If I had thought about it at all, I would have assumed it was simply the nearest, or the one his insurance covered, or chance.

It did not occur to me, because why would it, that a dying man might choose his hospice the way a person chooses anything of enormous importance, with research and patience and a specific goal in mind.

I did not know that Julian had learned, through the same careful invisible channels by which he had tracked my whole life, that his daughter volunteered at a small hospice on the edge of Boston, and that he had then arranged, with the last of his failing strength, to be admitted to exactly that hospice, under his own real name, so that the daughter he had watched from a distance for twenty years might, in the ordinary course of her volunteering, come to his door.

I thought I had wandered into his room by the luck of the rota.