Good Without You
Songs To Stories Volume IV
Inspired by: Mean by Taylor Swift
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Some stories are about love. Others are about survival. Good Without You is about what happens when a person finally stops fighting for a love that was never real to begin with. Inspired by Mean, this novella is for anyone who has ever been told they were too much, too sensitive, or too difficult—when all they ever wanted was to be seen by the family who crated them.
Lina spent her entire life trying to earn her father’s approval. No matter how much she excelled, no matter how kind she was, no matter how many times she swallowed her own needs to make space for his, it was never enough. And neither was she. Arlo Whitmore had one golden child—Michelle, the daughter he adored, the one who could do no wrong. And then there was Lina—the inconvenient one, the afterthought, the shadow trailing behind a sister who had always known how to play the game.
After years of being cast aside, Lina walked away. She built a life without them. She created success on her own terms, carved out a future where her worth wasn’t dictated by a father who never bothered to know her. But even from across the ocean, the ghosts of her past followed. Then, one phone call changed everything. Arlo was dead. And for the first time, Lina had to ask herself: Was she grieving a father she had lost? Or the idea of one she had never truly had?
This is a story about resilience. About learning to be good—not for them, not for anyone else—but for yourself. Good Without You is raw, real, and deeply personal. It’s for anyone who has ever chosen peace over people who refused to love them the way they deserved.
Excerpt From Good Without You By Britt Wolfe
There was a long stretch of silence where neither of them spoke.
Lina had imagined this moment a thousand times. What it would feel like. How it would land inside of her. If there would be a release, if there would be grief, if there would be anything beyond the dull weight of inevitability.
Instead, she only felt… distant.
There was a tinge of sadness. Not from him, but from the idea of him. Arlo had been old, and tired, and empty for as long as she had known him. He had lived his life in the shadow of his own imagined brilliance, convinced of his own superiority even as the world moved on without him. He had been given every opportunity, every chance, and had squandered them all.
And he had never, not once, been a father to her.
His death—the death of the man he truly was, not the man Lina had once wished he could be—did not feel like losing a father. It felt like the closing of a book she had never been a character in, the final sentence of a story she had spent her whole life trying to rewrite. He had been a stranger wearing the title of Dad, a ghost whose presence had been more absence than anything else.
And yet, his absence had still been a wound—one that had never quite healed, one that had ached in the desperate moments when she had let herself hope. Now, even the possibility of closure was gone. There would be no reckoning, no moment of clarity, no father standing in front of her with eyes finally open, seeing her for the first time.
There was just an ending. And a hollow kind of sadness for the man who had never been more than a mirage, slipping through her fingers every time she reached for him.
“I appreciate the call,” Lina said finally, her voice unreadable.
Katrina hesitated. “The funeral is on Saturday. Michelle’s already making a mess of things.”
Lina let out a breath, closing her eyes for a moment. “I won’t be there,” she said.
Another pause. A sharp exhale. “You sure?” Katrina’s voice became sharp, almost scornful. “He was your father, and he was a good man.”
“Yes.” Lina was sure. This was something she had put to bed a long time ago.
