Fletch had been fearful that things would fall apart just as quickly as they had come together. He stayed in good faith, trusting that Jac wanted this to work as much as he did. The fact that she actually trying gave him faith that she wanted him and that she wanted this, and every time she let him in a little more, he knew it was a step forward.
It was remarkable how quickly things settled down again. Thursday became date night again and Jac and Emma went over for dinner every Monday. They saw each other regularly throughout the week but always made sure that there was at least one day where they didn't see each other...to keep things from getting overwhelming.
On Friday afternoons, Jac went to therapy after she finished work.
"So Jac, how are things going this week?" Sarah asked with a smile, pen ready to note down anything important.
"Pretty normal; I've been working a lot, I've seen Fletch a little, things are starting to get back to the old routine," she replied concisely. Even if she was here, and even if she wanted it, Jac wasn't very good at therapy yet.
"How do you feel about that? The old routine resulted in you breaking up with Fletch and burying yourself in work, don't you think that it could just do the same thing again?"
Jac glared at her disdainfully, wasn't the point of therapists to make you less scared of doing the wrong thing? She was getting extremely annoyed with this woman who seemed to be doing everything wrong by her books, but she stuck around because she had promised herself she would try this time.
"It wasn't the routine. It wasn't Fletch. It wasn't work. It was me, and that's the part of the equation that I'm trying to change here," she answered confidently, and Sarah offered a little smile at that.
They spoke for the next 55 minutes about her childhood and her past relationships and where she thought it'd all gone wrong. There was a catharsis in talking about it, in admitting her anger at her mother and the way she had treated everybody she loved from there forward.
Jac left with an assignment of sorts. Do something small each day to show somebody that she loved them, and not to tell them why. Well this was going to be difficult to keep under wraps if she was using Fletch has her subject.
On the first day, she brought him coffee and told him she was allowed to do something nice for him if she wanted.
On the second day, she bought him the shirt that she had asked the guy on the train to Edinburgh about and left it on a hanger in his office with a note saying she thought it would suit him.
On the third day, she brought him a bacon sarnie for lunch and told him she didn't know if he'd had time to get anything himself.
On the fourth day, she finished early and picked Theo up from the creche with Emma, taking them both back to hers and dropping him a text to say that she would drop him off at 6o'clock.
On the fifth day, she told him that she liked his tie, jauntily describing it as 'not hideous' and saw the way his face lit up.
On the sixth day, she refused surgery in the knowledge that it would leave her running late for dinner.
And on day seven, she took him to the Darwin store cupboard and showed him just how grateful she was to have him.
The last thing was to do was to ask him if she'd been different this week, and so she did.
"I wouldn't say so. Why, have you had your haircut and I haven't noticed? Or, is it your perfume?" he rattled on awkwardly as she laughed at how flustered he was getting. "What is it?"
"My therapist gave me an assignment to do one nice thing for you every day and see if you picked up on it,"Jac explained. "I don't know what it's supposed to mean that you didn't, maybe I'm not good enough at doing nice things."
"No, it means that you do nice things for me every day without even realising it, and that you are so much better at caring about people than you think you are. Stop thinking that you don't show me how much I mean to you because you do," Fletch said, rubbing her arm from wrist to elbow, over and over again in a soothing pattern.
She smiled at him weakly, a little embarrassed but pleased all the same. Her appointment was in five minutes, so she excused herself and headed downstairs.
It was incredible the way that therapy structured her life. Every week, she would discuss how her assignment meant and what she learned, and then they would talk about her week, and then they would talk about the roots of her problems, and then she would be set another assignment.
Weeks passed, and she started to feel like things might actually be changing. When she was feeling insecure, she would go to Fletch instead of hiding from him, and when she needed time to herself, she would tell him first instead of leaving him to worry.
She had started to believe that things weren't going to fall apart solely because of her. Her mindset was actually changing, and she had never been more frightened; pessimism and emotional absence had served as a safety blanket for her almost her entire life and she wasn't quite ready to give them up.
But she had to, and she knew that deep down. Years of pretending that she didn't care had to be put into the past if she actually wanted things to change. No more excuses, she told herself, it was time to fix this.
