The grief counselor had a habit of finishing your sentences, and at first Dara thought it was kind.
"When I think about Marcus, I feel—"
"Present," said the counselor. Her name was Dr. Veth. She wore the same oatmeal cardigan every session and smelled, faintly, of someone else's cooking.
"I was going to say absent," Dara said.
"Of course." Dr. Veth wrote something. "And what does absent feel like, in your body?"
Dara tried. She put her hand on her sternum. "Like a socket. A pulled tooth. A—"
"Presence."
Dara looked up.
Dr. Veth was smiling the way fluorescent lights smile. Steady. Requiring nothing back.
The sessions were covered by Marcus's life insurance, which felt like a joke he would have made. Even dead I'm keeping the lights on, babe.
Dara started going twice a week. Then three times. She stopped calling her sister. She stopped eating food that required two plates.
"I feel like I'm getting closer to something," she told Dr. Veth.
"Tell me about closer."
"Like. Before, the grief was everywhere? Like weather? And now it's more. Concentrated. In the center of me." She pressed her fist to her stomach. "Right here."
"That's integration," said Dr. Veth. "That's him finding his correct location."
Dara cried. She always cried. Dr. Veth never handed her tissues, just let her cry until she was a dry husk and then asked: how does that feel?
"Like relief," Dara always said.
"Like presence," Dr. Veth always agreed.
Eight months after Marcus died, Dara called her sister for the first time and her sister said Dara oh my god where have you been and Dara said therapy, I told you and her sister said what therapy, you told me you couldn't afford—
"The insurance," Dara said.
Silence on the line like a wet cloth pressed to a face.
"Dara. The insurance lapsed. Marcus missed three payments before he—there was no payout. I tried to tell you at the—you were so out of it at the—"
Dara sat down on the kitchen floor.
She thought about Dr. Veth's office. The cardigan. The cooking smell she could never place. The way, when Dara described Marcus's voice, Dr. Veth sometimes finished the description using the exact word Dara hadn't said aloud yet, hadn't even fully thought, the word that had only existed so far as a shape in the part of her that used to be empty and wasn't anymore.
She thought about the center of her. The concentrated place.
She put her fist there and pressed, and something pressed back.
