I didn’t say anything.
“It was very good,” he said. “The view. I took a picture.” He scrolled to it.
The photograph was of the headland path, looking out toward the ocean, early morning light, no one in it. A landscape without a person, which made it look like a landscape waiting for someone. I looked at it for a long time.
“We’ll go in spring,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
He put the phone away. We sat together for a while in the specific quiet of two people who have been through something and are now on the other side of it, not yet sure what the other side is.
## The Second Session
Dr. Mehta’s office has a particular quality of stillness. The room is small, carpeted, lit by two floor lamps rather than overhead lights; there’s a window that faces a garden, and on the days we’ve been there the garden has been doing what gardens do in early autumn, which is turn golden and loose and ready to let go. I find the room easier to talk in than I expected, which I think is partly the lack of overhead light and partly the absence of anything competing for attention.
The second session began with a check-in that felt, briefly, like it might stay on the surface. Then Dr. Mehta asked Nathan about the trip, and he started describing it, and something in his telling — the details he chose to include, the things he observed — made the room feel more serious.