They had always been linked. Because of the horror that had been my childhood, I’d tried to love Daniel even more—with a love tainted by all the ways my father hadn’t loved me. Everything I’d done right over the years had been a stab at him. Look what I can do without you. Look what I can do better than you. Still, my father seemed convinced that I had come to see him in his final moments, as if I’d simply been waiting in the wings for the right opportunity to appear. The effort of communicating with me exhausted him; he sank into an instant, deep sleep and then woke a few minutes later, demanding to know who I was. A minute later he was asleep again, his chest rising and falling irregularly. He was dying—a nurse confirmed this for me in the hallway. He was in the final stages of liver disease, and would soon be moved to a hospice facility. One day soon, I realized, my mother would come to visit him, and the bed would be empty.
