It's Definitely Not All Mary Poppins

You Will Bear The Full Brunt of My Hurt (1)

It was almost a month later – Matthew blinked and time had passed – before the soft tints of summer started popping around them.

The nanny roused one night at an ungodly hour with the moon still glowing in the sky. He wasn't exhausted from the day – Lilly had managed to figure out an electrical diagram for Lloyd that neither he nor Edward were could understand. The girl had beamed up at the two men and said, quite simply, "It's like a big ol' map. You just have to read it." The moment had been celebrated at dinner with everyone, Matt making a toast to her saying Lilly was, "the next great...whatever you want to be." His outing earlier with Eli down to the beach to find seashells and sea glass for a Elliot-led project was calm and fun; the breeze blew and no one was around.

But now, just after two in the morning, Matthew Robinson sat up in his bed, exhausted. Not even exhausted, he was sad. It surprised him how heavy it sat in his limbs, sat on his chest. He wasn't used to this intensity; certainly he had accepted the reality that everyone was always a little sad to some degree, but this was suffocating.

So he studied it, resting himself against the headboard in the hopes of trying to find the source. Matt searched through his mind, scouring over old memories and interactions that could potentially pinpoint where the sadness started, yet nothing was there. There was no pinpoint. The sadness was either deep inside of him, already ingrained into his soul, or had been sprinkled through his life and built up to this moment of realization.

Matthew stood slowly, trying to muffle his sounds with the children asleep in the next room, the shared door cracked open. He dressed with clothes from the day before, still smelling of lakewater and sand, of plastic-wrapped wires and metal. Matt didn't know where he was going, but he knew he wanted to take his own advice – embracing the sadness within him, no matter how desperately he wanted to fix it, ignore it, smile and hold himself together for as long as his fingers could hold him until he cracked like a glass bottle.

The hotel's corridor was brightly-lit and empty, and the ache inside him wormed into his throat. His eyes unfocused and started burning. Matthew wiped his face, hiding himself from no one, and moved to the elevator.

He couldn't help himself; still, he tried to find the moment this sadness started, desperate to lead by example for the kids, for Yang. If he couldn't do that, what was the point of his Masters in psychology?

He was calling someone. He hadn't even realized he took his phone. Maybe it was a reflex, but he didn't realize who he was calling until a groggy voice asked if something happened. "No," Matt whispered, breathless. His voice shook with the word. "Um...do you...I need to talk to someone."