Robert, Her Billionaire Widower

Chapter 8

Vanessa was starting to feel a little uncertain about her job. She did not feel like she was going to be able to do it properly simply because she no longer felt like she was good enough. There was a lot of tragedy behind the story. It seemed like Robert had been hiding some of it from her, possibly out of fear, possibly due to the fact that he did not feel like he deserved to show that part of himself to her.

The thing was, she did not know how Robert felt. She thought that perhaps he was just some guy that was looking to get his story out there. This was not entirely true. Robert was a man that was trying to make it so that he no longer had to deal with the story that was already in his head, the story that was true. He was trying to change the narrative of his relationship with Marie because he could not deal with the thought of his wife having died with that narrative playing. He could not bear the thought of his wife leaving this world unhappy, and Vanessa was increasingly starting to believe that that had been what had happened with Robert and his wife.

She honestly did not know how to feel about this. She was starting to realize that a lot of what Robert had told her had been in order to make himself believe that his relationship with his wife hadn’t been all bad. She was starting to realize that Robert did not feel very good about himself at all, that he was starting to look at himself in a more self deprecating light and that this was leading to him feeling very low about himself. She didn’t want him to feel this way. She didn’t want him to feel like he was worthless or that he had made mistakes that could not be rectified.

More than anything else, what defined Robert was his inability to forgive himself. Every single mistake he had ever made in his life weighed him down like an anchor, every aspect of his life that he did not handle perfectly made him feel like he was not a good person and this was something that he simply could not deal with right now.

Vanessa wished that she could help him. She wished that she could somehow make him see that it wasn’t all bad, that there was hope for him yet. She wanted to make him see that he was a good person, a genuinely good person that deserved to be happy, that he deserved to feel joy. She wanted him to realize that everyone made mistakes, and when you were a person as good as Robert these mistakes tended to be a lot more forgivable because they occurred against a backdrop that is breathtakingly beautiful because it is composed of acts that are selfless and courageous and utterly, incorruptibly good.

This was the major problem with Robert. Vanessa thought that she could help him, however, she had a general idea of how to make him feel like he was worth something again. This idea was borne out of love, although she did not know it yet.

Humans have a fundamental inability to deal with loss. It weighs down on people for the rest of their lives. However, there is a thing called distraction, and that was what Vanessa was planning to give Robert today in a desperate attempt to make him feel better about the loss of his wife and the mistakes that he had made in the months leading up to that loss.

She wanted him to talk about something else, something other than his relationship with Marie. She decided that she would go over to his place and they would not talk about Marie for once. They were quite compatible, at least emotionally and intellectually, even if they did not share a lot of the same interests. This meant that she and Robert could have a proper conversation, they could talk about things that mattered to them and this would help Robert more than anything else because it would allow him to be himself outside of the context of his loss and Vanessa felt that he had not been getting that very often. She felt that he had mired his life in loss, that he had started to define himself by the loss of his wife and how he was dealing with it.

And so, Vanessa decided that it would be a good idea for her to go to Robert’s place and offer to talk about other things, things that did not concern Marie. She decided that she would go to Robert and make him feel normal again by talking about normal things, things that people talked about when they were not dealing with the crippling effects of loss.

She went to his place and enjoyed his warm smile of greeting. They sipped coffee and had a few snacks and prepared for the session that they usually had, the session that would involve Robert telling her about his wife and how he had interacted with her, the various memories that he had with her, and she would ask questions about what he had just told her in an attempt to properly understand what it was he had been going through, what his wife had felt and so on and so forth.

However, Vanessa did something quite different this time. She decided that in liking Robert she was doing nothing wrong. His wife had been gone for well over a year and a half now. There was nothing unethical about wanting to be friends with him, and within the context of that friendship trying to make him feel better about himself and the loss of his wife. This was an act of love but it was an acceptable one, it was one that Vanessa would allow herself to do.

She started to talk to Robert.

“How about we talk about something else today?” she asked him.

“What do you mean?” asked Robert.

“I mean wouldn’t it be nice to not have to talk about Marie for a little while?” said Vanessa. “We’ve been talking about her a lot and to be very honest we are way ahead of schedule. I think the book will be finished a month early at this rate, maybe even six weeks earlier than we thought it would be released. I think both of us need a break because talking about Marie is really intense for you and hearing about it is really intense for me. How about we take a day off together and talk about something else?”

Robert thought for a moment and then said, “That really sounds nice. I think I would like that a lot. I… talking about Marie has not been easy at all, it’s true. It’s made me feel like I’m not normal, like I’m some kind of ghost and that my body is nothing more than a shell. I’m starting to feel like I’m losing my wife all over again. Maybe this book wasn’t such a good idea. I don’t mean to say that I am having second thoughts about it, when I make a decision about something I always see it through until the very end, but at the same time I’m thinking that this book might not make me feel any better. I think I will probably have to go back to my psychiatrist and work on all of these emotions that I am feeling right now. I wish this was not the case. I wish I was stronger. I wish that I had the strength or resilience to simply move on after Marie’s death. God, has it really been over a year and a half? It’s been twenty months! Almost two whole years. I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking this whole time. If I’m being very honest, I think I feel like it just happened yesterday. A lot of this has to do with the fact that I dream about her a lot, and the rest has to do with the fact that I think of her so much. Time didn’t seem to pass before, but now that I am recalling Marie and our relationship in such vivid detail my loss just seems so much more potent. It’s like… It’s almost like I’m losing her every single day now. Yes, I think that is a good way to put it. I feel like I am losing her every day, and this concerns me because I don’t think I can handle this. I think I will be very glad when this book is over, which makes me want to finish it as quickly as possible, but at the same time I can’t help but feel like a break would do me good. Yes, let’s talk about something else. Anything else at all. I think that would do me a lot of good.”