What I felt more comfortable with was physical pain, because it was manageable and often didn’t linger. What I found interesting was that when we were in training with Bethanny, the men always asked if the pain we meant was physical or emotional, but the women always focused on emotional pain when answering.

What I was most uncomfortable with was gaining acceptance that my father was actively dying and I still wanted him to live.

And so I participated in the fantasy that he was okay. That the bourbon was to combat his cold. That the stomach pains he complained about were not a sign of impending doom, or at the very least signaled a future phone call that meant I would have to fly to a hospital bedside again, if I was lucky.

And when he talked about the future, I listened, and I believed, just as I had believed in the future talk of others who I knew would not be around for longer than a season. I believed because I wanted to believe.

I DID NOT WANT to see Daniel again, so I had to run away from him. I did want to have sex with him again. I just did not want to piss off Bethanny. I didn’t even tell her about what Lawrence did. No one said outright that something like this could happen, and no one shared situations in which they even came close. But when you develop a closeness with someone, it feels inevitable. At least to me. Or maybe I was just fucked up and couldn’t understand boundaries. But none of this mattered, because I hadn’t heard from Daniel.

I had a few overnight bags strewn about in various parts of the apartment, waiting for me to fill them haphazardly. They were called weekenders, but couldn’t fit the odds and ends of my itinerant travel. Instead of heading back to the desert, I was going to head north, up the 5, before switching over to the 14, toward Lancaster, past Daphne’s house and the now yellowed and withered poppy fields.

I briefly thought about Nathan and our hotel room as I passed the exit on the freeway. The pillows. The pool full of children. I was never going to be the type of woman who went for men like Nathan. But I also didn’t want to be the type of person who always picked men like Daniel.

The two hotels that I knew of in Death Valley were booked, so I found a house deep in the rocky valley at the base of the Eastern Sierras. I hadn’t told anyone I was going, but I had sent an e-mail with a picture of a ranch I found on a real-estate website to my parents. It contained a main house and stalls for horses on five acres of land. My e-mail said: “House I Want.”