To be honest, I did not want to tell Jack what I woke up thinking about. First thing in the morning was the worst. My mind worked away all night long, examining my life from every angle with no one to cover up for me or say comforting things; then, just when I was coming to, my mind gave me its conclusions before I had a chance to think. At that time of day the conclusions were always if not sad, then scary or bleak. Who wanted to hear about sad, scary, and bleak?

“Well, what do you wake up thinking about?”

Jack would not say.

Between treatments, we took an Uber to the Mall, to visit my favorite monument. No statues, no marching buddies, no pillars or famous speeches, just the black stone getting wider and thicker with names as we walked down, and at the bottom it was like some kind of soundproof room with everyone staring at the names of people who would never be seen again. Thousands and thousands of them. I could look in the book and see exactly how many, if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. Our reflections were caught on the polished surface, Jack in his Georgetown sweatshirt, me in my baseball cap, with the names stamped across us and those personal notes taped to the stone. I used to like reading them.

“I don’t know.” I steered Jack back up the slope. “I don’t think this will help us with what we’re making. Do you?”

It was by chance that I hit on the idea. If you believe in chance. It was the day I took Jack to meet my grandparents. We sat around in the kitchen drinking lemonade and admiring my grandmother’s ceramic pots, and Jack answered her questions about school and laughed at my grandfather’s lame jokes, and then we horsed around in the back with Barney.

“It’s so different out here,” said Jack. Where we lived, we had lawn on all sides, and the backyard was as nice as the front. Here, the houses were dignified and orderly from the street, but out back the wooden porches and fire escapes and additions of different sizes and states of repair looked as though a kid who didn’t know any better had thrown them together. An idea was circling in my mind, trying to land.

“Want to go to Meridian Hill Park?”