Brandon felt himself jump. He had paused, in recounting the events of that moment — what he would learn, progressively, was a singularly important one — and become disoriented; for the last twenty minutes, old smells and sights were real again: the smells of the house (which he and, moreover, his mother had feared would be recorded in the balance sheet of judgements carried inside Greta’s skull); the Teutonic set of Greta’s jaw during much of the discussion; the glistening of tears on his mother’s cheeks when she hugged him, as the proceedings had ended, and as they were making their way upstairs to retrieve what he held up as his most prized belongings. All of these had become far more real than was the carefully-hued, thoughtfully-scented sanctuary that was his therapist’s office.

Bradley smiled. “Did I startle you? I hate to interrupt really good flow.”

“I startled myself,” Brandon replied. “Don’t worry, I do that even when I’m alone.

Bradley laughed.

“What I wanted to ask you — and I want you to know that I ask this without judgement…are you telling me everything?”

Brandon smiled, slightly. “Nothing gets past you, does it?”

“That’s why they — well, you, for sure — pay me the big bucks.”

Brandon had liked Bradley immediately upon meeting him: soft-spoken, radiating compassion, yet decisive and fiercely protective of his patients — gifted with the ability to elicit painful truths (some half-), while extending an open metaphorical hand to the teller, as if leading her, or him, through a treacherous hike into dark and echoing mountains.

“Am I telling you the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” Brandon sat back in the overstuffed couch, and ran his hands through (more accurately, over) his recently-buzzed hair. “No.” He reached for his coffee, and drained he cup.

“Sorry. I don’t mean to be flippant.”

“I didn’t take it that way.”

“The whole truth? To be honest, it has been hard to face. Especially in the last few years.”

“Since you re-connected with your family.”

“Yes.  Yes…hell, yes. Because seeing them, talking to them…even getting frustrated with them…and they with me…makes it all real. The whole, huge, gaping hole in my life; all those lost years…the more ordinary my time with them becomes, the more, well…profoundly fucked-up all that distance looks to me. It’s like…if it can be this easy…why did I throw it away?”

Bradley frowned. “Well…I think you can answer that. Now, it looks easy. Right? Now, your family isn’t just an abstraction; isn’t just a massive weight of guilt and regret and what-if. But…I want to encourage you to be fair to yourself.” He glanced at his clock with a barely-noticeable flick of his eyes. “You can see it as a whole, as this Thing You Threw Away, only now. Only now that you have this unique perspective. And — and I want you to remember this — only now that you have changed.”