After Eighteen Years, I Walked Away

Six in the evening, in my counseling office, and the young woman across from me called herself a love diagnostician.

Her voice was thick with a grievance and a hurt that wouldn't dissolve.

"Dr. Mason, do you really believe there's such a thing as love that lasts a lifetime?"

She said she'd tested countless couples, husbands and wives, and not one of them had ever withstood the temptation.

"I only want to help women see the truth in the hearts of the men beside them. But everyone calls me a shameless mistress, a deliberate seductress."

There was a tangled struggle in her eyes.