Brandon and I sat side by side at his custom-made oak table, eating steel-cut oatmeal on a Thursday morning. He was in his monogrammed robe, and I was dressed for work. We’d been dating over three months and had a comfortable rapport on weekday mornings. The New York Times was filleted on the table, and we each had a section: Business for him, front page for me.
“I have to get going,” I said, folding up the paper. “Conference call with a client in an hour.”
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Eight thirty.”
He turned back to his paper. “My appointment’s not until ten.”
I assumed he was referring to a patient. When I leaned down to kiss him good-bye, he said, “I’m meeting with Dietrich—” He waited a beat, then: “my shrink.”
“Your what?”
He laughed, grabbing his stomach right where his robe was tied around his waist.
“My shrink.”
He continued to laugh. I suddenly saw Brandon not as eccentric or inexperienced and brainy, but calculating and cruel. I took a deep breath and shifted my bag from the right shoulder to the left.
“How long have you been seeing him?” He pretended to count on his fingers, still chuckling to himself. “Brandon. How long?”
“He’s an analyst, actually.”
“How long?”
“It’s not group. I don’t know how you do that—sitting around, listening to other people’s problems—” He was chuckling and folding the paper with studied precision. “The group thing would never work for me.” He followed me to the door. “Why are you so mad?” He talked to my back as I fumed toward the elevator.
“You’re making fun of me.” I stabbed the down button. Brandon followed me with a contrite look on his face.
The elevator dinged.
I stepped inside.
As the doors shut, I heard, “Nine years.”
I’d thought Brandon was a good person—quirky and a little repressed, but fundamentally good. The mixture of his smile, soft-spokenness, and impeccable manners left me with the impression that he was a gentle soul who, like me, was finding his way. Despite his wealth and privilege, he treated everyone with a quiet respect. He tipped well. When I told him I loved King Lear, he got tickets to see a production at the Goodman. Even when I learned about his weirdo bedroom habits, they didn’t seem like latent sociopathy. He was just socially awkward, like Justice Souter or Bill Gates. Or me.
But this was too much. He’d asked too much of me—to stop discussing him in therapy—without even telling me that he had a therapist. Not okay. If I could survive the other guys, the ones who made my body zing to life, I would survive him too. I fantasized about calling him later to say, “Have a nice life. Enjoy your penthouse and your money.”
But I didn’t think I was allowed to let go. That was literally the word in my head: allowed. I’d been bellowing about relationships for years. I’d invested thousands of dollars in therapy. I’d joined J-fucking-Date even though I was named after Jesus Christ. I’d recently been involved with a married man. Therefore, I wasn’t allowed to walk away from Brandon. He was single, solvent, and mostly kind. As the cab roared down Wacker and made a whiplash-inducing turn right in front of my office, I knew I wouldn’t break up with him. The urge to flee was overpowered by my need to prove I was willing to do the hard work I was sure intimate relationships required. I’d learned to hold anger, to face it head-on. I’d had too much therapy to simply cut and run. But now I faced a true dilemma: Should I tell my group what just happened?
I had four and a half hours to decide.
“Nine years?” Max said. Technically, I didn’t break my promise to Brandon because I’d said, “The man I slept with last night told me he’s been seeing a therapist for nine years.”
“Yes, almost a decade. Asshole.”
Dr. Rosen held up his hand. “Can we slow down?”
I pointed at Dr. Rosen. “He’s known about you for months. You should have seen him laughing at me. And his secrets—”
“It’s not a secret. He told you about it.” Dr. Rosen spoke in his calming voice, which only made me angrier.
“Don’t you want more for me?”
Dr. Rosen raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean, more?”
“He cut me off from the group and didn’t tell me about his own therapy. This relationship is another dead end. My specialty.”
Dr. Rosen wore his thinking face and stared at me. He rubbed his chin and started to speak a few times. Finally he offered his sage wisdom: “I don’t know.”
But I didn’t pay him eight hundred forty dollars every month to not know. I paid him to use his fancy degrees to transform my life by teaching me relationship skills so I could use them in healthy relationships. I asked if it was time to break up.
“Why would you break up with him?” Dr. Rosen looked as if I’d announced a plan to steal Brandon’s silver.
“He lied by omission for weeks. I’m going to end up right back where I started. For all I know, he has a wife and kids in Peoria.”
“That’s impossible,” Dr. Rosen said.
“Why?”
“Because Peoria sucks,” Lorne said.
Dr. Rosen leaned toward me theatrically as if he was going to tell me a secret. “Pssst. Confidential to Christie. This is the best relationship you’ve ever had.”
I wanted to knock his half-bald noggin off his scrawny neck. This was my best? “Fuck you, Dr. Rosen.”
“It’s true,” Patrice said. Grandma Maggie nodded along.
“Reed would never have kept his therapy a secret from me.”
“He lied to you plenty,” Brad said.
“Fine. But Alex—we did sunrise bike rides and had sex twenty—”
Max let out an exasperated sigh. “He didn’t love you, remember? Remember the letter opener
