“What’s that supposed to mean? Fall further than this?” I raised my arms at the sun-faded Oriental carpet, the rickety table, the plastic crystal ball. “And while we’re at it, what did you mean, that thing you said at the spa?”

“Your pain over your father,” she said. This time she looked straight at me. “You can’t pretend not to feel anything. You can’t hide from it. It’ll only make things worse.”

I was too stunned to say anything else, or even to nod. Clara turned her head to look out the window as though to give me a moment to sit alone with what she had said. I peeled away a strip of skin from the cuticle of my left pinkie until I felt a satisfying pain.

Four years ago, the casino was building a new garage as part of the expansion, but the engineers and the architects had orders to rush things along as quickly as they could. The construction team ended up completing one floor a week rather than one floor every three weeks. Then, on the morning before Thanksgiving, the supports collapsed and seven people were killed inside. Three times that many were injured. My father was one of them. It took hours to even find him in the rubble. He was brought to the hospital in the center of the city, where my mother and I sat by his bed and listened to his machines beep. The doctor was frank when he explained the swelling of his brain, the extent of the internal bleeding, that he was essentially already gone. But still we waited two more days before my mother signed the paperwork, agreeing to let him die. Even with all the charts and images, even with the IVs and the machine that was breathing on his behalf, it still seemed like he might wake up. There was a scrape on his left cheekbone and a cut near his hairline, but other than that, he was my father, with the same face, same expression even, he had when he was simply taking a nap on the sofa in the evening after an early start at work.