[He almost wishes she'd probe. Then he'd have an excuse to divulge things instead of having to voluntarily dredge them up. It's an attempt to be thoughtful, he understands, but now the burden of explaining things falls squarely on his shoulders. It's not that he doesn't know what to say or how to say it, it's that he'a bad with vulnerability and this is the most vulnerable he's been in a very long time. He's barely talked about this with anyone but Stan at all.]

My brother and I were very close as children. We didn't have friends, but I was smart and he was tough and we looked out for each other. My dad decided early on that Stanley was a disappointment, but my genius was one of the few things that could impress him. I built a machine that could have got me admitted to the top school in the country, but Stanley broke it and Dad threw him out of the house for costing us the fortune he thought I was going to make. I didn't do anything to stop it. I didn't even try to find him afterward.

[Even this is a highly-abbreviated explanation. The boxing lessons, the boat, the fight in front of the portal-- he can't have the whole thing out yet. In time. Knowing him it'll be an off-hand macabre joke, now that he's given her the basic setup.]

I don't regret not making my father proud, I regret ever putting what he wanted over the one friend I had back then. I hated my brother for decades over that scholarship, and he didn't even break my project on purpose.

[He's just not good enough at self-examination to really go into why. It's there, he knows it is, but he can't grasp it eloquently like he can so many other things. It was a mix of selfishness-- that part he knows and can acknowledge-- and the desperate need to please his father than came with being seen as the family meal ticket. When all you're worth to someone is the skill on which you also base your whole identity, being sabotaged (even unintentionally) is doubly devastating.]