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"She meant you," he says.

I look at the Brno evening around us.

"I told her I knew," Jan says.

— — —

The hotel room. Evening, the Brno dark beginning outside, the city settling into night.

Jan sits on the edge of the bed. He is not doing anything. He is just sitting.

I sit beside him.

"Your parents," I say. After a while. "They're warm. Open."

"Yes," he says.

"Your mother talked to me the entire walk. Your father was…” I pause. "They're sociable. Extroverted. Warm." I look at him. "And you’re…”

He looks at me.

"You're not cold," I say. "That's not what I mean. But you’re… you built walls. You learned to keep things very contained. And I'm looking at them and I'm trying to…” I stop. "How does that happen? Between parents like that and a person like you?"

He doesn't answer immediately.

He gets up from the bed and goes to the window. He stands there looking at the Brno evening — the street below, the buildings, the particular dark of a city you grew up in. His back to me. His shoulders doing the thing I know now, the held thing.

"You don't have to tell me," I say.

He is quiet.

"But we agreed," I say. Quietly. "To tell each other things."

He stands at the window for a long moment.

"Yes," he says. "We did."

He stands there a moment longer.

Then he comes back to the bed and sits down and looks at the floor.

"I knew at twelve," he says.

He says it simply. Flatly. The way you say something you have said to yourself ten thousand times and have not said out loud to anyone.

"What I was. I knew." He is quiet for a moment. "And I had been told… not by my parents, but by everything around me. It was a different time, and my world felt very small. The message was everywhere if you knew how to read it. In the church. At school. In the way certain things were said and certain things were never said and the silence around certain words." He looks at his hands. "I thought I was sick. I want you to understand that properly. I didn't think I was different or unusual or complicated. I thought there was something wrong with me. Something broken. And I was… I was twelve years old and I genuinely believed that and I had no one to tell."

I don't move. I don't say anything. I breathe.

"I tried to fix it," he says. "For a long time. The way I fix things… methodically, with focus, with complete commitment. I decided I would simply not be what I was." The almost-smile. Not the warm one. Something older and harder. "I was very thorough about it. I stopped letting myself think certain things. I monitored my reactions. I managed everything very carefully." A pause. "I was twelve, and I was managing my own interior like a risk profile, because that felt safer than the alternative."

He stops.

Outside the Brno evening does its quiet thing. A car. A voice somewhere distant. The city that built him going about its ordinary Friday night.

"The boys at school," he says. "It was… not physical. I want to be clear about that. It was the other kind. The kind that is harder to point to and harder to prove and harder to survive because no one can see it happening. I was different. I knew it. They knew it. I didn't want what they wanted. I didn't talk about what they talked about. I flinched at things they didn't flinch at. And boys at that age…” He stops. "Boys at that age can sense difference before they understand it. And once they sense it, they decide what to do with it."

I feel something happening in my chest that is not quite pain and not quite anger. Something colder and more fundamental.