Peter Ends His Therapy

Peter Ends His Therapy marks a decisive break in Peter’s attempt to recover through Hetty’s sessions and a turn toward a future he and Eva can choose together. He leaves not with a new therapeutic method, but with the conviction that continuing these meetings is making him less happy; on the drive home, that refusal gives way to renewed energy and a plan to pursue adoption.

The Meeting with Hetty

The decision takes shape in Hetty’s garden, where she asks Peter how he has been getting on with his affirmations. They sit beneath a green parasol and drink the herbal iced tea she says refreshes the heart. The setting is calm, but Peter’s response to the exercise is not. He tries to perform it, breathing in and murmuring the affirmation, while feeling deeply ashamed and alienated from what he is doing. He cannot recognize the practice as something that fits him, and the effort has become a torment he no longer wants to endure, despite how much he loves Eva.

Peter tells Hetty that he does not believe the meetings are helping and that he wants to stop. His explanation is measured rather than triumphant: he cannot say precisely what will help, but he knows this approach is wrong for him and expects it to make him more unhappy. In his own assessment, other parts of life are beginning to improve. He is slowly picking up his old life again, and he believes that continuing to sit in therapy is less useful than allowing that recovery to proceed.

Ending the Sessions

Hetty offers to refer Peter to another therapist, suggesting that he might prefer to work with a man. The offer leaves open the possibility that the difficulty lies with this particular therapeutic arrangement rather than therapy as a whole. Peter declines it. He does not ask for a different practitioner or a revised course of treatment; he wants to get on with his life.

That distinction gives the departure its force. Peter is not presented as having solved every problem or discovered a complete account of his distress. Instead, he recognizes a limit: the affirmations and meetings do not feel like a path he can inhabit, and persisting with them would deepen his unhappiness. His decision is an act of self-direction, but the scene also leaves its uncertainty intact. He does not know exactly what comes next when he walks away from Hetty.

A Return to Possibility

The change becomes visible on the drive home. Peter opens the car window and plays Guns N’ Roses. It is summer, and for the first time in years he feels that season as something he can participate in. His thoughts turn toward ordinary plans: calling Steef to invite him for a beer at the beach, going on holiday, cycling across the heath, eating out with Eva, looking for a new job, and attending a good concert. These are possibilities, not completed actions, but their variety matters. His attention, which he describes as having been stalled for years, begins to move rapidly outward again.

As he drives out of the city, past green fields and newly emerging housing developments, that returning energy becomes an interpretation of the couple’s predicament. He believes there is a way for Eva and him to climb out of the low period they have shared. His insight is not that they need more options, but that they need to remain faithful to choices they have already made. He recalls their decision to marry as one they made without hesitation, and their decision to have a child as another they embraced with conviction.

From Treatment to Adoption

Peter locates the couple’s crisis in what followed their inability to have a child. They had decided not to enter the medical process, then departed from that decision and faced so many treatment choices that they became overwhelmed. They tried them all, in his account, and lost their sense of themselves in the process. Their belief that they needed Hetty to find their way back had itself become part of that search for an external solution. Now, as he ends the sessions, Peter sees the next step as stopping the uncertainty and ceasing to grieve what they do not have.

The alternative he arrives at is adoption. He imagines it as a new goal shared with Eva: having a child who would have no blood tie to either of them. He sees this path as more honest for all three people involved, and explicitly not as a second-best version of biological parenthood but as a different choice. The conclusion links his departure from therapy to a renewed commitment to the marriage and to parenthood, while leaving the decision’s future realization beyond this moment. The emotional turn is from feeling trapped among treatments and possibilities to choosing a course together; the affirmation that matters is no longer one recited in Hetty’s garden, but the decision Peter believes he and Eva can keep.