Chapter 5: The first therapy session
1041 Words
Dr. Elena Vargas had a waiting room that smelled like lemon verbena and contained exactly one comfortable chair. The chair was always taken. Maya suspected this was a test.
"Maya?" A woman's voice, warm and unhurried. "I'm Elena. Come in."
The office was smaller than Maya expected. Two chairs, a box of tissues on the side table, a window that faced a fire escape with a single succulent surviving against all odds. No couch. No diplomas on the wall. Just a clock that ticked too loudly and a rug that looked like it had witnessed many tears.
Maya sat. Dr. Vargas sat across from her—not behind a desk, just across, knees almost touching. She was in her fifties, with gray-streaked braids and glasses that caught the light. She wore no wedding ring. Maya noticed immediately.
"So," Elena said. "You're here because your husband had an affair."
Maya blinked. "That was fast."
"I read your intake form. Also, you have the face." Elena smiled. "Not a bad face. Just a face that recently saw something it can't unsee."
Maya laughed despite herself. "Is that a clinical term?"
"It is now." Elena leaned back. "Tell me what happened. Not the affair. Tell me what happened to you."
The question landed like a stone in still water. Ripples spread outward, touching things Maya hadn't touched in weeks. Months. Years.
"I don't know how to answer that," Maya said honestly.
"Then tell me what you had for breakfast."
"Tea. I had tea. I used to drink coffee because my husband made it every morning at exactly 6:47. He said precision was love's forgotten language."
"And now?"
"Now I drink tea. And I hate coffee." She paused. "I've always hated coffee."
Elena nodded slowly. "So one thing you learned this week: you've been drinking a beverage you despise for nine years because a man told you it meant something."
"When you say it like that, I sound insane."
"You sound human." Elena pulled a small notebook from her pocket but didn't open it. Just held it. "We're going to find more of those, Maya. Small betrayals you didn't notice because they were wrapped in the language of love. The coffee is just the beginning."
Maya's throat tightened. She hadn't expected to cry this early. She'd budgeted at least twenty minutes before the waterworks. But Elena's voice—calm, steady, utterly without pity—unlocked something.
"He bought her gold," Maya said. "A necklace. Real gold. I found the receipt in his nightstand. Next to his side of the bed. Where I slept for nine years."
"And what did you buy yourself, the last nine years?"
"What do you mean?"
Elena set down the notebook. "What did you buy for Maya? Not for the house, not for David, not for his mother's birthday. For you. What did you purchase with your own money, for your own joy, in nine years of marriage?"
The silence stretched. Maya searched her memory. A book? No, those were gifts from friends. A dress? David had always been there, nodding or frowning. A weekend trip? They'd gone together. A fancy meal? She'd cooked at home to save money.
"I bought a new phone," she said finally. "Three years ago. My old one broke."
Elena waited.
"That's it," Maya whispered. "That's literally it."
"So here's our first assignment," Elena said, finally opening the notebook and writing something down. "By next Tuesday, I want you to buy yourself one thing. One thing you want. Not need. Want. Spend no more than fifty dollars. And I want you to enjoy it without explaining it to anyone."
"A fifty-dollar thing I don't need."
"Yes."
"What if I don't know what I want?"
Elena smiled again, smaller this time. Kinder. "Then that's the real work, isn't it? The affair didn't break your marriage, Maya. It broke your map. You've been navigating by someone else's stars. Now you have to learn the sky all over again."
The clock ticked. The succulent on the fire escape caught a sliver of afternoon sun.
"There's something else," Maya said. "I can't stop thinking about her. Kendra. The paralegal. I don't even know what she looks like, but I imagine her everywhere. At the grocery store. On the train. Sitting in my chair at the kitchen table."
"That's normal."
"Normal feels terrible."
"Yes," Elena agreed. "But terrible isn't the same as broken. You're not broken, Maya. You're just in the middle of a sentence you haven't finished writing."
Maya looked at her hands. The tan line from her wedding ring was still visible, but fainter now. She'd stopped covering it with makeup.
"What if I never trust anyone again?" Maya asked.
Elena tilted her head. "That's a question for future Maya. Present Maya just needs to buy something pointless and drink her tea. One week. Can you do that?"
Maya thought about the shoebox in her closet labeled OPEN IN ONE YEAR. She thought about the black trash bags, now empty and recycled. She thought about the brick wall outside her window, which she'd started talking to on lonely nights.
"I can try," she said.
"That's all I ask." Elena stood, and Maya understood the session was over. "Same time next week. And Maya?"
Maya paused at the door.
"Don't look up Kendra on social media. You'll want to. Don't."
"How did you know I was going to do that?"
"Because we al do it!." Elena opened the door to the lemon-verbena waiting room."and it does not help."
Maya walked out into the hallway, then the elevator, then the street. The city was loud and indifferent and exactly what she needed. She passed a corner store with a display of cheap sunglasses in a spinning rack. Plastic. Fifty dollars would buy ten of them.
She didn't buy sunglasses.
She bought a single orchid in a yellow pot. It cost eighteen dollars. She didn't know how to keep orchids alive. She didn't care.
That night, she put the orchid on her windowsill—the one facing the brick wall. And for the first time in nine years, Maya Chen looked at something beautiful that she had chosen entirely for herself.
It didn't fix anything.
But it was a start.
- Writer
