"Oh, please," Maggie shook her head, waving a hand dismissively as if physically batting away Ollie's excuse. "Don't even worry about it. I can't imagine what your mornings must look like—I can hardly get myself dressed half the time. A small human being added to the fold is just..." She exhaled in admiration. This, quite depressingly, was true—or it had been, at one point. Since she'd resigned herself to the ideology that little meant anything, it wasn't as hard for Maggie to convince herself to go through the motions of each day, to wake with an alarm and brush her teeth, to continue existing in whatever form. She knew this was something Ollie could understand, intimately, and so she didn't feel the need to belabor the point or, worse, to retract it, embarrassed. This was the sort of comfort afforded by the recognition of grief.
She smiled at his query. "Well, I got dressed," she began plainly, voice filled with brevity. "No, really, I'm—it's been okay, so far. Weird to have a weekday off, but kinda nice, if I'm being honest. I think I might go wander around Boyd's or something later and look at handbags I can't afford and don't need." She rolled her eyes at herself. "How about you? How..." She began, and then idled — it seemed an innocuous enough question, but they both knew well enough to recognize it could be a bomb depending on the day, on the moment. She smiled, small and sweet, finally finshing with: "How's things?"
Relief finds him that his apology has been accepted but he chafes slightly under the slight admiration. "I don't know how I do it most days either and to be honest sometimes it's only just. There's been more than one occasion where we've both been in tears before we're actually ready to go." He flashed a grin her way to show that he was being self deprecating but there was no denying the way that at times it felt like a constant uphill struggle. There was part of him that could acknowledge that for all it felt as though he lived in a state of constant worry, he at least had something to get up for in the morning. He figures it's nothing that he really needs to explain to Maggie when she'd just described the situation they were both all too familiar with. Instead he keeps it simple, trusting her to be able to read between the lines if she wanted to. "But he keeps me on my toes."
He nods slightly as he listens, her quip earning a wry smile from him. "An achievement." There was a smile on his lips but it was an encouraging one rather than a teasing one to match the sincerity of his words. "Yeah? I'm glad. So if you show up next time with a new bag I'll know why." There was a pause as he considered his own answer, knowing that he could be honest but unsure if he was ready to even admit some of it to himself. But he'd always tried to foster trust and truthfulness in any dynamic that he had and there was no better way to do that than by being honest. "Coping, I think. Even if it's more like just going through the motions. But everything's so busy I barely have time to think about it. It's almost been a year but I'm not feeling much of anything yet."












