Require it. As a matter of ordinary expectation. Not as a climax. As a baseline.
## Where Things Are Now
It is four months past the training day at Northbridge. Daniel and I are still with Dr. Watts, going every two weeks. The sessions have moved past the initial territory — the lie and the workshop and the immediate fallout — into something more interesting and more uncomfortable: the question of what we each want this marriage to be and whether those wants are compatible.
I think they are compatible. I think we have a real chance. I hold that belief carefully, not as a certainty, because I learned something this year about the difference between what a person says they believe and what their behavior reflects.
Daniel’s behavior has been reflecting the right things for four months. That is four months. I want to see four years.
He is doing the work. Dr. Watts says she can see it. I can see it in the small moments — in the way he talks about my work without prompting, in the way he handles a question about our finances with accuracy, in the way he called his uncle Richard out of the blue in August and had a ten-minute conversation that ended with Richard knowing exactly what I do.
That phone call Richard did not know about until Daniel told me about it afterward. He did not make it because I was watching. He made it because it was the right thing to do.