Page 10 of Based on You

"And your session with Dr. Reyes?"

She poured the juice into a tall glass, stopping to consider the question. "It was okay."

I nodded, hoping to draw her out. She gripped the glass with both hands and stood stiff at the marble counter, drinking slow, her gaze fixed on a blank spot on the wall past the kitchen island.

"Did you manage to eat today? Marta mentioned you had some soup."

"I ate," she said, flat.

"That's good."

She drained the last of the juice, rinsed the glass, and set it in the sink. Without another word, she turned back toward the dark hallway.

"Goodnight, Olivia."

"Night," she whispered, her shadow climbing the staircase.

I sat there a long moment after the thud of her footsteps faded. The rinsed glass gleamed in the sink, and the strained little exchange still hung in the air. I made myself move, finished eating, and cleared my plate.

Upstairs, I washed up, then settled on the edge of my mattress. I cracked open my laptop and pulled up the dense financial reports I'd been putting off since Tuesday. The lamp on the nightstand threw a warm pool of light over the duvet.

My cell phone rattled against the wood.

The caller ID flashed a single, demanding word. Dad.

I swiped to answer.

"I didn't think you'd pick up." His voice crackled through the receiver.

"You make it sound like I've been avoiding you." I rubbed my temple.

"Well, you haven't really spoken to me in months. That's evidence enough for me."

I groaned, tapped the phone to speaker, and tossed it onto the duvet while I yanked open a dresser drawer for my pajama shirt. "Not everything in the universe revolves around you, Dad."

He chuckled, unbothered by the jab. "How's my granddaughter doing?"

"She's fine," I reported. "Keeping up with her online classes. Seeing the grief therapist. She came down to the kitchen tonight for a drink, which was a lot more interaction than yesterday."

"That's good to hear." He went quiet for two beats, then three. "Have you thought of⁠—"

"No." I cut him off before he could finish.

"Simon, be reasonable⁠—"

"I'm not seeing a therapist, Dad." I pulled my shirt over my head. "I'm fine."

"You said that same thing at the funeral. You've been saying it on a loop for eight months. I'm not telling you how to grieve, but it doesn't look to me like you've done much of it at all. You marched straight back to the office."

The assumption made my jaw set. The idea that grief had one approved look, and that mine was wrong because it didn't match the script. The funeral had been a room full of people holding their breath. Olivia had collapsed by the open grave, sobbing until her whole frame shook, and every sympathetic head in the cemetery had swung toward me, waiting for the same break.

I denied them the show.

Not because I didn't feel the loss. I felt it every waking hour. It bled into the black coffee, the untouched breakfast plates, the unanswered voicemails, the empty chair at the head of the editorial meeting.

But I'd had Olivia's dead weight in my arms when I lifted her up from the muddy grass near the grave, and I knew right then that one of us was going to have to hold up the sky. She was thirteen. She'd just buried both her parents in a single day. It wasn't going to be her.

So I held on. And once a man starts carrying that kind of load, some part of him forgets how to set it down.