‘So, you’ve told me that you’ve moved house and you’ve gone back to work this week,’ Natasha summarises, ten minutes into our next session. ‘You’ve even been driving again, and you’re here by yourself today – no Rita in the waiting room, I notice.’
I grin. ‘Yep.’
‘It’s all brilliant progress.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You haven’t said a single thing about how you’re feeling though.’
‘I’m proud of myself. I’m taking control of my life and it feels wonderful. It’s been scary, but I really think I’m over the worst of it. Now the pieces are all in place and I can get on with life again.’
‘So… are you ready to talk about Sebastian?’
That wasn’t the reaction I expected from Natasha today. I thought she’d let me bask in my progress for a few minutes at least. I frown at her.
‘I have talked about Sebastian. I just told you five minutes ago, he gave me an emergency case to do right off the bat and I handled it well.’
‘Why do you think he did that?’
‘He understood why I wanted to go back to work so badly. He knew that I needed to fill my mind with good things again by being useful.’
‘It sounds like Sebastian knows you very well.’
Far better than anyone else does.
I pick at an imaginary piece of fluff on my jeans, because I don’t want to look at Natasha while she’s staring at me like that.
‘Sebastian isn’t the thread you need to pull to make me unravel,’ I say stiffly.
‘We have to talk about it sometime, Olivia. Have you been thinking about your homework?’
‘I have.’
‘And?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘All of this is complicated. That hasn’t stopped you from opening up before.’
‘Fine,’ I say flatly, and I cross my legs and I exhale, and I look at her with anger in my gaze. ‘From the first time David met him, he was jealous of Sebastian. They are polar opposite sorts of men. David was always so image conscious, Sebastian usually looks like he just got out of bed and forgot to iron his clothes. David’s hair was black, and he never left the house without product in it so that it sat just so. This year, David’s hairline had started to recede and he was in something of a panic about it – he had a specialist’s appointment in the city lined up to discuss treatment.’
I pause. Natasha leans forward. I look at her, and I’m suddenly stricken.
‘What is it, Olivia?’ she prompts expectantly.
‘Did I ever cancel that appointment? Did they wait for him, or send a reminder text to his mobile, or call him at work? Or did they see in the media what had happened and did some clever receptionist at the clinic join the dots and cancel his appointment without a fuss?’ I stop talking for a moment and squeeze my eyes shut. ‘I’m being an idiot. I don’t even know why that’s so upsetting. It’s just one of those things I forgot, you know? I haven’t thought about it since he died and maybe other people were let down by it.’
‘Does that really matter?’
‘Seb wouldn’t care one bit if his hair receded. He’s just not at all concerned about that kind of thing. He conserves his energy for things he’s passionate about – his friends, his staff, his patients – and I know he doesn’t make as much money from the clinic as he should because he’s forever giving customers discounts. But David’s business success was his life – he gave nothing away, and if people were late with their accounts he went after them like a shark.’
‘You said David was jealous of Sebastian. Can you tell me why?’
‘He used to mock Sebastian, all the time, especially his body language. Seb is so quiet but has these really enthusiastic mannerisms – he’s all hand-gestures and big facial expressions. But it’s weird because Seb can seem very reserved in a group – he lets everyone else have their turn before he speaks up, and he never takes charge. David was the kind of man who never had to speak twice to get the attention of a crowd – he had a deep voice, and somehow always managed to find a way to take charge. But Sebastian is the gentlest, most respectful man I know. He has always wanted the best for me, even when it wasn’t the best for him. Maybe that’s why I fell in love with him.’
Natasha sits back in her chair and she stares at me, and she’s clearly very satisfied by something I’ve just said. I rewind my own words in my mind and I’m gripped by an ice-cold fear.
Maybe that’s why I fell in love with him.
As soon as I acknowledge the words, the shame looms – right on cue, guilt and disgust at my own behaviour threaten, and if I let them loose, they will completely overwhelm me. Love for Sebastian and guilt have always been too closely entwined to separate. I can’t talk about my love for him without facing the shame.
By loving him, I broke my wedding vows.
By loving him, I dragged him into this mess.
By loving him, I made everything worse.
By letting him love me, I risked his safety.
By letting him love me, I took from him moments that he can never get back. Important moments. Moments he deserved.
I look down at my daughter and my heart starts to race. The panic is looming, and if I stay in this room, it’ll quickly overwhelm me. Where has all of the air gone? I can barely breathe, and I stand and cuddle Zoe tightly against me.
‘I have to go,’ I say abruptly.
‘We’ve still got forty-five minutes, Olivia,’ Natasha says quietly. ‘Stay. Talk with me. We’ll ride this out together.’
I shake my head fiercely and step towards the door.
‘Will you stay if we agree to talk just about the basic facts? I promise, I won’t push you past what you’re ready to deal with,’ Natasha says. ‘Say the word, and we’ll change the subject to whatever you’re comfortable talking about. You’re completely in control here.’
I hesitate. I’m still standing between my chair and the door. I glance back to Natasha. Her gaze is patient and she’s calm.
‘Why is this so important?’ I ask her, frustrated, and she smiles kindly.
‘You’ve made leaps and bounds of progress in every other area in the last few months, Olivia. But this one relationship… well, there’s a good reason why it’s so hard for you to talk about. Let’s at least try to take some baby steps?’
I swallow hard and return to my chair and sink into it. I keep Zoe on my lap, cuddled close against me.
‘Your relationship with Sebastian wasn’t just professional, was it?’ she asks, so gently that I can barely heard her.
I shake my head. A tear falls onto my cheek.
‘What can you tell me about that?’
I was disappointed and defensive the first time I met Sebastian McNiven, especially when I realised he was exactly my age and he was achieving the dream that David had denied me – the dream to own my own clinic.
I wasn’t hostile – I just wasn’t friendly, not at first. I was professional… I loved my job, and I didn’t want to risk it. But for the first few weeks after he arrived, I couldn’t help but resent Sebastian’s presence at work.
All of that changed with a single display of gratitude.
‘Liv?’ he stuck his head into my office late on a Friday afternoon and I frowned up at him from the computer screen.
‘Yes?’
‘Can you follow me for a sec?’
So I walked down the hall after him into the kitchen. There was a box on the table, and when I peered at it, I recognised a high-end automatic coffee machine.
‘The nurses told me how much you like your morning coffee, so I got this for the staff room. It’s for all of us, but I mainly wanted to do something to say thanks to you. You’re a brilliant vet – honestly, the practice would be nothing without you and I’d already be lost without your work. So… I just needed to make sure you realised how much I appreciate you. I hope you like it.’
I stared at him in shock.
‘But… ’ I was lost for words for a moment, until I laughed. ‘You know, Sebastian – Ryder used to grizzle if I took a coffee break once a day.’
Seb laughed too. ‘Yeah, well… Ryder was a tyrant by all accounts. I want to run this place as a team, you know? And you’re the glue that’s been holding it all together while I settled in so… thanks.’
Sebastian managed to take a fairly stale workplace and turn it into something of a family in a very short period of time, and despite his modesty – he was actually a very skilled vet. We fell into an easy rhythm together – collaborating on cases and diagnoses, but also, he’d come to me for advice about staffing matters or marketing or accounts. Often, I’d have no idea what the answer was, but that he thought to consult me at all was flattering.
We were a partnership of equals, and I loved it.
‘We were just colleagues at first,’ I tell Natasha. ‘Then genuinely just friends for a long time. I had always eaten my lunch in the kitchen at work, but Seb and I naturally started sitting together and talking while we ate. Sometimes one or two of the nurses would join us, but even when they didn’t, Seb and I usually found time to sit there together.’
At first, we discussed easy things… cases, the weather, colourful townsfolk. Gradually, the conversations grew deeper. We swapped stories from our childhood. We laughed about our naive assumptions about veterinarian practice during our uni days. Seb told me about the long-term relationship he’d ended just before he moved from the coast to purchase the clinic, and about his close bond with his father, who was battling cancer.
Gradually, on those lunchbreaks and as we worked side by side, I opened up to Seb. I shared hopes and fears with him, things I couldn’t talk about with anyone else. It was a complicated task, because I’d share something I thought was simple… like the fact that I didn’t want to have children with David just yet because I knew it would mean leaving work… and we’d somehow wind up talking about issues right on the edge of the dark side of my marriage.
‘Why don’t you just have a baby and come right back to work?’ Seb shrugged. ‘You can work whatever hours you want – giving you some flexibility will be easy.’
I cursed myself for bringing it up.
‘David doesn’t want me to work after we have kids,’ I admitted, flushing, and Seb’s eyes widened.
‘Why on earth not?’
‘He’s kind of traditional like that.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t actually know,’ I said, and I tried to laugh it off. ‘Anyway, it will have to happen one day.’
‘Will it? Do you even want kids?’
I was surprised by the question, because no one had asked me it like that before. David and I had talked about how many, but I don’t think we ever really considered the possibility that a perfectly acceptable answer might be none.
‘I guess so,’ I said, but I was frowning by then. The subject of children with David had become so fraught with tension and danger that I no longer allowed myself to think about it in any positive light at all. Truthfully, by that stage, I would have foregone motherhood if it was the only way I could keep my career.
‘Well, just because he doesn’t want you to work, doesn’t mean you can’t,’ Seb said, shrugging. ‘That’s why you’re waiting, right? So you can negotiate these things and find a compromise?’
Whenever Seb would assume the best of my marriage, I’d lie – either with my silence or a simple nod. For the longest time, I thought I had fooled Seb just like David and I had fooled everyone else. I figured Seb thought I was happily married and that David really was the admirable man everyone else assumed him to be.
And for all of that time, I told myself Seb and I were just friends. Increasingly good friends, incredibly close friends – but nothing more.
‘David had no idea how close Seb and I were becoming at work – I went out of my way to avoid talking about him at home, sometimes I even pretended not to like Seb at all just because I thought it might help. And I never wanted to be unfaithful to David. I would never have done it on purpose.’
‘People rarely set out to have affairs.’
‘It really happened very organically,’ I say softly. ‘We just became emotionally intimate. We learned about each other and we each liked what we found.’
‘Did Sebastian feel safe to you, Olivia?’
‘Completely. Nothing about the relationship felt safe once it became more overt, but whenever I was with Seb, I felt… ’ I pause, searching for the word. I think about his confidence in my ability to handle the feline case on my first day back at work, and how Seb seems to understand what I need even better than I do. ‘Even when I only gave him half of the picture of my life, he still seemed to know me better than anyone else.’
‘Did you ever feel that safe with David?’
I shake my head immediately. ‘It was different with David. He was always intense. But Seb is the most relaxed person I know.’
‘So you and Sebastian were good friends… best friends… and then… ?’ Natasha prompts.
Am I ready to talk about this? It’s been easier than I expected getting this far, and in some ways, I’m almost enjoying the chance to look back on those times with Seb. They were certainly some of the happiest moments of my life over the past few years.
‘A young family brought in a puppy one morning. They said it had been unwell overnight and they weren’t sure why. Once Seb checked it over, he realised it was actually critically ill – later we discovered it had eaten a heap of dark chocolate which contains theobromine… toxic to dogs, particularly little dogs, particularly large amounts. It was just too late to help, and the puppy died. Pets die all of the time in our job – it’s not pleasant, but it’s also part and parcel with it… but that puppy... the mother had been eating the chocolate the night before and she left it out. The father had seen the puppy chewing it but didn’t realise it was dangerous. So Seb had the whole family sobbing in the consult room with him. Once they finally left, he came in to chat with me and he was so upset.’
I saw the look on his face when he came to my office, so I rose and shut the door behind him. We sat together side by side on the edge of my desk while he talked – venting his frustration that there was nothing at all he could do to help – lamenting about how preventable the situation was if only they’d known or they’d called us sooner. I don’t think I’d ever seen him so upset before.
Even Sebastian’s self-awareness and openness with his feelings challenged me. It was bold – brave and deeply masculine, but in a way that was so unlike anything I’d ever seen, not in my father or male friends but especially in David. There was no loud testosterone blindness to navigate with an upset Seb. On this rare occasion that he was distraught, he sought to understand the emotions he was feeling, and he didn’t try to hide them behind machismo.
Seb opened my eyes to the wealth of connection I could feel with a man who knew how to express emotions other than anger, and the revelation was life changing.
‘If you’d told me once upon a time that a vulnerable man would be insanely attractive to me, I might have thought you were crazy,’ I whisper to Natasha, and she laughs quietly.
‘Self awareness and honesty are attractive traits because they make for pleasant partners,’ she tells me. ‘But they aren’t terribly compatible with the kind of hyper-masculinity you experienced with David.’
‘No,’ I shake my head. ‘Not at all. David would have called Sebastian a “sissy” or a “wimp”. In fact, even without knowing Seb much at all, he often did.’
When Seb had finished talking, we slid off the desk to leave and he thanked me for listening. Automatically, I wrapped my arms around his waist for a hug – offering him only support and comfort. As I did, I heard him draw in a sharp breath. Then his arms closed gently around me, and my heart started racing.
It was that simple, and that complicated. A purely physical response to a relationship that was entirely more than that. In a single hug, Sebastian really was more than a friend.
‘That’s all it took for me to realise at last that my respect for him had actually grown into something deeper. I pulled away just a little – just so that I could look into his eyes – and I saw it there too. It wasn’t lust. It was purer than that… just a mutual awareness of something more between us.’
‘Did the two of you discuss it?’
‘Not at that stage. Actually, I think he sprinted out of the office and avoided me for a little while, but we got over the panic of it and just carried on for some time. We stayed in this kind of in-between zone… more than friends, less than lovers. I knew I shouldn’t let it progress, and I told myself I wasn’t going to. But after that day, we touched each other more – innocent touches – the odd hug when we were alone, or we’d brush hands at the kitchen table but our hands would linger. It was dangerous but… it was nice.’
Sometimes, just for a moment or two when he walked into the room with me, I’d actually get a taste of what it would be like to be free, because for a few moments, I’d pretend that Seb and I were properly together.
‘So given how close you and Sebastian were by that stage, did he ever notice anything amiss in your relationship with David?’ Natasha asks me quietly.
‘Yeah, he did.’
It was dozens of gentle invitations to talk that came in the form of casual comments, always when we were alone, and never delivered with any pressure.
Have you noticed the way he talks to you, Olivia? Why does he think it’s okay to push you around like that?
That’s a nasty bruise on your neck, Liv?
Is your arm okay? That looks like… it almost looks like a handprint? How did that happen?
Why are you limping?
Of course you can take time off for the dentist, but if you chipped that tooth on a nut, why is your lip bruised too?
Is David really coming to the vet conference again this year?
‘He didn’t directly ask me. Not at first,’ I whisper. ‘He just gave me space. He’d mention things that concerned him, always when we were alone, and then he left the ball in my court.’
‘Did you consider talking to him?’
‘No way,’ I say firmly. ‘I couldn’t risk dragging Seb into it.’
‘So, Olivia,’ Natasha says gently. ‘Are you ready to talk about when Seb did get dragged into it?’
David gave me a black eye the night he made me go off the pill and I couldn’t hide it.
And from there, everything spiralled completely out of my control, if I ever had any at all.
‘Can we leave it there today?’ I ask her. ‘Please?’
‘Okay, Olivia,’ Natasha nods. ‘That was a great start.’