He nodded and kept his eyes closed as he knuckled one eye and then the other. His face was lined and exhausted. He should be sleeping. She almost rose, to leave him in peace, when he rolled to one side and stretched out his legs. His feet slid over her lap and all the way to the other end of the couch. The heavy weight of his calves penned her in. He groaned just a little bit and cast a forearm over his eyes. If she could have reached the lamp, she would have dimmed it.

“Yeah, but what do you do, as a person, when grief changes you for the better? God, I feel so much shame for it. She died and I became a better man. It makes me sick with myself. I’m such a bastard. Why did it take that for me to be who I am now? Why couldn’t I have done that when she was here?”

His arm was heavy over his eyes and his mouth was tightly clamped shut, his jaw square and dusted with more errant stubble than she’d ever seen him with before. His T-shirt was fully soaked through. If so many things were different, she’d go get him a fresh one, throw the sweaty one in the wash.

But as it was, all she could do was ignore the microscopic needle between her lungs and say the thing she’d wished someone had said to her. She had to keep going. For the first time, she wanted to keep going. The drafty feeling was absent, maybe because there was something else occupying her chest right now. Or maybe because that drafty wind couldn’t blow her away when she was being pinned in place by that hot needle inside of her.

“What do you do when grief changes you for the better? Seb, you say thank-you to the world for being the world.”

His forearm lifted off his eyes at her tone. He’d probably never heard her speak with such authority before, but she was an expert on this subject. The metamorphosis of grief. And he was her friend. And she was going to drag him out of the swamp if it was the last thing she did.

“You be grateful,” she continued. “Grateful that you’re here. That your little boy has a good, loving, competent father. A father who leaps a fence to sprint him to the ER and makes Raspberry Beret pancakes and tells him the truth about the dates he goes on.” Somehow one of her hands landed on his calf and she gripped the warm jeans there, as if she could pin him down and make him listen. Make him hear her.

His eyes flashed to her hand but then back to her face like he was being nailed in place by a cosmic hammer.

“And you stop doing this math equation that’s killing you. In one hand you have your wife’s death, and in the other hand you have all the progress you’ve made over the years. But, Seb, A plus B doesn’t equal shit in this case. You can’t add or subtract those two things. They’re a completely different language. And holding yourself hostage with your wife’s death is false math that’s designed to punish yourself. That’s a way of turning your grief back in on you, to keep it trapped and circling.”