“I’m sorry.” Suhani reaches out to grip his arm. “That’s awful. I never should have put you in a position where you could feel that kind of pain. I should have talked to you about how I was feeling instead of closing myself off more.”

“I should have talked to you more, too,” Zack says.

“We all should have talked to each other more,” Dad says, his voice soft. Gray stubble dots his chin.

“What do you mean?” Dr. Eze asks.

“I’ve done things to try and protect my family. And sometimes that’s meant staying quiet. But there’s no good that’s come from that. I should have known that after spending years telling my patients to be open and honest.” Dad adjusts his chair so it’s facing Mom. Natasha fidgets with the strings on her hoodie.

“I wanted to be a poet. A full-time poet.” Dad smiles at the thought. “The reason I even met your mom is because I was outside that theater that night for a poetry reading and her play was after that.”

“What? You’re serious?” Anuj says. “When I told you I loved poetry, you acted like you had no interest in it.”

“I know,” Dad says. “I buried that part of me years ago. I did what I had to in order to support your mom and, later, all of us. But when I was growing up and my parents would sell vegetables from sunrise to sunset, I always dreamed of writing poems, reading them to audiences. My parents and brother told me I was crazy. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been easier on Natasha. I understand how it feels for your goals to not make sense, to you, to the people who love you.”

Natasha can’t speak because her thoughts are in a tight knot. Everyone’s looking at Dad with an intense focus, as if they can also feel the emotional tectonic plates of their family shifting while he’s speaking. Natasha clenches her fists as she pictures a younger version of him hunched over a notebook and pouring out his most intimate thoughts onto a blank page. Picturing her parents when they were younger, long before she and her siblings existed, always overwhelms her. They had full lives. They had dreams and conversations and fears she never knew about.

“In India, nobody asked us how we were doing emotionally,” Dad says. “We just had to keep going and doing what had to be done. If someone was struggling, they were told to pray extra or do some religious ritual. My family never accepted that I wanted to become a psychiatrist, so maybe, somewhere inside, I got caught up with proving something to them, too, and I lost sight of what I believed in the first place. But you kids are showing us another way.”