After getting off the phone with Maura, Jane immediately dialed her mother. Pacific time was 9:12 pm, which meant it was just past midnight in Boston. Angela was almost certainly asleep, but this couldn't wait. The conversation with Maura had been a shock, but even as Maura had nervously posited her own theory of how her personal assistant must have accidentally included Alice on the guest list, Jane had started putting the pieces together of what had actually happened.

"Jane! You better be dying or dead to wake me up at this hour," her mother clucked into the phone.

"Ma, I wish it were just that." Jane asked calmly.

"Jane, I'm not in the mood for riddles."

"Do you know anything about wedding invitations being sent to non-invitees?"

"Jane, really. I have no idea…"

And as she hesitated mid thought, another theory occurred to Jane.

"You found them in the cupboard,"

"Do you mean the ones in the cupboard?"

They said at the same time.

"Oh, Jane. I'm so sorry," Angela keened. "Were those not meant to get sent? I just found them there with your junk food when I was organizing Maura's cabinets,"

"Ma! I told you to cool it with the organizing," Jane interrupted, frustrated.

"Well, I wouldn't have to if you weren't such a slob. You know I didn't raise you to be that way," but Jane interrupted her before she swung into full lecture mode.

"Ma, the cabinets?"

"Yeah, well I found the box of invitations there squirreled away with your junk food and thought, hmm, my Jane is so absentminded with this rushed wedding (and I told you there was no rush by the way). But there they were, these invitations that you had obviously misplaced with your junk food in your overtaxed state, and (God forgive me for trying to be a good mother!) but I thought I could finally help you both out with some of the wedding plans, since neither of you seemed to want to ask for my help anytime soon (despite the wedding being almost here!…)" Angela continued peppering her narrative with commentary, but Jane could only focus on the reality of her situation. Because of her indecision on the matter, all of Maura's exes had been invited to the wedding.

"I need to figure out some way to come clean to Maura," Jane groaned. Tomorrow, Jane thought.

Maura was waiting outside her therapist's office for an hour before he arrived. Maura knew that her appointment wasn't until 8 a.m. She knew that she was Dr. Valant's first appointment of the day and that he didn't arrive at his office until a quarter till, but her mind was still spinning from her unexpected encounter with Alice the evening before and Dr. Valant had become a safety net for her in processing her increasingly perplexing emotional world.

Maura had initially seen Dr. Valant after arriving in Boston and being slapped with the label "Dr. Death" by her co-workers. He was helpful then in dealing with her feelings of isolation, but even more therapeutic had been her daily interactions with Jane. As much as Maura had always been seen (and largely believed herself to be) a cold and emotionally unapproachable person, Jane made friendship (and later love) seem so easy. And with Jane, Maura discovered the salubrious effects of not just physical intimacy for one's health, but emotional intimacy.

But now that her issues directly involved Jane, and Maura decided it wasn't fair for Jane to continue to bear the brunt of her petite identity crisis triggered by the engagement. Actually, none of it was fair to Jane, she realized, but she was determined to do the best that she could, which for her meant going back to therapy.

As she sat in her car, she played with a pamphlet Dr. Valant had given her, fingering the words to a Robert Frost poem that graced its cover:

The Armful

For every parcel I stoop down to seize

I lose some other off my arms and knees,

And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,

Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once

Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.

With all I have to hold with hand and mind

And heart, if need be, I will do my best.

To keep their building balanced at my breast.

I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;

Then sit down in the middle of them all.

I had to drop the armful in the road

And try to stack them in a better load.

Maura felt like she had already tried to balance her needs with everyone else's. And she had definitely let them all fall, more than once. She had tried doing things her way and she wasn't happy with the results, so she was trying something else—trying to stack a better load.

And Maura was optimistic about her chances. Psychology had come a long way in the past few decades and the discipline was rich with empirical evidence about what might constitute "a better load." For instance, Maura had remembered from her psych classes that in the healthiest of couples, each mate had a strong sense of his or her own identity. If not, that person would often seek to control his mate as a way of imposing personal boundaries that he lacked. Maura had also learned that the strongest of couples do not lose themselves in a relationship—i.e., they don't define themselves primarily in terms of the other person. Finally, Maura learned that happy couples do not assume the other's personal responsibility or try to push off their personal responsibility on the other. In other words, successful couples allow each other to work through their own issues with only support, not interference, enabling, or bailouts. Long-lasting couples willingly offer up the best parts of themselves as gift to the other. They don't forcefully "take" the worst parts from each other and make those their business. What she took away from this research was that a thriving relationship depended on each mate preserving the integrity of the individual identity of the other.

Maura understood the research; she just didn't completely understand the application. Particularly, she didn't know the answer to the question—how much could or should one compromise oneself in a relationship? Should one try to always be true to oneself?

That's where Dr. Valant was so helpful, at least as Maura attempted to rebalance her long time polyamorous identity with her desire to pursue a monogamous relationship with Jane. He was the perfect man for this task because he didn't believe that you "find yourself" and then spend the rest of your life remaining true to that identity. He had convinced Maura that we are not the sum of our Facebook profile, résumé, or buzz feed personality quizzes. We are not defined by the brands we buy, the schools we matriculated from, the church's we attend, or the way we vote. As much as the world tempts us to label ourselves in a thousand different ways—liberal, educated, upper class, fashion-forward, bisexual, polyamorous—and find not just community but freedom in associating with those labels, Dr. Valant was getting Maura to see how restrictive identifying with those labels could be.

"Imagine, Maura, who you would have been 150 years ago. Would you have been a doctor? Would you have been open to the idea of loving Jane? Would you have married her? What if you had been born 500 years ago in sub-Saharan Africa, or 500 years in the future on a space station? You would have still been you, but different. What if you had never been given up for adoption, but raised by your birth parents, or put up for adoption but stuck in foster care? What if you were to become sick? Or handicapped? You would change, certainly. So many aspects about you would change, but you would still be you. I don't believe that your feelings of inner conflict aren't coming from your inability to remain true to the "real you", but rather a societal pressure to conform to expectations based on the labels that apply to you. 'Polyamorous' may explain certain aspects of your feelings and behavior better than any other single word can, but if you're not careful it can lock you into that particular version of you when another version may be just as authentic. You should feel free to be any version of yourself, Maura."

Maura usually felt her most hopeful during these sessions—like the marriage wasn't doomed to fail before it even got started. This renewed sense of optimism was what she was craving that morning, engine and heater running, until she received a text blast. Dr. Valant was sick and wouldn't be coming in. She would have to face Alice and her life on her own today.