I hesitated. Then gave her the truth I hadn’t said out loud yet. “Feeling like I’m not supposed to be here. That if I actually start to enjoy any of this, I’m betraying everything I left behind.”

“Everything like...?”

“Home,” I said. “Beverly. Jenna.”

“Do you want to talk about her today?”

I shook my head.

“Fair. But you’ve been talking more, which tells me something is shifting.” Then she gave me that look—the one that meant she was watching closely, not with judgment, but with that quiet, unnerving therapist x-ray vision. “I’m glad you’ve kept showing up these last five months,” she added, the faintest hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “That counts for something.”

I shrugged. “My best friend said if I bailed one more time, he was going to start mailing me motivational cat posters.”

Dr. Lemkin scribbled something down.

Probably: Patient still deflecting with sarcasm.

“I’m just saying, don’t read too much into my attendance.”

“Mmm,” she hummed, unconvinced.

I gave a dry half-smile.

Then I asked the question that had been gnawing at the back of my throat for weeks. “Do you think I’m depressed?”

She didn’t rush the answer, which made it worse somehow.

She folded her hands in her lap, leaned forward just slightly. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t think you’re clinically depressed.”

I stared at her, waiting for more.

“I think your life has been objectively hard, Blake,” she added. “And you’re having a very reasonable reaction to that.”

I blinked. “That’s it? No long diagnostic term? No syndrome or acronym?”

She raised a brow. “You want a syndrome?”

“I… I just thought there’d be a name for how shitty I’ve felt.”

“There is. It’s called being human.”

“Jesus. You’re so annoyingly calm about everything.”

“It’s in the job description. Here’s what I’ll say… You’ve been through more than most people your age, and instead of numbing yourself, you’re here. You’re trying. You’re at Stanford. One of the best schools in the country. You got there on your own merit. That’s not nothing.”

“Feels like nothing most days,” I admitted.

“Then we keep going. Keep showing up. Keep doing the work. Because you can achieve great things. And not because you have something to prove to the world, or to Beverly, but because there’s more to you than the boy who survived hell. There’s the man who’s going to build something with it. And your future self, twenty years from now, is begging you to enjoy your life while you have the chance.”

I didn’t roll my eyes like I normally do.

Because for the first time in a long time, I almost believed her.