He pried his shoes off, lining them up neatly next to the bed before sitting back. “Notebooks. She had these little black notebooks that she’d write everything down in. I think she started doing it when she found out she was going to die. I have all of them, now.”

Leora stared at the window across the room. “You mean the ones you have on those shelves at your place?” she asked. He nodded. “I thought those were yours.”

“Well, now they are, I guess,” he said.

Leora watched the window a few seconds longer before turning to him again. “What did she write in them?”

Jake smiled at her. “You know, it’s weird. It was always this big secret when she was alive. She would never show them to anyone, and after she died I still didn’t want to look at them. I figured there must be something really profound written in them, or at least something really personal, like a journal or something. My dad gave them to me a few years later, and it turned out they were just lists.”

“Lists?”

“Yeah, sort of like ‘to-do’ lists, except instead they were ‘have-done’ lists. Lists of all the things that happened to her each day. Some of them are almost clinical—lists of what she ate, things like that. But there isn’t much about her being sick. I think she was trying to prove to herself that she was living a normal life, even though she was in the hospital most of the time.”

Leora wanted to ask about her illness, but something stopped her. She had embarrassed herself enough, for now. “So what kind of things are on the lists?” she asked instead.

“Oh, all sorts of stuff. Actually, I was surprised, but most of it was about me.”

“About you?”

Jake smiled again. “Yeah, me. Like ‘Jake has a crush on a girl at school.’ Or ‘Jake hates writing reports about coral.’ Or ‘Jake got an A on his essay about explorers in the New World.’ The strangest thing is that when I read through those lists, I suddenly remembered all these things that had happened with her and me, little silly things that I didn’t even know I remembered. Like that essay about the explorers. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but when I saw that on the list, I remembered very clearly writing it at the kitchen table and asking her to read it over for me, to help me with the spelling. And then I remember that I asked her if she thought of herself as an explorer in the New World, and she said yes.”