POV: Jasmine
The therapist's office was on the seventh floor of a building I had walked past a hundred times and never noticed.
That was Nora. She had picked it on purpose. A neutral building. A neutral floor. A waiting room with a single ficus and one of those white-noise machines that sounded like a soft tide.
She had set it up the morning after she had sat on my bed, and she had said exactly nothing to me about it since.
I had told no one else. Not Finn. Not Asher. Not Leo. Not Priya.
The therapist was a woman in her fifties with grey at the temples and warm hands. Her name was Dr. Chen. She offered me water. She watched me sit down, and she sat down across from me, and she did not say so what brings you here today.
She folded her hands in her lap and spoke gently. "Take your time."
I sat there.
I did not know where to start. The list of things in me that needed to come out was so long and so badly organised that opening any one of them seemed like it would tip the others off the shelf. I looked at the rug and I tried to find the smallest thing.
The smallest thing was Aurora.
"My daughter," I said, and the two words sat in the room between us like something I had set on the floor.
Dr. Chen nodded. She did not write anything down. She let me hear myself.
"My daughter is four," I said. "She is the most patient person in my apartment right now. She has been patient with me for days. She is being careful with the volume of every room she walks into, and she is being careful for me."
I started talking about Aurora. Then about the morning before, when I had not made the French toast. Then about the kitchen, the box, the small white card. About the rabbit on the table. About the corridor in Italy. About the dress, which had been fine, and which I had been wearing for hours after he stopped breathing because I had not had the energy to take it off.
Liam came in toward the end. I had thought he would come in first. He came in last, the way he had come into every important room of my life — with the door already open by the time anyone realised he was there.
I told her about his hand. The temperature of it. The minute it was still warm, and the next minute, when the warmth was the warmth my hand had given it.
I did not cry. The body had not refilled the well. I just talked, in a flat, even voice that was not the voice I used for boards and was not the voice I used for Aurora, and at the end of the hour Dr. Chen leaned forward slightly.
"Can I tell you something?" she asked.
I looked at her. "Yes."
"You are not broken," she said. "You are grieving. Those are not the same thing. Broken means something is wrong with you. Grieving means something happened to you. The difference matters, because right now you are treating yourself like the problem."
I did not answer.
"You could not hug your daughter yesterday," she said. "That is not because you are a bad mother. It is because your nervous system shut down to protect you from a pain it was not equipped to process all at once. That is what bodies do. It is not a failure. It is a circuit breaker."
My hands were very still in my lap.
"But here is the part that matters," she said, and her voice got quieter, not softer — clearer. "The shutdown saved you this week. It will not save you next week. If you stay in it, your daughter will learn that love disappears when things get hard. You do not want to teach her that. So we are going to build you a way back to her that does not require you to pretend you are fine."
My throat closed.
"I do not know how to grieve and be her mother at the same time," I said, and the sentence came out of a place I had not known was open.
"No one does," Dr. Chen said. "That is exactly what we work on. Same time on Thursday."
I nodded and left.
In the elevator going down I noticed that some of the things I had said had not been things I had ever heard myself say before. They had been sitting in me since the hospital corridor and had not had a room to come out in.
They had a room now. That counted for something. Not enough. Something.
Priya texted me an hour later. Quick call?
I called her from the car.
"Jackson sent a formal request through his attorney this morning," she said, briskly, the way she said things when she did not want me to spend any energy reading the tone before the content. "He wants to schedule a meeting with you. He has framed it as a meeting as family."
I let the phrase sit. "As family."
Priya's voice went dry. "Those are his words."
"Of course they are," I said, and heard the old cold engine in me turn over for the first time in days.
"I am drafting a response that does not concede the framing and does not refuse the meeting," Priya said. "We need to choose the ground. Do not respond. Do not pick up his calls. If anything comes in writing, forward it to me without reading the rest."
I leaned my head back against the seat. "How long do you need?"
"A few days," she said. "Maybe a week."
"Take what you need," I told her.
She paused — a pause that was not like her. "Are you all right?"
I almost laughed. The laugh did not arrive. Priya, who never asks. Priya is asking.
"I went to a therapist this morning," I said.
There was a beat. I heard her release a small breath I had not heard from her before.
"Good," she said quietly. "Good, Jas. Don't think about him today. Let me carry it."
I hung up. I did not think about Jackson for the rest of the afternoon.
By the time I got home Finn was on the couch with Aurora in his lap reading her a book about a small fox, and Asher was in the kitchen doing something with rice and a pan one-handed.
Neither of them had texted to say they were coming. There had been no plan. They had simply both come, and the apartment had folded around them the way it had folded around them since the corridor.
We ate at the low table because Aurora had decided, again, that the dining room was for fancy.
It was rice with chicken and vegetables Asher had cooked one-handed. It was nothing.
Aurora ate two bites of the chicken and one of the rice and then she leaned against Finn's side and stopped chewing. Finn put his hand on her hair without looking down, the way a person did when they had been doing that motion for years, and she fell asleep against his ribs.
Asher finished his last bite. He looked at Finn over the top of her head. Move her? Finn answered without speaking. Not yet. They left her where she was.
I sat across from them with my fork in my hand.
I let myself look.
Aurora was tucked between them like she had been put there on purpose. Finn's arm was along the back of the cushion behind her shoulders. Asher's hand was against her foot through the small sock, holding it lightly, the way a person held a sleeping child's foot to check the temperature without thinking about it.
Neither of them moved. Neither of them looked at me.
I noticed the warmth at the centre of my chest before I let myself read it. I noticed the small, dangerous loosening at the back of my shoulders that came from the body recognising something it had been refusing to recognise.
This could be any evening. The thought arrived like a hand closing around my ribs. This is almost a normal evening.
I did not say either thing out loud. I lowered my fork. I did not pick it up again.
The lamp threw a soft yellow over the three of them. Aurora's hair was falling across Finn's wrist. Asher's hand on her foot did not move.
I looked at all three of them. I did not let myself name the fourth thought, the one trying to come up the back of my throat.
Not yet. Not in this room. Not tonight.
I picked up my water glass. I drank from it slowly, and I held my own face in the kind of order Liam would have recognised, and I did not look away.