Page 145 of Fault Lines
I felt my hands knotting into fists. “Because I didn’t want to end up like them.”
“Like your parents?” she prompted.
“Yes.” The word came out sharp. “I wanted to build something real. Something that wouldn’t fall apart because people were too busy or too scared or too selfish to hold onto it.”
She nodded again, but this time it was softer, almost mournful. “Did it work?”
I tried to laugh, but my throat closed up. “No. It made everything worse. I wanted it so bad I… I ruined it. I made it impossible for her to stay.”
Dr. Stiles let the silence settle again, a blanket of accusation I was supposed to pull off myself.
“I thought if I could just…” I trailed off, unable to finish.
She waited.
“If I could just keep her happy, make her feel like we were enough, it would work. That’s what I told myself. But I was never enough. Not for anyone.”
She let the words breathe. Then she leaned in, elbows on her knees.
Her gaze sharpened, voice even softer than before. “You told me once that after the diagnosis, something changed in you. That it felt like a switch flipped.” She tilted her head, searching my face. “Was it the absence of hope? Or was there something about losing the possibility of children that made you—” she paused, “—need more from your marriage?”
I looked away, unwilling to give her the satisfaction, but it was pointless. I wasn’t fooling anyone. “I didn’t know how to fill the void. There was just this… emptiness. Like the world shrank down to one thing I could never have. I thought, maybe if I could bring in something exciting, new—sex, variety, whatever—it would drown out what we’d lost.”
She nodded, not judgmental, just noting the words as they hung in the air. “So you tried to patch over the loss with distraction. You created rules and structure, hoping it would feel like control.”
“Didn’t work,” I admitted, letting out a laugh that sounded brittle. “All it did was make everything worse. For both of us.”
“It couldn’t have worked,” she said gently. “Because what you were missing wasn’t sex. It wasn’t excitement or newness. It was intimacy—a sense of belonging. A family. And when you substituted thrills, you only drifted further away from what you really wanted.”
A hollow spot opened in my chest. “I see that now. I just… at the time, it felt like the only option left. Like if we couldn’t be parents, then maybe we could at least avoid being miserable. But nothing stuck. Not for long.”
Dr. Stiles’ eyes met mine, steady and calm. “Cameron, people often try to compensate for deep emotional pain with temporary relief—sex, alcohol, gambling, whatever their drug of choice is. But it always comes back to the pain underneath. The wound just gets bigger the more you pretend it isn’t there.”
I swallowed hard, throat tight. “I could see Livi slipping away from me. Every night, a little further. I thought I was losing her to the grief, but it turned out I was the one burning the bridge between us.”
She leaned back, hands folded, her manner almost kind. “What would you go back and tell yourself? The man you were, the moment he decided to open the marriage?”
I let the question sink in. “Don’t do it. Just—talk to her. Admit you’re scared. Let her in instead of pushing her out.” The words stung, maybe more than I expected. “If I’d just been honest about how desperate I felt, maybe I wouldn’t have blown up everything good we had.”
Her mouth curved into a sympathetic half-smile. “Honesty is harder than excitement, isn’t it?”
A cold knot coiled in my stomach. “It’s easier to risk everything than to admit you’re already broken.” I picked at the seam of my pants, unable to look up. “I guess that’s what I am. Broken.”
She shook her head gently. “You aren’t broken. You’re hurt. And you’ve learned some painful lessons about how from running the core of your issues—the truth of them—only makes them hit harder when they finally catch up to you.”
She leaned back and sighed before continuing, “you’ve spent your life trying to outpace your loneliness. That’s what drove you—work, marriage, your obsession with having children. You thought that if you built the perfect life, you could fill the emptiness inside you. But you never learned to sit with yourself, to be enough on your own. So you chased, and when you got close, you sabotaged it because you didn’t think you deserved it.”
I closed my eyes. “That’s… exactly it.”
She sat back, satisfied. “Now, what do you think comes next?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“You have to grieve what you lost. Not just Livi, but the life you thought you were owed. The childhood you didn’t get. The family you built up in your head. Grief is ugly, and lonely, and it feels endless, but it’s the only thing that lets you move on.”
My chest tightened. “How do I do that?”
She smiled, just a little. “You let yourself feel it. All of it. Not just the anger, but the sadness, the regret, the emptiness. You don’t run from it. You don’t try to fill it up with noise or work or sex or anything else. You let it break you down, because only then can you start to rebuild.”
