Chapter 4 - What I ChoseI stayed with my mother for several weeks after that, though I never once hid away there completely. Xavier started attending counseling sessions. I found my own separate counselor too. At work, I stopped grabbing every single extra shift before anyone else could even offer to take it themselves.
The first time my supervisor asked, "Monique, can you cover tonight's shift?" I answered simply, "I can't." I waited afterward for the familiar guilt to arrive. It came, right on schedule. I went home anyway, regardless.
Months later, Xavier finally texted me. Can we have dinner together? My first draft response read, I don't think that's a particularly good idea. I waited for the guilt again. Then I deleted the whole message instead. I wrote back simply, Friday. Seven o'clock. I'll choose the place myself.
I deliberately picked the exact restaurant where he'd once left me waiting alone on our anniversary.
When I arrived, Xavier was already seated there waiting. "I genuinely thought you'd changed your mind," he said.
"No. I was simply six minutes late, that's all."
He very nearly smiled at that. "That's actually new, you running late."
"A lot of things are genuinely new now."
We ordered our food, and for once, I didn't ask him a single question about his medical appointments. He didn't ask me a single thing about my work shifts, either. Instead, Xavier told me honestly about his counseling sessions. He admitted he'd nearly quit going, twice already.
"I kept genuinely waiting for you to call and tell me to simply come home," I admitted to him.
"I kept reaching for my own phone constantly, to call you first."
"Why didn't you actually go through with it, then?"
"Because I finally understood clearly that missing you wasn't remotely the same thing as actually being ready for you again."
When dessert finally arrived, he set his fork down carefully. "Do you genuinely want to try again, the two of us?"
I looked hard at the man I'd loved for eleven full years already. "Not the way we actually were before, though."
Xavier nodded slowly. "What exactly does that mean, in practice?"
"It means I don't move back in simply because you're lonely without me. You don't stay married to me purely because I carried you through cancer treatment. We keep attending counseling separately. We actually date each other properly. We talk openly, before resentment ever turns quietly into secrets again."
"And if it genuinely doesn't work out, even then?"
"Then we end things honestly between us, Xavier. No more hiding."
His eyes dropped to the table. "You could still decide, eventually, that I'm genuinely not enough for you."
I leaned forward across the table. "Xavier, I nearly divorced you because I'd stopped feeling truly seen by you. Then cancer made you need me so desperately that I confused simply being necessary with actually being loved by you."
"I'm never doing that to you again."
"Do you still genuinely love me?"
"Yes. But love doesn't get to make every single decision between us anymore. I do, for myself."
He stayed quiet a long moment, taking that in fully. Then he nodded. "Okay."
I pulled the shared dessert plate toward myself. For years, I'd measured my own entire worth by exactly how much weight I could personally carry for other people. That particular night, nothing actually needed carrying at all between us.
Xavier wasn't my patient anymore. I wasn't his designated rescuer any longer, either.
And if the two of us genuinely chose each other again, going forward, it wouldn't be because cancer, or guilt, or fear, or eleven accumulated years of shared history had simply cornered us into it without any real choice involved.
It would be, instead, because I genuinely chose him myself, freely.
May you like
And because, finally, after everything, I understood clearly that I could choose myself too, just as easily.
— END —
