Misconception

by Christy Hayes

  “Did you?”

  “It was the first time I’d gone against them. Even my father got involved and he never got involved.”

  “What did your father do?”

  “He said he’d buy me a new car if I came home, said we’d go to Spain for two weeks, and that he’d arrange for me to intern at his best friend’s law firm.” She could still hear her mother’s voice in the background, spilling out more promises for him to recite. “When I wouldn’t budge, they demanded I bring him home so they could meet him properly.”

  Dr. Falcon’s eyes flicked to the wall clock over the door and back to Pace so fast she couldn’t be sure he’d ever looked away. “And how did that go?”

  “It was dreadful. My mother peppered him with questions, practically rolled her eyes in his face, and brought up my lineage. She actually used the word lineage whenever she could. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

  “And yet you married.”

  “Their worst nightmare, or at least my mother’s.”

  “What about your father?”

  Pace thought of her funny, charismatic father and how he went along with whatever her mother asked him to do and still did. “He just wants me to be happy. He loves Jason and has always made him feel a part of the family. My father wasn’t born into money like my mother was. He put himself through college and law school, fought hard for everything he accomplished. He and Jason are very much alike in that way.”

  At this Dr. Falcon shifted ever so slightly in his seat, but Pace noticed. He wore his mask of objectivity well and this was the first time she’d seen it slip. “So your father defers to your mother?”

  “Habitually.”

  His eyes flicked to the wall clock again and, after noting something on the pad, he scratched his chin. “We’re running short on time, but I think we’ve got a lot to work with here. Are you and Jason planning to come in together on Friday?”

  “Unless you scare him off during his session.”

  * * *

  Jason found Pace going through a box of old photos the night of her first therapy session. “What are you doing?”

  He’d startled her, he could tell from the way she whipped her head around and swiped at a tear leaking from the corner of her eye.

  “Nothing.” She gathered the pictures and frantically shoved them back into one of the many photo boxes she kept in the basement.

  He stuffed his hands in his pockets to keep from reaching for her. He’d seen the pictures; shots from college when they’d first met. He dreaded going to see Dr. Falcon the next day and seeing her walk down memory lane made him dread it even more. The last thing he wanted to do was rehash the past. His dinner with Adam had been enough.

  The afternoon of the appointment he was knee deep in drawings and emails with the New York client. Their list of questions about the process and their options kept him busy and responding to each one made him feel bogged under. Spending an hour he didn’t have in therapy pissed him off. His secretary lifted her brows again as he left; the whole office probably thought he was having an affair.

  Dr. Falcon opened his door right at three and ushered him inside with a wave. Jason couldn’t stand the guy’s casual greeting, like they were friends and he’d purposefully stopped work in the middle of the day to hang out with him. Just because Pace thought Falcon could magically make their marriage all better he was forced to sit in detention like a scolded child three times a week. The whole thing felt like a huge waste of time and money.

  He sat in the chair opposite Dr. Falcon without taking off his coat. He didn’t consider their meeting a friendly chat and he couldn’t wait to get out of there. He could tell by the look on the doctor’s face he was judging him on his appearance, his scowl, and whatever information Pace had supplied in their individual session. God only knew what she’d told him. Falcon’s intense focus made Jason want to punch him in the face.

  “How are you doing, Jason? Can I take you coat?”

  He hated it that he called him Jason as if they were pals. “I’m fine, thanks.” When he realized he’d gripped the arms of the chair in a white knuckle hold, he deliberately relaxed and dropped his hands over the sides.

  “I understand you and Pace spoke to your sons about what’s going on?”

  Jason nodded and when Falcon continued to stare at him, he knew the session wouldn’t be quick. “It wasn’t easy. Dillon, our oldest, I find him watching us together. I guess he’s looking for clues.”

  “It’s very hard on children to realize their parents might not always be together. Be sure to keep the lines of communication open with both of them if you think they want to talk or ask questions. Sometimes the best answer to give is, ‘I don’t know.’ They appreciate your honesty.”

  “I guess so.” He began to sweat in the warm office and stood up to shed his coat. He tossed it on the couch, sat down in the chair, and checked his watch.

  “Pace told me you and she met in college. Can you tell me about that?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “How did you meet?”

  Jason stared at him without blinking. “I thought you said she told you how we met.”

  “I’d like to hear you tell me.”

  Christ. A hundred bucks an hour for this? “We met at a party.”

  “What was your first impression of her?” Falcon asked.

  Jason sighed and thought back. The first time he saw her she was…stunning. Smiling, laughing, hopping around the room from girl to boy without a self-conscious bone in her tiny little body. He’d wanted to scoop her up and put her in his pocket. He knew right then he had to talk to her, had to find a way to draw her over to where he stood watching. “I thought she was beautiful. She looked classy, but…approachable.”

  “And you approached her?”

  “She came up to me. I’d been staring at her and she called me on it.”

  “And?”

  “And we started talking.” Dr. Falcon lifted his brows, expected more information. Damn, what did it matter? “The band cranked it up a notch, so we went outside. After awhile, we went to the intramural fields by the river to talk.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  Jason shrugged, thinking of that long ago night. Most of what he remembered was how pretty she looked in the moonlight and how she really listened. When he kissed her, she tasted like strawberries. “Stuff, school, our majors, where we were from, the usual when you first meet someone.”

  “And you were smitten?”

  Smitten? What the hell? “I wanted to see her again.”

  “Did you?”

  “We’re married, aren’t we?” He couldn’t do this for an hour.

  “Did you know her father was a senator the night you met?”

  “I’m sure she told you I didn’t.”

  “Jason…” He leaned forward in his seat. Jason pictured Falcon’s college professor coaching him in dealing with reluctant patients. “Whatever Pace told me in our session, I can’t repeat. It’s important for me to understand your relationship, from the very beginning and progressing to what’s brought you here. I promise you that although these questions may seem random or tedious, they’re relevant.”

  Jason imagined him quietly lecturing the kid whose picture sat atop his desk, that conciliatory tone droning on and on about what the kid did wrong and why it was wrong and did he understand why he couldn’t do it again. “No, I didn’t know her father was a senator when we met.” He fought the urge to smirk and say, “Happy?”

  “How did you find out? Did she tell you eventually?”

  “My roommate razzed me about it the next day.” He could still see his face, hung-over, sitting on the couch in his briefs when Jason walked in the next morning. “Dude,” he’d said. “You’ve got some kinda balls.”

  “Did you approach her about the fact that she hadn’t said anything?”

  Accuse her was more like it. “I mentioned it.”

  “Mentioned it how?” />
  Jason gritted his teeth. He knew Pace told him he’d yelled at her. “I thought she was messing with me, ya know, using me to make some rich frat boy jealous or just trying to rebel.” He’d nearly ruined it that morning, letting his insecurity and pride get the best of him. He’d never forget the way she looked that day when he’d said those things, like a little wounded bird. He’d mangled the flower he’d brought her in his fist.

  “Did she try to hide your relationship from her friends, sneak around to be with you?”

  “No, no one at school. Once we cleared the air about why she hadn’t said anything, we started dating. We were together all the time.”

  “How did you feel once you knew who her parents were, once you knew about her background?”

  Naïve and insecure, but he’d never admit that. “Everyone knew who she was, how she’d grown up. I guess I felt luckier, more independent, and a little intimidated.” Jason propped his leg on his knee. “She didn’t tell her parents right away. She seemed a little scared of them and now that I know them I understand why. Her mom’s a snob and her dad…let’s just say he hates me.”

  “How did you feel about being kept a secret?”

  Jason shrugged. Admitting he didn’t like it wouldn’t do much good. “I figured she knew best how to deal with her parents. Her ex kept calling from Yale. Prick wouldn’t leave her alone. She didn’t tell him about us either because she knew it would get back to her parents and she wasn’t ready to deal with them yet.”

  “You weren’t intimidated enough to back out of the relationship?”

  “We were in love. Completely in love. It never felt like something either one of us had a choice in.”

  Falcon jotted something down on his notepad and shifted focus. “Tell me about your family, your parents, siblings.”

  “My parents died…” Jason had to search his brain for the date. They’d never really been around, so the amount of time they’d been gone didn’t really register. “Eight years ago.”

  “An accident?” Falcon asked.

  He shook his head as the heavy weight of the past settled on his chest. “My dad died first. He’d battled cancer for years. He was seventy-three. My mom basically died of a broken heart. She stopped eating, stopped taking her meds. She only lasted three months without him.”

  “So your parents were older.”

  “My mom had me when she was forty-six.” The big mistake, she’d always said.

  “Siblings?”

  “My sister Cami’s fifty-one. My brother, Adam, he’s forty-seven.”

  Falcon noted it all down and tapped his pen on the pad. “Quite a big age gap between you and your siblings. You’re…” he rifled through a file on his desk, “…thirty-five?”

  Jason nodded and glanced at his watch again. Thirty minutes to go.

  “What was it like having a sister and brother so much older than you?”

  He shrugged, shifted positions in the chair. He had a feeling no matter how or where he sat in this office he wouldn’t be comfortable. “I never really knew my sister. She was out of the house when I was two.”

  “And now?”

  “She lives in Minnesota with her husband. They’ve got four kids and a grandchild. We exchange Christmas cards.”

  “And your brother?”

  “Adam’s in New York. He’s an accountant, two kids, divorced. I just saw him last week when I was in town, but before then it’d been two years. I guess you could say we’re not really close.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Belton, Georgia.” When Falcon cocked his head, Jason said, “It’s an hour-and-a-half from nowhere, little town with one stop light, two churches, and a diner that closes at eight. No one’s ever heard of it.”

  Dr. Falcon smiled at his description of the town that had held him captive for years. “What did your parents do?”

  “They both worked for the junior college two towns over. My mom was a secretary in the English department and my dad ran the science lab.”

  “Were you close to your parents when they were alive?”

  “No.” What the hell did this have to do with him and Pace?

  “Why?”

  Jason could feel his muscles tense. He hated talking about his parents. He tried to remember what he used to tell people when they’d ask why his parents weren’t around. It had been so long he couldn’t recall what he used to say. “When my brother got out of college, I was nine or ten, my parents retired. They’d saved to get Cami and Adam through college and had both put in thirty years. They wanted to travel, see the country. So they did, as often as possible.”

  “Did you go with them?”

  “No. I was in school and couldn’t have cared less about exploring the US in an RV.” And he’d never been asked.

  “Who did you stay with?”

  “My grandfather. He was ninety, died at ninety-six. I think they wanted me to take care of him more than him to take care of me.”

  Dr. Falcon sat up in his chair and uncrossed his legs. “How did that feel, being left to care for your aging grandfather when you were just a child?”

  “It sucked. He couldn’t drive, so I had to catch rides for sports, rarely saw my friends who lived farther away than I could ride my bike. We used to eat charity meals when the food my mom left ran out and we couldn’t get to the grocery store.”

  “How long would your parents be gone?”

  Jason’s eyes shifted to the window, where he noticed it had started to rain, as he thought back to their absences. “A month or two, sometimes longer.”

  Dr. Falcon wrote something down on the pad. When he raised his head, his brow furrowed and disapproval was written all over his face. “Tell me about your grandfather.”

  “He was a crotchety old son of a bitch. He chewed snuff all day long and carried an old tin can around to spit in.” To this day Jason couldn’t stand the smell of tobacco. “He liked to play cards, poker usually, and he told the same stories over and over again. He’d get real confused, called me Adam most of the time.”

  “How did you do in school?”

  “Good. I liked school, the order and structure of it. Besides, I knew there wouldn’t be any money for college and I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of town. An academic scholarship was my only hope.”

  “Did you get one?”

  “Nope. And my parents made too much money for me to qualify for financial aid.” Not that they’d spent a dime on him. “I found a mason jar filled with cash on my grandfather’s property one day. By the time he died, I’d found six in all. Over six thousand dollars. No one seemed to know they existed, so I used the money to pay for my first year and a half. I got a loan for the rest.”

  “So school was important to you?”

  Jason wanted to slap the pity right off his face. Dr. Falcon’s parents probably paid for graduate school. “It was my only option.” He sat up in his seat and got to the point. At the rate they were going, Jason would likely pay for Falcon’s kid’s education, too. “Look, Dr. Falcon. I’m sure there’s some reason for all these questions, but what I’d really like to talk about is my marriage and what you can do to prove to me that my wife didn’t sleep with some other guy.”

  He sighed and tapped the end of his pen against the yellow legal pad on his lap. “Jason, there may never be proof one way or the other. You’ve lost faith in each other and rebuilding that trust is pretty much the same as if one of you cheated.”

  Jason looked at him, with his khaki pants and sweater, his little round glasses, and the picture of his son on his desk. Pace had said he was widowed. He’d felt grief and had to deal with it because his wife wasn’t ever coming back. “Do you think she cheated?”

  “It’s not what I think that matters.”

  Jason sat back and rapped his fingers on the chair’s arm. He needed some answers. “I’ve gone through her stuff, her drawers, her purse, her emails. I’ve even looked through the trash a few times. I go over the phone bill with a
fine tooth comb, have looked over past phone bills. I’ve done a history on her internet searches, looked through her calendar…” Jason shook his head. “Nothing. There’s no evidence she cheated. I’ve been reading some stuff, on the internet.” He shrugged, felt embarrassed to admit he’d researched infidelity. “Most of the stuff I’ve found says a marriage can’t be fixed after one partner has cheated if the cheating partner isn’t willing to admit to the affair. But if she’s telling the truth and the affair didn’t happen, if it was just a huge mistake, she won’t ever admit to it.”

  “I can’t imagine she would if she didn’t do it. What would be the point?”

  “So what do we do?”

  Dr. Falcon looked at Jason, cocked his head to the side like he was trying to think of a way to say what he wanted to say. “You need to decide if you believe her. If you can accept that she wasn’t pregnant, that she didn’t cheat on you, you can begin to move past this and get on with your marriage.” Falcon leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees. “But things won’t go back to the way they were just because you say you believe her. She’s lost faith in you, just as you’ve lost faith in her. Your absolutes are gone. You’d be starting from a new place and building back to where you were, to where you can both trust and love again without questioning.”

  “What if I can’t do it?” Even though everything seemed to point to her innocence, Jason still wasn’t sure he could believe her and living in the boggy middle ground was driving him crazy.

  “If you didn’t want to be in this marriage, if you truly didn’t believe her, you wouldn’t be sitting here right now. You’d never have agreed to therapy, you wouldn’t be living under the same roof. Admitting you love your wife, that you want to be with her, that you want your family to be whole again, it doesn’t make you weak, Jason. It makes you human.”

  Chapter 15

  Since his individual session with Dr. Falcon, Jason seemed more withdrawn than ever. Pace was dying to know what they’d discussed and what had left him so troubled. She quickly dismissed the notion that they’d spent the entire hour bashing her and women in general. It was therapy, she reminded herself, not boys’ night out.