After Lily wentto play in the backyard, Grant and I cleaned up the project mess. The silence between us was… expectant.
Finally, I asked, “Did you mean what you said the other day? About staying?”
He met my eyes. “Yeah. Every word.”
“I don’t know how to make space for someone in my life who doesn’t need me to carry everything.”
“Then don’t carry me,” he said. “Just walk beside me.”
It was so simple, so obvious, that I wanted to cry.
Instead, I said, “I think I want that.”
Grant smiled. “Then let’s start there.”
After Grant left,I sat at the table for a long time.
The kitchen had that warm, lazy glow it gets in the early afternoon; light pooling across the floorboards, the faint hum of bees outside the window, Lily’s laughter drifting in from the porch like wind chimes in a summer breeze.
Everything was soft. Still.
And I realized how rare that was—this feeling of being held by the moment instead of braced against it.
I reached for Iris’s journal.
There was something about the way she’d made space for the quiet pieces of her life in those pages. Grocery lists next to poetry. Torn edges and coffee stains pressed against confessions in careful cursive. She didn’t categorize her thoughts or polish them. She just… put them down.
I opened to a page at random.
you can be strong and still need softness.
you can hold others and still want to be held.
don’t let them tell you it’s one or the other.
I traced the words with my finger. My breath caught on the truth of it.
When Lily came inside laterwith sticky hands and sun-pink cheeks, I helped her wash up, made her a sandwich, and watched her curl up on the couch with her stuffed stingray and a glass of apple juice like the world had never let her down.
Maybe I don’t want to just protect her from the hard parts. Maybe I want to show her what it looks like to livethroughthem.
That night,after Lily was asleep and the house was dim and quiet, I sat outside with a blanket wrapped around my legs and the ocean breathing in the distance.
Willa came out a few minutes later and wordlessly handed me a mug of tea. She didn’t ask for anything in return; no story, no explanation. She just sat beside me, curling her legs under her and staring out at the stars.
“Do you ever feel like you became someone out of necessity, and now you’re not sure how to undo it?” I asked after a long silence.
“All the time,” she said. “I was the escape artist. You were the caregiver. Harper was the achiever. Survival roles.”
“And now?”
She shrugged. “Now I think we’re finally in a place where those roles aren’t required. Which is kind of terrifying, honestly.”
I looked at her. “Do you think I’ve forgotten how to want something that’s just for me?”
She didn’t answer right away.
“I think you’ve been so busy holding up the sky that you never stopped to ask whether it was your job to begin with,” she said gently.
