The kitchen clock ticked loudly in the silence. Olivia sat at the table, her laptop open but untouched. Her father, Henry, stood by the sink, drying a dish with slow, deliberate movements. They hadn’t spoken in days, a fragile truce lingering between them since their last argument. “You can’t keep running from everything,” he had said. “And you can’t control everything!” she had snapped back. Now, the silence hung like fog, heavy and impenetrable. Olivia stared at the blinking cursor on her blank document. Deadlines loomed, and so did her doubts. She had dropped out of college last semester, moved back home, and taken on freelance gigs she couldn’t finish. Every rejection email felt like a nail in the coffin of her confidence. Henry set the dish down and cleared his throat. “You hungry?” he asked. “No,” she replied, not looking up. He nodded, retreating to his armchair by the window. It had been his wife’s favorite spot before she passed away, and now it was his refuge. Olivia watched him out of the corner of her eye. His shoulders were stooped, his face more lined than she remembered. “Dad,” she said suddenly, her voice cracking. He turned, surprised. “Yeah?” “I feel stuck,” she admitted, her fingers twisting in her lap. “Like I’m just… failing at everything.” Henry’s gaze softened. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Liv, you’re not failing. You’re figuring it out. That’s different.” “It doesn’t feel different,” she murmured. He got up and went to the cabinet, pulling out an old wooden box. Olivia recognized it instantly—it was her mother’s keepsake box. He placed it on the table and opened it, revealing a collection of letters, photographs, and trinkets. “She used to feel like that too,” Henry said. Olivia blinked. “Mom?” He nodded, pulling out a letter. “Your mom used to write me these when we were younger. She’d get so overwhelmed by everything—work, life, even being a mom sometimes. She thought she had to have it all figured out. But she didn’t.” He handed Olivia the letter. Her mother’s neat handwriting spilled across the page: “I’m scared I’m not enough. For you, for Liv, for myself. But then I think about how you believe in me even when I can’t, and that keeps me going.” Olivia’s throat tightened as she read. “She felt this way?” “All the time,” Henry said, his voice steady. “And she got through it, one day at a time. Just like you will.” Tears welled in Olivia’s eyes, but she didn’t wipe them away. “I miss her,” she whispered. “Me too,” Henry said, his voice cracking slightly. For the first time in years, they sat together, their shared grief and love filling the space between them. --- That night, Olivia opened her laptop again. Her father’s words echoed in her mind, mingling with her mother’s. She began to type, not for the deadline but for herself. “Sometimes, being stuck is just the pause before the next step. And sometimes, it takes someone else to remind you that you’re still moving forward.” As she wrote, she felt lighter, as though the weight she had carried was finally shifting. The next morning, Henry found a note on the kitchen table: "Thanks for believing in me, Dad. I’m trying again." He smiled, tucking the note into the keepsake box.