He looked at me, though he wasn’t expecting a response. We had been through the same program and we weren’t victims of our circumstances anymore.

“Why do you?”

“I’m preparing myself for the people I love.”

“Oh yeah, there are a lot of people like you who come to Bethanny,” he said.

I felt like I was on the opposite side of some giant divide: someone who was still untouched by the kind of catatonic grief that comes with having a parent die. No amount of preparation was going to help me. I just wanted to be less leveled.

“Where is she on the PSAC?”

“Hovering around sixty percent,” I said. “She’s very lucid. It’s disconcerting.”

“What do you mean?” Nathan asked.

“It almost seems like she could get better.”

“She’s Stage Four. There’s no Stage Five.”

“Some people live at Stage Four for a long time.”

“She already has.”

“I just mean that she still has some time. It’s not like she’s dancing around her house, but you know.”

“People have different thresholds. What’s yours?”

“I think I wrote down fifty percent. But it’s honestly more like seventy.”

“Seventy percent is barely showing signs of sickness,” he said, and laughed.

“I don’t really have a strong will to live.”

“Dark.”

“I’m not a depressed person,” I said, weirdly defensive. “What are you, at twenty percent?”

“This process is difficult.”

“I’m saying there are people who have lost their will to live, and she’s not one of them.”

“You,” he said.

“Yes, she definitely wants to live more than I do.”

“She doesn’t, though. And that’s her choice,” he said, changing lanes.

“I get it,” I said. “She called us, not the other way around.”

“What’d you do before this?” he asked.

I worked behind counters, at registers, or as a secretary. Secretarial work felt the most substantial, because it carried with it the promise of health insurance and retirement plans if you chose to be a lifer. The offices I had worked in were full of lifers: women who had slid behind their desks in their early twenties and hadn’t moved, well into their fifties and sixties. In these offices, you became a person who decorated your desk with years of pictures of momentous life occasions and jars of candy used to lure people for daytime breaks in between stringing calls together and maintaining complicated appointment calendars for someone else, while barely being able to handle your own affairs. All I could look back at were jobs that didn’t really matter—ones that were always just going to be jobs—while everyone around me settled into careers, doing things they found fulfilling.