It had been a long day and I was already teetering on sleep. I hadn’t yet wondered what it would mean for me that I might be the odd man out, or why.

August 7

The dinner proceeded for some time, each guest talking casually while I made mental notes about them and watched. We reveal ourselves through our movements and expressions as much as we do our speech. Observation is a habit, perhaps a discipline, in which you stop cataloguing details and start noticing the spaces between them, the things that don’t quite line up. I want to be honest and tell you I don’t know exactly when that shift happened, only that it had happened by the time Eileen refilled my water glass without my asking.

Phillip suggested early on that we each say something about why we’d come. It wasn’t demanded, exactly. Nothing at the retreat those three days and nights was demanded, only suggested in a tone that made refusal feel like bad manners. Claire went first, unprompted, something about a divorce she hadn’t had yet but could feel coming, like bad weather forecasted with certainty. Harlan mumbled about ‘unfinished business,’ which struck me as deliberately opaque, information that was by design not informative. Benita laughed and said she was there because her therapist suggested a retreat and she’d Googled the wrong kind. Considering the nature of the online posting we’d all responded to it seemed unlikely.

Larry said almost nothing, which was its own kind of answer. Remy offered a single word—’curiosity’—delivered with such flatness that no one asked him to elaborate. We were all curious, were we not? About spiritual matters, about afterlives, about reincarnation and ghosts.

When my turn came, I gave some version of the truth: I was there because of the item on a website we’d all seen and responded to. (At least that was how I assumed they were all there, an assumption that proved incorrect and nearly fatal in the end.)