Couples Retreat – Part 2: Remembering

The second week was harder. Teresa set them a task each morning: a question to ask, a memory to share, a single thing to try that they had not tried in years. Owen called it homework. Nina called it therapy with better scenery.

On Tuesday they had to write down three things they had never told each other. They sat on the cabin's narrow porch, pencils in hand, the jungle steaming gently around them.

Nina wrote: I was afraid, in the first year, that you'd leave when I got sick. She had never said it. She had been sick for three months after the miscarriage, and she had been certain that he would see her as broken and go.

Owen wrote: I didn't go back to work that Friday. I sat in the car outside the hospital for two hours, because I didn't know how to be useful.

They read them aloud to each other, and neither of them looked away.

"You never told me you were sitting in the car," Nina said.

"You never told me you thought I'd leave," said Owen. "I'd have stayed. I was always going to stay."

The rain came down. They sat close together on the porch, shoulders touching, and for the first time in a long while, the silence between them felt full rather than empty.

On Wednesday, Teresa asked them to try one thing neither of them had done in years: to spend an hour in the outdoor hot spring at the edge of the forest, together, with no phones and no talking unless they wanted to.

The water was warm and dark, steaming in the cool air. Lanterns flickered on the wooden rim. Above them, the canopy of trees whispered, and somewhere a bird sang one long, liquid note.

Nina sank down into the water with a sigh. Owen came to sit beside her, close, his arm resting along the rim behind her shoulders.

"Green?" he asked quietly, without looking at her.

"Green," she said. Then, after a moment, softer: "Owen, I'm glad we came."

"So am I." He was quiet for a while. "Can I hold your hand?"

"Yes."

He found her fingers under the water, and held them, warm and steady, the way he used to on long walks in Central Park before they had a mortgage and a dog and a list of things to do.

Later, back in the cabin with the rain still falling on the roof, Nina lay in his arms and listened to his heartbeat slow.

"What do you want to do when we get home?" she asked.

"Go to the lake on Sundays," said Owen. "Talk about nothing. Ask you a question every morning. Remember the bad films."

"And if we forget?"

"Then we come back here, and Teresa makes us write it down again," he said, and she laughed, low and warm, into his shoulder.