“Well, that’s just it. The expectations. Of being a Frankel. It’s a lot. We’ve decided. Libby and I—”

Deena needed a new school. Like, yesterday.

Akiva rubbed his face with both hands. For a while, he’d been feeling strangely numb, like he was floating above his life, unaffected by the choices he was making.

But now, he’d been feeling a sense of rising emotions ever since he’d stormed out of the boardroom yesterday. He refused to label the feelings as “panic,” but it was getting very close.

His phone buzzed: Baruch. He pressed ignore for the third time.

He didn’t have the mental capacity for Baruch right now.

That made him sad; his relationship with Baruch used to be effortless. Was anything effortless these days?

Libby was upset, Deena was out of school, and in about an hour, his parents weren’t going to be happy either.

He’d told them before Shabbos that he needed to speak to them on Motzaei Shabbos. So there had been no Shabbos naps in the Frankel Junior house. Not that he was sleeping much these days, anyway.

He was pretty sure that his parents had no idea what was coming. He’d lain awake last night, running through a montage of moments together with them, trying to think if he’d ever given them a clue.

The answer, he’d realized, was a firm “no,” mainly because he hadn’t even known himself.

Now, as he waited for Libby in the car, he felt sick.

Was he blindsiding them?

They were good people, his parents. They’d raised him to know right from wrong, to always lend a helping hand. He knew how much they loved him, and how much they’d poured into his success over the years: the tutors, one-on-one with private rebbeim, the gifts and time and efforts....

But there had also been other things, things that painfully quashed who he was and who he was able to be, and right now, it was time to stop holding himself back, to stop living in ways he didn’t want to live, and start doing things he’d never done before.