“Can you tell me about”—she checked my chart—“Will?”

Without permission, memories crashed through my defenses—a million different moments from thousands of days over twenty-four years. Childhood. High school. Peyton dying. Him coming home from West Point. Paisley. The breakup. His unwillingness to be with me. The ball. The wings. The kiss. The casket—

“No,” I forced out, trying desperately to cram everything back in the box. “It’s not that I don’t want to, but…” I swallowed and swallowed again, until she leaned forward, nudging a bottle of water across the glass coffee table.

I twisted off the top and chugged half the bottle, trying to dislodge the tension in my throat—to swallow it down—but it didn’t help. It never did. A few moments passed while I watched the waves crash on the beach outside the window.

“I have trouble talking about him,” I finally admitted. “I don’t really know where to start—how to sum him up in words—and then I can’t breathe because I know exactly how it…ends, and I can’t go there.”

“To when he died?”

I nodded. “It’s like opening Pandora’s box. I can’t pick and choose what comes out of it.”

“That’s fair.” She nodded slowly. “How often do you think about him?”

My eyes jumped back to hers. “More than I should.” All the time. Every minute of every day. If my life was an ocean, then the water was Will. Always there, sometimes calm, deep, and soothing, and sometimes he was a tsunami ready to pull me under in waves of grief so deep I wondered when I’d eventually drown.

“And who told you that there was an appropriate amount of thinking to be done?” She sipped her tea.

I blinked. “Everyone, I guess. Family. Friends. My old psychiatrist. I’m supposed to get over it, right? It’s not supposed to still hurt like this.”

She studied me carefully, but it wasn’t intrusive or judgmental. “How long has it been?”

“Twenty-two months.” The longest months of my damn life. Every day felt like it was a personal test designed to see how much I could take.

Some days, I won. Some days, I didn’t.

“Has it gotten any better? The grief?”

“Compared to what?”

“Compared to the first month or so after he passed.”

He hadn’t passed. He’d been taken. Hell, he’d given his life away.

“No,” I finally answered. “But I gave up on that a long time ago. Kind of figured this was simply the way things would be now. This is how I am.”

“And how is that?”

“Broken.” I stared at the water in my hands. “My previous doctor told me it’s anxiety and depression. You have my file.”

“I do.” She put her tea down and scribbled on a little notepad. “But I’d rather hear it from you than read another clinician’s notes. When you think of your future, what do you see for yourself?”

What did I see? It had been so long since I thought about goals that I wasn’t sure I even had them anymore.