Sure, maybe part of that was to make the other person feel lonely, or miss you, or uncomfortable, but … Actually, if I thought of it like that, maybe Brougham had a point. It didn’t seem the same, though. It was not emotionally abusive to create boundaries and space after being dumped by someone. What a ridiculous thing to imply.

How did he get me doubting myself? Who was the expert here?

“Can we just…” I trailed off and waved my hand around in a circle.

“Just what?”

“Just not right now? It’s too early, and we don’t have much time to get you ready for today.”

He wanted to push it. Ooh, I could see in his eyes he wanted to push it. And I had the horrible feeling if he did, he’d have me scrambling to type out a new email response imploring my customer to ignore the initial advice.

Instead, he flopped backward onto the bed and spread his arms to the sides, chin up and self-assured. “Rain check on that one, then. Hit me, Phillips, what have you got?”

I went under the bed and fished out the bulletin board. “I realized your timeline with Winona is missing something important.”

Brougham shook his head in amazement. “You dragged that all the way from your mum’s for this?”

“You’re welcome. We know a lot about what was working for you guys, but I’m unclear on what wasn’t. So: first fight?”

“Jesus, I don’t know,” Brougham said as I got my pen and paper ready to add to the board. “How am I supposed to remember the first one?”

“Lots of fighting,” I murmured as I wrote the words down for a caption.

“We didn’t—it wasn’t lots.”

“Whatever helps you sleep at night, buddy. Okay, how about the most common fight?”

“We mostly fought over how often we should be messaging each other.”

I nodded, and started the picture above the caption. A male and female stick figure, both with angry eyebrows. I drew a speech bubble over the female figure and wrote “Text me more” in it.

“No,” Brougham said.

I glanced up at him. “It’s close enough, it doesn’t have to be word for word.”

“No, I mean…” He suddenly looked uncomfortable. “I was the one who wanted to be talking more often. Not her.”

And for once, I had no words. How was I supposed to speak when my whole view of Brougham was crumbling into a thousand pixels and rearranging itself to tell the story of a person who looked nothing like the version of him I had in my head? That version of Brougham was a commitment-phobe. He pulled away when people got too close. He was aloof where others were clingy. He had a closed-off heart.

But this, apparently, was false.