The person who can handle things is handed things to handle, precisely and only because they can, until handling things becomes their entire assigned role and no one thinks to ask whether they would like, occasionally, to be handled themselves.

Marisol had been the competent one her whole life — the daughter who managed, the friend who could be relied on, the wife who paid the taxes and fixed the roof and absorbed the mother-in-law without collapse.

And every demonstration of that competence had, paradoxically, lowered the care she received, because each time she proved she could carry something alone, the people around her revised downward their sense of what they owed her.

She’s fine.