These strange steps

26

Four more days, and then she's back to her life.

Though...

It's unsettling that the decaf is starting to feel more familiar to her than the idea of her New York apartment, or the warm-up runs she goes through before shows; but it's not as crippling as she thought it would be, to realize that the past is in fact the past. In fact, for the first time in years, change just isn't terrifying to her.

McDonald's is a no go, the day after her dads leave, but it's somehow less devastating than she thinks it'll be when she can't quite make it inside, and instead just ends up having a conversation with Tony outside about what is different about today, and how she can help herself recreate yesterday. It stops her from thinking about percentages, and forces her to instead think about how even when she can't reach fifty percent, she at least can take it in stride and just try again a different way, or on a different day.

She cries, a little, but it's mostly in relief. Tony looks like he understand what that is like without her having to say anything, and then takes her back to the facility for a discussion about how she's going to continue her CBT after she leaves.

When they're done with that, and she's had the world's best vegan club for one of the last times in her life, she has a constructive session with Joel about how to broach the wrap-up of her career so that it doesn't cause more attention than say, a continuance of it would, and then gets her most difficult homework assignment yet.

In some ways, the way that he lays it out for her-"You can do this yourself, or we can do it in a controlled environment, the way we've steered most people into helping your recovery. In my opinion, Rachel, this is something you can do without hand-holding. What do you think?"-almost dares her to take what is obviously the easy way out-to have Joel tell Kurt where their friendship went off course, and why she's not going to be capable of dealing with her own issues on top of his.

But she got that McFlurry, and her dads are going to try to become more involved-and positively so-in her life again, and Puck remains a rock solid background presence, now with better-guided intentions.

That's a lot. That's a lot, and then on top of that, there's Quinn.

"No," she tells him, after a long five minutes of thinking about the many ways this is going to be one of the hardest conversations of her life, and probably the end of ten years of friendship. "I'll do it myself. And-"

"We'll talk about it tomorrow," he reassures her, and that is all she really needs: to know that she will be able to talk to someone about what is actually going on with her. "Good luck."

The thing is, the conversation she has to have with Kurt isn't about luck.

It's about honesty, and she's finally ready for it.

...

She wanders out to Adam's tree with her phone, and stares at Kurt's number for a very long time before finally hitting call and waiting for him to pick up.

It's clear to her that she's not the only one who's been thinking, when he says, "Hello, Rachel" a little tentatively; like he both resents her for not calling sooner and yet wasn't expecting her to call him at all.

"Hi," she says, but she doesn't have much beyond that.

Kurt asks her how she is, in an almost cursory fashion and not like her cares, even though she's sure he does but is just refusing to let her know that. She knows him so well that it's suddenly impossible to ignore what's going on with them, and what has been going on. He's wounded, that he's somehow not been invited to come to Hawaii. He wants to matter more than that, and since she's excluded him from the recovery process to date, he can't quite muster up the kind of enthusiasm for it that he knows he should.