After his father died, Carlos went back to work in two weeks. He sorted the flat, cancelled the subscriptions, wrote the thank-you notes for the flowers. He was functional, practical, and fine. He told everyone he was fine. What he didn't tell anyone was that he had stopped sleeping, that he sat in his car some mornings for twenty minutes before going in, that he had once started crying at a petrol station and was not entirely sure why he had stopped. He was not trying to be strong. He simply had no language for what he was carrying. He had bottled it up so thoroughly that he had almost convinced himself there was nothing there.

A colleague — someone Carlos barely knew — stopped him in the corridor one afternoon and asked, without preamble, how he was really doing. Carlos opened his mouth to say fine. What came out instead was the truth: that he wasn't fine, that he was tired, that he missed his father in ways he didn't know how to describe. The conversation lasted twelve minutes. Nothing was solved. But something shifted. He called his brother that evening. He made a therapy appointment. He started, slowly and imperfectly, to open up. He discovered, in the months that followed, that the feelings didn't destroy him when he let them out. They simply, at last, began to move.