The Day It Happened

The Hard Months Until It Was Okay

She'd struggled in the week after the funeral. She refused to take any more time off work, she refused to let any filming be cancelled on her behalf, and she struggled through the week with the occasional wash of tears out of nowhere and smiles that were a lot more forced than usual. It was, in a darkly ironic way, an easy way to hide the sudden shift in her relationship with Shayne, because all the times she squeezed his hand twice to ask him to hold her or literally just walked up to him and pulled him into a hug, everyone assumed it was just for comfort from her friend. No one thought twice when they turned up at work together every day for the rest of the week.

She'd volunteered to go and pick up a group lunch order on the Thursday two days after the funeral, when the place had called and apologised that they had a shortage of staff and couldn't get a delivery driver in their selected window. She'd wandered out to her car, pressing the key to unlock it, and getting no response despite the fact she knows the remote battery had just been replaced. She'd tried again – still no response – and suddenly she found her mind spiralling until she was leaning against the side of her own car bawling in the work parking lot.

"Shit, Courtney, are you okay?" Ian had asked, having wandered outside to go to his own car to go and pick up something from somewhere and instead beelining for her. She ends up rambling nonsensically about how her Dad was meant to help her find a new car the next weekend because hers kept having dumb malfunctions but it wasn't worth it to keep getting it fixed anymore, and it's how she'd ended up walking through used car yards with her boss that weekend, just before she met up with Kari to talk about her Dad and how they were both feeling.

It had been good, in the end. Ian knew what the hell he was doing with used cars, and she ended up with a good deal on another slightly newer Fiat with his help. Her afternoon at Kari's had been a little more emotional as they both reminisced and talked, but it had also featured exactly as much prying into her and Shayne's new relationship status as she expected, too. What she expects less – and appreciates more -, though, is Kari's quiet reassurance that the timing doesn't make it bad.

"If anything," she'd mused, "it just makes sense. You both dropped any pretence at all about how much you needed each other, the full admissions weren't that much further, were they?"

Courtney stopped randomly bursting into tears over her Dad a few weeks later, instead only doing so whenever something brought up the subject. Shayne had to push the writers to scrap a joke in an Every Disney Princess Ever about absent and presumed-dead fathers when it made Courtney abruptly break down in a table read and rush out of the room, but otherwise, her crying became mostly contained to the moments when she was just by herself and something prompted a memory. As time progressed, she settled back into her own life, slowly adjusting to the one person now missing from it.

It helped, more than she ever admitted to anyone except Shayne, that she gained so much more in her relationship with him. They never actually said anything at work, but there were the occasional pet names and the sharing rides to and from the office going well beyond the week of the funeral and the cheek-kisses in the office that they were sure made it blatantly obvious something had changed. No one made comment, however, just letting it slide, and they quite comfortably settled into twisting their lives even tighter together than they already had been.

KC did try and get into fights over dividing up her Dad's things, but to everyone else's relief, no one had bought it this time. Instead, Courtney ends up with one of his skateboards, a couple old jackets, all of her things still at his house, a little money that she tucks away in her savings, and – when Conrad asks where they are – validation from everyone that she should have his medals (she doesn't tell them she stole them, of course – Kari makes up something about him having already passed them to Courtney for safe-keeping when his own house was in a fire path a few years earlier, and KC doesn't seem to know about the oldest-male-child rule, so no one argues with her keeping them). And, much to Courtney's relief, Kari had located the letter her Dad had written for her ambiguous future wedding. She decides she will take it immediately, but she stores it in a drawer in her bedroom until whenever she may have the opportunity to open it.