In twenty-eight years Rael had prepared over four hundred people for their visits.
He knew the process in both directions: what to tell a client who arrived with an exact moment already chosen, clear about what they needed; what to tell the ones who came in with nothing and had to be walked through the choosing, which was always the harder case. He knew how to explain the silence rule without making it sound like punishment. He had been wrong about the difference between readiness and avoidance in the early years, and then less often.
He had never used his own visit.
This was not unusual. About twelve percent of counselors never did. The standard explanations: too much knowledge of the mechanics, which made the experience feel curated rather than felt; a kind of professional deferral, the visit always being saved for the right moment, which kept it permanently in the future. Rael did not fully believe either of these about himself. He knew where he would go. He had known for eleven years: a Sunday morning in May, a fourth-floor apartment, the hour before nine. He had never told anyone this. It seemed too specific to explain without explaining everything else.
His client Emina had used hers yesterday. She was 67. She had been working toward the decision for three years, which was longer than average, and then it had come in the way the decisions that were ready always came: clearly, without drama. She had gone back to see her brother Piotr on the afternoon before he died. He was twelve. She had found him in the kitchen eating a bread roll.
"I just needed to know there was a bread roll, " she said, in the session this morning. "That's all. I needed to see him eating something ordinary."
Rael had written this down. He wrote down what clients said after, which was part of the documentation, but also for himself, because after twenty-eight years the things people went back for still surprised him. The deathbed recoveries, the apology scenes, the one lost afternoon with one lost person. And then Emina, who had crossed forty years of grief to find a bread roll in her brother's hands.
He understood it completely. That was the thing about this work: you understood the things you could not explain, and the things you could explain were never quite the point.
He sat at his desk after the session. His next client was in an hour. He thought about the fourth-floor apartment. Sunday morning, May, the hour before nine. He knew what was there. He knew it was still there, unchanged, with the patience that all finished things have.
This year, he thought.
He had thought this the year before.