SHE TOUCHED EVERYTHING HE HAD. She picked up every shoe, every sock, ran her fingers through his shirts, put her hands in the pocket of his pants, made sure to inspect each and every thing he owned like a blind person might. She cradled his saxophone like an infant. She picked up a book Frank had on his nightstand, Moral Actions and Their Relation to Modern Law. “This is my brother’s,” Casey said. “Yes it is,” I told her. “You have the same tastes?”

“Not really,” she said. “A shared interest, I guess. But I didn’t have to read everything, you know. He’d tell me about it all anyway. I didn’t have to read. I got the summary and the dissertation.”

She examined the back copy on the book and said, “Maybe I should give this a try.”

“Not that one,” I said. “I read that. Spoiler alert: moral acts are still a threat to the State. If Jesus were alive today maybe he wouldn’t be crucified, but he’d be locked up in a maximum security prison. That’s the gist of it.”

“That much progress in twenty-one centuries?”

“Is that progress?” I took the book from her and held onto it. If she had opened it, she would have seen Frank’s handwriting in the margins. He had used that particular book to try and rationalize what we did. He didn’t have a problem with stealing, not usually, but he had a problem with hurting other people. He occasionally needed to sort through it all, and wrote comments in the book as he worked through his arguments and defenses. “People shouldn’t put value in things,” he wrote. “Theft can be a moral action, not Robin Hood, but a more existential act. No one owns anything, it all simply passes through our hands.” I don’t know if I believed any of that, but I knew it wouldn’t get us very far with the law.

I didn’t have the same problems and qualms that Frank had, but I couldn’t help him sort any of it out for himself. I could only listen, could only listen as he read from the book and read the things he’d jotted down, wishing he hadn’t put any of it in writing. I put the book in a drawer of my things, hoping Casey would forget about it.

She was over at the closet, studying his shirts. She had asked to come over. Her parents had gone home. I let her stand around the apartment and touch as much stuff as she wanted, for as long as she wanted. “Can I take a shirt?” she said.

“You can take anything you want. You can take as much as you want. You can take everything if you want.”

“I couldn’t do that,” she said. “You’ll want to keep something.”

“I don’t know if I can.”