But Ms. Barrantes didn’t move, and I followed her lead. “Why am I here? What are we doing?” She wagged her head. “You can’t just . . . just . . . drop me off into some creepy hallway, Kevin.”

“I’m sorry, but it has to be this way, Simone. Listen to what they have to say. I think . . . I think you’ll find solace.”

We stepped out of the elevator and watched the doors close. And suddenly, it was so dark I could see just as much with my eyes closed. Ms. Barrantes felt for my hand, and together we took a few small steps forward. Then a few more, until we heard a click, and a buzzy halogen bulb flickered on, giving us enough light to continue moving forward.

We walked.

Past one door.

Quietly, carefully, we walked past another.

We saw it at the same time, the third door on the left, light escaping from the gap beneath it.

Ms. Barrantes looked at me, then turned the knob.

Now here we are.

“Losing a child,” the woman continues. “No one should ever bear that cross.”

“You’ve lost a child?” Ms. Barrantes asks.

The grief specialist shakes her head. “I don’t have children,” she says with a pause that sounds like I can’t. “But I’ve lost people I’ve loved. My husband last year.”

“I’m so sorry,” Ms. Barrantes says.

“He’d never been sick before. Not even a cold. All his coworkers gave him a hard time, said he made them look bad. Just take one sick day, Ross, they’d say. Everything Ross did, he did faithfully. That was his way. One night he woke up with severe abdominal pain. The doctors said they needed to remove his appendix, there was no time to waste . . .” The woman’s face neutral. “When they cut him open, they found mets in his pancreas. He was already stage three. He died four months later.”

And I want to say something comforting, but what?

“When the Center came to us, I was skeptical, as I’m sure you are now. Ross was their second case. What they did for him, for us . . . I left my practice of twenty-three years to sit in this chair to talk to people like you. To offer you that same gift.”

Ms. Barrantes takes a sharp breath, wipes her eyes. “I just want to see my son. I don’t care if I have to climb onto that hospital table to be with him . . . I have to see him.”

“Ms. Barrantes, what if he sat up on that table? What if the two of you walked out of that room together?”

Ms. Barrantes opens her mouth but says nothing. Her face perspiring. I hop from my chair.

“Ms. B, are you okay?” I ask.

Ms. Barrantes cuffs her ears like she’s blocking out a painful frequency only she hears, her face color draining rapidly, as if some internal plug’s been pulled.