I expected advice. Instead, he asked a question that landed like a stone in my chest.

“What are you carrying that you haven’t let go of?”

…the question cracked something open. Not dramatically — not the way emotional breakthroughs happen in movies, with sudden tears and swelling music. More like the sound a frozen lake makes in early spring: a low, deep crack that travels outward in all directions, and you realize the surface you’ve been standing on is not as solid as you thought.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came. Then everything came — not in words, but in sensation. A pressure behind my ribs that I’d been carrying so long I’d mistaken it for my actual body…

“All of it,” I finally said. “I’m carrying all of it.”

He didn’t smile, exactly. But something shifted in his expression — a recognition, maybe. As if I’d said the one thing he needed to hear before we could begin.

“Good,” he said. “Then we have work to do.”