Chapter 3

Zara's next session landed three days later. The wait had been unbearable, but I’d learned patience the hard way this past week.

“You know what scares me the most?” Zara’s voice cut through the quiet.

I looked up from my notepad, her fingers were laced tightly in her lap. “What's that?”

“That I might have started loving him even more.”

I let the silence sit between us instead of answering right away. A therapist’s office has to feel safe, no judgement, no pressure, no consequences for saying the wrong thing, and right then I needed Zara to feel safe enough to keep talking.

“What makes you think so?” I finally asked.

“Because he's trying.” A smile almost broke across her face.

“How?”

“Since our last session, he changed. He talks to me more. He listens. He even complimented me a few days ago.” She wasn’t hiding her smile anymore.

She looked lighter than she had in weeks, and I found myself wondering if that lightness would survive the truth.

“He did all that?”

She nodded. “For the first time in a while, I felt seen.”

I made a note. “So what did you do differently?”

“Me?” She blinked..

“Yes. Last time you said you questioned whether you were doing something wrong in the relationship.”

“I tried what you told me. Giving him space instead of demanding answers right away.” She paused. “It helped a lot.”

It felt strange hearing that. I was handing my fiancé’s side piece the tools to win his heart, and it would have been almost funny if it weren’t my actual life.

“And how did that make you feel?”

She was quiet for a moment before lifting her eyes to mine. “Honestly?”

“Always,” I assured her.

She smiled faintly. “Relieved.”

“Good,” I said softly, because that was the whole point of therapy, not teaching someone how to keep another person happy, but helping them understand their own patterns.

Zara taught at an elementary school, and she’d told me earlier on how much she loved it, that it was the only thing that made her feel needed. She talked about her students, about how they showered her with affection and made her feel important, and I understood, with real discomfort, that she’d stayed with Alex for the same reason. At a point in her life when she needed to feel important, he had given her that.

I hated how much I understood her. Hated, too, that we might have been friends if Alex hadn’t ruined everything between us before we’d even met.

“How long have you and Alex been together?” I asked.

She sat up. “Almost two years.”

I looked down at my notes, pretending to write. “Two years, right?”

“Yeah. Well.” She hesitated. “Until he moved out last October.”

My pen stopped moving. Last October? That was around the same time Alex had moved into my apartment.

I wrote it down so I could see it beside everything else.

“Does he ever talk about what he wants for the future?”

Zara looked up. “Actually yes. He’s been talking about an endorsement he’s trying to get. He said it could change a lot for him.”

“An endorsement?” I kept my eyes on my notes.

“He says once he gets it, everything falls into place and things will be different for us.” She said it smiling.

I had no idea what endorsement she meant, though my mind went straight back to the dinner conversation with Alex a few nights earlier.

Was that the big project he’d mentioned? I wondered, but pushing further risked steering the conversation somewhere she’d notice, so I kept my expression blank instead. “Why would he move out if he had talked about the future with you?”

Her shoulders sank. “We were fighting all the time.”

“And after he moved out?”

“We kept seeing each other.”

My fingers curled around the pen. “So you're still together? Has he made it clear to you he still wants you?

“Technically,” Zara said.

“Technically?” The word slipped out before I could stop it.

“Things are complicated but I know he still wants me.”

I looked at her and felt something cold settle into a strange kind of pity. “What makes you think it’ll be different this time?”

“Because,” Her voice sharpened. “If I haven’t made him want me now, I never will. He’s the nicest man I’ve ever met. I want to be his prize, Dr. Eloise. I want to be the one he chooses at the end.”

And there it was, the other side of Zara, the part of her that wasn’t a victim so much as a compulsive chaser, wanting Alex precisely because he felt unreachable. I was there realizing we were both part of the same sick game, just standing on opposite ends of it.

It struck me, not for the first time, that I’d built an entire career out of helping people stop chasing things that were bad for them, and I couldn’t say the same about myself.

I was good at this because I understood it. I understood it because some version of me had always been Zara, just better at hiding it.

I held her gaze. “When you say he still wants you, what makes you so sure?”

“I mean, we had lunch a few days ago, Tuesday evening, actually.”

My hand stilled over the page. That was the lunch Alex had supposedly had with James.

On my notepad, I wrote.

Alex — lunch with James.

Zara — lunch with Alex.

Same day.

“Just lunch?” I asked.

She laughed softly, touching her face with both hands, a flush spreading across her cheeks. “Not exactly.”

“Tell me about it?” I set my pen down and crossed my legs, leaning in.

“It was fun. He treated me the way he did when we first started dating.” Her face had gone fully red now.

“That's a good thing,” I lied. It wasn't. It made me faintly sick.

“We talked a lot. I did everything we’d discussed, told him I was tired of fighting, that I didn't want to keep chasing him every time he pulled away.” She added it almost proudly, and I couldn’t remember telling her to say any of that.

“And how did he respond?”

“He listened.” Her cheeks rounded slightly.

“Actually listened?”

“Yes, and…” She paused, her flush deepening, “he told me he loves and misses me.”

A quiet ache bloomed behind my ribs. She had no idea she was holding onto smoke.

But I wanted to know more. That was the line, the exact place I was supposed to stop. A real therapist redirects, brings the client back to her own feelings instead of dicing for a name and time.

I wasn’t doing my job anymore I was interrogating a witness, and I told myself I’d stop after this one answer. I’d been telling myself that continuously.

“Then what happened,” I asked, as I broke eye contact with her.

“He followed me home.” Her voice dropped. “We had sex.” It came out fast, like she’d been waiting to tell someone.

My eyebrows lifted before I quickly lowered my gaze, and Zara kept going before I could respond.

“Afterward, I made us something to eat. We talked the whole time, and for the first time there wasn’t a single fight between conversations.”

“What did you make?” The question left me before I could stop it.

She glanced at me, and I forced myself to look casual, running a page. “Sorry. What meal?”

“Oh.” She smiled. “Crab pasta. The creamy one.”

The room seemed to tilt and shrink at once, the air going out of my lungs in one long pull..

The same meal Alex had made for me days earlier. The same meal he’d claimed he made because he knew it was my favorite, the same one he said he’d spent hours watching tutorials for.

Zara leaned back in her chair, a small smile on her lips like she was sharing a fond memory. “He liked it so much he took some home.”

My mind raced through the pieces suddenly fitting together, my fingers curling into my palm. I’d asked her what she’d made because I needed one small detail I could check. I’d gotten far more than I bargained for.