Chapter 37: Roots of Distrust
The session with Dr. Arman didn’t end in the office. “Let’s walk,” the therapist had said after fifty precise, unflinching minutes. Cylene felt scraped hollow, her mind buzzing with the echoes of her own admissions. Drugged and cheated on. The words were out there now, hanging in the lemon-verbena air, stripped of their protective, clinical shell.
They exited through a French door into a walled garden. It was a wild, sun-dappled secret in the heart of the city. Lavender spilled over stone paths, its scent thick and medicinal. A gnarled wisteria vine, past its purple bloom, wove through a weathered pergola. The distant gurgle of a small fountain mixed with the city’s muted hum. Cylene inhaled, the herbal sharpness a shock to her system.
Dr. Arman led her to a wooden bench, its paint peeling to grey. She sat, not as a therapist now, but as a woman in a garden. “Sometimes the brain needs a different container to process things. Walls can make thoughts feel trapped.”
Cylene remained standing, her fingers brushing the velvety tip of a lavender spike. “I told you everything I thought was the thing.”
“You told me the plot,” Arman corrected gently. “Now tell me the theme.”
Before Cylene could untangle that, the garden gate clicked open. Pedro stood there, silhouetted against the brighter light of the alley. He looked out of place in his dark jeans and leather jacket, like a film character who’d wandered into the wrong scene.
“My next appointment cancelled,” Dr. Arman said calmly, without turning. “I took the liberty of asking Pedro to join us. Informed consent is key. Is this okay?”
Cylene’s heart thudded against her ribs. This felt like an ambush. A professional, therapeutic ambush. She nodded, a stiff jerk of her chin.
Pedro approached slowly, his footsteps crunching on the gravel path. He looked at Cylene, then at the therapist. “You said she’d had a breakthrough.”
“A beginning,” Arman corrected. “Often, they feel the same.” She gestured to the space beside Cylene on the bench. “Sit. Listen.”
He sat, leaving a careful foot of space between them. The scent of his cologne, something woodsy and familiar, cut through the lavender. It was the smell of their old life.
“Cylene was just about to trace the pattern,” Arman prompted.
Cylene stared at a single peacock feather, caught high in the wisteria branches. It trembled in the breeze. Her mouth was dry. “The thing with Emily,” she started, her voice low. “It wasn’t the first time.”
Pedro turned his head to look at her fully. “What?”
“The first time someone I loved was taken from me by another woman.” She swallowed, focusing on the feather’s impossible blue eye. “I was twelve. My dad left my mom for his dental hygienist. Janice.” She let out a short, sharp breath that wasn’t a laugh. “He brought me a stuffed panda from a conference in Phoenix to soften the news. As if a toy could fill the hole where my father used to be.”
Pedro was utterly still. “Cy…”
“He didn’t just leave,” she continued, the words coming faster now, loosened by the earlier session. “He rewrote history. Told me my mom had never understood him, that Janice was his ‘true intellectual match.’ He erased twenty years of my mother’s love like it was a clerical error. And I learned something that year, in my stupid pink bedroom, hugging that fucking panda. Love isn’t a fact. It’s a temporary condition. It can be revoked by a hygienist with a better smile.”
The fountain gurgled. A bee dove into a rose.
“And then,” she said, finally looking at Pedro. His face was pale. “There was Ben. College. My first real… everything. He slept with my roommate two weeks before graduation. A ‘stress reliever,’ he called it. Another woman, another erasure. So when you…” She couldn’t say it. “When it happened with Emily, it wasn’t a shock. It was a confirmation. A third data point in a lifelong study. The thesis is: I am not a safe place for love to land. It always finds a better offer.”
Dr. Arman watched them both, a quiet witness.
Pedro’s hands were clenched on his knees, knuckles white. “You never told me that. About Ben.”
“It was before you. It didn’t matter.”
“It all matters!” The force of his words sent a sparrow fluttering from the lavender. He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a raw whisper. “Don’t you see? Emily… she didn’t just find a weak moment. She found the weak spot. The exact fucking wound. She exploited a primal fear you’ve carried since you were a kid.” He dragged a hand over his mouth. “And I handed her the knife. I got in the car. I was the delivery system for your oldest pain.”
His understanding was more devastating than his shame. Cylene felt tears burn, hot and sudden. She fought them, looking back up at the feather.
“So your fear,” Dr. Arman said softly, to Cylene, “isn’t just that Pedro will be drugged again. It’s that the pattern is inevitable. That your history is a prophecy.”
Cylene nodded, a single tear escaping down her cheek. She wiped it away angrily.
Pedro stood up abruptly, pacing the short length of the path. He kicked a loose stone, sending it skittering into the roses. “It’s not. It’s not a prophecy.” He turned to face her, his dark eyes blazing. “You think I haven’t been reading those co-parenting books? The therapy blogs? I have. I know what ‘repetition compulsion’ is. I’m living it. My dad cheated. His dad cheated. It’s the family fucking business. But I’m not my father.” He took a step toward the bench. “And you are not your mother.”
“How do you know?” The question ripped from her, childlike and terrified.
He closed the distance between them in two strides. He didn’t sit. He crouched in front of her, his hands coming up to frame her face. His palms were warm, his thumbs gentle on her cheekbones, holding her gaze prisoner.
“Because I choose,” he said, each word a vow hammered out on iron. “Every damn day, I choose. I choose to show up. I choose to read the boring guidelines. I choose to burn the toast. I choose to be the guy who doesn’t run, even when the distance feels safer.” His voice cracked. “Emily wasn’t love. She was a symptom. A fucking symptom of me running from the hard work of being real. I’m not running anymore. I’m standing here, in the mess I made, and I am telling you: I am breaking every fucking pattern. Mine. Yours. All of them.”
The intensity in his eyes was a physical force. The garden, the therapist, the city noise—it all fell away. There was only his touch, his words settling into the cracked places inside her.
He didn’t wait for an answer. He leaned in and kissed her.
It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was bruising, desperate, a claim and a plea fused together. It tasted of salt from her tears and the bitter tang of his regret. It was a circuit completing, dangerous and vital. Her hands came up, not to push him away, but to clutch the leather of his jacket, grounding herself in the familiar feel of it.
When he finally broke away, breathing ragged, they were both shaking.
Dr. Arman cleared her throat softly. “Well,” she said. “That’s one approach to breaking patterns.”
Pedro rested his forehead against Cylene’s, his eyes closed. “I’m sorry,” he breathed, the words meant only for her. “For being part of the pattern. And I’m sorry for that. I shouldn’t have…”
“It’s okay,” Cylene whispered, and for a flashing moment, it was. It was all okay. The violation, the fear, the years of doubt—they were washed clean in the sheer, terrifying truth of his choice.
But then reality, cold and practical, seeped back in. She pulled back, her hands falling from his jacket. The scent of lavender was overwhelming.
Dr. Arman stood. “Our time is up. Pedro, I’d like to see you individually. Soon. Cylene, you have your family therapy appointment Thursday.” She looked between them, a clinical curiosity softening her sharp features. “What just happened was significant. It was also a bypass. A feeling masquerading as a solution. The work is still in the thinking. In the rebuilding.”
She walked back toward the French door, leaving them alone in the tangled, fragrant garden.
Pedro stayed crouched before her, searching her face. “Was that a mistake?”
Cylene looked at him—really looked. She saw the father of her child. The man who had shattered her. The man who was trying, clumsily and fiercely, to piece everything back together with his bare hands.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. Her lips still tingled. “But it was real.”
He nodded, slowly standing. He offered her a hand. She took it, his fingers closing around hers. They walked out of the garden together, through the quiet building, and into the bustling afternoon street. They didn’t let go until they reached the curb, where his car and her train station lay in opposite directions.
He lifted their joined hands, kissed her knuckles, and released her.
“Thursday,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
She nodded. “Thursday. Pedro-“ she paused. “I’m trying not to be scared.”
“We both are,” Pedro replied, squeezing her hand.
As she walked toward the subway, the ghost of his kiss on her lips and the ghost of her father’s betrayal in her bones, she understood Dr. Arman’s warning. The kiss was a lightning bolt. Illuminating for a second, leaving everything changed, but not rebuilt.
The work was waiting. In the quiet of her own mind. In the next session. In the terrifying, open space between the pattern and the possibility. She touched the shell in her pocket, its sharp edge a comfort. Proof of something solid, found in the chaos. She kept walking.
The city’s noise rushed back in, a jarring symphony of horns and shouting vendors. Cylene walked, her skin humming where his lips had been. The ghost of his hands framing her face lingered like a sunspot. She touched her mouth, half-expecting her fingers to come away stained by the violence of his promise.
I am breaking every fucking pattern.
She believed him. That was the terrifying part. She believed his desperation in the garden, the raw sincerity in his eyes. But belief was a feeling, and feelings were weather—they changed. The work, as Dr. Arman said, was in the architecture. Could you build a shelter out of a storm?
Her phone buzzed in her purse. She ignored it, navigating the crosswalk with robotic steps. The shell in her pocket pressed against her thigh, its sharp edge a grounding pain. It was just a broken thing washed up from the deep. She kept it anyway.
Her phone buzzed again, insistent. She pulled it out, expecting Pedro. It was her mother. The screen flashed a picture of them from last Christmas, smiling under tinsel. Cylene’s thumb hovered over the decline button. She answered.
“Hey, Mom.”
“You sound winded. Are you walking?” Her mother’s voice was bright, layered with its own history of weathered storms.
“Just left my appointment.” Cylene ducked into the relative quiet of a coffee shop alcove, the smell of burnt beans wrapping around her.
“The therapy? How was it?” A careful neutrality. They didn’t discuss feelings head-on; they navigated them like minefields.
“It was… illuminating.” Cylene leaned against the cold brick. “We talked about Dad. About Janice.”
The silence on the line was profound. She could hear her mother’s television droning in the background, some daytime game show.
“Oh,” her mother finally said. The word was small and hardened, like a pebble. “Well. That’s old news, honey. Why drag that up?”
“Because it’s not old.” The words surprised her with their force. “It’s the blueprint. It’s why I expect the floor to disappear.”
Her mother sighed, a sound of infinite weariness. “Your father made his choices. I made mine. Staying, leaving… they’re all just choices. None of them are magic.”
“Did you ever trust him again?” Cylene asked, staring at a stray coffee stirrer on the ground.
“Again?” Her mother gave a short, dry laugh. “I never trusted him to begin with. I trusted myself to handle whatever he did. There’s a difference.”
Cylene absorbed this. It felt cold, and true, and incredibly lonely. “I don’t know if I can live like that.”
“Then don’t,” her mother said, her voice softening. “Make a different choice. But make it with your eyes open, Cylene. Not because some man kissed you and promised you the moon.”
She hadn’t mentioned the kiss. A chill skittered down Cylene’s spine. “How did you—”
“You have a certain tone,” her mother interrupted, not unkindly. “I’ve heard it before. It’s the tone of a woman who’s just been offered a shortcut out of the pain. Shortcuts have cliffs.”
They talked for a few more minutes about Juliet, about the weather back home, a swift return to safe harbor. When Cylene hung up, the buzz of the city felt louder. Her mother’s words melded with Dr. Arman’s. A feeling masquerading as a solution.
Her phone buzzed again. This time, it was Pedro. A text message.
Pedro: I’m outside your building. I know I shouldn’t be. I just drove.
Cylene stared at the words. The pattern would be to tell him to leave, to create a safe, angry distance. Another pattern would be to run to him, to lose herself in the heat of another kiss. She typed back.
Cylene: I’m 20 minutes away. Don’t come up.
Pedro: I won’t. I’ll wait.
When she turned onto her street, she saw his car first, a familiar silhouette parked under a flickering streetlight. He was leaning against the driver’s side door, hands shoved deep in his jacket pockets. He watched her approach, his expression unreadable from a distance.
She stopped a few feet away. The space between them felt charged, but differently now. Less like a magnet, more like a held breath.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” She shifted her bag on her shoulder. “You didn’t have to wait.”
“I did.” He pushed off the car. “The garden… that was a lot. For both of us. I needed to see you weren’t a hallucination.”
A faint smile touched her lips. “I’m pretty real. Sore feet and everything.”
They stood there on the sidewalk, two people who knew the exact texture of each other’s skin, feeling like awkward strangers. The kiss hung between them, a third presence.
“Can we talk?” he asked. “Just talk. I bought terrible corner-store coffee.” He gestured to two paper cups on the roof of his car.
She nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
They didn’t go up. They walked to the small, dismal parkette at the end of her block, a concrete square with a few sad benches and a sculpture nobody understood. They sat, the metal cold through their clothes, and sipped the bitter, scalding coffee.
“I scared you,” he said, not looking at her. “In the garden. I saw it. The moment after I kissed you, your eyes went wide. Not with passion. With panic.”
She held the coffee cup, letting the heat seep into her frozen fingers. “You didn’t scare me. The… inevitability did. It felt like we were just skipping to the next chapter of the same old story. Forgive, forget, repeat.”
“That’s not what I want.” His voice was low, urgent. “I don’t want you to forget a goddamn thing. I want you to remember it all, every second, and choose to sit next to me on this shitty bench anyway.”
She looked at him then. The streetlight caught the grey at his temples, the new lines around his eyes that hadn't been there two years ago. “What does ‘choosing’ look like, Pedro? Practically. It’s not just grand gestures in gardens.”
He took a deep breath. “It looks like me going to my own therapist. Starting next week. It looks like the three of us—you, me, Juliet—having dinner next Saturday, and me not trying to make it perfect. It looks like me reading your new pages, if you ever write them, and giving you notes without making it about us.” He paused. “It looks like me not touching you again until you tell me it’s okay. Really okay.”
The specificity disarmed her. It was a map, not a moon promise. “And what about Emily?” she asked, the name a poison on her tongue. “The scripts that were still waiting for clarity because criminal trumps civil?”
His jaw tightened. “My lawyers are sending a cease and desist tomorrow. For the plagiarism. It’s separate from… us. It’s your work. She doesn’t get to keep it.”
A wave of something fierce and protective rose in her chest. It wasn’t just about her. It was about the truth. “Good.”
They sat in silence, the traffic a distant river of sound. The coffee cooled in their hands.
“I’m scared too,” he said, so quietly she almost didn’t hear it. “I’m scared I don’t have the tools. That I’ll fuck it up just by being me. That my… magnetism, or whatever people call it, is just a defect. A way to avoid being known intimately, afraid it makes me a danger.”
She studied his profile, the familiar slope of his nose, the uncertainty in his downcast eyes. This was the man she’d loved. Not the celebrity, not the charismatic director. The one who feared his own shadow.
“Then you learn new tools,” she said, echoing Dr. Arman’s pragmatism. “You show up for the boring lessons.”
He nodded, finally looking at her. A faint, wry smile touched his lips. “Boring lessons. I can try.”
A gust of wind rattled the bare branches above them. Cylene shivered.
“You’re cold,” he said, starting to shrug off his jacket.
“Don’t,” she said gently. “It’s okay.” The gesture, the old reflex of care, was both sweet and dangerous. They needed new reflexes. “I should go up. Juliet’s with the sitter until seven.”
He didn’t argue. They stood, the bench creaking in relief. He walked her to her building’s front door, that careful foot of space between them still intact.
“Thursday,” he said again, a statement of fact now.
“Family therapy,” she confirmed. “Be on time.”
“I will.” He jammed his hands back in his pockets. “Cylene?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For talking.”
She met his gaze and gave him a single, slow nod. It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t a fresh start. It was an acknowledgment. They were here, on this cracked concrete, talking. It was a thing they were doing. Forgiveness may come, but they must be grounded in truth.
She went inside. The lobby was overheated and smelled of old mail. As she waited for the elevator, she pulled the shell from her pocket. The blue of its inner surface was muted in the fluorescent light. She ran her thumb over its smooth curve.
Upstairs, her apartment was quiet. The “KEEP” box sat by the door, a silent monument to her afternoon of sorting. She walked past it, to the window that overlooked the street. His car was still there. He was still leaning against it, head bowed, looking at his phone.
Then he looked up, straight at her window. He couldn’t possibly see her in the dark, but he lifted a hand. A small, tentative wave.
After a moment, she lifted her own hand in return.
He got in his car. The taillights flared red, then disappeared around the corner.
Cylene let the curtain fall back. The apartment was very still. She had a shell in her hand, a box of kept things by the door, and a conversation that hadn’t ended in a scream or a kiss. It was a strange, new kind of momentum. She walked to her desk, cluttered with insurance forms and a dormant laptop.
She opened the laptop. The screen glowed blue in the dark room. She opened a new document. The cursor blinked on the vast, white emptiness.
She placed the shell carefully beside the trackpad.
Her fingers found the keys. She typed a single line, the words appearing like a breath fogging glass.
INT. PARKETTE - NIGHT
She stared at it. Then she typed another.
Two people sit on a cold bench, holding bad coffee. The space between them is a live wire. They talk.