If I left Bobby I wouldn’t have an emergency contact, either. I could put my parents down as beneficiaries, but that felt like a fundamental misunderstanding of how the flow of inheritance was supposed to work. Who would I have after they were gone? I was an only child. The line ended with me, too. I never put Bobby as my beneficiary for anything, as if I was preparing for something in the future that would certainly not be good, but he didn’t know that.

I had taken to looking at the money in my 401(k) and agonizing over whether I should cash it out or not. The sum seemed so small that it would never accrue into anything meaningful anyway, so why couldn’t I just take it and start over?

Debbie’s voice filled the room, and her dread filled me with dread, too. She said she was on the hunt for someone worthy of being a beneficiary, but not a husband per se (who was she kidding?). We were of varying ages in this room, but it felt like we had all somehow misjudged the big life events. We were focused on the end because we had already fucked up the middle part. We were flailing. Or maybe just I was flailing. People out in the world were filling their social-media feeds with momentous life changes like weddings and babies and new, serious jobs, and though some people in this room might have been doing just that, too, I was not. I had hit a point of stagnation, and I felt like I was dying.

Nathan found me after our session and said it was great to see me again. Self-assessments were intense, he told me. But they would be more intense to perform on our clients. He sensed that I would be a beneficial member in the group. He hugged me for a long time as we were leaving. It felt strange to have a man’s body envelop me, a body that did not belong to Bobby. I liked it.

When I got home from the training, I decided to tell Bobby I was going to a workshop to help people grieve.

“A support group,” he said.

“No, it’s a workshop.”

“What are you grieving?”

“It’s not for my grief.”

“I feel like you start something new every week. A beading workshop. Spin class.”

“That’s vaguely insulting.”

“That wasn’t my intent, but if you took it that way maybe there’s something to it.”

I had a choice. Either I could continue down the path of a fight or I could deflect and pivot. I had become a master of avoidance, even when Bobby wanted to go headlong into an argument about what I always perceived as my deficiencies.

“People have a lot of feelings.”

“So you’re where you belong,” he said, a smile growing on his face.

“I don’t really have feelings like that,” I said.