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“Punch me instead.”

“Are you insane?”

“It is not the first time I have been told.”

“I’m serious. I could— I could break your—” I couldn’t say it.

“Jaw?”

“Yeah.”

“You could not.”

“Maksim, I’ve been hitting people for ten years. I hit hard. I know what I’m doing.”

“You do.” He stood. “You are also aware, are you not, that I am eleven hundred years old and heal from silver? That I have been struck by a good deal worse than you? That I am, in this house, the only person on earth you cannot hurt?”

I stared at him.

“Come,” said Maksim. He held out a hand. “Downstairs. The old squash court. Your father tells me it has not been used since 1998.”

The squash court was at the back of the house, past the library, down a set of steps. A long, echoing, white room with a wooden floor and a high ceiling and a single bare bulb. It smelled of dust and old rubber. Someone, I think my mother, had put a bucket in the corner. Someone else, I think Jenny, had left a pair of gym shoes by the door.

He stood in the middle of it.

He’d taken off his shoes. He stood in his socks, in his black trousers and shirt, with his hands loose at his sides and his feet planted at shoulder width. He looked completely at ease. He looked like a statue of a man about to be punched.

“I’m not doing this,” I said.

“You are.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s you! “

“Yes,” said Maksim. “That is the point.”

He waited.

I stood in the doorway, shaking. The voice in my head was very loud. It was saying: he’s asking. He wants it. He’s giving you permission. Take it. And underneath it, in a smaller, quieter place, I heard a second voice, a kid’s voice, six years old, with a mouth full of somebody else’s ear.

You always hurt the ones who let you.

“Lex.”

“I’ll hate myself.”

“Perhaps. But you will hate yourself less with me than with a stranger.” He took a step forward. “Listen. I will tell you what I know. You are not afraid of hurting me. You are afraid that if you hurt me, you will find out you are the thing you fear.”

The words went through me like a nail.

“You are not,” said Maksim. “I promise you. You are the man who took a bullet meant for me and did not so much as flinch. You are the man who kissed my forehead in a hospital. You are the man who gave a stranger half his pizza. The violence is not you. It is what happened to you.” He spread his hands. “So let it out. All of it. Here. On me. Where it cannot hurt anyone. And when it is done, we will sit on this floor and talk.”

I looked at his face.

It was calm. It was open. There was no fear in it. There was no judgment. It was the face of a man who had already forgiven me, everything, all of it, in advance.