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"I had two friends," he says. "Barbora and Lucia. Both girls. They didn't care what I was. They just… they saw me. Talked to me. I spent more time with them than with anyone else because it was the only place I wasn't managing everything constantly." He pauses. "Which gave the boys at school two reasons instead of one."

He looks at the floor.

"My parents saw me changing. Getting quieter. Closing down. They didn't know why. I didn't tell them. I couldn’t… I didn't have the words and even if I had I wouldn't have known how to say them without saying the thing I was terrified to say." He is very still. "I think they thought it was normal. Teenage years. Boys becoming quiet. They gave me space, which was what they thought I needed, and it was the wrong kind of space, the kind that meant I was alone with it."

He lifts his head and looks at the window.

"I was alone with it for a very long time," he says. Very quietly. "Until I wasn't."

Silence.

"I moved to Amsterdam at twenty-two," he says. "With one suitcase and a list. And I built a life that was entirely mine. That didn't require anyone to accept anything because I didn't give anyone the chance to not accept it. I was simply Jan. Jan lived alone, worked hard, was fine." He looks at me. "I was fine. I want to say that… it wasn't… I built something real. I was okay." A pause. "I was just also very alone."

He is quiet for a moment.

"And then I sat down at your breakfast table in Cancun," he says.

I look at him.

At Jan. At the precise, careful man who walked into my life and said I think I recognise you, you have a YouTube channel and did not know, standing there at my breakfast table in the Cancun sun, that the months ahead would reorganise my understanding of my own life around him.

At the twelve-year-old boy who sat with something he could not name and had no one to tell and managed it alone with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided that was the only safe option.

At the thirty-two-year-old man sitting on a hotel bed in the city that built him with every single wall down.

I cross the room.

I put my arms around him.

He goes into it, not reluctantly, not with the careful measured version. Properly. His face against my neck, both arms around me, holding on the way he holds on when it is very late and the walls are all the way down.

I hold him back.

There is nothing to say that is adequate. I know this. There are no words for what he just told me — the twelve-year-old managing a risk profile in his own chest, the boys who could smell the difference, the two friends who saw him, the long alone. There are no words, so I don't use any.

I just hold on.

After a long time he says, into my neck: "I'm okay."

"I know," I say.

"I just…” He stops. "I haven't said that to anyone. Most of it."

"I know," I say again.

"It felt important," he says. "To say it here. In this city." A pause. "To you."

I tighten my arms.

"Your parents," I say eventually. Into his hair. "They love you."

"Yes," he says.

"They didn't have the language for it. At the time. When you needed it."

"No," he says.

"They have more of it now."