“I also worry Lorraine is having a hard time working with Daphne. She didn’t say it, but sometimes it’s hard to detach when the person you’re helping is a mirror.”

Bethanny liked to speak in koans. Sometimes I understood them; sometimes I just wrote them down for later, when I might be able to understand them better.

“Maybe I could talk to her.”

“Is this pain avoidance?” Bethanny asked.

“I’m not sure. I’m still struggling with detachment.”

“You’re stronger than you think,” she said. “I’ve already called Nathan, and he’s agreed to take Lorraine’s place.”

“Permanently?”

“I don’t want to destabilize her with changing her guides over and over. Would you prefer I do it with you?”

“No, Nathan’s fine,” I said.

DAPHNE WAS DYING in the spring. Reports had come out that because of the rare heavy rains that had finally settled over Southern California we were experiencing an April super-bloom that had not been witnessed in at least a dozen years. Meteorologists talked about “atmospheric rivers” with a giddiness I had never seen before. There had even been thunderstorms with hundreds of pulses of lightning per minute shooting down over the Pacific. Bobby told me one thunderbolt had hit a palm tree near our apartment and set it ablaze. People had crowded around it to take pictures instead of calling the fire department. He shook his head while he said it. Purple and yellow flowers crowded the hills around the city, and if you looked closely enough you could see tall grass undulating in the breeze up there, too. The desert, meanwhile, was covered in an array of wildflowers. Cacti were sprouting bright pink and magenta blooms from every direction. For the first time in years, after we’d been living with persistent drought, things were starting to feel verdant again.

Daphne lived near fields where vibrant California poppies bloomed in vast blankets each spring. Each year, for a brief few weeks, cars traveled in packs just for a chance to glimpse the rolling hills of orangey gold. For a couple dollars you could walk through the poppy fields and be transported into a kind of Technicolor dream, as long as you averted your eyes from the thick yellow smog settling over the tract homes in the valley down below. Hordes of people photographed themselves in the sea of flowers and didn’t care what they were trampling.

Bobby hated crowds and refused to go see the poppies with me. I wanted to stop to see them the first time I went to meet Daphne. I had mapped it out for my drive with Lorraine. The bloom was only ten miles from Daphne’s, and I figured on our next drive we could take the long way past the flowers, since she seemed open to exploration.