Marcus Sylvain adjusted his reading glasses and leaned forward in his ergonomic chair, maintaining perfect eye contact with the woman sobbing across from him.
His office, all clean lines, neutral colors, and motivational prints that he'd grown to hate, felt particularly suffocating today.
The late afternoon sun slanted through floor-to-ceiling windows, highlighting dust motes that danced like his thoughts, scattered and exhausted.
"Sarah," he said gently, his voice carrying the practiced warmth of five thousand similar sessions.
"What I'm hearing is that you've spent so long being what others expect that you've forgotten who you actually are. Is that fair to say?"
The woman, thirty-something, designer handbag worth more than Marcus's monthly rent, wedding ring recently removed based on the pale band of skin, nodded frantically.
"Yes! Exactly! My mother, my ex-husband, even my book club, they all have these ideas about who Sarah Chen should be, and I just... I just..."
"You just want to be Sarah," Marcus finished, ignoring the sharp pain that lanced through his left arm.
Probably slept on it wrong. Again.
He'd been falling asleep at his desk more often lately, case files for pillow, cold coffee for breakfast.
"Not Sarah the perfect daughter. Not Sarah the devoted wife. Just Sarah."
Her eyes widened. "How do you always know exactly what I mean?"
Because I've had this conversation with forty-seven other Sarahs this year.
Marcus thought, but his smile never wavered.
The tightness in his chest intensified, creeping up toward his jaw.
He discretely loosened his tie, the same blue one he'd worn for three days straight because laundry required energy he didn't have.
"Let's try an exercise," he said, pulling out his tablet to hide the tremor in his hands.
"I want you to write down three things, just three, that you want to do this week purely for yourself.
Not for anyone else's approval or happiness.
What would Sarah choose if Sarah was the only person who mattered?"
As she bent over her designer notebook, scribbling furiously, Marcus's vision blurred at the edges.
The pain wasn't in his arm anymore, it was everywhere, radiating from his chest like someone had reached inside and was squeezing his heart in a vice.
Not now, he pleaded silently.
Just ten more minutes. Let me finish this session.
"Okay," Sarah said, looking up with the first genuine smile he'd seen from her in six months of sessions.
"I wrote them down. I want to take that pottery class Mom says is beneath me.
I want to eat carbs, like, real pasta, not that cauliflower nonsense.
And I want to... God, this sounds stupid..."
"Nothing you want for yourself is stupid," Marcus managed, though each word felt like lifting weights.
Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the aggressive air conditioning.
"I want to dye my hair purple. Just the tips, but still. I've always wanted to."
"Then do it."
The words came out more forceful than intended, almost desperate.
"Sarah, you have one life. One. Don't waste it being someone else's idea of perfect."
She stood, clutching her notebook like a lifeline. "You're right. You're absolutely right. God, Marcus, you've changed my life. I can't thank you enough."
Changed your life, he thought as she gathered her things, practically glowing with newfound purpose.
While mine circles the drain.
"Same time next week?" she asked at the door.
"Of course." The lie came easily.
They always did. "I'll be here."
The door clicked shut.
Marcus counted to ten, making sure she was truly gone, before letting the facade crumble.
The pain exploded through his chest like a grenade, dropping him to his knees. His tablet clattered across the sustainably-sourced bamboo flooring.
This is it, he realized with startling clarity.
This is how I die. Alone in my office at 7 PM on a Monday, surrounded by other people's breakthroughs.
His fingers scrabbled for his phone, but his vision was already going dark.
Emergency services wouldn't make it in time. He knew the statistics, had quoted them to cardiac patients often enough.
The irony tasted like copper in his mouth.
As his body gave up its futile fight, Marcus's mind wandered through thirty years of memories like a drunk man searching for his keys.
College, where he'd discovered his gift for understanding people.
The counseling certification he'd earned while working three jobs.
The girlfriend who'd left him because he spent more time on his clients than their relationship.
The promotion to senior life coach that meant longer hours, not better ones.
The hundreds, thousands, of people he'd helped find happiness, purpose, love.
But never himself.
His cheek pressed against the cool floor, and Marcus Sylvain had one final, desperate thought:
I just wanted to help people find happiness. Real happiness.
The kind I never figured out how to have.
The pain stopped.
So did everything else.
✧✧✧
There was no tunnel of light.
No chorus of angels.
No life flashing before his eyes, that had already happened on his office floor.
Instead, Marcus found himself simply... existing.
Consciousness without form, awareness without sensation.
The void around him wasn't dark or light, it was the absence of the concept of darkness or light.
It was nothing in the purest sense, so complete that it somehow became something.
If Marcus had still possessed lungs, he would have held his breath.
If he'd had a heart, it would have stopped again.
"You wanted to help people find happiness."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, neither male nor female, neither young nor old.
It didn't speak so much as impress meaning directly into whatever Marcus had become.
Am I dead? Marcus tried to ask, though he had no mouth.
"Death is a transition, not a destination," the voice replied to his unspoken thought.
"You lived thirty years in service to others' joy while denying your own.
A peculiar form of martyrdom, wouldn't you say?"
I helped people, Marcus protested.
That was enough.
"Was it?" A pause that might have been a second or a century.
"Tell me, Marcus Sylvain, life coach to the lost and shepherd to the searching.
When did you last follow your own advice?
When did you last choose happiness?"
The truth hurt more than the heart attack had.
I... I don't remember.
"And yet your final thought was not of yourself, but of continuing that very pattern.
You wished to help people find real happiness."
The voice carried something that might have been amusement or pity.
"Such a pure intention from such a broken vessel."
So what happens now? Heaven? Hell?
Reincarnation as somebody's forgotten houseplant?
"Something far more interesting." The void began to shimmer, taking on a quality that suggested anticipation.
"You will have your wish, Marcus Sylvain.
You will help people find happiness, genuine, authentic, lasting happiness.
But this time, perhaps you might learn something as well."
Learn what?
"That helping others and helping yourself need not be mutually exclusive.
That happiness shared is not happiness halved.
That even the guide needs a destination."
The nothingness began to collapse, or expand, or transform, Marcus couldn't tell which.
Reality was origami, folding in on itself in impossible ways.
"One more thing," the voice added as Marcus's consciousness began to scatter like dandelion seeds.
"The world you're going to has its own rules, its own story already in motion.
You know it, though you won't remember knowing it at first.
Try not to break too much of the plot, would you?
Fate gets terribly cranky when people go off-script."
Wait, what do you mean I know—
But the thought never finished.
Marcus Sylvain, overworked life coach, helper of everyone but himself, ceased to exist in one reality.
And began to exist in another.