He laughed—a real laugh, surprised out of him. "You're direct. I like that."
"I'm paid to be direct. What I'd like is an answer."
We stared at each other across the space between our chairs. Three feet, maybe four. It felt like less. The afternoon light caught his face, and I noticed the shadows under his eyes were lighter than last week. He'd slept better. Something had shifted.
I wondered if it was this. If I was the something.
Don't.
"Fine," he said. "Yes. I perform. I've been performing so long I don't remember how to stop." He spread his hands, a gesture that was almost helpless. "Rodion the charmer. Rodion the easy one. The brother you can have a drink with and forgetwhat family he belongs to. That's my role. That's what I'm good at."
"And what's underneath the role?"
"Does it matter?"
"It matters to the work we're doing here."
He caught the clinical phrasing—I saw it register in his eyes. A flicker of something. Disappointment? Amusement? Both?
"The work we're doing," he repeated. "Right. The work."
"You sound skeptical."
"I sound like a man who's been talking about himself for two sessions and is starting to wonder what the point is."
"The point is helping you sleep."
"Is that what this is about?"
"What else would it be about?"
He didn't answer. Just watched me with those dark eyes, and I felt the weight of his attention like a physical thing. Most patients looked at me and saw a function—someone to listen, to advise, to fix. He looked at me like he was trying to see the person underneath the function.
It was unsettling. It was also, if I was being honest with myself, the reason I'd been thinking about him all week.
"Tell me about your mother," I said, redirecting. "You mentioned her last week. You said she died when you were young."
The shift in his posture was immediate—a tightening across the shoulders, a stillness that hadn't been there before. I'd found something.
"What about her?"
"Whatever you want to tell me."
"That's very open-ended."
"It's meant to be."
He was quiet for a moment, and I watched him decide whether to engage or deflect. The internal calculus of vulnerability—how much to reveal, how much to protect. I'd seen it hundreds of times. It never got less fascinating.
"Her name was Antonina," he said finally. "She was... she was the center of everything. The reason our family held together. When she died, it was like someone removed the keystone from an arch." He paused. "Does that make sense?"
"It does."
"My father was never the same after. None of us were." He looked at his hands, spread on his knees. "Demyan became harder. Kirill became colder. Nina threw herself into helping others, like she could fill the hole our mother left by saving strangers." Another pause. "And I started smiling. Joking. Being the easy one. Because someone had to, and no one else was going to."
"You took on the role of holding the family together."
"Someone had to."
