Maya blinked. “You cleared a month.”
“I own the company.”
“That’s not how that works.”
“It is when people are afraid of disappointing me.”
She shook her head. “This is temporary. You’re reacting.”
“Probably.” He held her gaze. “I’m still doing it.”
The first week home was humiliating.
Not because Taylor was cruel. He wasn’t. That would have been easier to resist. The humiliation came from slowness. From needing help in ways she hated. From walking ten minutes and feeling winded. From sitting at the kitchen island while a nutritionist named Elena, warm-eyed and unsentimental, asked careful questions about food, routine, fatigue, emotional triggers, sleep. From seeing her own habits mapped without judgment and therefore without an easy enemy.
Taylor sat through the sessions only when Maya allowed it. He spoke less than she expected. When he did, it was to ask practical questions: grocery structure, sodium thresholds, realistic exercise progression, medication timing. Elena answered him the way one speaks to intelligent people who are in danger of trying to optimize a human being into disaster.
