Her dad tilted his head and gave a sad smile. “Your mom never liked to shop. She didn’t care about new clothes or new furniture. She did it because she was angry with me.”

“Why?” Kate shook her head, trying to make sense of it. “Why would she be angry with you?”

“You know what OCD is?”

“Of course. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’ve counseled a couple clients who—” Kate stopped, letting it soak in. OCD. “You, Daddy?”

“I didn’t know it at the time. Your mom was after me for years to go and get checked. She insisted something was wrong, but I thought she was being critical. As the years went by, she got angrier and angrier. I wanted the house impossibly neat, so she made sure it wasn’t. I wanted to control the money, so she spent it. I wanted to be punctual, so she dawdled.”

Her dad pinched the crease in his pants, mechanically, following it down the thigh. “I didn’t see any of it at the time. Of course, her actions made me furious, and we had terrible arguments. Unfortunately, you heard a lot of them. It was a vicious cycle that would’ve been broken if I’d just been able to see that I had a problem.”

How could all of Kate’s assumptions about her parents’ marriage have been wrong? So much of what she advised stemmed from what she thought she’d learned from her childhood.

“One day, when you were eight or nine,” he said. “I walked by your bedroom and heard you playing. I stopped and listened. Barbie was screaming at Ken, and Ken was yelling at Barbie. You were holding them face-to-face, and as you were talking in your angry little-girl voice, your mouth was all screwed up, your brows drawn together. I realized you thought that’s the way families behaved. You thought that was normal.”

Kate had spent a lot of time playing with her Barbies. When you were an only child, you learned to make believe. “I don’t remember that.”

Her dad folded his hands across his stomach. “It was then that I began to wonder if your mother and I would be better off apart.”

Kate had thought it was her mom’s decision. She’d been angry with her mom for months. But even though she’d blamed her mom—the woman was her caretaker, the one who fixed her French toast in the morning and made sure her favorite jeans were washed—Kate couldn’t conceive of leaving her home. Even when her mom started drinking.

“When did you find out about the OCD?” Kate asked.