Seeing his notes and lists gave me a strange feeling. He had drawn little pictures in the margins, boats and houses, all with dark firm pen strokes. He’d written sideways on the third page, She Is Alive.

I looked at the words, and felt my face flush, felt something shift inside, tiny fault lines. Who was she? I wanted it to be me, although I hardly understood why. I wanted, I guess, for those words to be mine, to act as an incantation, bewitching me into some higher level of existence. She is alive. She is alive.

I closed the notebook, placed it back on the nightstand, and continued my examination of the room. His empty duffel bag on the chair. The smell of the room—dusty, hot. I touched the blanket on the neatly made bed. I touched the pillow. I kneeled down beside the bed and examined it. There was no indent from a sleeping head, no stray hairs.

I remember my mother once told me you could tell a lot about a man by looking in his pockets. To demonstrate, she went to my father’s old camel hair coat hanging by the door and reached into the side pocket. She pulled out a matchbook, a handful of coins that clinked together in her hand, and a bird’s nest.

“I rest my case,” she said.

“Found it on the path behind the school,” my father had said. “Maybe wren.”

In the closet, Cole had hung a jacket, and I reached in both pockets. A quarter. A receipt for coffee beans. I knew just when he’d bought them—one morning early after we’d discovered we were out of coffee entirely.

I returned to the duffel bag. I checked the outside pocket first and found it empty. On the interior, though, was a slim little pocket, which I unzipped, and inside was another zipper. A pocket within a pocket. When I unzipped that, I found a piece of paper, stationary size, folded into quarters. I almost didn’t open it, sure it was another receipt, because it was that kind of thin, faded paper. But I did unfold it, and when I did, I felt a shock, a seismic shift, my feet no longer on solid ground. My heart pounded in my temples.

It was her pointy, calculated letters, my mother’s handwriting. I turned it over to see the signature. Cecily, my mother’s name. I shook as I read it.

Dearest C,