At nine he stood to leave. Angela walked him to the door and hesitated with her hand on the knob.
"He's spending Christmas with his sister in Cleveland," she said. "I wanted you to know so you wouldn't wonder if he was parked around the corner waiting for you to go."
"I wondered anyway," Jamal admitted. "Habit."
"Habits can be broken."
"Some of them. Some of them just get quieter."
He kissed her cheek. He drove to Rhea's through streets dressed in cheap lights and expensive hopes. In the guest room he opened his laptop and stared at a blank message to Daryl for ten minutes before closing it unsent. Merry Christmas felt like a lie. Thinking of you felt like a wound. Silence, for that night, was the only honest language he had left.
January brought a counseling appointment he did not cancel.
The therapist's office smelled like peppermint tea and printer paper. Dr. Okonkwo was a Black woman in her fifties with short silver hair and a patience that did not perform itself as softness. She asked Jamal why he was there. He told her about the towel, the seven months, the best friend, the mother, the silence. She asked what he wanted from the work. He said he wanted to stop tasting metal when he walked into kitchens. She wrote something down and said they could start with that.
Weekly sessions became a structure he clung to the way he had clung to formation schedules overseas. He talked about Raymond leaving. He talked about enlisting as a way of choosing departure before departure chose him. He talked about the particular betrayal of discovering that caretaking can be a costume for desire. Dr. Okonkwo never told him to forgive. She asked him what forgiveness would cost and what withholding it was already costing, and she let him sit in the math until the numbers stopped lying.