“Do you want me to stop?” I asked.

“No.”

“Do you have to get home?”

“No. I don’t know. Do you?”

“No,” I said.

“I bring my daughter here every year.”

A daughter. I think he wanted me to ask him questions about her, but I wasn’t about to. He didn’t seem like someone’s father. But he didn’t say he was a husband and a father, and that was enough. His admission placed him in an entirely new light. He had lived a life, which was obvious, but now it had taken on new dimensions. He was responsible for someone besides himself.

“I can’t go to my apartment,” I said.

“There are hotels by Magic Mountain.”

I assumed he had taken his daughter to the amusement park, too. Nathan and I walked down the hill toward my car, which was still running and had both doors open, as if abandoned.

Nathan looked on his phone and booked a room at the Hilton Garden Inn—the cheapest, he said. I wasn’t sure if we were spending the night or just looking for a temporary bed. He gave me the option of two queens or a king bed.

“They’re the same price,” he said.

“Just pick one.”

“You sure you want to do this?”

I moved the hand with my wedding ring away from him. I nodded yes.

He made the reservation and put his hand on my leg as we drove. I had initiated this, after all. It felt like our collective grief had merged us in some reckless way. After Daphne took her last breath, she relaxed into herself. Not a collapse, really, more like her body had stopped fighting gravity and she finally got to rest fully. I saw Nathan’s eyes well up. And though I didn’t ask him, I felt he didn’t really want her to go, either. He’d spent less time with her than I did, but she had an effect on people. Bethanny said I would be experiencing Daphne’s final moments in my dreams for weeks, months, years to come, and I was scared of that. Bethanny had shared with us her own experiences of seeing clients in her dreams. The accumulation of ghosts was inescapable, she said. Grief becomes ambient.