She started going to Dr. Lau because she wanted to save her marriage. She'd said that at the first session, sitting very straight: "I want to make it work."
Dr. Lau asked good questions. Each week, a small correction. Look at this from another angle. Notice what you feel when he says that. Try saying it back to yourself.
The corrections were tiny. Each one made sense on its own.
Around month four she told her sister she thought it was helping. Her sister said, "You look different."
"Different how?"
"Like someone who's leaving."
She denied it for two more months. But each session was another small step — honest, local, impossible to argue with individually. She wasn't heading anywhere. She was just being more precise about where she stood.
By month seven, when she finally said the word, it didn't feel like a decision. It felt like recognizing something that had been there since the first session, waiting at the bottom of a long sequence of small honest steps.
She thought about what would have happened if she'd sat in a different chair. Started from a fractionally different position. Said "I want to understand" instead of "I want to make it work."
Some of those versions saved the marriage. She was sure of it. They were iterating right alongside her, taking their own small honest steps, converging somewhere else entirely. The boundary between her and them was the width of a word, a pause, a Tuesday instead of a Thursday. Infinitely thin. Infinitely complex.
You couldn't know, from the starting point, which side you were on. You could only take the next step and see where it was already taking you.