POV: VIVIAN
The decision happens in Dr. Wells' office on a Friday afternoon, which is where most of the significant decisions of the past few months have happened, the therapy room having become the location where things get said that have been true for a while and are finally allowed to be formal.
It emerges from a session that has been honest in the specific way the third and fourth sessions always are, past the orientation and past the initial evaluation and into the territory where what's actually present in the room starts to be named rather than gestured at. Dr. Wells has been building toward something for three weeks and today she says it directly: the pattern cannot break from inside the pattern. The only way to understand what you are without the other person is to be without the other person, completely, with enough time and enough distance that the nervous system has to reorganize around absence rather than around presence.
