Page 69 of Shame

“It’s okay,” I say quietly, almost under my breath. “I know it’s hard for you.”

His jaw flexes. “I’ll do whatever it takes.” He swallows. “I hate what I did. I hate why I did it. I don’t like to look at it.”

Panic rises inside me and I breathe deeply, trying to stay in the moment. Just sit with it. Just look at. Don’t react.

It’s harder than it fucking sounds, that’s for damn sure.

“Now I want you to both focus on this moment. And if I were to ask you to make a decision, a micro decision, what would your next move be? What would you do to shift yourself, in the smallest of ways, out of this pain.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “I’m not ready to get over it.”

“I hear that. That’s okay. I’m talking about micro moves. Imagine there’s a string dangling in front of you, leading you out of this pain. Where does it go? If you take hold of it and take the tiniest of steps, what happens? Do you move towards Luke? Away from him?”

“Do I need to move?”

She purses her lips for a moment. “Can you tell me more about that?”

“I don’t know what I want to do.”

“You can choose to stay where you are. Are you holding the thread?”

I shrug. “Sure.”

Luke leans forward. “I’ll move towards Grace.”

She nods. “Okay. Then do that.”

I give her an alarmed look. “What?”

She smiles. “A micro move. Luke, shift your chair a centimetre towards Grace. No more. Just the tiniest of shifts.”

He nudges his chair infinitesimally closer to mine.

“And now let’s sit with this for a moment. Find that stillness.”

Even though Luke and I have an in-joke about sitting still being scary, this is genuinely intense for me in a way I didn’t see coming. Maybe because it’s not just the two of us. For all our problems, we are a unit, and we see each other in every way. This therapist is a stranger. A professional, sure, but a stranger all the same.

And I’m letting her see that I struggle with giving my husband even an inch after what he’s done. I’m not being defensive about that, I’m just being in my true essence.

Grace Preston, tired bitch.

“Now, if I were to ask you again…”

We repeat the exercise a few times, Luke moving closer to me by fractions of an inch each time, me not moving at all, feeling more and more settled and at peace with my decision to just hold on to the thread.

And then, on the fifth time, when she asks if I’m willing to make a micromove, I surprise all of us by saying yes.

Both of us move our chairs together a little tiny bit.

Then the therapist gets out a ruler, measures the distance between our chairs, and tells us we’re out of time.

“That was weird, right?” Luke asks me as he holds the passenger side door open for me.

“Yeah.”

“But a little good, too?”

I push up on my toes and kiss his jaw. “Yep.”

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