Good Without You ~ Songs To Stories Volume IV ~ By Britt Wolfe
Inspired By: Mean (Taylor's Version) by Taylor Swift
Some wounds aren’t loud. They’re quiet, invisible—and they don’t always heal.
Lina spent her entire life trying to earn the love of a father who only ever saw through her. Overshadowed by a golden older sister and dismissed at every turn, she was the quiet child, the good girl, the one who disappeared into the wallpaper of her own life. But being good was never enough. Not for Arlo. Not for Michelle. Not for a family who only loved conditionally—if at all.
Now an adult, Lina has built a life of her own—far from the Pennsylvania town that never saw her, far from the house where she was silenced. But when her father dies, the past comes clawing back. Old ghosts, unfinished grief, and family dysfunction swirl once more as Lina is forced to reckon with the truth: that healing doesn’t always come from reconciliation—it comes from release.
Good Without You is a powerful and unflinching story about the ache of being unloved, the strength it takes to walk away, and the quiet triumph of choosing yourself. For anyone who has ever had to heal without an apology, this is for you.
Inspired By: Mean (Taylor's Version) by Taylor Swift
Some wounds aren’t loud. They’re quiet, invisible—and they don’t always heal.
Lina spent her entire life trying to earn the love of a father who only ever saw through her. Overshadowed by a golden older sister and dismissed at every turn, she was the quiet child, the good girl, the one who disappeared into the wallpaper of her own life. But being good was never enough. Not for Arlo. Not for Michelle. Not for a family who only loved conditionally—if at all.
Now an adult, Lina has built a life of her own—far from the Pennsylvania town that never saw her, far from the house where she was silenced. But when her father dies, the past comes clawing back. Old ghosts, unfinished grief, and family dysfunction swirl once more as Lina is forced to reckon with the truth: that healing doesn’t always come from reconciliation—it comes from release.
Good Without You is a powerful and unflinching story about the ache of being unloved, the strength it takes to walk away, and the quiet triumph of choosing yourself. For anyone who has ever had to heal without an apology, this is for you.
Inspired By: Mean (Taylor's Version) by Taylor Swift
Some wounds aren’t loud. They’re quiet, invisible—and they don’t always heal.
Lina spent her entire life trying to earn the love of a father who only ever saw through her. Overshadowed by a golden older sister and dismissed at every turn, she was the quiet child, the good girl, the one who disappeared into the wallpaper of her own life. But being good was never enough. Not for Arlo. Not for Michelle. Not for a family who only loved conditionally—if at all.
Now an adult, Lina has built a life of her own—far from the Pennsylvania town that never saw her, far from the house where she was silenced. But when her father dies, the past comes clawing back. Old ghosts, unfinished grief, and family dysfunction swirl once more as Lina is forced to reckon with the truth: that healing doesn’t always come from reconciliation—it comes from release.
Good Without You is a powerful and unflinching story about the ache of being unloved, the strength it takes to walk away, and the quiet triumph of choosing yourself. For anyone who has ever had to heal without an apology, this is for you.
EXCEPT 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.