I take a sheet of light-blue writing paper from Maddie’s desk and hastily note down everything I can see in her room. I hear footsteps, and Eddie appears in the door with an empty fruit crate in her hand.

“What do you think? Shall we take her back a little piece of herself?”

We put into the crate books and the jars of soil from Scotland, Australia, New York’s Central Park, and Paris. I carefully unstick the Shirley MacLaine poster. I add CDs and her ballet shoes to the other items in the crate and, on top of it all, the mobile made of shells, leaves, and bits of wood and glass that was hanging by the window. Lastly, I take her pillow with us.

“She obviously likes piano music and beautiful little pieces of nature, and clearly she loves the color blue,” Eddie says as she leans against the doorjamb.

“She also values friendships, even if she has very few of her own,” I reply. I feel both close to and distant from Maddie, but I now know that she likes coconut and used to read John Irving, prefers Russian to Italian composers, likes the color blue, and arranges her books but not items she’s picked up outdoors. She loves every part of a tree: leaves, bark, branches, and knotholes. There’s a picture of her looking at herself in the mirror, and in that photo I see the woman she might one day be. I want to be there when she becomes every Maddie she can possibly be. I want to see every woman she becomes, until my time comes.

By her side, I will become the best man I can be. Without her I am nothing.

“Congratulations, mon ami!” I imagine Scott saying. “You have now taken your place in a long line of men who could only offer their lives in return for love.”

Eddie and I carry seven crates out of the house and then the car is full. Linda shakes Eddie’s hand and gives me a hug. “They were a team, Samuel. They were all different, but for all their differences they fit together and they watched out for one another. Some people are best protected in a family, while others . . .” She doesn’t finish her thought.

Maddie’s house watches us drive away.

WE HAVE only fifteen minutes remaining to explore New College. The cloister is cool and shady. The large oak gleams silver in the afternoon light. I imagine Maddie talking to it or sitting among its roots to think. I sit down there too.

“Maddie?” I ask. “What are you searching for?” I shut my eyes and rest my hand on the trunk of the tree.