Everyone around me nodded yes. I felt like the only person who didn’t understand what she was saying. Why did she have to say things like that at a party?

“Those aren’t my words, though—that’s from Walking Through Grief, by the brilliant Christian Meyerson. Our identity can’t help but be interwoven with what we grieve.”

She leaned in and whispered into my ear, “Have you read it yet?”

I could feel her hot breath on my neck, and I wanted to lie and tell her yes.

“You will. You will,” she said, before I could answer. She pulled me into the kitchen so she could fix herself a plate of food.

“I’m so proud of the work you did with Lawrence. It feels like you had a breakthrough,” she said. “He really appreciated you spending time with him before he left us.”

“He’s gone?”

“He is,” she said. “I’ll give you your check before you leave.”

“Thanks.”

I started doing my breathing exercises to steady myself.

“I have something wonderful to share with you,” she said as she led me to Nathan’s meditation room.

It wasn’t the first time I felt like I was being indoctrinated into a cult. California was ripe with meet-ups, healers, and healthy-living gurus. She always made us feel like we had a bigger purpose here, though, and so we were set apart from those simply searching for higher vibrations.

“Can you start a new client?”

“Alone?”

“At first. Unless you want Nathan to help.”

This was my graduation. I could feel it.

She told me his name was Daniel.

34.

When I knocked on Daniel’s door I assumed he’d be glassy-eyed, jaundiced, and medicinal-smelling. But he wasn’t any of those things, though his house did smell like it hadn’t been aired out in weeks. He lived in an East Hollywood bungalow that sat behind another bungalow that was cut off from the street by chain-link fence. Heat radiated off his cracked concrete driveway when I walked up to his door; I noticed the blackout curtains as I knocked. Bethanny hadn’t sent me all of his forms yet, which meant I didn’t have a last name so I couldn’t search for him online.

When he answered, he looked very much alive, though he had the kind of dark circles under his eyes that made me believe he stared at the ceiling most nights, too. He had filled out the paperwork, and his prognosis showed no hope. He told Bethanny he was pretty much homebound—agoraphobic—though he could still do most things without help. The first thing he told me as I was settling in was that he didn’t want to get to the point where he was bedbound or needed someone to help him bathe or go to the bathroom. He did not want to become a shell of himself.