Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 7: The excuse
JAKE
Dr. Okafor said: *Tell me about relationships.*
Jake said: *What about them.*
Dr. Okafor said: *In the intake assessment you marked that one of your primary concerns was your capacity for relationships. I’d like to understand what you meant by that.*
Jake looked at the wall.
They were in the individual session room in the east corridor — smaller than he’d expected, a window with a view of a parking lot, two chairs, a table with a box of tissues that he had not touched and did not intend to touch. Dr. Okafor was sixty, thin, with reading glasses on a cord around his neck and the specific demeanor of a person who had been doing this for a long time and was not going to rush it.
He said: *I meant that I’m not available for one. A relationship.*
Dr. Okafor said: *Why not.*
Jake said: *Because I have nightmares that wake me up on the kitchen floor. Because I have a panic attack in the hardware store when a toddler drops pipe fittings. Because I am — not functional, not in the way that a person in a relationship needs to be.*
Dr. Okafor said: *What way is that.*
Jake said: *Stable.* He paused. *Reliable. Not a liability.*
Dr. Okafor said: *A liability to whom.*
Jake said: *To the person.*
Dr. Okafor said: *The person.*
Jake said: *Anyone. A person.*
Dr. Okafor was quiet for a moment. He said: *I notice you said liability. That’s an interesting word.*
Jake said: *It’s the right word.*
Dr. Okafor said: *It’s a military word. It describes a resource that costs more than it provides.*
Jake said: *Yes.*
Dr. Okafor said: *Do you assess yourself that way.*
Jake said: *In the context of a relationship, yes.*
Dr. Okafor said: *Why.*
Jake looked at the parking lot.
He said: *Because the nightmare is violent. The one last week — I woke up on the floor and I didn’t know where I was for forty-five seconds. If there had been someone in the room with me, I could have—* He stopped. *I’m not safe.* He said it flat. *Not in that way.*
Dr. Okafor said: *You’ve had forty-five-second disorientation episodes.*
Jake said: *A few. Yes.*
Dr. Okafor said: *And they’re decreasing.*
Jake said: *Some.*
Dr. Okafor said: *Sergeant Mitchell.* He leaned forward slightly. *The goal of the work we’re doing is to reduce the frequency and intensity of those episodes. We’ve had three sessions. You’ve been consistent, you’ve been doing the grounding exercises, you’ve called the support line twice.* He paused. *I want to ask you something, and I want you to hear it as a clinical question rather than as a challenge.*
Jake said: *Okay.*
Dr. Okafor said: *When you say you can’t be in a relationship because you’re not stable — is that a conclusion, or is it a way to avoid making yourself vulnerable to someone?*
The room was quiet.
Jake said: *They’re not mutually exclusive.*
Dr. Okafor said: *No. They’re not.* He paused. *But they’re also not identical. A conclusion about your capacity for relationship is based on an assessment of your current state and its trajectory. An avoidance strategy is based on something else — usually a fear about what happens when you let someone in.*
Jake said: *I’m aware of the difference.*
Dr. Okafor said: *Are you using the PTSD to avoid the vulnerability?*
Jake said nothing.
Dr. Okafor said: *You don’t have to answer that today. But I’d like you to hold the question.*
Jake held the question.
He held it on the drive back to Oakwood with the flat Texas road ahead of him and the radio off and the window down. He held it in the south pasture that afternoon, standing in the heat while his nervous system learned, incrementally, that this was not a threat environment. He held it through dinner with his mother and through the hour he spent on the porch afterward with the sound of the evening and the lights going on down the road at Amy’s house.
He thought: *I am not avoiding vulnerability. I am protecting her.*
He thought: *that is different.*
He thought: *is it.*
He had known Amy Brooks since they were eight years old. He had known her through the fence that separated the farms and through seventeen years of summer afternoons and kitchen tables and a hundred Tuesday evenings watching the stars from the tailgate of his father’s truck. He had known the smile and the full-version attention and the way she made tea at three in the morning without asking if it was wanted.
He had not, at eighteen, told her that he thought about her in a way that was not the way you thought about your best friend.
He had known it was there. He had known it the summer before he’d left — the specific weight of watching her laugh at something Mrs. Henderson had said at the Fourth of July and thinking: *I’m going to do something stupid.* He had left two weeks later. He’d told himself it was the right time to go. He’d told himself the Army was what he’d been building toward since he was twelve.
Both of those things were true.
Neither of them was the whole story.
The whole story was: he was eighteen and he was going to a war and he did not know how to say *I think I love you* to the person he had been too scared to say it to for two years, so he left.
He had been leaving her for eleven years.
He stood on the porch and looked at the light at Amy’s house.
He thought: *the protocol doesn’t run for Amy.*
He thought: *when she hugged me at the party I almost flinched and then I didn’t.* The not-flinching had been managed — but it had been managed faster than anything else in the last month. Like some part of his nervous system had a separate file for Amy Brooks, stored before the war, that said: *this is safe.*
He thought: *that’s not protection. That’s using her.*
He thought: *I don’t know what I’m doing.*
He went inside.
His mother was reading at the kitchen table. She said: *How was Garland.*
He said: *Productive.*
She said: *Good.* She did not look up from her book. *Amy called. She wanted to know if we needed anything from the grocery store before the weekend.*
He said: *We’re fine.*
His mother said: *I told her to come for supper Saturday.*
He looked at his mother.
She looked at her book.
He said: *You didn’t have to do that.*
She said: *I know I didn’t. The food’s better with more people.*
He said: *Mom.*
She said: *Jake.* She turned a page. *I’m not doing anything. I’m making food.*
He went upstairs.
He lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about Dr. Okafor’s question — *is that a conclusion or a way to avoid making yourself vulnerable* — and he didn’t have an answer, but he had the specific discomfort of a question that was landing somewhere real.
He was not using the PTSD to avoid Amy.
He was protecting her.
He was.
He thought about the forty-five-second disorientation. He thought about the pipe fittings at Pruitt’s. He thought about the thing the counselor before discharge had said: *you are going to think you are protecting people by keeping them at a distance. The people who love you will not agree.*
He thought: *she doesn’t love me.*
He thought: *she’s my oldest friend.*
He thought: *I don’t know why I said that like it was a correction.*
He turned over.
He did not sleep for a long time.
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