I swallowed hard. I could feel my eyes brimming with hot tears, and my chest was tightening. It was getting harder to breathe. “Yeah,” I said with a tremendous effort that took absolutely every bit of my acting ability. “Yeah, something like that. Good to see you again, Carla.”

“You too, hon. Take care,” she called.

I turned to walk back to the elevators, my chin quivering wildly, out of control, the way it only ever did when I was crying for real, not stage tears. I kept my eyes on the dark-patterned carpet, trying to keep it together. I just needed to make it down the hall to the elevator. Then I just needed to make it down the elevator. It was how you eat a whale, after all.

But this technique was no longer working, as the reality of the situation crashed over me like a forty-foot wave. My dad had bailed on my birthday dinner. He’d lied to me about it, then gone to have dinner with Joy instead. And the worst part of it was that, deep down, I wasn’t actually as shocked by this as I should have been. It had been obvious for years now—that my dad had had other priorities. He had moved on, and I wasn’t nearly as important to him as his new family.

I pressed the button for the lobby through a haze of tears, then just prayed for the doors to close without anyone else getting on. I truly felt like I couldn’t endure this ride with a cheerful paralegal, no matter how well-meaning. As the doors finally, blessedly closed, I let myself fall apart, sobbing into my hands—big, ugly, openmouthed sobs, the kind that I would never have done onstage.

It was like all my excuses and rationalizations were collapsing before my eyes like a house of cards. This had been going on for years now. And I had just let it, happy to take crumbs, never asking for what I wanted or telling my dad how I felt. Because what if I did, what if I told him that I missed him and that he should have come to my play—and it backfired? I barely got to see him as it was, and that was without me getting mad at him.

But, a tiny voice in my head, one that sounded a lot like Kat’s, whispered. Would that really be worse than what you’re feeling right now?

I didn’t have an answer for that, but when the elevator passed the eleventh floor, I tried to compose myself. I wiped off my face, took one long, big breath, held it, and then let it out for twice as long.