I was running twenty-five minutes late, and blinking icons on my laptop told me that my next two patients were already waiting in their examining rooms. But I wasn’t yet ready to leave the patient in front of me.
Ms. R. continued to weep as she described how, two nights earlier, her husband of twenty-two years had come home, eaten a plate of reheated pasta while standing at the sink, taken a long pull from a beer she’d handed him, and then announced that he’d met another woman and would be moving out that weekend.
