“Right.” I mean, she knows I’ve been working on myself, but she hasn’t seen it, and that’s fair. “I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s really good to see you. I want you to know I get that we can’t pick up where we left off. I’ve done a lot of work around understanding that.”

“That’s good to hear. I’ve actually been working on that too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” She takes a deep breath and unzips her messenger bag. “And I decided that I don’t want to pick up where we left off. That was . . . bad.”

“Right, no,” I say, jumping down off the table, and I hope my voice doesn’t sound like she just drop-kicked my heart into next week, even though it feels like she kind of did. “I talked about this in my session this morning. We made a list of outcomes, and you meeting me for closure was one that we put in the positive-outcome column. Although, I don’t remember why. I did at the time, it made sense, but right now I—” I look down and shake my head. “I took notes, and I can email them to you if you want. They’re actually right in the car. I could go grab them now. You know what? I’m rambling. Sorry.”

“Wow.”

“I’m really nervous,” I say, because Dr. Gabriella says labeling my feelings is an important tool to help control my anxiety. If I address what’s at the root of it, too, sometimes I can stop it from spiraling out. I suck at figuring that part out, but I’m working on it.

“Let me finish.” She pulls the Batman mask out of her messenger bag and slides it onto my head. She stops short of pulling it over my face, and okay, I was not expecting this. “I don’t want to pick up where we left off. I’d rather rewind farther than that.”

“You want to—”

“Have a redo maybe and see where it goes,” she says. “Slowly. Extremely slowly. Like glacial.”

“I can do glacial.”

“Like occasional cups of coffee as friends with several days in between.”

“I love coffee,” I say, a little too eager. “Are you sure, though?”

“No, but I want to try. I miss you a lot, and if you think—if you’re in a good place, I thought maybe we could start talking again. Just talking.”

“I would like that.” I grin; I can’t help it. “Hang on.” I grab my phone off the table and pull the tattered feather out from the case, twirling it in my fingers.

“You’ve carried it the whole time?”

“Whole time.”

She smiles so big it’s blinding, and maybe my eyes water a little, but who’s really checking, anyway.

•  •  •