I shook my head without glancing at the book, because Dara and I did not have the same reading tastes. I was pre-med like my brother and obsessing over my organic chemistry reader so I could move back to Atlanta and become a doctor like everyone else in my family. Dara was majoring in sociology, but her shelves were stuffed with paperbacks with cursive fonts.

“This book is the only thing that got Andrea over Todd,” she said.

I looked at Dara’s friend Andrea, who fell face-first into another girl’s lap.

“I’m crying because it’s so beautiful,” Andrea sobbed.

When Dara and her friends left in search of lattes, I felt the gold foil letters of the book’s title staring me down from across the room. I picked it up and held it in my hand.

Ninety-Nine Things I’m Going to Love About You by Noa Callaway.

I don’t know why, but the title made me think of my mother’s last words. Her plea that I find someone I really, really loved. Was she sending me a message over the transom?

I opened the book and started reading, and a funny thing happened: I couldn’t put it down.

Ninety-Nine Things is the story of Cara Kenna, a young woman struggling to survive a divorce. There’s a suicide attempt and a stint in a psych ward, but the tone is so brightly funny, I’d commit myself if it meant I could hang out with her.

In the hospital, Cara has only time to kill, and she does so by reading the ninety-nine romance novels in the psych ward library. At first, she’s cynical, but then, despite herself, she finds a line she likes. She writes it down. She says it aloud. Soon she’s writing down her favorite line from every book. By the day of her release, she has ninety-nine things to hope for in a future love affair.

I read the book in one sitting. I was buzzing all over. I looked at the chemistry homework I had to do and felt something inside me had changed.

Ninety-Nine Things held all the words I’d been looking for since my mother died. It spelled out how to really, really love. With humor, with heart, and with bravery. It made me want to find that love myself.

At the back of the book, where the author’s bio usually is, the publisher included three blank pages, lined and numbered from one to ninety-nine.

Okay, Mom, I’d thought, sitting down to get to work. I wasn’t sure which of Dara’s friends this book had belonged to, but it was now undeniably, cosmically mine.