts up neatly enough, you can file the person away under ‘Tragedy’ or ‘Waste’ and move on.”
She waits.
“That is what I did to Kane,” I say. “I turned him into a warning. For myself, for Bruno, for anyone I needed to reassure. I told them the story so they would understand why I got married, why I needed Marianne, why I am the way I am. I carved him down into something almost useful.”
“And he was more than that,” Carla says quietly.
“He was the first man who touched me and made me feel like the world could tilt and not collapse,” I say. “And the first man who taught me that love could feel like standing at the edge of a cliff with someone who keeps stepping closer just to see if you will pull them back.”
I hear my own voice go thinner. I ignore it.
“The edited version,” I continue, “goes like this: we met at university, we loved each other, he hurt me, I stayed, he hit me, I left, he killed himself, his family blamed me. That is the one I can say at dinner, if anyone ever asks.” I shrug. “It is even almost sympathetic.”
Carla’s pen is still. “And the unedited version?”
I close my eyes for a moment.
“The unedited version is that I learnt two things from Kane,” I say. “First, that I was something you hide. Second, that if someone leaves you, it is because you weren’t enough to make them stay. I have been rewriting those two lessons ever since. Just with formfitting clothes and better wine.”
I open my eyes again. Carla is watching me with that kind of attention that feels like being held by the collar very gently.
“After he died,” I say, “every choice I made was about not becoming him and somehow I still did. Just quieter. More polite. Less obviously tragic. He burned bright and short. I learnt how to slow-burn the same pattern over years.”
“How do you mean?” she asks.
I give her a half smile that does not land anywhere. “He disappeared into clubs and pills and other men. I disappeared into work and flings and promises I never fully made. He lied to my face to keep both worlds. I lied by omission, by charm, by smiling and saying I was fine. Different costumes. Same script.”
There is a long silence after that. The kind that would have made me crack a joke a few months ago.
Now I just sit in it.
“You said Bruno saw you,” Carla says eventually. “Did he see the similarity?”
“Yes,” I say. The word is small, but it is a weight. “Not at first. At first he saw the version of me that I wanted to believe in. The devoted father. The charming, slightly cocky married guy who flirts but would never actually step over the line.” I huff out a breath. “Then he saw me in the coffee shop with someone else. And he saw Kane. Even though he never met him.”
“You saw him too,” she adds.
I nod. “I saw myself. It was like watching an old film of your worst mistake and realising you have memorised the script.”
“And that is when something ‘broke open’?” Carla asks.
“It was already cracking,” I say. “Bruno did not cause it. He just refused to pretend he could not see it. Marianne had seen it for years in a different shape. She saw what I did to myself. Bruno saw the part of me that still believed chaos equals love.”
“And you believed that?” she asks.
“For most of my life,” I say simply. “If it did not hurt, it did not count. If it was calm, I assumed it was temporary. So with Marianne, I waited for her to leave. With Bruno, I tested how much pain he could carry before he put me down. Kane taught me that if someone stays after you hurt them, that must be love. Logic has had a hard time competing with that.”
Carla leans forward a fraction. “And now?”
“Now I am sitting in a too-low chair, telling a stranger with nice shoes that my first love died and I modelled my worst habits on the ghost of him,” I say. “So I suppose now is the part where I try to stop.”
I let the words sit between us. They feel new and old at the same time.
“You mentioned earlier,” Carla says, “that you have told this story before. To Bruno. To yourself. What is different about telling it here?”
I think about the phone call with Bruno. About the way his breath had sounded on the other end of the line, steady and present, while I walked him through Kane like a tour guide who knew which rooms to skip.
“With Bruno, I wanted him to understand me but not doubt me,” I say. “So I told him enough to make me tragic and brave and loyal. I did not tell him the parts where I enjoyed the chase, where I stayed partly because the drama made me feel important. I did not tell him how much of Kane I recognised in myself. I did not want him to hear ‘future risk’ when I said ‘past pain’.”
“And with me?” she asks.
“With you, I don’t need you to stay,” I say. “That is the luxury of paying someone by the hour. I just need you to witness it.”
Carla gives a single small nod. “Then start where it feels most honest, not where it sounds most reasonable.”
I breathe in once, slow. The clay figures on the shelf blur slightly at the edges.
“His name was Kane,” I say, more firmly now. “And the first time I saw him, he had blood on his knuckles and glitter on his cheek. That is probably where we should start.”
Carla does not move.
The room doesn’t either.
I let the memory surface. Not the neat version. The real one.
“He’d been in a fight outside a club,” I say. “Some boy called him a slur and hit him. Kane hit back. Twice. Maybe more.” I swallow. “He was always like that. Firecracker heart. Fuse already lit.”
I breathe in through my nose.
“He was beautiful,” I admit. “Insufferably, recklessly beautiful. The kind of beauty that makes you think you’ve been cast in a movie you weren’t prepared for. He laughed like everything was funny, even the things that made no sense. He kissed me first. He always took the first step. I spent years taking the ones after.”
A silence stretches, not unbearable but sharp at the edges.
“We didn’t call it anything,” I say. “Not boyfriend. Not partner. Not lovers. If he’d put a name to it, he would have had to own it. If I put a name to it, I’d have had to risk losing it.”
I rub the side of my jaw.
“That’s the part I don’t tell often,” I say. “That I was complicit in the hiding. He wasn’t the only one afraid. I liked being wanted in secret. It made me feel chosen. Special. Until it didn’t.”
Carla’s pen rests on her notebook. She hasn’t written in a while.
She is listening now, not recording.
“He couldn’t touch me in daylight,” I say. “But at night he’d climb into my bed like the world didn’t exist outside the sheets. We’d stay up until dawn, talking about everything and nothing. Dreams. Stories. Jokes that made no sense at all. And then he’d vanish in the morning before anyone woke up.”
“And you accepted that?” Carla asks, gently.
“I thought that was what love looked like,” I say. “Intensity. Secrecy. Wanting. Waiting. I had no map to follow. No examples. Only him.
And he was chaos, so I learned to read chaos like scripture.”
For a moment my voice thickens.
“He would disappear for days,” I continue. “Come back with pupils too big and excuses too small. He’d swear he loved only me. Then flirt with someone else right in front of me. One night he brought someone home and told me I could join them if I wanted. Like it was generosity.”
Carla flinches - not visibly, but in that tiny, human way.
“I wasn’t angry,” I say, shaking my head. “I was relieved. Because at least he’d come home.”
My throat tightens as I say it.
“If I had been a different person, maybe I would have left,” I admit. “But I was twenty. I thought suffering meant depth. I thought pain proved something. I thought the more I tolerated, the more he’d realise I was the constant. I kept thinking he’d wake up one day and say, ‘It’s you. It was always you.’”
“And did he ever say that?” she asks.
“He said everything except that,” I answer. “He said I was the one he trusted most. The one he came back to. The one who understood him. The one who made him feel safe. But he never said I was the only one. Not once.”
I swallow.
“And I took bits and pieces,” I say quietly. “I built a whole life out of them.”
I let that sit before continuing.
“We moved in together eventually. Not because it was healthy. Because it was convenient. He was in trouble with his family, and I had the space. He promised he was clean. That he’d told them about us. That he was ready.”
I laugh once, without humour.
Carla’s brow creases with something like ache, not judgment.
“I started shrinking,” I say. “Invisibly. Quietly. The way you do when someone’s shame gets into your bloodstream. I started thinking I was the problem. That maybe loving me was something he needed to repent for.”
“And Kane?” she asks.
“He got worse,” I say. “More drinking. More drugs. More nights gone. I confronted him about money missing, things disappearing. He told me I was paranoid. Too controlling.”
I exhale. It feels like letting out smoke I’ve been holding for years.
“And then he hit me,” I say. “Once. Just once. But it was enough.”
I look at Carla directly now.
“I didn’t leave because he hit me,” I say. “I left because I saw his face afterward. He looked… relieved. Like the violence let him breathe for a second. Like hurting me was easier than loving me.”
Carla closes her eyes for one slow blink.
“Marianne came to get me,” I say softly. “She helped me pack a bag while I was shaking. She didn’t lecture me. She didn’t pity me. She just held the door open and said ‘Come on, love. Enough now.’”
My voice drops.
“I think that was the first time I’d been saved.”
I lick my lips, remembering.
“Kane vanished for a while after that,” I say. “Blocked my number. Drifted into whatever came next. I went back to being a person. Slowly. Clumsily. I went back to class. I slept. I ate meals that didn’t come from vending machines. Marianne helped with all of it.”
Carla shifts quietly in her chair.
“And then he came back,” I add. “I was with Marianne by then. Not romantically. Not sexually. Just… married to her, somehow. Safe. Stable. Breathing normally. Kane showed up like a storm. Thin. Terrified. Eyes like shattered glass.”
The memory is sharp enough to taste.
“He accused Marianne of stealing me,” I say. “Said she’d bewitched me. Said we were meant to grow old together. He smashed things. Plates. Windows. The police came. They had to drag him out while he screamed my name.”
My voice breaks on the next breath.
“The next call we got was about a motel room,” I whisper. “A note. A body.”
Carla remains utterly still.
“The note said he loved me,” I say. “Said losing me hollowed him out. Said it wasn’t my fault but also that it was my absence that tipped him over. He wrote that he didn’t know how to live without me. But he didn’t ask me to come. He didn’t ask for help. He just ended it and left me the debris.”
I swallow hard.
“I went to pieces. Quietly. Efficiently. Like someone packing away a life into labelled boxes.”
“And his family?” she asks.
“They blamed me,” I say simply. “They showed up at Marianne’s house. Called me every name you can imagine. Said I’d corrupted him. That his death was the consequence of my sin. They said Marianne was evil. They said I was a demon. And I stood there and took it because part of me believed them.”
Carla’s voice is soft. “You weren’t responsible.”
I meet her eyes.
“I was in my early twenties,” I say. “I thought love meant saving someone. I thought failing meant killing them.”
Another long silence expands.
“I wasn’t allowed at the funeral,” I add. “They buried him like he’d never loved me. Like I’d never existed. Like the years we had were a stain to be washed out of the story.”
I inhale shakily.
“I grieved alone,” I say. “And even that felt forbidden.”
My hands open and close on my knees.
“I’ve spent years trying to heal,” I say quietly. “And I thought I had. I thought the marriage proved it. The baby proved it. The business proved it. But when I cheated… it wasn’t about lust. It was the old script. The one Kane taught me. The one where I test how much someone will endure before they leave.”
“And Bruno didn’t play along,” Carla says.
“No,” I whisper. “He didn’t.”
I sit back, exhausted.
“So here it is,” I finish. “All of it. The real version. The unedited one. Kane was the first man I loved. He was also the first man I lost. And I’ve been living like a ghost of myself since.”
Carla watches me with a gentleness that feels unbearable.
“And now?” she asks.
Now.
“I want to stop disappearing,” I say. “Before I lose anyone else.”
Carla nods once, very small. “That sounds like a beginning,” she says. “Not an ending.”
I let out a breath I did not realise I was holding. It comes out shaky, almost like a laugh.
“I thought endings were supposed to feel clean,” I say. “Neat. Tidy. Like a closed file.” I shake my head. “This feels like standing in a room full of open drawers.”
Her mouth tilts, almost a smile. “Most honest endings are messy,” she says. “And most beginnings start in the middle of that mess.”
I look at my hands. They are resting on my knees, but they feel like they belong to a younger version of me. One who still believed love was a test he had to pass.
“When Kane died,” I say quietly, “I decided two things. I did not know it then. Not in words. But I can see them now.”
Carla waits. She always does.
“The first,” I say, “was that loving a man could kill him. Not literally, maybe, but in my head it fused. Kane. Me. The note. The accusations. Something inside me decided that my desire was dangerous. That I hurt people just by being myself.”
Carla’s brow creases. “So you learned that being fully yourself was a risk.”
“Yes,” I say. “So I split. I gave parts. Marianne got the safe parts. The steady ones. My child got my heart. The clean version. The one who shows up for bedtime and naps. And men got the rest.
The hunger. The truth I did not want to look at for too long.”
I feel my throat tighten.
“The second thing?” Carla prompts.
“The second thing I decided,” I say slowly, “was that if anyone was going to be hurt, it would not be me again. I would leave first. Or I would ruin it first. Then if they walked away, I could tell myself I already knew it would happen. That I was in control.”
Carla leans back slightly. “You became the one who creates the chaos. So you never again have to be the one destroyed by it.”
“Exactly,” I say. “Kane was the storm. So I became a smaller weather pattern. A manageable one. Flings. Secrets. Little betrayals. Enough destruction to feel familiar, but not enough to flatten the whole house.”
My laugh is empty.
“Except this time,” I add, “I somehow managed to find someone who would not tolerate it. Bruno did not try to manage my storm. He walked out of the coffee shop.”
“And that surprised you,” Carla says.
“It hurt,” I say simply. “More than I wanted to admit. Because part of me thought he would stay and try to fix me. Like I used to try to fix Kane. That he would love me enough to absorb my worst parts.”
“And when he did not?” she asks.
“When he did not,” I say, “I realised I became the man who hurt others to avoid being hurt, and it did not protect me at all. It just made me the villain in someone else’s story. His. Marianne’s.”
I rub my palms against my thighs.
“I spent years resenting Kane for making me feel small,” I say. “Invisible. Replaceable. Then I turned around and made Bruno feel exactly that. And Marianne too. Different shapes. Same wound.”
Carla lets that hang a moment.
“Do you believe you are capable of loving one person at a time?” she asks, very quietly.
I do not answer immediately. I look past her, to the clay figures. Two faceless bodies leaning into each other. The sculpture has not moved for weeks, but today it looks closer together.
“Yes,” I say at last. “I believe I am capable. I do not think I have allowed myself to try.”
“Why not?” she asks.
“Because if I love one person completely,” I say, voice soft, “there is no one else to hide behind when it goes wrong. If there is only one, and it breaks, it is just me. And them. And the truth of who I am.”
“And who are you?” Carla asks.
The question is simple. It is also ridiculous in its size.
“I am a father,” I say. “I know that much. That part feels clear. I am someone who can get up at three in the morning and sit in the dark with a crying child, humming stupid songs, and not feel trapped. I am someone who would sell every item of value I own if she needed surgery.”
I pause.
“I am also a coward,” I add. “At least I have been. I am someone who takes the easy high, the instant validation. Someone who turns desire into a game so he does not have to admit he is lonely.”
Carla nods, very slight. “And with Bruno?”
“With Bruno,” I say, “I felt like I was standing in front of a mirror for the first time. Not the funhouse distorted kind. The real one. The kind of reflection that is both flattering and unforgiving. He saw the good in me. The father. The man who could stay. He also saw the other parts before I wasn’t ready to admit they were still there.”
I exhale.
“He looked at me like I was worth more than the story I had been telling,” I say. “And I panicked. Because if he was right, then what had I been doing all these years? Wasting myself. Wasting other people.”
“You sabotaged it,” Carla says.
“Of course I did,” I answer. “It is what I know. I saw how much he mattered, and instead of stepping closer, I ran a test. A stupid, cruel, tired test. I let myself be seen with someone else. I let myself be that man. The one who never chooses.”
“And when he saw you,” she says, “you finally saw yourself as that man.”
“Yes,” I whisper. “And I hated it.”
The room is very quiet. The clock’s second hand slides around, patient.
Carla shifts her notebook to one side. “Bryn,” she says, “you keep talking about yourself as if you are a fixed thing. As if you are doomed to repeat one story.”
“Feels like it,” I say.
“That is the guilt talking,” she replies. “And the shame. They are familiar. They are loud. But they are not the only voices you have.”
I look at her, a little irritated at the hope in her tone, a little relieved that she still has some.
“So what,” I ask. “I just decide to be different now? Flick a switch? Press reset?”
“No,” she says. “You do not reset. You recognise. You notice the old script when it starts. You choose differently. One small moment at a time. You reach for help before you reach for the high.”
“That sounds exhausting,” I say.
“It is,” she answers frankly. “Change is always more tiring than what we know. Even when what we know is hurting us.”
I tilt my head. “And what does that look like in practical terms?” I ask. “Because right now, it just sounds like a nice poster quote.”
She smiles properly this time. “Fair,” she says. “Let us talk about that.”
She glances at her notes.
“First,” she says, “you stop pretending that what you did to Bruno and Marianne was an accident. It was a choice. Several choices. You already started that work. You came here. You put words to it. The more honest you are about what you did, the less power it has to repeat itself in the shadows.”
I flinch a little. She is right and it stings.
“Second,” she continues, “you let grief be grief. Not punishment. You loved Kane. You lost him. You were treated as a villain when you were a victim of circumstance, of addiction, of his family’s prejudice. If you do not let that grief move through you, you will keep recreating it. With new names.”
“So my cheating is grief theatre,” I say faintly.
“In part,” she says. “It is also self-loathing. It is also fear. It is also habit. None of that makes it less harmful. But it means there is more underneath it than simply being a bad man.”
I look away.
“The problem,” I say, “is that sometimes I think I am a bad man.”
Carla nods once. “That is the easy story,” she says. “If you are a bad man, you never have to try. You already know the ending. Everyone leaves, and you get to say you were right about yourself.”
That lands with a strange clarity.
“What if I do not want that ending anymore?” I ask.
“Then you need a different story,” she says.
I huff a breath that might be a laugh. “Rewrite the script,” I say.
“Not rewrite,” she corrects gently. “Continue. You are not erasing Kane. Or Marianne. Or Bruno. Or the damage. You are adding chapters where you act differently. You are proving to yourself, over time, that you can live with responsibility and still deserve love.”
The words responsibility and deserve scrape against each other inside my chest.
“And Bruno?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Carla does not rush her answer.
“Bruno is a person, not a prize,” she says. “You cannot redo what happened with him so that it heals what happened with Kane. You cannot ask him to hold all that for you. That would only repeat the pattern in another shape. What you can do, if the opportunity comes, is tell him the truth. Cleanly. Without performance. And accept whatever he chooses.”
“Even if he chooses to stay away,” I say.
“Especially then,” she replies.
I stare at the little sculpture again. The faceless figures have become something else in my mind. Not Kane and me. Not Marianne and me. Not even Bruno and me. Just two people who have decided to lean in without hiding.
“I do not know if I am capable of that yet,” I admit.
“Then that is our work,” Carla says calmly. “Not to make Bruno forgive you. Not to win Marianne back. Not to become perfect. To become honest. With yourself first. Then with them, if they still want to stand in the same room as you.”
My eyes sting unexpectedly.
“What if no one does?” I ask.
She considers me for a long moment.
“Then you will learn how to stay in the room with yourself,” she says. “Without leaving. Without disappearing into someone else’s bed or body for approval. That is the hardest part. That is also where real fidelity starts.”
“To myself,” I say, almost under my breath.
“To yourself,” she echoes.
The words settle on my skin like something unfamiliar but not unwelcome.
For a few seconds, neither of us speaks. The air feels heavier, but not claustrophobic. More like the weight of a blanket.
“Say it,” she prompts.
“What?” I ask.
“What you are afraid to say out loud,” she answers. “You already know what it is. It is sitting just behind your teeth.”
I close my eyes.
I think of Kane’s note. Of Marianne at the sink with rolled up sleeves. Of Bruno on the tarp, paint in his hair, saying I love you with his whole body and not just his mouth. Of myself, watching every one of those moments from a distance, even when I was right there.
“I am tired,” I whisper.
Carla waits.
“I am tired of being the reason people hurt,” I say. “I am tired of punishing myself for things that were never mine to carry. I am tired of believing that I am poison.”
The last word tastes ugly. It also tastes familiar.
“What else?” she asks, softer now.
“I am tired of living like love is a bomb I have to diffuse instead of something I am allowed to have,” I say. “I am tired of flinching from my own reflection.”
My voice almost breaks.
“And I am terrified,” I add, “that if I stop doing all of that, I will not recognise myself.”
Carla nods slowly. “That is grief,” she says. “You are talking about grieving an old self. The one that survived by hurting people before they could hurt him. You are allowed to mourn him. Even as you outgrow him.”
I wipe at one eye with the heel of my hand.
“He was not all bad,” I say. “He kept me alive.”
“And now he is keeping you from living,” she replies.
The truth of that hits deeper than I expect.
She lets the silence stretch again, but this time it feels less like a net and more like a pause between waves.
“Tell me one thing you would do differently,” she says, “if you believed you were not poison.”
The answer arrives before I can talk myself out of it.
“I would stop hiding,” I say. “From Marianne. From Bruno. From myself. I would stop trying to keep everybody half informed so no one can fully leave. I would… let them choose with the full picture.”
“Good,” she says, and writes one simple line in her notebook. “We will come back to that.”
She closes the notebook then, a quiet signal that the session is winding down. The clock has been doing its silent glide this whole time, but for the first time it does not feel like it is counting down to something awful. Just marking time that actually passed.
Carla looks at me one last time before we stand.
“Bryn,” she says, “you are not here to earn forgiveness. You are here to learn how to be someone you can live with. The rest will be what it is.”
I nod. My throat feels too tight to speak.
“We can pick this up next time,” she says.
I nod again and reach for my jacket, the familiar weight of my keys in my hand. The room suddenly looks different. Same chairs. Same shelves. Same little clay sculpture. But something has shifted, and I know it is me.
As I stand, Carla adds one more thing.
“Write it down,” she says. “Not the brochure version. The truth. About Kane. About Marianne. About Bruno. Not to send. Not yet. Just to have. So you cannot pretend you do not know your own story anymore.”
I almost smile. “Homework,” I say.
“Witness,” she corrects. “You have been trying to heal with edits. It is time you faced the whole draft.”
She is right. Of course she is.
I leave the office. The corridor outside smells faintly of coffee and cleaning fluid. The light is a different colour out here, less filtered.
On my way to the stairs, I feel the urge to take out my phone. To text Bruno something small. A hey. A how are you. A I am trying.
I do not.
Not yet.
Instead, I slide the phone back into my pocket and walk down the stairs with both hands free.
Outside, the air has that strange edge between seasons. Not hot. Not cold. Just waiting.
You are probably waiting too.
She waits.
Carla waits.
You wait.
Always waiting.
And this, finally, is me realising I cannot ask anyone to wait for a man who keeps hiding in his own story.
Which is why I have to tell it. All of it.
To you. To him. To myself.
So when I say what comes next, it will not be from behind a closed door.
It will be right here.
Where you can hear me.
Here’s the truth I haven’t said yet:
These months weren’t punishment. They were rehearsal.
I thought I could edit myself into someone worth keeping.
Turns out, healing doesn’t take edits. It takes witnesses.
So, yes, I’m talking again.
To her. To you. To him, even if he doesn’t hear it.
You might’ve thought the story ended when Bruno walked out of that coffee shop. You wouldn’t be wrong to think so. It felt abruptly final. But endings are lazy things. They show up just when you’re too tired to argue.
I’m not tired anymore.
I owe someone an ending that isn’t silence. I surprise myself with how steady it sounds.
I don’t know the ending yet. But I know it’s going to start with honesty
If you’re still here, reading, waiting, thank you for that.
I know it’s been months of nothing. But nothing has weight too. It presses down until something breaks, and when it finally does, the air tastes different.
That’s where I am now. On the inhale after the break.
So this is me, speaking again. The lights are back on. The story isn’t over.
Not for Bruno. Not for Marianne. Not for me.
And certainly not for you.
Because some confessions aren’t meant for therapists.
They’re meant for the people who never stopped listening.
