Natalie looked at him. Is it brave? It doesn't feel brave. It feels like I'm finally doing the obvious thing. The obvious things are the hardest ones.
That's why people spend so long not doing them. She looked at her hands in her lap. I talked to my mother last week, she said. Really talked. Not the managed version I give her.
Not the update where I explain what I've accomplished so she won't worry. Actually talked. She paused. She told me she knew something was wrong with me for years, but didn't know how to say it because I kept presenting evidence of success. She said success is the best camouflage for loneliness she's ever seen.
He didn't say anything. She said she watched me build an empire and kept waiting for me to build a home and she'd stopped hoping. Her voice was steady. She said Saturday the chicken and rice the wobbly table. Ava explaining the honey scoring system.
She said it was the first time she'd seen me eat a meal. You eat, I fuel. There's a difference. She saw it. Natalie looked at the room.
She cried again on the phone. My Connecticut mother, who expresses emotion through precise sentences, cried twice in 6 weeks because her daughter finally learned to eat a meal. That's a lot. It is a pause. Caleb, I want to tell you something.
He turned to her. I was going to leave, she said. Not San Francisco. Before that, when Ava started the sessions, those first few weeks, I was going to manufacture a reason to refer her to someone else and remove myself from the situation. I had the referral drafted.
Dr. Patricia Owens, the same person I eventually transitioned Ava to, but for different reasons. I was going to do it because I could feel what was happening, and I'd spent 6 years running from exactly that feeling. He was very still. What stopped you?
She looked at him. Ava asked me what the figure had left behind and whether she should go back and get it. Her voice was quiet, and I realized I'd been asking myself the same question for longer than I could track, and the answer I kept arriving at was, "Yes, go back. Whatever you left, go back and get it." She met his eyes steadily.
You were the thing I almost left behind before I'd even started. The room was completely quiet. He looked at her for a long time with the full honest open attention he gave things when he'd stopped managing what he felt about them. I froze in a park in October. He said 7-year-old points at a stranger and something in me just stopped.