Page 37 of Ex- Factor

Dr. Bailey was waiting. His silence gave me the urge to fill it—with jokes, with deflection, with anything but the truth. But I’d promised Eshe I would talk to him—be real, be truthful about how I felt. I couldn’t let her down.

“My parents died.” The words should’ve had a ripple effect, but they just sank.

“I’m very sorry, Silas,” Dr. Bailey said. His voice was calm, steady—not dipped in that syrupy sweetness everyone else had been feeding me. I appreciated that.

I nodded, eyes fixed on the bookshelf behind his head, on the neat rows of spines. “Yeah.”

Pressure built in my chest, a scream lodged behind my sternum. I picked at the frayed edge of the bandage on my knuckles.

“I should be… sad,” I forced out. “Just… gutted. Right? That’s how other people are when they lose a parent. I lost both, and I feel nothing.”

“Is that what you’re feeling?”

“Yes,” I admitted, tapping my chest. “Inside me, it’s this… empty hole.”

“What created that hole?”

I finally met his eyes. “Guilt.” The word tasted like ash. “It’s just… guilt. A three-ring circus of fucking guilt.”

He didn’t pounce on the metaphor. He let it hang between us, ugly and true.

“What does the guilt tell you?” he asked.

“That I wanted this,” I said quickly, the words scraping out of me. “That I wished them gone. And now they are, and I can’t stop thinking maybe I caused it. Like my hate summoned it. And the fucked-up part? I don’t even feel bad about that.”

My voice cracked, but I pushed on.

“And then there’s the company. Already I’m getting calls—lawyers, board members, strangers who somehow got my number.

They’re talking about ‘succession,’ about me stepping in, about legacy.

And all I can think is, I don’t want it.

I don’t want anything that belonged to them. But then I feel guilty for that too.”

My throat tightened. I wanted to cry but forced it down.

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, staring at the carpet until it blurred. “I hated them. Both of them. But I still feel like I’m failing them—and part of me is glad about that. What the fuck is that, Doc?”

He studied me, then spoke. “That’s the conflict of the human condition, Silas. It’s the complicated, often contradictory nature of our relationships with the people who shaped us—for better or worse.”

He leaned forward slightly. “You’re holding two truths that feel like they should cancel each other out, but they don’t.

You can feel relief that a source of conflict and pain in your life is gone, and you can also feel the hollow loss of their absence.

You can be angry at them for the people they were.

And yes, a part of you can even feel a dark satisfaction in their death. ”

I kept my head down, listening. He was putting words to the mess I couldn’t.

“No guilt isn’t a sign you’re a bad person,” he continued. “It’s a sign you’re a feeling person caught in an impossibly painful situation. The fact that it’s confusing, that it’s a tangled knot of anger and relief and obligation—that’s the most normal thing about all of this.”

I finally looked up. “So how do I untangle the knot?”

“We—how do we ,” he corrected. “We don’t try to untie it all at once.

We just look at one strand at a time. We acknowledge it.

We name it. ‘This is my anger.’ ‘This is my relief.’ ‘This is my guilt.’ We hold them separately for a moment, and we understand that no single one of those feelings defines your entire relationship with your parents.

They’re just parts of a whole that was… complicated. ”

He let the words settle.

“The calls about the company—that’s a tangible strand. The feeling of not wanting it—that’s valid. The guilt you feel about not wanting it is also valid. They can coexist. Your job right now isn’t to make a decision. Not until you’re ready.”

I sat back, drained, but the pressure in my chest eased just a fraction.

“It’s a lot,” I said. Understatement of the century.

“It is,” Dr. Bailey agreed. “And you don’t have to carry it all today.”

We sat in silence for a long stretch. I don’t know how many minutes passed before he added quietly, “We can stop here. Go do something that makes you happy—with Eshe. Or Ekon. Or both.”

I nodded. “Okay.”