Adrian knew that well. He had learned it young without fully understanding it at first. In his house there was no room for grand collapses. There was room only for function. For routine. For work. For getting up in the morning and going where you had to go even if something inside you was dragging itself around bleeding.

His father put it differently.

“A man does what has to be done, and afterward, if there’s any time left, he grieves.”

He said it without cruelty. As wisdom. That was the problem. The worst damage to a soul does not always come from people who want to crush you. It also comes from those who went through their own hardship, mistook it for normality, and handed it down to you like a family recipe.